V2 Chapter 5: Gods Descend from the Sky
When the thundering heavy landing craft and large armed transports began coming down across the outer perimeter of the hive, the wasteland shook under the weight of that iron torrent falling from above.
The high-temperature exhaust from the landing engines baked the acid sludge on the surface into a hard crust. Acrid white smoke and billowing yellow dust intertwined, turning the entire zone into a roaring, grinding construction site of continental scale.
The Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests worked with an efficiency that violated any mortal understanding of what was possible, rapidly assembling and activating large void shield generators at the perimeter of the landing ground before the last transports had finished touching down.
A low, sustained drone. The smell of ozone hit the air suddenly and heavily. A shimmering curtain of green-tinged energy rose from the ground, high-voltage arcs crackling across its surface, and spread into an enormous inverted hemisphere that sealed the landing zone completely, the zone the Astra Militarum had bought with tracks and blood.
The garrison forces in the distant hive had clearly read the crusade force's intentions. Shrill air-raid sirens began wailing above the hive's walls.
Then the heavy guns in the hive's upper battery towers opened up, sending large-caliber rounds down in a torrent of falling steel that hammered the landing zone.
But the enemy's fire could only detonate against the air above the perimeter. Every round that reached the void curtain burst against the shimmering surface and stopped there.
Explosions bloomed continuously along the shield's outer face. Nothing inside was touched.
The outer defence position, less than six kilometres from the main hive's wall, was now formally the Imperial crusade force's forward bridgehead for the assault on the main hive.
As the landing corridor opened and held, more and more transports loaded with troops and ammunition came down through the atmosphere and set down inside the protected zone. Astra Militarum regiments disembarked, reformed, and filled the entire position with a black mass of soldiers and vehicles.
Every one of them was holding still under the suppressed rolling thunder of the enemy's bombardment, breathing carefully, waiting for the order for the next phase: breach the hive's gate.
Duvette stood alone at a raised point on the outer edge of the camp, the top of a waste-metal mound.
The cold, corrosive wind snapped at his black commissar's greatcoat. His frame did not move.
Beneath him, the 112th Armoured Infantry Regiment was assembled. More than a hundred heavy tank engines were maintaining their low running vibration, a sound like a pack of iron animals that had not yet been told to stop.
After more than two hours of the wasteland assault, combined with the aftereffects of the Blessing of the Omnissiah, the 112th's vehicles needed a rest before any further sustained action. The Machine Spirits needed time.
Large numbers of Adeptus Mechanicus Engine Seers in their dark red robes and the half-mechanical tech-servitors moved around the tanks conducting emergency field repairs.
The rest of the 112th's infantry and vehicle crews had been given a brief and absolute rest before the next phase began, sitting in the constant noise of engines and artillery fire.
The veterans had settled against the tank tracks and were doing what veterans do during a pause: inspecting their weapons quietly. Every soldier who would be entering the main hive for close-quarters work was in full carapace armour with a hellgun on the rack.
The quality of that equipment made the 112th visible on the entire forward position in a way that attracted a specific kind of attention. A regiment with heavy armour and a large complement of elite heavy infantry was a rare enough formation in the Imperium that observers tended to register it the way people register something expensive. The response from most of the other commanders Duvette had seen was first envy, and then the practical calculation that following the 112th's axis of advance might materially improve their own regiment's survival odds.
He did not care about any of it. If people wanted to follow, he was not going to stop them. He and his regiment were heading for the hardest defensive line regardless.
He raised his field glasses and looked at the hive's outer wall.
It was the kind of structure that made attacking commanders stare for a moment before saying anything.
The metal walls stood a hundred metres high, in a dead grey colour that the toxic haze made look like something carved from the planet itself rather than built on it. An immovable cliff face.
The heavy fire positions on the wall and on the battery towers behind it had clearly been at maximum readiness for some time. Countless macro-cannon barrels and twin-linked laser batteries pointed out across the landing zone.
