V2 Chapter 6: The Omnissiah's Wrath
As the five God-Machines took their positions in the rolling thunder of their engines, the crusade high command's top-level general assault order came through the encrypted Astropathic network and tactical data-links simultaneously to every forward command element.
Duvette stood beside a Chimera's track unit, head down, reading the tactical data-slate in his hand as its parameters refreshed in real time. He opened the 112th's internal officers' channel and issued the final-phase readiness orders to each company commander.
"All units, synchronise by standard Terran time. Total assault in one hour. Our objective is singular: breach the hive's outer wall at any cost."
The order had barely cleared the channel when an Engine Seer in a dark red robe came picking his way across the mud-covered position with heavy, deliberate steps and came to a stop beside Duvette.
"Commissar." The Engine Seer's synthesised voice carried the particular inflection of someone delivering difficult information to someone who will not want to hear it. "Despite full prayer and rites of maintenance, the Machine Spirits of your armoured vehicles are still operating at the critical threshold of extreme exhaustion. They require a considerably longer recovery period."
Duvette raised his head. "Confessor. The Chaos enemy is not going to sit patiently behind their auramite gate while our tanks rest. And this assault is a Supreme Command directive."
The bionic eyes beneath the Engine Seer's hood cycled through several rapid flickers. He held his silence for a moment, arrived at no effective counter-argument, produced a quiet burst of Binary prayer under his breath, and turned away with his tech-servitors in tow.
Then a weight in the ground interrupted Duvette's thoughts, a vibration that had been building from somewhere along the position's flank.
He turned his head and looked along the defensive line.
The Warlord-class Titan, more than thirty metres tall, the equivalent of a ten-storey structure in motion, was taking steps that registered on the ground like localised seismic events. It was moving past the edge of the 112th's assembly area.
On an enormous battlefield, thirty metres might sound like a modest figure. But when that construct of pure auramite, ceramite, and plasma reactors actually appeared before a mortal, the physical pressure it generated was not like anything in the same category as ordinary scale. It was the weight of myth made real. It was capable of breaking the will to resist simply by being present.
Each mechanical stride of the Warlord covered the combined length of more than a dozen Leman Russ tanks arranged end to end.
The Imperial aquila emblem blazed on its heavy armour plates. The exhaust vents expelled high-temperature steam that formed a small, private cloudbank in the air around the machine.
In the 112th's assembly area, every soldier stopped what they were doing.
These veterans of Macragge and the worst the galaxy had produced, men who had stopped being impressed by ordinary violence a long time ago, were all looking up. What was in their expressions had bypassed the usual professional detachment and become something more fundamental.
For most of them, this was the first time in their service they had stood this close to a God-Machine.
The awe that resonated in the human soul before something of this scale came from somewhere deeper than training or discipline, and the entire position fell briefly and completely silent.
"Ahem."
Duvette cleared his throat twice on the regimental vox, sharp and cold, and the sound worked like cold water poured over every soldier who had gone still.
"Snap out of it. Into your vehicles. Now. Prepare for combat."
Under their commissar's voice, the 112th came back to itself and moved at maximum speed, soldiers climbing onto tanks and APCs with a scramble that produced the overlapping hydraulic sounds of hatches closing in sequence.
Duvette settled into his command vehicle and deployed the tactical overlay.
"Listen. We advance with the Titans toward the hive's outer wall." He brought up the hololithic display. "The five Titans will form an arrowhead formation, with the Warlord as the absolute point. Every armoured unit in the formation, including the 112th, will advance in a broad fan behind the Titans as the anchor."
"Once we cross into the void shield's interior, the Titans will immediately open fire on the gate and simultaneously suppress the heavy fire positions on the wall and the battery towers behind it. Every other vehicle in the formation drives at maximum speed to the base of the wall, into the blind zone where their fire can't reach us. That is where the first infantry go into the breach."
"For the Emperor."
The hour counted down to zero.
The vast crusade force moved.
With a mechanical sound that shook the air itself, the Warlord-class Titan went first, its enormous frame stepping out of the landing zone's void shield and into the open.
The two Reavers and the two Warhounds followed. Behind them, the steel torrent: thousands of Leman Russ, Chimeras, and every category of transport vehicle that the crusade had brought, surging toward the distant hive like a dark tide breaking over a shore.
The moment the Imperial force cleared the shield's protection, the Chaos garrison on the hive wall responded immediately.
