The metallic whump and whistle of mortar shells sounded first, four shots in all. From nearby
crests, the thunder and rush of two missiles streaked a smoky path to the cave mouth. The tyranids
barely had time to acknowledge the attack, the explosions of fire, smoke and sand bursting in the
thick of them. The blasts flung tyranids and body parts through the air.
By the time the gunner fired his missile down at the mob, a second flight of mortar shells
pierced the air with their shrill keening. A terrible roar followed and the projectile curled, careening
towards one of the pillars. The explosion devastated the thirty metre high stack of limestone,
bringing it crashing down across at the entrance, crushing more beasts under its weight.
The two men swore they could hear the other crews cheer, and allowed themselves a smile. The
loader mounted another missile into the launcher and tapped the gunner’s head. He fired again, his
missile joining the other projectiles as they devastated the hordes of tyranids, sending more
dismembered beasts flying. Instead of being frightened or cowed, however, the tyranids surged
outwards, splitting into smaller swarms, each unerringly homing in on the different crews. Each
knew its place, each its duty. And, they were bridging the gaps fast. Time for one more, the two men
realised. The loader popped another missile into the launcher and tapped the gunner on the head
before dropping down next to him and covering his ears. The tyranids were scaling the dune to reach
them, but the gunner took his time aiming. His next shot, his last shot, arced over the heads of his
attacker, towards the tunnel entrance, and a second missile rocketed down from another angle, the
mortar shells raining down hard and persistent. Both missiles slammed into the cave mouth,
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blossoming into hellish explosions that caught the beasts trying to escape further into the tunnels.
The entrance collapsed at the same time as the first tyranids, bipedal creatures wielding scythes,
reached them. One inadvertently stepped on a pressure plate mine, adding to the thunder of the
explosions.
“Commissar Rezail,” Nisri repeated over the micro-bead. “Are you there?”
“I’m here, I’m here!” Rezail yelled back. “We’re holding our…” He stopped, his voice
deafening in the cavern. The tyranid swarm had stopped advancing, the corridor filled only with
their dead. The Guardsmen hesitated for a moment, terrified of the sudden calm, before they
scrambled to reload their weapons. Rezail could see the fear on their faces. They could still hear the
distant echoes of gunfire in the other caverns, but the deathly silence in Tunnel Three seemed
oppressive.
Nubis flicked on his micro-bead and contacted C Platoon in the neighbouring tunnel, but they
could see nothing either. Everyone exchanged quick, panicked glances, but mostly, they couldn’t
tear their eyes away from the chokepoint with its carpet of dead tyranids. Something was happening,
and they were more afraid of what they couldn’t see than of what they could.
“Steady, men,” Rezail said. “Remain strong and the Emperor’s light will shield you.”
“What’s happening?” Nisri asked over the micro-bead.
“The tyranids,” Rezail said more quietly, “they’ve stopped attacking.”
“Not here they haven’t,” Nisri replied. “All tunnels, what is your situation?”
“Tunnel Two… we’re still getting swarmed,” Captain Nehari replied, his voice almost panicked.
“All shaped charges expended!”
“Tunnel Four… they’re trying here, but we hold the advantage,” Turk replied.
“Same for Tunnel One,” Nisri said. “Commissar, be on your guard!”
“Depend upon it,” he said. Rezail glanced away from the tunnel long enough to address Kamala
Noore. She was standing straighter, her battle-hood with its cyclops-like eye piece and power cables
crackling with psyker energy. She almost appeared to be standing on her toes, her powers levitating
her from the ground.
“What is it?” Rezail asked.
“Something comes, something to surpass my prowess,” Kamala said simply, her voice echoing
with a faint metallic ring, her head held aloft. “You will quake in its presence, but whatever you do,
do not flee. I will try to distract it and keep your minds free of its terror. Shoot when I tell you to
shoot. I cannot kill it alone, and neither can you. We need each other in this. Together we have a
chance. Now, steel yourselves for horror!”
The ghost flickers of blue bioelectric sparks leapt from the distant walls to the tyranid corpses.
The air buzzed and hummed with power, and the lume-paint on the walls seemed to glow more
brightly.
“The Aba Aba Mushira’s light guides me,” Rezail said, trying to instil courage in his men. “His
beacon is the celestial chorus of the Astronomicon, and so long as they sing, I will always be close
to His Grace. We war for the Emperor!”
