intended use.
By the Emperor’s grace, however, there was no real damage done. The beam had glanced off the
left cannon, put a dent in its barrel, and the calibration had been thrown off a little, but he could
compensate for that.
Then, with another great bump and a dip, they were on even ground, picking up speed, and the
enemy was in Barreski’s field of vision again, on a level with the tank. No obstructions remained
between them.
The Chaos forces were undisciplined, some paralysed in the face of the approaching juggernaut,
while some tried to fight and others simply turned and fled. They were getting in each other’s way,
falling over each other, their resistance collapsing before Barreski had loosed off a single shot.
The sponson gunners beat him to it, unleashing heavy bolter fire. Barreski bided his time, using
his vantage point to survey the scene, seeking his optimum targets and taking aim, knowing that the
lascannons’ slow recharging cycle meant that he had to make every shot count.
He aimed for a giant of a man, towering over the rank and file, his face an eruption of pustules,
his hair clinging to his head in clumps. Barreski could almost smell the Chaos stink on the mutant.
He gave it both lascannons and let their recoil reverberate through him, through his bones,
invigorating him with their power. The twin beams seemed to dissect the sky with their thunderous
cracks, and when one of them struck true, the mutant was vaporised.
The Leman Russ ploughed into the Chaos army, pushing its soldiers back with its blade,
mowing down those who couldn’t get out of its way, powdering their bones and pulping their flesh.
Inevitably a few heretics survived — the lucky ones. And those that did found themselves
behind the tank, in the sponson guns’ blind spots — and, knowing their handheld weapons were
useless against its plasteel hull, they concentrated their fire on the one vulnerable spot they could
see: Barreski’s head.
He dropped down into the turret, abandoning his lascannons reluctantly; like the sponson guns,
they only had a forty-five degree arc of fire. He swung the pintle-mounted heavy stubber, and laid
down a discouraging hail of bullets in the tank’s wake even though he couldn’t see to aim it
properly.
He was alarmed when a head appeared over the turret’s rim.
The cultist must have just missed being crushed, found himself alongside the tank, behind the
sponson guns, and seized the opportunity to leap on board, to climb. He was ill-equipped, his body
armour salvaged from many sources, some too small for him, some too large, and his only weapon
appeared to be a knife. Still, the element of surprise made him a threat.
Barreski managed to shoulder his lasgun in time. The cultist was leaping for him with a snarl
when a beam stabbed through his heart. His momentum kept him going, but by the time he hit the
Ice Warrior he was already dead. Barreski risked raising his head, peering over the side of the turret,
to see a second cultist climbing towards him. A single las-beam was enough to shake the man’s grip
and send him falling, screaming, beneath the tank’s heavy tracks.
The Chaos army was reacting, slowly, to the incursion of this lone Imperial vehicle into its
midst, starting to turn its war machines around. This was what the Ice Warriors had wanted, of
course. Their attack had been calculated to distract, to take the pressure off their front lines, and to
give their comrades time to regroup, to renew their defence of a stretch of land that would otherwise
have been lost.
There were hundreds of foot soldiers in the path of the Chaos tanks, but their operators seemed
no more concerned than Grayle had been about who they might crush beneath their treads.
7
Explosive rounds burst against the Leman Russ’ armoured hide, but this was where its lascannons,
with their superior range and firepower, came into their own. It was not for nothing that they were
known as tank-killers.
Barreski was in his element as his cannons roared. He concentrated his fire on a Chaos-held
Imperial Salamander, its slight form surging ahead of its fellows, its autocannon spitting furiously.
He scored one direct hit, two, three, four, until he had blown it apart. In the heat of the moment, he
could almost have forgotten where he was, seeing only his targets lined up in front of him as if on a
range.
And then those targets were close enough to start to hit back, for their own guns to do some real
damage, and Grayle had slammed the battle tank into reverse, but Barreski knew he couldn’t go far
with the ruins still piled up behind him.
The cannons were out of power. Barreski yelled down at the loader below to work faster, to
chug the heavy, new cell into place, to give him more shots while he could. The Chaos tanks had
formed an arc in front of them, closing in, the port sponson gun was lost, and of course there was no
hope of back-up out here.
