V2 Chapter 42: I Have Faced the Leviathan of the Deep
The moment Duvette confirmed that an extremely capable Astartes force was driving at full speed toward the spire position and had already destroyed the Void Shield generator array, he issued a defensive contraction order across the full tactical network.
"All outer companies, abandon the first and second interception lines. Fall back to the central hall. Repeat: fall back to the central hall. Construct a circular defensive perimeter."
His voice cut through the static-heavy channel, cold and clear. He checked the Cognitor Array screen. The blood-red countdown read twenty-nine minutes.
The enemy's response was more frantic than anticipated. The moment Asphodel understood that his Cognitor Array, the control nexus for every Bane Engine under his command, was being forcibly overwritten by some high-order Mechanicus kill-code, he sent a death order to every cultist and mutant in the upper hive.
They stopped caring about casualties. They stopped looking for cover. Like a black tide breaking through a dam, they drove themselves in a suicidal, all-or-nothing charge directly at the spire core where the 112th was dug in.
The pressure on the defensive line spiked instantly. At the end of every corridor, dense masses of Blood Pact cultists were climbing over their own dead to push forward, using bodies to block the 112th's heavy weapon sightlines.
Melta gun barrels glowed red-hot. Plasma gunners' cooling coils screamed with the strain of sustained overload.
In the ferocity of that fighting withdrawal, Duvette and the 112th drove their boots into the floor and held the line where it was.
They had held for less than ten minutes, the ground ahead already carpeted in fragmented remains, when a new sound came through the noise of the battle. A bolter cadence, deep and metronomic, distinct from anything on the battlefield. It erupted from somewhere behind the cultist mass.
Duvette climbed to a raised defensive platform and looked out through the smoke.
He saw them.
Close to a hundred warriors in brilliant silver plate. Their power armour carried no camouflage. The finish was pure and cold: gun-grey and bright silver, interlocked. On their left pauldrons, a blue sea-serpent coiled in a double ring showed clear through the smoke.
Adeptus Astartes. A successor of the Ultramarines. Hunters from the ocean world of Ithaka.
The Iron Snakes.
These demigods fought nothing like any Astartes Duvette had encountered. Their preference was absolute: spear and shield.
Most of them gripped spears more than two metres long, the tips alive with crackling blue disintegration fields: the Spear of Poseidon. In the other hand, each carried a domed round shield in the style of ancient heavy infantry, its surface generating its own protective field.
On Ithaka's deep ocean floor, these were the weapons they used to hunt enormous sea-serpents bare-handed. That instinct, refined across generations for killing things vastly larger than themselves, gave them a suffocating dominance against both the Bane Engines and the cultist tide pouring against the 112th's position.
The cultist rearguard tried to respond. Improvised heavy stubbers and autocannons swung toward this new threat and opened fire. The dense volley struck the Iron Snakes' domed shields and threw off harmless cascades of sparks.
The Iron Snakes did not look for cover. They advanced in absolute lockstep, a wall of silver that nothing was stopping, walking directly into the heavy fire and breaking the cultist formations by sheer forward mass. Bolter fire placed with mechanical precision. Power spears driving through throats and chests with the efficiency of something that had done this ten thousand times.
In less time than it should have taken, nearly a hundred silver giants had cut clean through from the rear, parting the heretic wave that had been pressing against the 112th like a blade dividing water.
The battlefield centre was forcibly cleared.
A Space Marine of exceptional height, honour laurels and the marks of old wounds covering his armour, stepped across the bodies and stopped in front of Duvette. He wore no helmet. His face was like stone, weathered and hard, the halo on his power pack marking his rank.
"I am Khûres. Brother-Captain of the Iron Snakes."
He looked down at the blood-soaked mortal holding the power sword, with the particular measuring quality of someone from Ithaka, cold and assessing, and offered what passed for an Astartes compliment.
"I heard of the honour Colonel-Commissar Duvette defended at the Battle of Macragge, from the parent Chapter of the Ultramarines. Before making landfall on Ashek II, I held reservations about the account. Few mortal frames produce results of that kind."
Khûres' gaze moved across the bodies at Duvette's feet.
"I am glad I now have the opportunity to verify it myself."
Duvette shook the blood from his blade and met this ancient demigod without the flinch that most mortals would have found unavoidable. He allowed himself a composed, knowing smile.
"I prefer to prove myself through the deaths of heretics rather than secondhand reputation."
There was no time for anything further. The situation did not permit it. Both men moved immediately to a brief, precise tactical exchange.
Asphodel's main reinforcement force, those massive Bane Engines breaking off the frontal lines, was only a few city blocks from the spire now.
