Drop
The quiet humming of the cogitators and the servos of his armor comforts Brother Carolus. Crimson lights bathe the interior of the drop-pod in a film of blood. A quiet prayer to the Omnissiah filters through the vox-net. The Iron-Father praying for their safe decent and thanking the Machine Spirit for its work. Two mechanical fists tighten on the stock of the bolter which he has wielded since he was a neophyte new to the Chapter. Forty years in service to the Iron Hands. Forty years of war and pain. Each battle exposing another weakness of the flesh. Each victory bringing him closer to the ideal of the machine. His arms from the elbow down, both lungs, his left leg, and his right eye all the superior bionic implants.
His armor, sable and grey, bears the iconography of the Ninth Company Clan Vurgaan. The lightning strike within a cog and the mailed hand of the Chapter are emblazoned proudly on either pauldron. The rest of his brothers are silent. The squad channel void of the banter and comfort so common to the other Chapters of Astartes in service to the Imperium. They are the Iron Hands. Such things are for the flesh and its weakness. The flesh is weak. The mighty Strike Cruiser Unbroken Will shudders as the Void Shields absorb another volley from the pitifully weak raiding fleet.
She ignores them all and lets the following Imperial fleet deal with them. They are not the objective. The detritus left behind by the Jaws of Rage is. The World Eaters' Strike Cruiser left a demi-company of berserkers behind when they left the system and the Iron Hands are there to deal with them. Unbroken Will's cannons roar shattering a pair of escorts and her lances carve deep furrows in the armored flanks of the wounded Dauntless-class cruiser corrupted by Chaos. The cruiser shudders and lurches away from the Strike Cruiser the cowardice of its captain leaving the planet open to the assault of the Ninth Company.
Unbroken Will hardly slows as she passes by the planet. Onboard cogitators are fed the information they need to guide the pods to the surface safely...or at least intact. The pods are jettisoned like parasites pinched from boils. Each pod contains either a full squad of transhuman Astartes, or a single Dreadnought ancient. They slam into the planet's atmosphere with enough force that it would have pulped a mortal man. But they are not mortal. Not anymore. None of them react to the strains of the drop displaying a machine-like disregard for the discomforts of the flesh. As they fall through the heavens the internal temperature of the pods exceeds one-hundred degrees celsius. Far beyond that which man was designed to survive.
The flesh is weak. That is their warcry. Their creed. Their soul. The Iron Hands know the weakness of the flesh for what it is: corruptible, riddled by the curse of aging, soft. They strive for a more perfect existence. That of the machine: cold, calculating, unfeeling...iron. The Deathstorm pods leading the way slam into the ground first to unleash their payloads. Missiles and assault cannons roar in every direction killing everything in range and clearing the way for the following landings. Their sable flanks fall with a final clang signaling an end to the enemies of Man. The city shudders and bleeds in the face of the indiscriminate onslaught.
The Emperor's Angels of Death earn their epithet. On wings of fire the pods bearing the Astartes slam home just as the final bullet is fired. Timed to the millisecond by the clinical minds of the Iron Hands. More black pods land in an explosion of dirt and fire, their ramps slamming down with a deafening clang. Mutants and cultists. Twisted abominations of the flesh crowd close to try and overwhelm the Astartes with sheer numbers knowing that they stand no chance against the demigods in their midst. Bolters, screaming chain-weapons, lascannons, missiles, plasma weapons, and bare blades plunder the corrupt flesh of Chaos.
Carolus steps from the interior of his pod in silence. His bolter is his voice. Every booming report claiming a life, sometimes more. Mass reactive rounds punch through flesh and armor with ease. Sometimes detonating within the first body, sometimes punching through multiple bodies before exploding. Flesh and bone spray through the air indiscriminately. The roar of his weapon gives his rage voice. The rage inherent in every member of the Chapter. It is not the burning fury of the Space Wolves or the Salamanders, nor the maddening wrath of a Blood Angel and their successors. This is the cold anger directed towards those who oppose one's beliefs and threaten all they hold dear. Those who stand in the path of the dream of a being greater than them and those who represent the traitors who cast down that dream.