He couldn’t complain. The whole crew had known what they were getting into when Barreski
had suggested this, when Grayle had confirmed that he could drive them into position, when the
tank commander had approved their plan.
They had achieved their goal, delivered a good, solid blow to the enemy and slowed their
advance, and that was all they could have hoped for.
This had always been a suicide run.
The war on Cressida was lost.
Trooper Mikhaelev had seen it weeks ago. There was something about the scent, the feel, of the
air, as if the planet itself had given up. He had heard that whole continents had been transformed in
days, verdant fields devolving into arctic tundra — and even here, where the walls of civilisation
had only just begun to come down, there were patches of a freezing purple fungus sprouting amid
the wreckage.
Mikhaelev knelt on the plinth of a statue — of whom he couldn’t tell, as a frag blast had cut it
off at the knees — and steadied his missile launcher against his shoulder. He saw the shape of an
enemy tank, and he sent a krak missile whistling over the heads of his squad, and of nine more ranks
of Ice Warriors. He didn’t wait to see if he had struck the tank, too busy with the cumbersome task
of reloading. He should have had a comrade to assist him, but the last one had been cut down in the
enemy’s last push and hadn’t yet been replaced.
When he tried to fire again, the launcher clicked and jammed, and Mikhaelev let out a resigned
sigh and reached for his lasgun. At the rate at which his comrades were falling, he would be on the
front line soon, anyhow.
It was all right for the clerks at Naval Command, he thought. They could afford to dither, so
reluctant to lose a productive world that they had hung on to hope long after hope had died. They
should have ordered this withdrawal long ago. They could have spared millions of Guardsmen to
fight again — but to them, those Guardsmen’s lives were only numbers on a data-slate, so what did
they care?
It didn’t especially bother Mikhaelev that he was going to die today. It just rankled with him that
it would be for nothing.
Then a voice crackled over his earpiece, and rewrote his destiny.
He slipped down from the plinth and made his way deeper into the hive, still lugging the useless,
heavy missile launcher along with him in case a tech-priest could salvage it. He thought about the
summons he had received, and it cheered him up a little to think how irritated his commander would
be to let him go.
8
So, Colonel Stanislev Steele was putting together a special mission, and he wanted Mikhaelev
on board. The only question Mikhaelev had was… why me?
9
CHAPTER TWO
Time to Destruction of Cressida: 47.04.33
The Sentinel walkers were equipped as power lifters, not intended for combat use. The lost and the
damned had got hold of a pair somehow — either they had captured them or their pilots had simply
defected, as so many Guardsmen had done during this war — and their Imperial markings had been
defaced.
The Sentinels were being used to deal death now. They were marching amid a legion of Chaos
spawn and other mutant creatures, sweeping and gouging at the defenders of Alpha Hive with their
single metal claws.
Trooper Borscz’s Ice Warrior platoon was ranged along the edge of an empty residential sector.
So far, they had been holding the tide back, but the Sentinels’ appearance threatened to change that.
It had fallen to Borscz’s squad to deal with that threat. His sergeant, Romanov, was bellowing
orders, instructing his nine troopers to aim their fire at the leftmost of the two leviathans. Borscz’s
first beams went hopelessly wide, and he cursed the unreliable sights of his lasgun under his breath.
Many of his comrades struck true, but their las-beams seemed to do little damage, at least to begin
with.
At last, their sustained barrage began to bear fruit, and Borscz saw sparks flying from the left
knee joint of the bipedal machine. Without needing to be told, the Ice Warriors refocused their fire
on that spot — and a long, agonising minute later, the Sentinel collapsed, and flattened a number of
luckless spawn beneath its mass.
It had taken too long.
Sergeant Romanov shouted again, and his squad turned its fire on the second Sentinel. Before it
could be felled, though, the spawn would be upon them.
Borscz weighed up his options, and then lowered his gun. He caught Romanov’s suspicious
glare, and he shrugged his broad, muscular shoulders.
“Sorry, sergeant,” he yelled, “the machine is kaput, it jams up in the cold. What is a trooper to
do?” Then he drew his long-bladed knife, lowered his head and took a single giant step forward to
meet the first of the charging mutants.
