V2 Chapter 8: Working Together
I watched those bastards drown in the blood they had craved, watched their heads taken off and their hearts cut out. And the legend did nothing more than raise his power sword and point the way for the animals under his command. — Ibram Gaunt, Formal Prime After-Action Report
The lower hive of a major hive city typically spans more than a hundred kilometres, a man-made world of its own.
Even if the entire one billion Astra Militarum troops assembled for the Sabbat Crusade were poured into it, they would not begin to fill it.
The one hundred thousand assault troops who had made it through the outer wall could only push as hard as they could toward the hub passages connecting the lower levels to those above, crawling through an endless steel abyss.
Ibram Gaunt was fighting in front of an unnamed chemical processing plant with the remnants of an 8th Hyrkan company.
Gunfire was everywhere and constant.
The enemy came without warning from any pipe junction, any pocket of shadow. Every window in every derelict building was a potential heavy fire position.
The sound of the weapons bounced between the dense metal walls and doubled back on itself, making it impossible to track sources. In the dark, soldiers had to navigate by the muzzle flashes of the guns trying to kill them.
Nobody liked fighting in a killing ground like this.
Gaunt was thinking exactly that while crouched behind the ruins of a building that had been reduced by enemy rockets, breathing hard. Beneath his feet: the remains of soldiers from a unit he did not recognise, still warm.
The fighting here had apparently just ended when they arrived. But his people had to get through that chemical plant ahead before they could keep moving.
They had originally been operating behind one of the Ash Watchers 112th's smaller detachments. At first Gaunt had not understood why the legendary commissar had broken two thousand infantry into small dispersed fire teams.
The lesson had arrived through painful experience.
In the lower hive's cramped, disorienting terrain, a dense formation was the most efficient target the enemy's heavy fire could ask for.
The 8th Hyrkan company had been ground down under fire suppression to fewer than two sections.
And the 112th fire team they had been following had disappeared entirely into the labyrinthine terrain ahead.
What had taken its place was a large body of enemy troops materialising in their path. Evading, fighting, and hiding as they were pushed back, Gaunt had been driven with his survivors to the gate of the chemical plant.
What was the right call here? Every direction had enemy in it. Between friendly forces and other friendly forces, every gap was filled with enemy strongpoints. They had only the people alive beside them to work with.
Gaunt turned his head toward a soldier carrying a signal amplifier pack. "Are we still unable to reach anyone?"
"Still trying...bloody hell..." The vox operator answered with a strained urgency. "Our channel's being washed out by the void shield's harmonic interference."
"Damn it." Gaunt ran a quick count behind him. Himself included: sixteen.
He eased his head out carefully and looked inside the chemical plant's main gate. From somewhere in the dim interior, he could hear a sustained heavy bolter fire echoing back and forth, an enemy position raking the adjacent street. He decided to take it.
Gaunt drew his bolt pistol and looked back at the sixteen Hyrkan soldiers with their smoke-blackened faces. "Listen. Our task is to neutralise the enemy inside and clear the way for the—"
The sentence did not finish.
A dull, tearing sound. The soldier carrying the signal amplifier pack had his midsection torn open by a large-calibre round from an unknown position. His upper body had not yet hit the floor before a second round destroyed his skull with precision.
The echoing gunfire gave nothing away. Gaunt's expression went to something past anger. The weapon was solid-shot; there was no energy trace to track. He had no idea where it had come from.
"Go! Into the building!"
The survivors with no retreat left drove themselves forward toward the dark chemical plant. The distance was only a few dozen metres. Six more soldiers died to unseen precise fire in those few dozen metres.
The ten who remained tumbled into the shadows of the plant's interior, breathing in ragged bursts. The fire position that had been hammering the adjacent street had gone silent.
The silence was the worst thing in the room.
Gaunt narrowed his eyes in the dark. Unseen pursuit behind them. An ambush ahead, coiled and waiting.
He raised the chainsword without activating it, levelled the bolt pistol in his right hand, and signalled the remaining soldiers to stay tight.
They moved through the dense tangle of large machine components and chemical conduits, bent low.
In the crushing tension of waiting for death, one Hyrkan soldier's boot caught a discarded chemical supply pipe on the floor.
The impact rang through the empty plant like a shot.
In the same instant, muzzle flashes erupted from every direction of darkness simultaneously. The soldier who had given their position away was shredded before he could produce a sound.
"Break and scatter!"
The survivors threw themselves behind machine components. In the brief illumination of the muzzle flashes, Gaunt finally got a clear picture of the enemy's positions.
"Right front, the iron walkway above! Left front, a group in the pipe section! And directly ahead of us!"
There were far more of them than the Hyrkan soldiers' assessment had allowed for. Having found their prey, the ambushers were no longer bothering to stay hidden.
They came forward screaming and laughing in a corrupted Low Gothic so debased Gaunt could not follow a word of it. These were the Penitents, even with arms broken, even with legs shattered, still moving on the floor, dragging themselves forward.
The weight of fire nailed the surviving Hyrkan soldiers in place.
Gaunt forced himself out from the edge of cover and fired the bolt pistol repeatedly, accounting for several Penitents attempting to work around his right side. But the numbers did not move in his favour. The line was close to breaking.
Then, in the dark of the chemical plant, a thick beam of deep red energy crossed the space.
A Penitent on the iron walkway directly above them, about to fire down, went straight off the edge and hit the floor. His skull had been melted through.
A breath later, from the direction they had come from, dense intersecting red laser beams poured through the plant from outside.
Friendly fire.
Gaunt recognised the shift immediately and was on his feet from behind cover, bolt pistol firing, putting down the closest Penitents as their formation went to pieces.
The force that had just entered drove through the outer positions at a rate that was not compatible with ordinary infantry and reached Gaunt's position.
He could see who they were.
The equipment was not standard Astra Militarum issue. These soldiers were in heavy black carapace armour of exceptional quality. The unit number on their shoulder plates confirmed it: Ash Watchers 112th Regiment.
They moved through the fight without hand signals, without shouted orders, and still coordinated with a precision that exceeded anything organised communication should have been able to produce in this darkness. They appeared to be able to see through walls. They levelled their hellguns and the hot beams cut through hollow metal conduits without hesitation, shearing the heretics hiding behind them at the waist.
How were they doing that?
"Ibram Gaunt?"
A low, familiar voice from the side. Gaunt turned sharply. The tall figure in the black commissar's greatcoat had come into view.
Left hand carrying a power sword with its characteristic deep hum. Right hand holding a plasma pistol.
Gaunt opened his mouth to respond.
His peripheral vision caught a Chaos heretic who had been lying face-down in a pool of blood suddenly come alive, rising without a sound from behind and to Duvette's left, driving forward for the lunge.
Gaunt drew breath to shout and raised his gun in the same motion.
In the same instant, the unhurried expression on Duvette's face closed itself off entirely.
He did not turn his head.
The left hand moved like a weapon going off — a single backhand sweep, the power sword's blue force-field edge tracing a short arc through the dim air behind him.
The Penitent's body ran on for several steps under its momentum before the lack of a head caught up with physics and it went down.
Blood crackled against the force field. Duvette turned, fixed the nearest 112th veterans with a look, and addressed them with clear displeasure: "Has your accuracy declined? Remember to confirm kills. Every time."
"Understood, Commissar!" Several voices in carapace armour answered, flat and competent, through the noise of guns and the screaming.
Duvette turned back to Gaunt, surveyed the grey-faced cadet commissar, and let a dry amusement into his voice.
"They're like that. Too fast. Not always thorough."