Chapter 40: True Coordination
Via short-range comms, with the Storm Troopers and the Bane Engine still two kilometres out, Duvette received the enemy confirmation.
The pursuing target was a tracked super-heavy Bane Engine. No other enemy units providing escort or cover. Void Shields already overloaded by friendly forces in the preceding engagement.
That counted as rare good news. At least they would not have to deal with the steel monster while cultists and dark Mechanicus constructs were simultaneously driving into their flanks.
With the enemy confirmed, Duvette began his plan.
The Storm Troopers came out of the burning street end at a dead run.
They had set out as twenty-seven. Nine remained. Their black carapace was covered in the white scorch marks of sustained close-range fire. None of them looked back. They ran at maximum speed.
Behind them, something terrifying was tracking them without any sign of stopping.
"Everyone keep moving, into Cargo Lane Three!" The Storm Trooper vox shout cut through the channel. "112th! Alert! It's coming in behind us!"
The next second, a crimson energy beam swept the length of the street from end to end.
The three troopers at the rear did not scream. They were vaporised from the waist up. Two pairs of legs kept going forward on inertia, stumbled two more steps, and fell into a water-filled crater pit.
The remaining six did not stop. They dropped as low as they could and sprinted for the cargo lane Duvette had marked.
Duvette was in a half-collapsed cargo control tower, watching through a cracked observation window.
His expression was not good.
He had prepared for this. But when the Bane Engine actually came out of the smoke, he could not entirely suppress the internal remark.
You would want a Shadowsword super-heavy to deal with this thing.
From his position: close to three storeys tall, wide enough to nearly fill the hive city's main thoroughfare. The body resembled a super-heavy siege vehicle that had been possessed from inside out, its forward face covered in angled armour plates so thick they approached the absurd. Dark red liquid moved through the gaps between them.
On both flanks: enormous multi-tier track assemblies. Each track segment was worked with the relief of a twisted human face. These faces were not decorative. They were active, wailing, turning their hollow eye sockets toward every living thing within reach.
From the hull above: an asymmetric turret, with skulls and eight-pointed stars and the remains of skinned bodies welded across its surface. Several mechanical tentacles extended from gaps in the armour and moved slowly through the air in long, exploratory motions, as though tasting the fear of whatever mortals were nearby.
Below the cargo control tower, the 112th's veterans had dispersed into their positions.
This had once been a large cargo transit hub on Ashek II, processing enormous volumes of shuttle traffic in peacetime. On both sides of the lane: tall warehouse buildings. Between them: a wide but long and narrow cargo corridor with broken transport rails above, crane hooks, steel cables, and maintenance gantries throughout. Below the surface: a deep structure of maintenance levels, load-bearing beams, lift platforms, and old pipelines forming a dense web of steel.
Not suitable terrain for human fighting.
Also not suitable terrain for a tracked machine that size to turn.
"All units, hold concealment." Duvette pressed the comms. "No one fires without my order."
"Sir, the Storm Troopers are about to come in." Finn's voice from the channel. He was positioned on a broken gantry on the western side. "That thing is under a hundred metres behind them."
"I can see."
Duvette kept his gaze fixed on the Bane Engine.
The Storm Troopers burst into the cargo lane. The lead sergeant spotted the 112th soldiers holding position behind cover, and he showed none of the relief that should have come with it. He waved his arm with mounting urgency instead.
"Don't fire! Your weapons won't penetrate it! Repeat! Your weapons cannot penetrate it!"
"He seems to have great confidence in us." Stroud, lying behind an elevated pipe run, delivered this observation to no one in particular.
"Shut up." Duvette. "Wait until they clear the first marking line."
The Storm Troopers crossed a patch of floor marked with white paint, the line Duvette had engineering teams paint earlier.
The Bane Engine came in behind them without slowing. Its side armour scraped long runnels of sparks from the lane walls. Its tracks crushed the thermal decoy devices the Storm Troopers had dropped on their way through.
Duvette raised his right hand slowly. Every person in the lane held their breath.
The Bane Engine's leading edge crossed the second marking line. Then the third.
"Now." He dropped his hand. "Decoy team, cut the cables."
A series of sharp detonations came from above.
Stroud's scout group had pre-cut the safety locks on several dozen overhead anchor points. In the next moment, industrial steel cables that had been hanging at height came down with a piercing howl, driving toward the Bane Engine below.
The machine registered the threat. The turret spun hard. Several mechanical tentacles lashed upward and destroyed two of the cables directly.
But the remaining cables were not targeting the main body. They dropped into the tracks.
The thick steel cables were seized by the spinning tracks and wound in. They snapped taut instantly, producing a sound that went through the teeth. The Bane Engine's enormous body shuddered. Its speed finally dropped.
"Track team." Duvette's voice remained level. "Hit the tension wheel."
In the maintenance channels cut into both sides of the lane floor, melta gunners who had been prone and motionless for a considerable time rose simultaneously.
White heat-streams erupted from both sides of the lane and struck precisely at the gap in the left-side skirt armour.
The front armour was a non-option. Even melta guns could not penetrate it directly.
The gap beneath the side skirt armour was something else. There, the track-tensioning structure, road wheel assemblies, and exposed transmission lines were already under enormous load from the cable entanglement.
After the first melta volley struck, the Bane Engine's left track did not immediately give way under the combined stress and the Warp corruption sustaining it. The impact blew out bright sparks. The Bane Engine released a roar that drove blood out of the ears of every soldier within range. Eardrums perforated. The veterans in the maintenance channels did not retreat. They put the second volley in through the agony.
