V2 Chapter 12: A Titan Falls
The fight inside the chemical plant ended faster than anyone had expected.
The young cadet commissar Ibram Gaunt had not even managed to pull the trigger of his bolt pistol a second time. A standard 112th fire team of ten soldiers had, in the space of a few minutes, comprehensively dismantled a heretic force several times their own number.
No battle cries. No wasted movement. Black carapace moving through the shadows, hellgun beams cutting through cover with precision and driving through skulls. Every shot, every covering move, every advance interlocked with the next, seamless in a way that should not have been possible to sustain in conditions this chaotic. When the last body hit the iron grating and went still, the entire plant fell silent.
The commissar in the black greatcoat stood exactly where he had been standing, eyes cold, watching his veterans clean up the last of the engagement.
When it was done, Duvette produced one short tactical hand signal. The veterans read it immediately and fell in behind him again, silent as a wolfpack returning to its stride, and pushed forward.
Remarkable combat capability. And an operational discipline that bordered on severe.
Like the fabled Angels of Death themselves.
Gaunt stood watching it and felt something shift in him at the foundation level. As a cadet commissar of the 8th Hyrkan Regiment, he had seen a great many formations that earned the label elite. He had never, in his time under arms, encountered an Astra Militarum force composed of mortal soldiers that demonstrated individual combat capability and combined-arms coordination at this level.
Duvette turned his head and looked at the young man standing frozen in place, the man who was destined, in twenty years, to become one of the Imperium's own legends. He moved the corner of his mouth in something he privately considered a reasonably warm smile.
"Come with us." His voice was low. "Your unit has been gutted. Stumbling around alone in this killing ground is a death sentence. Move with us."
Gaunt heard this and paused, visibly.
Fight alongside a legendary commissar and a force that could only be described as monstrous?
He looked at the smile on Duvette's face, slightly rigid, made something close to severe in the flickering firelight, and felt a brief tightening in his chest. It occurred to him that this might be some kind of test.
He dismissed the hesitation in a few seconds and made his decision. He gave a firm nod, and with the last surviving Hyrkan soldiers behind him, matched pace with Duvette.
"Switch to our comms frequency." Duvette was already walking, not looking back as he gave the instruction, and passed Gaunt the 112th's channel code.
Gaunt did as he was told. As he and the Hyrkan soldiers tuned their earpieces to the 112th's main channel, he had expected to hear what usually filled a regiment's comms during a fight of this scale, requests for support, screaming, commands overriding each other.
What he heard was entirely different.
No trace of panic. No noise. What filled the channel instead was tactical coordination operating at a rate and precision he had not thought achievable in the lower hive.
"Second Company, First Platoon, Third Squad, target point cleared, moving to coordinates E-4."
"Fourth Company's advance axis is encountering enemy armour. Requesting armoured fire support."
"Third Street right-flank blind angle sealed. No casualties."
Dozens of fire teams reporting coordinates and confirmed kills in clipped tactical shorthand. And Duvette, like an emotionless cogitator array working through a problem, issuing brief, cold corrections in the gaps between reports, adjusting unit advance routes with the precision of a scalpel making small incisions in exactly the right tissue.
Gaunt finally understood why Duvette had seemed to be talking to himself since the beginning. He was remotely commanding an entire regiment across a lower hive labyrinth. And keeping the whole force operating like that.
He looked at the figure ahead of him with something that refused to settle into any single expression. One man, across multiple city blocks of structurally complex terrain, commanding thousands of soldiers from brief incoming reports and directing them to advance as though they were extensions of his own body.
He had never seen anything like it. He had not even heard of anything like it.
Duvette had no time for and no interest in whatever impression he was currently making on Gaunt.
His attention was on the strategic map at the edge of his vision. He had just received Stroud's report: the enemy's frontline command post had undergone structural collapse, decapitation complete. But both Stroud and Anderson were wounded.
He adjusted the infiltration routes of several left-flank infantry squads and the armoured company on the road below immediately, the 112th's formation shifting with surgical precision through the sectors around Stroud and Anderson's retreat path, folding them back into the regiment's protective perimeter as naturally as a hand closing.
Then they kept advancing toward the connecting passage that led upward to the mid-hive levels.
In the fighting that followed, Gaunt came to understand more fully what made this formation so disturbing to face.