The heavy fire that had been somewhat suppressed by distance and the landing zone's shields redirected instantly. Macro-cannon tracer fire, missile contrails, and plasma beams filled the sky in every direction.
The Titans at the formation's front used their vast frames and their own void shields to absorb the most lethal of the anti-armour fire, standing in the torrent like rocks in a flood, deliberately drawing the killing blows to themselves.
Rings of brilliant energy cascaded across the Titan shields as the discharges hit, dissipating attacks that would have flattened the armoured formations behind.
But the density of the enemy's fire was too great. The Titans absorbed everything they could, and still substantial volumes of incoming fire arced over and around the God-Machines to fall across the fan formation behind them.
Explosions erupted continuously through the advancing steel columns. Tanks and transports that did not evade in time became burning wreckage: tracks blown clear of their hull mounts, crews vaporised in the thermal flash, the remains dragging long streamers of black smoke across the wasteland.
It was a brutal, suffocating death march. Every soldier watching the vehicles beside them become fireballs was carrying a pressure in their chest that was looking for somewhere to go.
The distance closed under the tracks. The casualty count climbed in a straight line. Until the enormous armoured formation had driven forward through everything the hive threw at it and closed to within three kilometres of the outer wall.
Duvette sat steady in the lurching command vehicle, eyes fixed forward.
Then he felt it. A high-frequency tremor came through the steel of the vehicle's hull, and then the tremor passed through armour plating entirely and produced a resonance in his body: flesh, bone, and organs.
The air filled with an intense smell of ozone and burned static electricity, and with it a faint edge of nausea.
He knew what that meant. In the last second, the formation had forced its way through the surface of the hive's super-scale void shield.
"All units! Free fire! Put everything you've been holding into them!"
Duvette's order hit every channel simultaneously.
And every armoured vehicle that had been carrying the pressure of that advance unleashed it at the same moment.
Thousands of tank main guns, multi-barrel laser mounts, and heavy explosive rounds fired simultaneously and kept firing.
All that anger and hatred drove forward in a concentrated reverse storm of fire, precise and uncontrolled at once, directed at every heavy fire position on the hive's outer wall.
The enemy's forward trenches were ploughed into a continuous sea of fire in seconds.
But on that enormous battlefield, with everything firing at once, every eye was on the Warlord.
Three kilometres from the gate, it stopped.
On its arms, two Volcano Cannons, each bore wide enough to swallow a Space Marine Dreadnought, each looking less like a weapon and more like an industrial cooling tower, began accumulating energy at a rate that made the air in their immediate vicinity do things air does not normally do.
White light concentrated at the muzzle centres with an accelerating intensity. The sound of the energy building was not a sound the ears processed normally. The air around both cannon barrels warped visibly from the extreme thermal output.
In the next instant, the Omnissiah's fury was released.
Everything around those beams went quiet. Every other light went dark.
Two beams that would permanently damage the vision of any living thing that looked directly at them drove through three kilometres of combat at absolute straightline velocity and hit the auramite gate.
It took approximately one second.
The gate that the Chaos garrison had relied on as an absolute barrier, cast from pure auramite to a thickness of several metres, dissolved. The surrounding section of solid plasteel wall went with it. Both simply ceased to exist in the extreme thermal event that followed, neither burned nor cracked, but resolved from solid matter into superheated vapour and were gone.
When the sound of the discharge had fully settled, the outer wall showed a circular breach one hundred metres across, its edges running with dark red cooling magma.
"The gate is open!" Duvette's voice came through the channel at full volume. "CHARGE!"
Every Astra Militarum vehicle behind the Titans drove its engine to its absolute limit.
Drivers pressed every throttle to the floor without hesitation. The tanks and APCs passed the Titans' still-cooling barrels at a sprint, crossed the burning ash where the gate had been, and threw themselves at the enormous breach in the wall.
The Warlord-class Titan, having delivered the gate strike, began accumulating energy for its next shot. It rotated toward the heavy fire tower positions behind the wall; the triple-barrelled Laser Blaster on its back opened fire.
The two Warhounds broke from both flanks at high speed, clearing the fire positions on either side of the breach with their mobility.
The two Reavers advanced with the armoured formation, their shoulder weapon arrays suppressing the remaining heavy fire positions on the wall with sustained fire.
As the 112th's lead tracks drove into the molten-edged breach in the gate, the bloodiest urban battle the regiment had yet fought, the 41st Millennium's Stalingrad, the killing machine that was Formal Prime, opened for business.