There are no roared litanies of fury and damnation. No oaths of hatred hurled alongside material weapons. The company's vox-net is silent but for the clinical direction of the fire patterns needed to crush the enemy in the most brutal and efficient fashion. Volleys of bolter fire and gouts of flame throw the enemy back in shambles. Lasfire, wild and inaccurate, washes across their armor without even warming the hardened ceramite. Panic and fear spreads through the milling masses. If Carolus was of a mind to obey the instincts of the flesh he might have sneered. As it is he flicks the fire-selector of his bolter to burst. Volleys of bolter shells fan out from the tactical squad scything through the unarmored masses leaving nothing but piles of steaming meat.
The final three cultists are killed with fists and knives to save ammunition. Not a word is exchanged. The vox silent. The squad shifts like a machine forming two parallel columns along either side of the street. Augmented muscles and bionics are untroubled by the rubble strewn path. Senses expanded far beyond mortal man strain to give the smallest warning to the warriors. Their steps are deceptively quiet and smooth for as heavy as their armor is. Flowing like oil down the street to the percussive roaring of bolters and dull thumping artillery in the distance.
A once grand city is reduced to a tattered warzone. Gothic architecture perforated with the evidence of weapons fire. Gargoyles and painstakingly carved saints laying shattered in the streets. To the Iron Hands this is merely natural. Art is useless without purpose. Without function. Where is the beauty of a mirror when it is shattered, where is the skill in a mosaic when the tiles are ground to dust beneath armored treads? In the days of the Great Crusade it was said that the Primarchs were capable of creating weapons of unparalleled power and beauty. Those the Iron Hands can respect at least.
The road opens to a square occupied by a fountain that once bore a statue of an Inquisitor or general important to the planet's history, now it lays shattered across the cobblestones. Bodies in the uniforms of the PDF lay scattered across the square outnumbered by far by the corpses of their enemy. The Astartes take note of this and merely file it away for later. An inarticulate roar shatters the morbid silence that descended over the square. No hesitation is to be seen in the Iron Hands. Stone grinds beneath their boots as the formation swivels around to regard the source of the challenge.
A twisted, bloodsoaked parody of themselves. The ancient Legionnaire stands atop a pile of rubble covered in the blood of Imperial martyrs. Once pristine battle-plate is marred by the wear and tear of ten millennia of battle and defaced. Symbols devoted to a god bloodshed and murder cover the ceramite plates. Screaming faces are worked into the two colossal pauldrons protecting his broad shoulders. Two twisting horns crown the dented helm both tipped with grinning, freshly flayed skulls. The snarling chainaxes in his hands drip with blood from his fresh kills. Twelve more appear from the shattered buildings to either side of the first Berserker. All armed with snarling weapons. All driven mad by their own rage and bloodlust. Nine bolters and a buzzing plasma gun snap up and release a thunderous volley.
The World Eaters charge to meet it. Ceramite and gene-forged flesh shatters beneath the wrath of hundreds of mass-reactive shells. Carolus focuses his fire on the largest of the group who carries a massive Eviscerator chainsword. The meat clogged and blood soaked teeth of the massive weapon howl like a thousand banshees. The wielder looses a blood curdling, inarticulate roar of raw fury as he storms towards the squad of Loyalists. Carolus feels nothing as his weapon belches death into the World Eater's chest. Almost carelessly he allows the recoil his next burst to drive the muzzle of his bolter higher.
His expert aim, and hundreds of hours on the firing range, plants the last round in the burst between his target's eyes. By some quirk of the helmet's roaring demon visage the round doesn't penetrate the ancient ceramite and instead deflects at an angle. The snarling berserker jerks to the side from the force of the round. Bloodshot eyes clouded by rage lose track of their target for a brief instant. An instant is all the son of Manus requires. Superhuman speed sees the bolter locked to his thigh and a crackling power axe held in his free hand. The gift from Sergeant Araxis of the Ultramarines, impossibly heavy to a mortal, feels light as a feather to the superhuman Astartes.
The humming of its energy field is a prayer sent to the Omnissiah by the fearsome machine spirit within the weapon. It sings a funeral dirge to all those who would stand against the Imperium. A vendetta given form. The ebon armored marine explodes forward with two easy steps bringing the now recovered World Eater into range. The mindless berserker swings his massive weapon with all the force of a battering ram. Carolus shifts. That is the only way to describe it. One moment he's charging straight towards the berserker as if he were one himself and the next he is out of the Khorne worshipper's path. His crackling power axe however is another story.
