Commander Julians sat in his command harness and sweated. The interior of the armoured Hunter Killer was closer and more humid than the deepest jungle interior known to the Catachans. But you got used to that when you were a career tanker like Jared Julians.
'Any sign yet?' he asked. The vox operator, Gantse, shook his head. 'Well, I'm damned if I'm going through there without infantry support, that I can tell you,' Julians growled.
He'd been reckless in his younger days, but the loss of a steed had taught him never to venture into tight confines without eyes on the outside. He didn't have the crewmen to spare for the task and anyway they'd get torn apart quicker than blinking if the enemy were waiting in ambush. Besides, you needed three men minimum to get the most out of a tank like this; a driver, a loader and a gunner. Although vox-ops was non-essential, he wasn't sending Gantse out on foot. He'd be up the creek without a paddle if the vox went down.
So they sat there, ensconced within the belly of the Nightshade with their sister steed, the Proud Hunter idling behind them. If Julians had known the fate that awaited him, he might just have taken a few more risks.
xxx
Alri was dead. Borer beetles had chewed out his eyes and burrowed into his brain. Hew was down with spines of some crystalline substance perforating his bodysuit. If they could get him to a medic he might live, provided the spines were toxic, but the pain was enough to make him howl and writhe with agony.
Shopal gritted his teeth in frustration.
The serpentine bugs had been joined by a small host of spine-gaunts and termagants. His men were keeping them at bay but with only six of them left standing things were looking grim.
'I'm telling you, man, we can't stay here…' Antillus was almost hysterical. He'd fought the abhuman cultists of Fered Roathi without flinching. He'd even fought tooth and claw against the local mutants, but these xenos were obviously too much for him. Shopal just wished he'd shut the frak up and get on with it.
'I don't hear you offering me any solutions, numb-nut!'
Antillus fell silent, concentrating on keeping his skin whole as a fresh wave of spine-gaunts assailed them. Orpio forced them back but his flamer had started rattling and that was not a good sign.
'Sarge, there's a door back here behind the crates.' Choffre yelled. 'I've tried blasting the lock out but this pea-shooter ain't cutting it…'
Shopal took a moment to toss him the bolt pistol from his belt-holster. He'd purloined it from the armoury back on Fered Raothi as a souvenir.
'I'll be wanting that back,' he yelled as he turned back to the job at hand.
The bolt pistol barked, blasting a hole in the aluminium door and smashing the lock out. Choffre rolled the door up to admit them to the warehouse interior.
'Come on,' he cried, taking up a covering position to one side of the opening.
Orpio used the last of his prom to make pursuit a toasty prospect and the squad piled into the warehouse. Antillus got his shoulder under Hew's arm and dragged him through, Okar limping on ahead favouring his battered leg. Shopal tossed his hellgun to Choffre and reclaimed his bolt pistol before taking point.
He led them through a small office into a well-swept corridor, then through into a broad mezzanine beyond. The name of the owning company was stencilled in big bold letters facing the outer doors.
'Well, would you look at that?' Shopal grinned for the first time since they'd started on this wild goose chase. 'Kalliko Merchant House, right where we wanted to be. Come on.'
He shot out the glass doors fronting the building and stepped out into the street. Fifty metres to the north-east he could see the squat, menacing forms of the Pardus Hunter Killers.
'Let's get moving before they catch up…'
xxx
There was an infirmary set up in the room next door to the one they'd used to interrogate Luek. It was well stocked and Vaughn had no trouble finding iodine and gauze to apply a field dressing to his torn and bloodied ear. Binding the wadding in place with a crepe bandage he pulled his cap on gingerly, wincing as the dressing shifted slightly.
He cast about for some painkillers but the medication was all locked away. He shrugged and resigned himself to the discomfort. He'd experienced worse than this when he was wounded during the assault on Five Rivers. This was a mere scratch in comparison.
He stalked out into the corridor, the clipping of his iron-shod combat boots echoing from the stark white-tiled walls and floor.
He headed for the front exit. Rhys should be there with whatever transport he managed to scare up to take them to the front. But as Vaughn turned a corner into corridor 1a he was brought up short by the incongruous sight of blood. Lots of it.
Corridor 1a was where the main service elevator was located. The doorway to said elevator was landmarked with a trail of blood congealing on the tiled floor. The drag-trail wound off in the opposite direction to that from which Vaughn approached, disappearing around a corner further up the hall.
Vaughn pressed the elevator call button and waited for the bell to ping and the doors to slide open. He had seen death in abundance and so he did not blanch as he looked down at the remains of the medicae. He'd been butchered.