“Aya!” a few men cried, their voices strangled by fear.
“Any man that runs will be executed,” Rezail concluded.
A shadow crossed the passage ahead, a shadow moving among shadows. It produced its own
light, and it approached the chokepoint.
“We war for the Emperor!” Rezail repeated, his voice stronger, more demanding.
“Aya!” more voices cried out.
“We WAR for the EMPEROR!”
“AYA!” the platoons cried across the two tunnels.
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A tyranid floated into view, lazy tendrils of electricity dancing off its atrophied spine and
enlarged brain sac. Its mouth was pulled back in a perpetual scowl, revealing, I row of bloody teeth,
while from its back tube-vents leaked a greenish miasma. It was more than a linchpin of the hivemind,
it was one of the axles that guided the tyranids. The hive-mind’s thoughts leaked out through
its very being, stray images like bullets that wounded the mind and injured the Guardsmen. Some of
the men cried out in terror. A few others sobbed. Even Rezail stopped speaking. He felt like he
stood on the shores of an infinite, black ocean, able to see further across its vastness. Some unnamed
horror rose from the waters, its tentacles raised so high as to brush away moons, its voice sending
out ripples of tidal waves across the ocean’s surface, so dwarfed were he and the others by the
staggering monstrosity of the alien sea that drowned them.
They were all paralysed. They saw nothing but the beast, heard nothing but its terrible whispers.
“Do not drown,” a tiny voice said.
Rezail heard Kamala’s voice, feeble against the roaring waves of the infinite seas. Like a man
drowning, Rezail grasped at the lithe hand stretched out to pull him away. As he closed his hand
around hers, he could feel others do the same.
Absently, almost subconsciously, a few of the gap-mouthed men tried to fire at it, but their bolt
and las-rounds struck a bioelectric barrier surrounding the creature. Their shots ricocheted, and hope
seemed to leave them again.
“Don’t drown!” a voice shouted in their minds, and Rezail knew that Kamala was trying to
buffer them from the worst of the attack.
Behind the creature, tyranids followed slowly, cautiously: the pack behind the hunter, waiting to
be unleashed.
The creature seemed to scream, although its mouth never opened, and the full brunt of the hiveintellect
blasted through the minds of the Guardsmen. A handful of soldiers scurried back,
abandoning their positions and stumble fleeing down the corridor, their minds stripped down to their
primordial terror. Rezail was too locked in his nightmare to even consider shooting them for
cowardice. Instead, he stared at the creature, unable to take his eyes away from it. He was only
distantly aware of a few men sobbing, and watched in horror as energy crackled and built in strength
around the tyranid. He recognised the signs of an impending attack, the signs of death.
“Not this time,” a metallic voice called, cutting through Rezail’s terror. “In the Emperor’s name,
I smite thee!”
A hammer of bioelectric energy appeared in Kamala’s hands, her hood crackling with an
electrified halo. She motioned, and the hammer flew from her grasp, striking the creature’s shields.
Electricity sparked and showered everywhere. The tyranids screeched in anger, but did not rush
forward. The blow, however, rocked the creature, and it blasted back with a braid of bio-energy that
barely missed Kamala, and incinerated a nearby gunner.
Kamala fired back, her mental energies slamming into the creature’s shields. Electricity flared
and sparked across the entire chamber. The tyranid’s and Kamala’s powers snapped and danced
against one another like two wild animals. Bolts struck the wall, and slammed one soldier in the
chest, blowing his ribs open. Kamala almost buckled to her knee, but the creature’s shield also
seemed to dim.
Suddenly, it wasn’t so invulnerable. Suddenly, it wasn’t so untouchable. A crack was all it took
for panicked hope to surge through, that last kick for the surface before drowning.
“Fire, damn you, fire!” Kamala screamed.
The Guardsmen, shaken awake from their fear and briefly shielded against the hive-mind,
unleashed a sudden avalanche of rounds. Some shots whined and ricocheted off the creature’s bioshields,
but many found their way through the weakened barrier, striking the tyranid horde.