Adamantium sheathed in a crackled energy field shears through ceramite that was forged during the Great Crusade as if it weren't there. The impossibly sharp edge cuts through armor and the superhuman flesh beneath like a hot knife passing through butter. Blood sprays from the upper and lower parts of the now halved berserker. But the raging madman refuses to die. Two halves of an Astartes flop to the ground. One of them swings the still shrieking Eviscerator at Carolus' feet. The Iron Hand merely steps back before bringing the axe down through the downed warrior's skull.
A single glance tells him all he needs to know before stowing his axe and re-equipping his bolter. The square already a charnel house is now the final resting place of an augmented squad of ancient Khornate berzerkers...and one son of Manus. The squad spares little time for their fallen beyond stripping him of ammunition to replace that which was already expended and marking his corpse for the Apothecary to harvest the progenoid glands later. An unfortunate death in that it has weakened the squad for the moment but an expected outcome if he was proven weak. The Iron Hands are as harsh with each other as they are with the enemy. Strength is expected and weakness crushed. The flesh is weak.
The squad continues on to their objective. Periodic waves of rabid cultists swarm from the shadows to attempt and overwhelm the Demigods of War only to smashed aside like chaff. Their incoherent shouts of praise to their God of Blood and Slaughter fall on unfeeling ears. The roar of bolters, crackling of power fields, and shrieking chainswords are all the retort the Iron Hands require. They butcher in total vox-silence. Black ceramite becomes coated in gore but they pay it no mind. The Machine Spirits are unharmed by the gore, if insulted at the bits and pieces becoming lodged in some joints.
But the sons of Manus are un-bothered by this fact. Their only concern is the proper prosecution of war against those who would threaten human dominance. And so they grind onwards.
"Clave Kassius reporting," the sergeant announces as they arrive amongst the rest of the company. The Captain nods and resumes his examination of the enemy fortifications. The last remnant of the traitor forces are withdrawn within the fortified complex surrounding the generators of the planetary defense cannon Flame Unending. The massive lascannon variant remains functioning beneath its void shields powered by the secondary generators within the same complex. The masterfully constructed structure is power incarnate. Capable of threatening most ships below cruiser-class if they try to achieve orbit above the city the cannon is the sole reason why the Imperial Guard has not yet landed in force on the world. Forward elements of the Krieg 8th Armored Regiment and Mordian 777th Infantry have already begun clearing the outer rings of the city and have secured eighty percent of the habitation and production districts. The Administratum and Ecclesiarchal sectors remain in the hands of the traitors for now.
That is none of the concern of the Iron Hands. There one concern is to deal with the traitors within the cannon complex and then move on to the next campaign. Carolus glares at the offending fortifications knowing that had they not been there they would be free to move on to more important fields. This minor Forge-Mining World is of little consequence when the Despoiler assault Cadia. Ten-meters tall, five meters thick. Protected by two-thousand heretics with stolen arms and armor, automated turrets, a field of anti-personnel mines, and thirty Khornate berzerkers. A paltry force to resist the full strength of the Clan Company.
"Bombardment begins in three minutes and will cease seven minutes after that. Claves Armal and Kassius shall lead the assault followed by Clave Granal. Wipe these traitors from the face of the galaxy!" The Clan-Captain's snarled orders bear only the barest inflection of the bionic that replaced his larynx in the aftermath of a battle with the Tyranid menace. A being more machine than flesh now, a state surpassed only by the Chapter's Ancient Dreadnoughts encased in their life sustaining sarcophagy. The closest among them to the ideal excluding the presence of the Iron-Father beside him. The two titans of war are the very image of what every Iron Hand aspires to achieve. The rumble of venerable iron treads announces the presence of the three warmachines with which the Iron Hands shall shatter the enemy's fortifications. The boxy shapes of the two Vindicator siege tanks and a single Deimos pattern Predator rumble to the front of the Imperial lines. Low whispers spread through the battered positions of the remaining PDF forces that survived the counter assault.
As powerful as the warmachines available to the PDF are they pale in comparison to the might of the Astartes vehicles. These altars of war, scions of the Omnissiah, have served the Chapter since the Great Crusade itself. Tested in war unending and honed through ten millennia of battlefield encounters into the perfect vehicles with which to shatter the enemy. The cavernous cannons of the Vindicators rise on the low whine of hydraulic mechanisms guided by cogitators more advanced than that which guides the aim of the mighty Baneblade and certainly more than the humble Demolisher Leman Russ. The Deimos Pattern Predator Executioner's Plasma Destructor begins to build power in its glowing coils. Precisely three minutes after the Captain finished speaking the first round is fired.