This time, a tension wheel on the left side finally gave way. The entire twisted metal assembly blew outward from inside the track.
A section of track tore loose violently, like a severed black serpent, and smashed out into the wall beside it, collapsing half the structure.
The sudden ambush drove the Bane Engine into complete fury. It screamed and turned its secondary turrets across the 112th positions in the maintenance channels. The soldiers whose eardrums had already been destroyed had nothing left with which to receive the warning. Explosions swallowed entire sections of channel along with everyone in them.
Duvette drew a slow breath. He did not allow any of it to show. Not right now.
"Right-side rocket team, suppress the secondary turrets." His voice steady and even. "Finn, hit its sensory equipment."
"Understood."
On the gantry, Finn exhaled slowly.
His mechanical eye reflected the countless pulsing red lights visible through the Bane Engine's armour gaps. He gave his thanks to the Emperor's guidance, and pulled the trigger.
The laser beam struck precisely between the twisted biological structures visible in the gaps, hitting the sensory organs set into the armour. The Bane Engine released another ear-splitting howl. Its turret locked mid-rotation.
"All plasma guns, repeat Finn's point of impact." Duvette's order was immediate.
Multiple plasma shots struck the same location from different angles. The armour plates there melted into deep craters. Streams of viscous liquid mixed with what might have been blood and might have been coolant sprayed outward. The machine was completely blinded.
The turret began spinning blindly, energy beams raking across surrounding structures at random, cutting several gantries in two.
Stroud grabbed a swinging steel cable and carried himself through an arc in the air, narrowly clearing one of the beams.
"Throne above!"
Duvette did not look at him. He knew the bald soldier could handle his own situation.
"Anderson, now." He raised his voice.
"Finally." Anderson's voice was low enough to feel in the sternum.
He burst out from behind cover in the same instant and the thunder hammer was already live.
Anderson, with both [Flesh Engine] and [United We Stand] driving him, had arrived at a level of strength that had nothing human at its edges. The force-feedback armour read the wearer's force and will and responded in kind. The jet-pack's roar climbed until it sounded as though even the machine-spirit had lost its composure.
He drove straight at the Bane Engine's left side where the track had detached.
With the tension wheel gone, that side's track was mostly loose. But the Bane Engine was still using its right track to push itself forward by brute force, the enormous body slamming continuously against both walls, trying to tear free of the cables and debris.
Anderson hit the swing of his charge and brought the hammer down.
The roar he produced in the comms channel came with an impact sound so severe it was felt in every chest on the lane. The entire three-storey-tall Bane Engine shuddered.
Duvette saw the enormous machine briefly tilt sideways.
The turret locked completely. Could not continue rotating. The main armour developed a crack.
Inside the crack: a mass of dark red flesh, pulsing. Countless mechanical cables were inserted into it, contracting and expanding in something that resembled a heartbeat.
"Evan! Elias!" Duvette's voice cut through everything. "Second demolition team, move!"
"Moving!"
Both of them came out of cover at the head of their squads, melta charges in hand.
The Bane Engine registered the threat. Mechanical tentacles stabbed outward through the crack. One of them drove straight through a veteran's abdomen and lifted him off his feet.
The veteran did not scream.
He set his jaw, used what strength remained to him, grabbed the tentacle, and pressed a magnetic-clamp explosive against its root.
"For the Emperor!"
The explosion severed the tentacle and bought Evan and Elias several seconds.
"Take this from Elias, you disgusting thing!" The Cadian veteran was shouting as he drove the first explosive charge into the crack. Evan came in immediately behind him and pushed the second charge deeper.
The flesh mass seemed to register what was being done to it. The entire Bane Engine began shaking violently. A terrible force erupted from within.
Its right track spun frantically. Dragging the half-severed left track behind it, the machine lurched forward a distance.
The floor began giving way.
"It's breaking free!" Stroud shouted.
"No." Duvette was looking at the structural diagram of the cargo zone under his feet, where the load-bearing layer indicator had gone red. "It's on the fourth marking line."
He pressed a different channel.
"All personnel evacuate now! Engineering team, detonate the load-bearing beams. Thirty-second countdown!"
The Bane Engine continued grinding forward.
The floor cracks spread and widened. The old metal plating produced the sounds of metal under load it was not designed to carry. The remaining Storm Troopers and 112th veterans moved along the planned evacuation routes. Wounded soldiers were dragged back by the men next to them.
"Thirty."
"Twenty."
"Ten."
The Bane Engine's leading edge crossed the final load-bearing zone.
"Detonate."
When the countdown reached zero, the explosions came from beneath it.
The entire cargo lane seemed to be opened from below. Rebar, ferrocrete, and old metal floor fractured simultaneously. The Bane Engine's enormous left body dropped downward. Half the track assembly plunged into the lower maintenance level. The right track kept spinning in open air, producing a deafening friction roar.
It was stuck.
The machine that had ground Astra Militarum regiments into blood and rubble had been physically wedged into the hive city's steel skeleton by mortal infantry with no tank support.
Then the second explosion came, from inside the main turret.
The melta charges Evan and Elias had placed finished their work.
The stench of blood and black smoke spread outward. The flesh mass and control structures inside the Bane Engine were burned through. It released one final ear-splitting shriek. The turret and tentacles drooped simultaneously. The red light deep within the body dimmed and went out, piece by piece.
The Bane Engine was silent.
Duvette drew a long breath.
Done.
He gave the order immediately. "All units, disengage from this position. Advance toward the Cognitor Array. Move fast. The enemy knows what we're after and they will reinforce it faster than we can walk."
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