Fame Cimex Chapter 4

From the midnight sky a flight of blocky, cruciform shapes dived, pushing hard for the ground as their engines left blazing contrails behind them. They were Thunderhawk gunships and they were on a desperate extraction mission. They fell upon the city like a meteor shower, yet none of them impacted the earth for at the last moment they pulled up hard and fired braking rockets, slowing their descent with stunning speed.

Two of the gunships veered off and smacked into a nondescript street, filling the road with their bulk and sending clouds of dust spinning away. Even as their assault ramps were grinding down Captain Toran was leading his squads to meet them, racing into the thick choking dust. The Captain knew time was running out and they could brook no delay, there was no telling how long the Light of Terra had allotted for the extraction before it fired its world-breaking payload. Toran dashed to the ramp of the Thunderhawk and paused there to wave his brothers into the gunship, his command squad followed him along with the squads of Sergeant Priyar and Mylos. Chaplain Wrethan led the charge onto the other gunship, waving Sergeants Lorath and Zeax into its troop bay, followed by the bulky form of Ajax who took up the whole lower section by himself. Toran waved the last Marine aboard and the Captain hit the rune to close the ramp as he signalled the pilots, shouting "Go, go, go!"

The Thunderhawk's engines screamed as they surged to life, hurling the gunship back into the sky and tilting it back so that the craft stood on its tail as it shot vertically away from the ground. Inside Toran was almost thrown from his feet as G-Forces slammed into him, he quickly activated his armour's magnetic locks and his feet clamped to the deck, fixing him in place. Inertial forces pressed into him, making his reinforced bones creak and strain but he gritted his teeth and grabbed a support rail to cling on for dear life. After a few seconds the twisting disruptions vanished, leaving only a crushing G-force from one direction, but Toran was used to that. He disengaged one boot from the deck and stomped forwards, then clamped down and repeated the process, making his way slowly to the troop bay. In moments he had found an empty restraint cage and he backed into it, pulling the harness down to secure himself in its embrace.

The Thunderhawk rattled and shook as it fought for altitude, pressing everyone firmly back into their restraint cages. The G-forces were remarkable and even with a Transhuman physiology, Toran could feel his body being pushed to the limit. Persion seemed to agree for he shouted over the howling of the engines, "The pilots are shaking this crate apart, the Chapter Master must have cut it even closer than we thought!" Toran replied, "Let me see what is happening outside."

With a neural impulse Toran beseeched his armour to link into the Thunderhawk's external pict feeds, the machine spirit of the gunship resisted for a moment but then the Captain's armour barked authorisation overrides and the system yielded to him. Toran's vision dissolved into static for a moment and then came back, with a small corner of his vision taken up by a grainy, washed out monotone image. The Machine Spirit must have resented his intrusion for it only showed him the rearward feed, displaying the rapidly shrinking city beneath them.

The last bastion of Veltri was burning, streets awash with chitinous monsters that rampaged everywhere, from this altitude the city looked like it was being consumed by ants. Rising from the city was the great bulk of the civilian transports, fighting for lift with all that they had, even as scythed monsters clawed at their hulls. Alongside them were flights of Thunderhawks, all rising fast and carrying the Space Marines to safety. Toran could only hope that the pilots had managed to evacuate the entirety of the Chapter, for anyone left behind was surely dead. Over a private vox link Persion swore, "Warp Hells, look at that sky."

Toran was not the least bit surprised that Persion had cut into his officer-level only visual feed, the brother was born on the feral world of Trux and had a savage's disregard for petty rules and protocols. Toran implored the machine spirits to twist his vision about and saw what Persion was looking at. All around the gunship the sky was filled with flapping monsters, fanged monstrosities that swooped and dived upon the city below. It was not just gargoyles either for he saw Harridans and shrikes everywhere, along with beasts that he not seen before, even in the most detailed briefings.

There were mutated and twisted things swarming everywhere, living testaments to the Tyranid's hyper-evolutionary potential. There were floating gas bags with long tendrils hanging beneath them, dropping spores from jellyfish-like bodies. There were lso vast, bloated creatures hanging on ridiculously thin membranes over the city, each with mouths wide enough to swallow the gunship whole. And in the distance were the unmistakable silhouettes of capillary towers rising to the sky, preparing to convey this world's biomass to the hungry Hive Ships in orbit.

Toran had absolutely no idea how the Thunderhawk had managed to not collide with something so far, his respect for the pilot's skills raised a notch as the sky began to change from midnight blue to the pure black of space. Their desperate gambit seemed to be paying off, the Chapter would escape, but then Persion gasped in horror and Toran frantically switched his view trying to see what was going on. Not too far from them one of the civilian transport ships, a three-mile-long conveyor filled with thousands of innocents, was beset by swarms of flapping nightmares. Hideous beasts covering every inch of it, making it look like a rotten bone swarming in maggots, and they were hacking and biting their way through the hatches to get at the marrow inside. The Tyranid beasts were ripping and tearing the hatches open, dissolving the portals with acid if they had to, then dragging themselves within to feast.