Through the field glasses' high magnification, Duvette could see the fire points on the wall clearly: thousands of black figures moving with the density and constant motion of ants. These were the Chaos garrison troops the briefing had identified as the Penitents, soldiers with their pain responses severed, holding every position and waiting for the Imperial forces to come close enough.
At the exact centre of the hive's enormous outer wall, a gate. Pure auramite, cast to a thickness of several metres, tall as a mountain, sealed absolutely. It blocked the only passage the Imperial force had into this steel hell as completely as a wall of despair.
"Another hard fight," Duvette said quietly to no one.
His mind was moving quickly through the problem, working through what could actually open that gate.
The crusade force's heavy artillery could not reach anything inside those walls. The hive had its own super-scale void shields, the same grade that stopped near-orbital bombardment, which made conventional fire support irrelevant anywhere the shields covered.
The only viable approach was combined arms. Armour and infantry advancing together under the enemy's defensive fire, using the physical reality that void shields could not stop slow-moving solid objects passing through them. Drive the armour to point-blank range, break through the shield's boundary with bodies, use the vehicles as moving fire platforms as close as they could get to the gate.
That close-assault covering role would fall to the armoured formations that had just driven through the wasteland. The 112th would be at the front of that as well.
But Duvette's brow had drawn together slightly.
Even if the armoured element paid its price, even if infantry carriers forced through the shields and tanks were driven to within a hundred metres of the gate, they still had no way of breaching a wall of solid plasteel alloy many metres thick, or an auramite gate of the same construction.
He was still working through the question of what the crusade had brought for that specific problem when the sky changed.
Without warning. Without any gradual transition.
The toxic overcast directly behind the forward position was torn apart from above. Several enormous structures, vast as mountain ranges, drove through the upper atmosphere at a steep angle.
The friction of their descent produced a heat that was visible from the ground: a band of deep crimson fire-cloud stretching for dozens of kilometres across the darkened sky, with ion trails burning through the air behind them.
As the drop-fortresses accelerated downward, the plasma retro-thrusters at their bases ignited. The jets of plasma, each with enough thermal output to melt steel at the point of contact, hung in the air like inverted suns and worked against the fall's velocity with controlled fury.
The extreme temperature differential and the energy output cut through the surrounding cloud banks and triggered a violent local thunderstorm directly above the landing zone. Thick bolts of lightning crossed and recrossed through the broken cloud.
The retro-thruster flames scorched the wasteland below. Then the drop-fortresses, each one weighing millions of tonnes, hit the planet's crust.
The impact sound hit a register that was not entirely sound. It hit the body.
The waste-metal mound under Duvette's feet lurched. The entire position full of Astra Militarum soldiers shifted and grabbed for something to hold.
In the 112th's assembly area below, soldiers who had seen enough death to be well past surprise were stopping everything they were doing.
"Throne above—"
"What in the—"
"Is that — a God-Machine?!"
With a mechanical scream and the sound of hydraulic drives engaging, the vast doors on the drop-fortresses' flanks, cast from pure auramite, smashed down onto the ground.
Hundreds of metres of dust and steam erupted. Then five enormous shapes walked out of the cloud. They moved through the scattered incoming fire from the hive's distant guns with the particular indifference of things that do not find incoming fire relevant, and entered the position at a measured pace.
At the centre of the formation: a Warlord-class Titan of extraordinary scale.
Flanking it on both sides: two Reaver-class Titans slightly smaller in height. And at the outer edges, crouching like hunting animals, two Warhound-class Scout Titans.
Duvette looked at the enormous-caliber weapons mounted on the Warlord's arms, and the triple-barrelled Laser Blaster on its back, and let out one short sound of satisfaction.
He now understood how a gate of auramite several metres thick was going to be addressed.
He turned and looked back at the distant hive wall, where thousands of Chaos troops were still working their positions and preparing to hold every fortification they had.
"Good luck," he said.