It cannoned into him, rebounding from his bulk, and Borscz thought he could read surprise in its
twisted face. While it was still reeling, he seized it, kicked its legs from beneath it, and sent it
sprawling against two more mutants behind it. Two more came up alongside him, and he dodged
their clumsy swings, and threw one of them over his shoulder into the other.
Borscz knew that the mutants were stronger than he was. He was using their unwieldiness
against them, keeping them off-balance, but he couldn’t keep it up.
He didn’t have to.
The second Sentinel was upon him, towering over him, more than three times his height. It had
raised its foot to stamp on him, to crush him, and the mutants were trying to hold him still, wrapping
their disgusting tentacles around him.
Borscz loosed a great roar from his powerful lungs, and hacked at the tentacles with his blade.
He slashed and tore them, ploughing forward as one great foot slammed down in the spot where he
had just been. Then he whipped a krak grenade from his belt, and with a grim flourish, he slapped it
against the armoured stanchion of the Sentinel’s leg.
10
The mutant saw what he had done, and even their tiny minds told them to run from the
predictable explosion. This gave Borscz the chance to run too, back towards the rest of his squad,
who were watching in astonishment and backing him up as best they could with las-fire.
A second later, there came a tremendous bang, and the shadow of the teetering Sentinel fell
across him. Borscz twisted out of its way as it crashed to the ground, its cockpit beside him now. He
could see his reflection in its cracked front shield, his wild black beard split by a white maniacal
grin — and behind that shield, the pilot, the cockpit’s lone occupant, his face white with terror as he
realised that his unexpected plunge had taken him right to his enemy.
He was operating his controls feverishly, employing the only weapon he still had. The Sentinel’s
giant claw pivoted back on itself, and came snapping, grasping for the Ice Warrior. Borscz ducked
underneath it, and drove his meaty fists through the plexiglas shield. He grabbed the pilot by the
scruff of his tunic, tore him from his seat and drove him headfirst into the unyielding ground,
breaking his neck.
Robbed of their advantage, the mutants and spawn were being driven back once more. His
cheeks flushed, Borscz took his place among his comrades and drew his gun. He was alarmed to feel
a firm hand on his shoulder, and, turning, he found himself fixed by the glowering eyes of an
Imperial commissar.
For a moment, Borscz feared he was to be disciplined for disregarding orders. He and his
sergeant had an understanding born of long service together — Romanov knew that, unconventional
though his methods were, Borscz got results — but he knew that an outside observer might see
things differently.
To his surprise, the commissar didn’t want to talk about his behaviour. He had a message for
Borscz, although, to judge by his scowl as he delivered it, he wasn’t at all happy about it. It was a
summons from Colonel Steele.
Trooper Anakora heard the Chaos hounds before she saw them, the scampering of their clawed feet
in the tunnels and their ravening howls as they scented fresh meat even over the underhive’s stink.
She whirled around, and saw the first of them, its twisted black bulk, in the light of the beam
from her lamp-pack as it leapt on Petrovski and tore out his throat.
There were three more behind it. Anakora swore and abandoned the limpet mine she had been
struggling to adhere to the crumbling wall of a slum building.
Her squad of eight had been sent down here on a demolition mission. Their commanders were
concerned that as the Imperial Guard withdrew from Cressida, there weren’t enough men left to hold
all fronts in the ongoing war. By collapsing strategic sections of these underground levels, they
could at least close off one route to the heart of Alpha Hive, preventing the Chaos forces from
coming up beneath them.
Their enemies, it transpired, were a step ahead of them. They had penetrated deeper into the
underhive than anyone had known. Anakora and her comrades hadn’t planted even half their mines
yet.
One of the hounds came for her, but with remarkable precision she fired a las-beam through its
left eye and killed it. The momentum of its pounce kept it coming, and it hit with enough force to
knock her from her feet. She crashed to the ground with the hound’s slavering tusks in her face, and
gagged on its last gasp of rancid breath as she hauled herself out from beneath it.
She had dropped her lamp-pack, breaking it, but the tunnel was lit by the criss-crossed beams of