Persion whispered, "We have to help them."

Toran replied grimly, "There's nothing we can do, they are dead already… they just don't know it yet."

Even as they watched the transport faltered, tilting over on its columns of thrust like a nautical ship capsizing. The transport began to list sideways as its crew were slaughtered and the great ship began a death dive back towards the planet, taking ten thousand screaming innocents to a fiery death.

Toran changed the feedback to the horizon and said to Persion over their link, "Speak not of what you just saw."

Persion protested, "But…"

Toran rebuked him, "I will have your silence on this matter, the Company has no need to know about this."

Their conversation was interrupted as Novak called, "Sir, are we clear yet?"

Toran switched his vox back to squad wide and said, "Almost, we are nearly into space, good job too for the Light of Terra is on her way."

Novak asked, "What is the blast radius of a Cyclonic Torpedo anyway?"

Furion answered him saying, "It depends really, how thick is the atmosphere of Veltri?"

From across the bay Bylan said, "+I can't believe we are burning a whole world+"

Brother Jediah commented, "Better that than letting the Tyranids feast, this may only be a hard-scrabble mining outpost but it's enough to increase their numbers significantly, we prevented that at least."

Persion said forlornly, "This was the Chapter's last chance to halt the Tyranid advance, our only shot at preventing them from reaching the Saint Karyl Trail. We can only trust that we have bled the Hive Mind enough here to make a difference."

Novak drew in a breath to ask another question but before he could speak the whole gunship rattled and shook as it was thrown across the sky.

Novak called, "The Cyclonic Torpedoes, we've been caught in the blast!"

Furion refuted that saying, "Don't be stupid, we'd already be dead, that was just the shockwave of their passage. They are on their way down now!"

Toran refocussed his vision to the rear and saw a bright star disappearing into their stern, they were well into the upper atmosphere now and from this altitude it took even a torpedo a full minute to reach the ground. Frantically his mind ran through the numbers, the Thunderhawks were on the edge of space and still climbing, but could they reach high enough before the Cyclonic torpedoes detonation?

How much of a safety margin had Chapter Master Gorgall been willing to grant them?

As he watched the light dwindled and shrunk, plummeting ever closer to the ground and then it hit the dirt in a terrific explosion. Toran's vision washed out for a second as a colossal fireball was born, enveloping the city below in a wave of fire. The entire urban environment was engulfed in star hot light and heat, vaporising flesh and stone and steel in one single second. From the centre a terrific shockwave was born, spreading outwards in every direction. Shattering buildings and loose structures, turning the air itself into a blizzard of shrapnel that would gut anything in its path, human or Xeno. Close behind that came a rolling wave of fire that swept the ground clean, incinerating everything it touched and rendering it down to ash.

The devastation in the first few seconds was immense but so far it had yet to exceed the capacity of an Atonomic bomb, tragically the greatest horror was yet to come. The arcane detonation of a cyclonic torpedo was designed by forgotten sciences to create artificial exotic elements, ones that could not possibly exist in nature outside the heat and radiation of a fusion reaction.

With the detonation all around the exotic elements began to catalyse a chain reaction, taking air molecules and separating out the oxygen while converting nitrogen into Hydrogen, explosive hydrogen. The whole world paused for an instant and then a second, bigger explosion filled the sky, racing outwards for miles around in every direction. The power of the blast was beyond any measurement, spreading and spreading over the ground at the speed of sound. The explosion also had the effect of creating new atoms of the exotic elements, which instantly began converting the atmosphere, creating an unstoppable chain reaction.

Even as Toran watched a self-sustaining fusion reaction raced out across the continent, engulfing all and burning everything into ash with the heat and fury of a star. And this was just one torpedo, there were a dozen more doing the exact same thing all over the hemisphere below them. As the Thunderhawk clawed its way into space, its engines switching from atmospheric flight to plasma thrust mode, the planet below was reduced to a lifeless husk. The world of Veltri was gone, but billions of Tyranids had died with it and the Hive Fleet had been denied a chance to feed and grow.

Toran shut off his visual feed and said, "It is done." The Space Marines fell silent as they gave respect to the people and the planet they had left behind. The ending of an entire world was an event to even give an Astartes pause, the death of an entire people and all they could ever have been was a tragedy beyond compare.

Long moments passed and then Persion said, "So what now?"

Toran spoke up to say, "Now we dock with the Light of Terra and blast a path for the civilian transports to escape through. There is still a whole Hive Fleet in orbit we need to fight off, then we link up with the rest of the Chapter and prepare for the next battle."

He concluded, "Make no mistake, we will fight the Tyranids once more and the dead of Veltri shall be avenged."