Duvette and Khûres reached agreement quickly. The Iron Snakes, as the established specialists in killing enormous prey, would take the lead in the active engagement: confronting and dismantling the incoming Bane Engines directly. The 112th would act as supporting attack and fire base, working to slow the enemy's encirclement wherever the Iron Snakes needed time bought.
During the coordination, Duvette observed the Iron Snakes' tactical organisation at close range for the first time. It was unlike anything in the Codex Astartes.
They did not use standard company and squad divisions. Instead, every ten Space Marines formed a fully independent Brotherhood, led by a senior Sergeant.
More distinct still: every ten-man Brotherhood carried its own Apothecary as a standard allocation. The cost of that structure was enormous. The return was equally so. It gave the Iron Snakes a survivability and tactical cohesion in sustained close-quarters attrition that most Chapters could not match.
Working from the defensive pressure across the line, Duvette and Khûres set the joint positions rapidly.
The Scipio Brotherhood, the Viae Brotherhood, the Thebes Brotherhood, the Parthian Brotherhood, and the Orpheus Brotherhood, fifty elite Space Marines in total, would operate alongside the five 112th vanguard companies led by Stroud, Anderson, and the other veterans in their force-feedback armour. This formed the mobile strike element. They would push out actively, using the upper hive's complex terrain to disperse, redirect, and hunt the Bane Engines returning to the spire.
Duvette himself, with the bulk of the 112th, and Brother-Captain Khûres personally commanding the remaining fifty Iron Snakes, would hold the central hall entrance against the full weight of whatever Chaos threw at it.
Duvette checked the countdown. "Twenty minutes remain. Hold for twenty minutes and this machine finishes its work. Then it is over."
Brother-Captain Khûres gave a single cold sound. He turned, brought the tip of his disintegration-field spear down against the face of his domed shield with a single sharp strike. The metal ring it produced cut through the noise of everything around it.
His eyes had already fixed on a wide street at the far end of the approach, where a mutated Bane Engine of serpentine, multi-headed configuration was grinding through the rubble toward them.
"For Ithaka!" Khûres' battle-cry overrode the battlefield entirely. "I have faced the leviathan in the deep. You are nothing but another trophy."
The fight detonated.
What followed was brutal and costly in a way that did not ease. Even with the Iron Snakes as the spine of the defence, the pressure of the endless Chaos assault pressed the line to its absolute limit.
On the wide steps outside the central hall, fifty Iron Snakes locked into their signature formation. Shield interlocked with shield, edges overlapping like scales, the individual force fields merging into a single continuous barrier. A silver wall that was not a metaphor.
Screaming mutant cultists and heavily-armoured Chaos infantry broke against it like water against rock. When their charge stalled against the shields, the disintegration-field spear tips came through the gaps, darting with the precision of something that had practised this in deep water against things that could swallow a man whole, finding throats, hearts, and the spaces between armour plates.
The Iron Snakes carried bolters and plasma guns, but held them for distance suppression only. Once the enemy was inside spear range, they preferred the blade.
But the Bane Engines' firepower was a different problem. When a super-heavy secondary turret's plasma burst struck the shield wall, even an Astartes shield formation shuddered and broke apart.
"High-position fire support! Do not leave the Iron Snakes to absorb all the heavy fire!" Duvette roared from the elevated position.
Under the extreme amplification of [United We Stand], the 112th veterans demonstrated a tactical precision that was difficult to watch and not feel something about. They did not freeze in the presence of demigods. They took their weapons and positioned themselves on the elevated ruin points behind and to either side of the Astartes shield wall, establishing a layered high-low arrangement that worked with perfect instinct.
Every time the Iron Snakes' shields absorbed a heavy impact, the 112th's heavy weapons answered from above and from the flanks, striking the sources of that fire before they could reload.
The casualties climbed. They did not stop climbing. But regardless of how frantic the enemy assault became, not one heretic crossed the hall threshold. The line held. Mortal and demigod, together.
The minutes ran out.
When the countdown on the Cognitor Array screen reached zero, an ear-splitting overload tone came from deep inside the hall.
Then something that could not be seen but that every person on the battlefield felt at once, a pulse that went through the skin and into the bones, erupted from the burned-out Array and swept across the better part of Ashek II.
The battlefield froze.
The Bane Engines that had been pressing hard toward the defensive line one second before went silent in the same instant the pulse passed through them. Their massive mechanical frames produced a series of shrieking metallic distortions.
Some locked up completely on the spot, enormous gun barrels drooping without power. Others, their reactor cores thrown into logical conflict by the purge code's corruption, detonated from the inside without warning, catastrophically.
Those with lighter damage lost their identification protocols entirely. Their already corrupted machine-spirits collapsed into pure frenzy. They turned their guns on the cultists around them and began cutting them down without any distinction.
The Chaos assault dissolved.
