Chapter 39: From Here On, the 112th Takes Over
In the transport's wide cargo hold, the engines' deep vibration carried continuously through the deck plates and up through the soles of boots.
Duvette looked down at the antique pocket watch in his hand. The second hand moved. Thirty full minutes had passed since Stroud's first batch had left the transport.
The encrypted channel produced occasional brief static and clipped reports: enough to confirm that the first batch had successfully punched through the upper hive's Void Shield and established an initial landing zone at the designated anti-aircraft tower.
The blade had found its way through the enemy's outer shell.
He closed the pocket watch and tucked it into his coat's inner pocket. His gaze moved across the hangar and came to rest on the young woman standing near Doctor Wayne.
Lena had her eyes closed. Both hands were clasped tight on her chest. Her lips moved with barely any sound. She was focused entirely on praying — for her brother Evan, and for the veterans who had gone into the fire before her.
Watching her concentration, Duvette allowed himself a private thought.
With Lena's [Prophet] ability, capable of nudging probability itself in the subconscious, her wholehearted, undistracted wishing for everyone to land safely made it genuinely difficult for this near-certain-death forced drop to produce serious casualties. He had asked Doctor Wayne long before this to spend some time on Lena's mental state, hoping to guide her natural inclination toward something more resilient. It seemed to be working.
"Second batch, board."
His voice came out flat and cold. The engine roar amplified immediately. The second batch was the 112th's primary force: sixty Valkyries forming a complete combined wing, carrying more than seven hundred fully armed soldiers.
They would follow the safe air corridor Stroud's team had cleared and conduct the second large-scale landing.
Their task was not to push further. It was to nail themselves to the landing zone like iron stakes and hold against the inevitable cultist counterattack, buying room for the forces that came after.
There were no rallying cries on the boarding deck. Only the sound of heavy boots and weapons settling against carapace. Valkyries slid one by one into the launch rail and disappeared into the cloud layer and the fire below.
Over the several hours that followed, Duvette operated like a cold and precise timepiece. Every thirty minutes, he ordered another batch released.
Third batch. Fourth batch. These descended through the upper hive's other anti-aircraft weak points in flank landings, like grey streams of iron converging after touchdown toward the enemy's interior.
When all four batches had gone, only several hundred soldiers remained in the hangar.
"Fifth batch, prepare." His voice through the channel.
He walked to his own command-type Valkyrie. Against the extreme cold of ten-thousand-metre altitude and the forces of breaking the sound barrier, he had put on dark grey carapace armour beneath the greatcoat. But the black commissar's greatcoat was still fastened tightly over the armour, and the distinctive peaked cap was secured to his tactical belt.
On his head: a sealed helmet fitted with a high-output respirator and tactical visor.
The hatch closed behind him. The red jump lights began flashing.
A sharp drop in apparent gravity — the Valkyrie separated from the mothership.
Duvette did not close his eyes. He looked down through the porthole with a cold expression.
After the Storm Trooper teams and the four batches' sustained, costly work, the upper hive's formerly near-impenetrable anti-aircraft network had been paralysed across most of its coverage. The occasional dark-red defensive laser and booming artillery that still emerged from the cloud layer below were sparse and weak. His safety envelope was substantially better than what the first batch had dropped into.
[Drop coordinate confirmed, countdown......1]
The ramp dropped. Wind carrying the taste of smoke and promethium poured in. Duvette activated the grav-chute, and stepped off into the grey sky.
Weightlessness took him. The wind hit hard. The drop was fast. The gravity field activated at full power under a hundred metres from the ground, producing a sharp howl, and Duvette landed steadily in an ornate plaza.
At the moment of landing, he pressed the pressure release on the face mask, removed the helmet, tossed it to a nearby soldier, then drew the peaked cap from his belt and fitted it to his head properly.
At this point, setting aside the small number of losses to anti-aircraft fire and drop accidents, all five batches of the 112th had assembled in the complex upper hive architecture.
Duvette wasted no time on anything else. He brought the strategic map up on his retina at once.
On the translucent pale-green overlay, the green dots representing the 112th were spread like a net across the zone. The dense red dots surrounding them were converging on all sides with the urgency of scavengers that have scented blood.
"All regiment, tactical network link."
His voice reached every squad leader through the channel simultaneously. Working from the map's real-time position updates, he began directing each squad through the labyrinthine upper hive structures with the precision of someone who has run this kind of operation enough times to do it without effort.