It was growing difficult to see, Kamala’s electric storm clashing with the creature’s powers, the
points of intersection flaring with brilliant explosions of light and peals of thunder, but the
Guardsmen kept heavy fingers on their triggers. Another trooper rushed in to take the place of the
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fallen gunner, bringing the second heavy stubber to bear. Another soldier on the line fell, a blast of
electricity shearing his shoulder off. The creature shrieked, the attacks overwhelming it, rounds
skipping off its bone plates, shattering two of its limbs and destroying a segment of its tail.
Kamala doubled over in pain. Even with the amplifier, it was difficult maintaining her powers
against the creature, but she seemed to redouble her efforts each second, pushing herself even after
she collapsed to one knee, and then both. Her hand stretched out, trying to push against its thoughts.
She was taking the brunt of its mental assaults. One of the fingers on her outstretched hand exploded
from the lashing psyker energy. She screamed, but did not buckle. Another digit was obliterated
soon after.
“C Platoon! Now!” Nubis screamed.
A second later, sporadic fire erupted from the adjoining tunnel, catching the tyranids and the
creature in the crossfire. The hail of tracers and las-rounds increased with each passing second, the
Guardsmen regaining ground.
The creature was buckling under the assault, its agony setting the tyranids behind it into an
animal frenzy. Some raced into the killing fields, where incoming fire punctured and lacerated them
to shreds. Others turned on one another, completely feral, and unable to distinguish friend from foe.
Another soldier fell, a stray bolt obliterating his face. Nubis stepped into the gap, his war cry
carried in the cycling whine of his heavy stub cannon. The creature screamed, round after round
pounding through its protective field and shattering pieces of its body. Finally, Nubis delivered the
killing shot, a stream of hollow points stitching the creature’s face and blowing out chunks of
greenish matter from its brain sac. It flared for a moment, a surge of bio-electrical energy and the
hive-mind’s psyker powers scorching rock and beast. Finally, it crumbled to the ground in a number
of unceremonious heaps.
The tyranids were stunned by the creature’s death, as were the Guardsmen, who were rendered
senseless from the mental slap.
“Keep firing, keep firing!” Nubis cried at the same time the pack of tyranids went completely
feral and began fighting anything they could see, each other and the Guardsmen.
On the vox, soldiers were reporting the same thing; the tyranids were lashing out at everything
around them. But, this was not the moment to celebrate. The tyranids were turning into rabid
berserkers, and some of them were reaching the firing lines before dropping, killing Guardsmen in
their dervish dance of claws and scythes. More explosions rocked the tunnels; the shaped charges
were being expended quickly.
The large bipedal tyranid continued stabbing the Guardsmen with its spiked limbs, chittering madly
as the nearest soldiers screamed back and shot it at point-blank range. It eventually stumbled back,
its carapace cracked wide and a gut-wrenching miasma spraying the line of men. Captain Nehari
continued firing at the tyranids charging the line, yelling to drown out their horrible, guttural
screams. The tyranids fell metres from the skirmish line, and the chokepoint had partially collapsed,
allowing more of the creatures to stream through.
The chatter over the vox was frenzied, the Imperial Guard losing control over the battles in three
of the four tunnels. Only Turk and B Platoon were having any success in keeping the tyranids
corralled.
A runner with tube-like protrusions on its back reached the Guardsmen. As it bit into the shin of
a soldier, it blasted out a cloud of greenish gas from its tubes. The soldier screamed, his tibia
shattered.
They shot the creature dead, and pulled the wounded soldier from the line, but not before
everyone began coughing. The men closest to the wounded soldier fell out of line, vomit exploding
past their lips, and many soiling themselves. More men took their places, but everyone was fighting
violent stomach cramps and intestinal spasms; the smell of faeces in the air didn’t help. Nehari
wasn’t a fool. He’d fought the tyranids before, and he understood what they were up against.
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Nehari activated the command channel on his micro-bead. “Colonel Dakar, we’re about to be
overrun! We can’t hold the line much longer.”
Nisri hissed a curse at Nehari’s message. Nothing could be done about it, but fighting while
retreating was no way to do battle the tyranids. Worse, Tunnel Two and Tunnel Three were
connected further back. If Two fell, Commissar Rezail and the combined Platoons of C and A would
be trapped. Moreover, the tyranids would then flood into the caverns.
“D Platoon will help you fall back,” Nisri responded, immediately switching channels and
sending half of D Platoon to help Tunnel Two evacuate under bounding overwatch fire. The other
half, minus Sergeant Ballasra’s squad, which was still searching the caverns, was to remain in