He found that although the 112th had broken itself down into squad and platoon-level fire teams to accommodate the lower hive terrain, the actual operational range of those teams functioned like a net that could tighten and expand at will, always centered on that same commissar. Infantry cleared blind angles in the complex ruins and on the elevated walkways above, while Leman Russ tanks on the main thoroughfares below moved forward with a slow and absolute inevitability, providing mobile cover and heavy fire support for everything working above them.
When the enemy's xenos-pattern armour units, those agile, strange machines on multiple mechanical limb assemblies, made their surprise attacks, the 112th's armoured element demonstrated its actual level of dominance.
The overall rate of advance was slow. But nothing could stop it.
And with Stroud's decapitation strike completed, the Chaos forces in this sector had lost the control of their frontline commander, and the full depth of what Khorne's corruption had done to them became visible. These Khorne-faithful no longer maintained tactical discipline or used cover. They came laughing, suicidal, charging the 112th's positions without any apparent consideration for self-preservation. Some heretics whose lower bodies had been destroyed by laser fire still dragged themselves forward along the floor on their hands, reaching for the enemy ahead.
Duvette regarded this mindless, animal quality of assault with contempt.
Four days since the force had entered the lower hive. In all of that time, apart from the two scouts lost during Stroud's infiltration, the rest of the 112th's soldiers had suffered nothing beyond wounds. Not a single death in the main body.
Honestly, the individual combat capability his soldiers had developed could at this point only be described as fundamentally unfair to anything they were encountering. Against heretics flooding forward like this, there was no meaningful difference between the ongoing engagement and a systematic culling.
But Duvette was not complacent. He had received specific intelligence from Anderson after the captain returned to the main force: the enemy's rear echelons were sheltering disciplined Blood Pact regulars and Chaos Champions of genuinely terrifying capability. Those were the hard obstacles this advance was actually working toward.
Gaunt stayed close beside him. He had been watching the 112th's unstoppable advance through this killing ground, and finally could not hold the question back.
"Sir, our assigned mission—"
"I know our assigned mission." Duvette cut across him without ceremony. "Establish a bridgehead in this sector, expand the attack front to allow follow-up forces to enter the battle." He turned his head and looked at the cadet commissar beside him. "It is an extraordinarily stupid strategic approach. And I don't have time to spend arguing with the senior generals sitting in comfortable chairs in orbit, pointing at hololithic maps."
He turned back, issued a few clipped commands on the channel adjusting the right-flank tactical teams, and continued.
"The enemy outnumbers us by an enormous margin, and their familiarity with this terrain is beyond anything we can match. Grinding forward in positional attrition warfare down here is nothing but sending soldiers to die by increments. The only viable solution is to eliminate the Chaos leadership on this planet as fast as possible. That alone ends this slaughter at the fastest rate."
Otherwise this grinds on for most of a year, he added to himself. And in the original course of events, Shebol Red Hand that bastard actually got away. This time, since he was here, he was not going to allow that to happen again.
Gaunt opened his mouth, he appeared to be working toward something about violating direct orders, and the situation changed without warning.
Behind them, in the direction of the outer wall breach, a sound tore through everything with enough force to register as physical impact. A noise of an entirely different category.
Then the ground produced a sound it did not normally make. An enormous, terrible vibration drove through the lower hive's steel foundations and reached everyone standing in it simultaneously, hard enough to break their footing.
This was not artillery.
Plasma-blue light, blinding and absolute, punched through the lower hive's layered debris and cover in an instant and lit the dim underground world to something close to daylight. The destructive shockwave that followed knocked structural debris, pipes, and metal trash from elevated positions like driving rain.
Duvette's pupils contracted sharply. He pushed aside whatever was in front of him, crossed to a gap in a building at speed, and fixed his eyes on the direction the explosion had come from. Then he dropped his awareness to the strategic map on his retina.
On the map: in the open plaza before the assault breach, the dense cluster of blue markers representing Imperial forces had, in the space of that single instant, lost a large section. Evaporated. In their place, a cluster of red had appeared not far ahead of the breach.
He understood immediately what that sound meant.
A God-Machine. One of the Emperor's Titans had fallen.
What could bring down a Titan, he thought — even a Warhound? A Daemon Engine? A captured Shadowsword that the enemy had turned against them? Some blasphemous construct dragged out of the Warp?
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