He moved at the very front of the advance, master-crafted plasma pistol raised. The enhanced weapon produced a lethal hum. Without particularly taking aim, he pulled the trigger on instinct at a second-floor window in an ornate ruin ahead.
The blue-white plasma sphere crossed more than a hundred metres and drove precisely into that concealed fire point. The explosion blew away half the wall. Several heretics in the process of setting up heavy weapons were vaporised in the heat.
The deafening impact was the 112th's formal announcement to Chaos warlord Heritor Asphodel: the hunters had entered the field.
[Flesh Engine], activated.
With the skill running and [United We Stand] spreading its reach across the regiment, two invisible forces enveloped the 112th's warriors simultaneously.
Strength flooded through muscle fibres at a level that the physiology involved had not been designed to produce. More significant: under [United We Stand]'s amplification, the reaction speed, dynamic vision, and shooting accuracy of the mortal veterans around Duvette were elevated past what should have been possible for anything born without genetic modification.
Armed with hellguns and Triplex Phall-pattern lasguns, they moved rapidly through the Gothic architecture and ravaged cathedrals of the upper hive, everything Chaos-contaminated and partially collapsed.
They moved nothing like standard Astra Militarum forces, nothing like soldiers who depend on heavy cover and meter-by-meter progress. They moved like something much harder to shoot.
Cultists ahead peeked around ruined corners, had not even located the enemy's position, before precisely-aimed high-energy laser beams found their foreheads. Heretics sheltering in bunkers and pushing gun barrels through firing ports had their bodies burned through along with the bunker walls by the melta teams.
This was a one-sided, efficient clearance. Under [Eye of Judgement]'s target-marking shared across the regiment, the 112th moved through the fanatical cultists without slowing.
Duvette was at the very front. Compared to long-range shooting, he found with [Flesh Engine] running that he was increasingly drawn to the close-range option. He reversed his grip and drew the master-crafted power sword from his hip. The Eternal blade. The blue disintegration field traced lethal arcs through the dim building shadows.
Several large, heavily-mutated heretics covered in blasphemous runes charged with melee weapons, screaming.
Duvette went forward rather than back. A sharp drop into a slide step and the power sword cut through their crude flak armour and mutated bone without encountering any meaningful resistance. The heretics' cherished brute strength and weapons, along with the heretics themselves, were cut in two. Entrails and blood covered what had once been polished marble floor.
While the 112th drove like a heated blade through the enemy concentrations, something on the strategic map's edge caught Duvette's peripheral attention.
The map showed it clearly: three street blocks to his right front, dozens of blue Imperial friendly dots were retreating toward him in extreme disorder. Moving fast, and badly.
Those would be the Storm Trooper remnants from the anti-aircraft destruction missions.
And behind those blue dots, tracking tight: a large, deep-red cursor.
This marker radiated lethal danger with every pulse. Each time it flared, blue Storm Trooper dots on the map went dark.
"A Bane Engine."
Duvette stopped walking. He allowed himself a cold smile.
So the heavy guard force the enemy had left near the Cognitor Array had been drawn out by these Storm Troopers. That suited him.
He looked at the enormous, lethal red dot on the map. There was nothing resembling fear in his expression. What replaced it was the particular quality of attention that a hunter gives something it has decided to pursue.
In Formal Prime's lower hive they had broken one Daemon Engine. Here they would break another.
"All units, halt advance. Construct interception positions where you stand." He issued the order through the command channel at once.
The heavy weapons squads moved immediately. Melta gunners and plasma shooters settled into the best ambush positions available, finding the dead angles that gave them clean lines without exposing their own. Veterans with rocket launchers climbed expertly to the high points on buildings along both sides. Their dark barrel openings locked onto the wide main passage ahead.
They had no Leman Russ tanks for armour cover this time.
But Duvette's certainty was higher than it had been at any comparable moment.
At his side: Anderson and Stroud leading the five veterans in force-feedback power armour. Around him: nearly a thousand battle-hardened soldiers, under [United We Stand]'s maximum amplification, boiling with killing intent and capable of things their physiology had no right to produce.
From the distance, the rumbling was growing louder. Heavy mechanical treads accompanied it. And beneath that: the desperate panting of the Storm Troopers running for the intersection ahead.
Duvette forced his way into the Storm Trooper squad's communications channel.
"This is Colonel-Commissar Duvette."
His voice cut through the noise and the explosions with enough clarity to reach every cornered trooper.
"Storm Troopers. You did well on the anti-air network. Your mission is complete. Come through the intersection ahead and fall back to rest."
He let a single beat of silence land before the last line.
"From here on, the 112th takes over."