V2 Chapter 9: Overwatch
Finn was half-crouched behind a window that had long since lost its glass, keeping his body half a metre back from the gap.
At his feet: two bodies, neither of them relevant to him. One appeared to have had its head removed by something that had not used a blade. The other had a blood-hole in the chest that was not complicated.
He paid them no attention. He set the long, heavy solid-shot sniper rifle across his right knee and took a cylindrical flash suppressor from his tactical leg strap, threading it onto the muzzle with the practiced turn of someone who has done this in complete darkness.
The faint metallic click of it seating. The weapon was ready.
He did not need a high-magnification optical scope. His mechanical eyes were the better instrument.
Of all the infantry soldiers currently engaged, Finn was the only one not wearing the full carapace armour kit. He had the lighter ballistic vest suited to high-mobility solo movement through ruins and shadows. He was also carrying two weapons today: his own lasrifle, the long-hafted precision weapon he had used for years, and the solid-shot sniper rifle he had just assembled, kept ready for situations where silence of position mattered.
The derelict tower he had chosen was the last structure in this industrial district still standing at height. The elevation gave him a field of view over the surrounding area that nothing else could match.
The Eye of Judgement. The Commissar had called it the God-Emperor's blessing made visible on the battlefield, and Finn had no reason to disagree. Through his mechanical eyes, the enemy heretics who had hidden themselves in rubble dead-angles and believed themselves unseen glowed in deep red.
Every red light in his vision was the God-Emperor personally directing his hand toward the next sin that needed clearing.
He switched his ocular implant to high-contrast night-vision mode and adjusted the tactical communications band to the frequency the Commissar had designated before the engagement, to filter out the void shield's harmonic interference.
"This is Finn. I am in position."
Brief static. Then Duvette's voice through the earpiece: "Duvette, received. Are the other sniper teams in position?"
The channel produced a series of short, clean confirmations from the other elevated positions as each team checked in.
When the last confirmation came in, Duvette issued the tactical directive with the decisiveness that came from already knowing exactly what it would be: "Finn, your job is clearing high-threat targets along Stroud and Anderson's advance route. Everyone else, prioritise the positions directly above me."
"Received."
Finn had nothing to add. He immediately shifted his mechanical eye's focus away from the large chemical plant area where Duvette and the detachment were visible in peripheral vision, and found Stroud and Anderson through the shared tactical coordinates.
A narrow street packed with rusted piping and chunks of ferrocrete. The advance team was moving forward slowly through the shadow cover.
His muzzle followed where the mechanical eye pointed, the reticle sweeping the street ahead and settling on an elevated position a hundred metres out.
"Stroud, Anderson, three o'clock. Heavy fire position."
Through his mechanical eye's penetrating scan, behind a solid ferrocrete wall, two red shapes lay across the housing of a heavy bolter, absolutely motionless and absolutely patient.
The wall was in the way. Against the depleted uranium armour-piercing rounds currently loaded in the large-calibre solid-shot rifle, that specific wall was not a meaningful obstacle.
Finn held his breath. His finger settled the trigger without pressure and then applied it.
The muffled roar of the suppressed weapon hit the air. The recoil drove into his right shoulder. The long armour-piercing round tore through the dim space at a velocity that broke the sound barrier and drove directly through the ferrocrete wall.
Through the spatter of stone chips, the heavy gun position behind the wall went silent, both markers dropping in his vision.
On the street below, Stroud pointed a thumb upward in the direction the round had come from, then moved with Anderson and the team across the open ground and kept going.
When the advance team had entered secure cover and confirmed communication was holding, Finn raised his mechanical eyes and extended his focus across the half of the lower hive that was visible from here.
What was visible was burning. Roughly half the sub-hive below was on fire. This was an end-times image without a frame.
Everywhere he looked: jumping fire and rising black smoke in dense columns. The Astra Militarum and the Chaos garrison forces, the Penitents who did not know what fear was and would not learn it today, were locked in close-quarters combat across this steel-built hell with the absolute commitment of people who had no other plans.
None of the grand massed formations or coordinated charges that the Imperium's military doctrine preferred. This was a killing ground with no top.
The armour that the Imperium had relied on was stuck. Leman Russ tanks were trapped in streets too narrow to turn in, their tracks destroyed by improvised explosive devices planted under rubble, their hulls locked in place as fixed gun platforms. They rotated their turrets in whatever direction the fire was loudest and fought with their main guns and coaxial weapons against the constant human wave washing over them from every elevated surface.
On this vertical battlefield, death came from any direction. Laser beams and solid shot wove through broken walls and rubble in interlocking fires that left no routes that were fully clear.
The soldiers on both sides had weapons for this: monomolecular bayonets, entrenching tools, and their hands. Every room, every stairwell corner, was its own contest.
Death was something that happened every second, not in the abstract.
While the advance team held in cover waiting for the enemy mass ahead of them to shift, Finn did not stop.
He moved his muzzle to other streets where the fighting was worst, and began providing precision support to Imperial soldiers and 112th tactical teams who needed it from above.
His mechanical eye found a street several hundred metres away where several remnant Astra Militarum units were pinned by fire from elevated positions, unable to raise their heads.
He scanned the structural environment around the enemy's positions. His focus settled on the support brackets at the base of an enormous chemical storage tank hanging directly above the enemy's heads.
"God-Emperor, guide me."
He said it quietly to himself, then pulled the trigger with the same calm. Three successive precise large-calibre armour-piercing rounds cut the support columns at the tank's base, one after another, spacing the impacts by less than a second.
The sound of metal tearing and giving way. The enormous tank came off its brackets and fell straight down. Its shadow covered everything below it, and the mass of metal came down on the enemy position and everything in it, burying the fire point entirely.
The Imperial soldiers in the street below erupted and drove forward with everything they had.
Finn worked the bolt. The hot casing hit the floor beside his foot. He shifted his aim to another elevated position.
Several heretics in tattered robes, wearing ballistic plating, carrying heavy-duty promethium flamers, were preparing to torch an Imperial position below.
The heretic shall cleanse himself of sins in fire. Finn thought, and fired once into the pressurised fuel canister one of them was carrying.
The orange fireball that went up at the centre of their position was immediate and total. The detonation tore the flamer-carriers apart at the point of origin. The fire spread outward and consumed everything within reach.
He was already scanning for the next target when he registered a sound from below: controlled footsteps on the stairs, deliberate, kept quiet.
Someone was coming up.
Finn turned in silence and moved without a sound, pulling back from the window to the stairwell entrance, pressing himself into the corner of the upper landing where the dark fully covered him. He settled the solid-shot rifle in both hands and waited.
Through the thin stone wall, the mechanical eye tracked the red markers ascending the stairs.
When the lead marker entered the optimal engagement position, Finn fired through the wall without hesitation.
The enclosed stairwell made the sound of the shot enormous. The armour-piercing round drove through the thin wall the way its design intended. The force of the impact took the lead attacker out of the fight entirely — in the narrow space, the result was not subtle.
The second heretic behind him had no time to process what had happened before the shadow above him moved.
Finn came down from above. The mechanical arm, steel and servo-muscle, closed around the second man's face like a vice. The momentum of the drop carried them both down, and Finn drove the man into the ferrocrete floor headfirst with everything the fall gave him.
The sound of it was brief and final. The heretic did not produce anything vocal. He was simply no longer upright.
Finn looked at neither of the bodies. He slung the solid-shot rifle back across his shoulder alongside the laser sniper rifle in a single practiced motion and pulled his autopistol from his hip.
"This is Finn. I've been made. Clean. Relocating now."