"We did it." Duvette leaned against a broken stone column and let out a long, slow breath. He could feel [Flesh Engine]'s load releasing through him, the tearing ache of pushed-past-limit muscle announcing itself in every fibre simultaneously.
The moment everyone around him began to absorb that it was over, a sound tore through from deep inside the hall. An amplifier mounted on the wall, its speaker shrieking with electrical feedback, carrying a voice saturated with mechanical distortion and something that had no business being mistaken for anything but pure, deliberate malice.
Asphodel.
"I find myself curious...what manner of high-order key did you carry, little insect, and to whom did you transmit your signal...but none of that changes anything. We will meet again, corpse-emperor's..."
The transmission cut off with a sharp crack.
Brother-Captain Khûres, still drenched in blood from the fighting that had just ended, moved without any announcement. The muscles in his arm snapped taut. His spear left his hand like a bolt of lightning and drove through the amplifier with complete accuracy, spraying sparks across the wall. The voice stopped.
"Cowardly heretic filth." Khûres walked over and pulled the spear free with a cold sound. "When I find you next, I will take that corrupted head from your shoulders with my own hands."
When he turned back, the measuring quality that had been in his eyes earlier was entirely gone. What replaced it was unambiguous.
"Colonel-Commissar. You held the line." He looked at Duvette and the battered veterans of the 112th around him. "I will not qualify it. You and your soldiers fought with honour."
Duvette straightened and gave the Aquila salute with the precise formality the moment deserved, then inclined his head.
"Your support arrived exactly when it needed to, Captain. Without it, the outcome of this defence was not certain."
Khûres did not answer with pleasantries. He turned his head toward the steps outside the hall.
Several Iron Snakes Apothecaries were at work there, performing the rites of the fallen. After recovering the gene-seed from their dead brothers with complete solemnity, they drew small glass vials from their tactical pouches. They unsealed them and tipped clear water, seawater unmistakably, onto the broken armour of the warriors who had not stood up again, speaking words too low to hear across the distance.
Noticing Duvette's attention, Khûres' voice dropped a register.
"This is the tradition of the Iron Snakes. The waters of Ithaka guide the dead hunter home to the deep."
Duvette gave a nod, and something in his tone was not ceremony.
"I know. In a galaxy soaked in blood and betrayal, holding to tradition is worth more than almost anything else."
Something shifted in Khûres' expression at that. Just briefly. A wry quality in a face not accustomed to it.
The veteran Space Marine looked at Duvette for a moment, then pivoted unexpectedly.
"I have heard that in an earlier campaign, you fought alongside the White Scars of Chogoris. I find myself curious." His tone was direct and carried something that was, for all its restraint, entirely competitive. "In your estimation, how do the spear-hunters of Ithaka measure against those riders?"
Duvette blinked. He had not anticipated that from this particular Astartes, the dry and deeply concealed chapter rivalry behind a face that had shown him nothing but cold assessment until now.
He allowed himself a candid smile and gave the only answer that was simultaneously honest and survivable.
"When it comes to cutting the enemy's throat. Equal."
Khûres made a sound. Whether it expressed satisfaction or dissatisfaction was entirely unclear, and he did not elaborate either way.
After a brief silence, something passed across his expression. He made a decision. He stepped forward with deliberate formality, reached to his tactical belt, and detached a small glass vial wrapped in silver wire. The water inside it was completely clear.
He extended it to Duvette.
"This is our gift, Commissar." Khûres' voice was low and carrying. "You are a warrior worthy of Ithaka's waters. As allies who stood together in a place of death, I, Khûres, and the entire Iron Snakes detachment, recognise the 112th's designation."
Another Chapter's recognition. Duvette took the vial with both hands and thought, somewhere at the back of his mind, that at this rate he might eventually collect a souvenir from every Chapter that saw action in this crusade.
He inclined his head with genuine respect.
"The 112th is deeply honoured."
When the Apothecaries had finished their work, every gene-seed recovered and every piece of salvageable wargear accounted for, the Iron Snakes formed up with no delay and no ceremony beyond what they had already performed.
"The heretics on this battlefield are still routing. Asphodel's main force is broken, but the war for this planet has only just begun. We have residual enemy elements to clear."
Brother-Captain Khûres slung his shield across his back, held the spear in a reversed grip, and offered Duvette his final words.
"Stay alive, mortal. In this long crusade, I am confident we will have occasion to fight alongside one another again."
Then the measured, heavy tread of silver-armoured giants moved away down the corridor, disappearing one by one into the smoke-blackened passages of the upper hive.
Duvette stood holding the small cold vial and turned to look at the 112th.
Across the comms channel, the voices of his soldiers were beginning to rise. The particular sound of men and women who have survived something that should have killed them and are only now beginning to understand that they are still standing.
The fighting was not finished. Ashek II had not fallen yet.
But their victory had already arrived.
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