He reached for his pistol and cautiously followed the blood trail into the next corridor.
The blood trail dwindled to almost nothing as it wound down the corridor. Vaughn followed it as far as he could. Before long it was just a spattering that dwindled to a drip. By the time it had faded in was in the western wing of the building and in unfamiliar territory.
A scream rang out, punctuated by a gurgling death rattle. Vaughn followed the direction it had come from and rounded a corner to see something hunched over the prone body of a medical orderly, whose white scrubs were steadily turning red.
Vaughn took careful aim with his pistol but the thing had already detected him and it moved before he could pull the trigger. It spun about and started towards him, moving low and fast… almost too fast.
He pumped a single shell at it, aware that he had only the one clip and not wanting to waste a single round. Nevertheless he missed, exploding ceramic tiles instead of alien flesh.
The commissar back-tracked as it rapidly closed the distance between them, carefully squeezing off another round that clipped the creature's armoured cranial plating but did little damage.
'Frak this,' he swore, turning on his heel and running for it. In a vain attempt to slow it down he pulled internal doors shut and threw obstacles to the tiles as he fled. The creature too it all in stride and ate up the distance between them. Vaughn made for the infirmary, reasoning that it had a hefty metal door and dead-bolt, not to mention a plethora of sharp-bladed instruments that would serve should he run out of ammo.
Halfway there he turned, determined to do some damage before he was cornered.
The bolter barked again and again as the cyclone of alien tooth and claw hissed and scrabbled its way towards him. Two out of five shots hit the mark, blowing off one of its left appendages and smashing through the thoracic exoskeleton under the other.
It was slowed, but still abominably mobile. With just two rounds left he reached the infirmary and slammed the door shut behind him. The deadbolt slid into place and Vaughn cast about for a weapon.
The door shuddered behind him, slammed from without by the Tyranid.
The young commissar reached up to take a heavy cleaving instrument down from the rack. It was a curved length of razor-sharp steel with a handle at either end, used for breaking through breast-bones during autopsies. Heavy and unwieldy, it was the most suitable thing he could find.
At the third impact, the door toppled inward. Vaughn brought up the pistol but the creature had ducked aside, remaining outside the room.
'Come and get some, you freak!' he cried, pistol poised.
It came in a rush. He had enough time to squeeze one shot out before the pistol was sent flying from his numbed fingers.
It missed.
xxx
'This is like attacking a Leviathan with spit-wads!' Toal cried in frustration.
Darron shrugged and hosed the trygon with las anyway. At best they were distracting it from whatever fell errand it had embarked upon, but they couldn't go on like this forever. The fuel dump was worryingly close by.
Lita's Valkyrie circled overhead, pumping autocannon fire into its toughened hide and doing only slightly more damage than the men on the ground. The thing writhed in frustration, lashing out with the massive talons than had already killed three of Darron's boys. The pilot could have had a free shave if he'd stuck his head out the window.
Suddenly the trygon turned, its hide scored by something with a bit of kick to it. Darron tried to get a look at whatever it was but the bulk of the creature was in the way.
'What the hell is that?' he asked over the bead. Lita's voice came crackling back, barely within range of the short-distance vox.
'We've got sentinels coming in from the north. They're ours!'
'Finally, some good news for a change,' but he knew it wouldn't be enough, even if they were the anti-tank squadron.
The trygon howled its ear-splitting clarion call and coiled its lower body underneath it.
'Aw, frak,' Toal swore, grabbing Darron's upper arm and shoving him towards a nearby building. 'It's gonna jump… get into cover, now!'
The ground literally trembled underfoot as the trygon exerted massive pressures to launch itself into the air. It entered a shallow arc that brought it down in amongst the sentinel walkers with its talons scything out. The ground shuddered again as it landed.
The sentinels never stood a chance.
One was crushed beneath the creature's sinuous torso. Another was skewered from above by a scythe-claw. The third managed to turn but hadn't got very far before the trygon batted it against the rockrete wall. The crunching sound of the impact made Darron wince, but the trygon wasn't finished.
It plunged its talon into the sentinel three times, breaking it to pieces and rupturing the fuel cells. The explosion rocked it back onto its haunches, but it was impervious to the flames that caressed it.
'What do we do now, boss?' Toal asked. The rest of the squad had formed up around him.
'Not much we can do,' he replied. He was rapidly losing hope that the armour would ever turn up. The weight of despair cast its shadow on them all and they waited in silence. What they waited for, none of them really knew.
Fifty metres away the trygon stretched itself to its fullest height and let slip a deafening roar of victory, its manifold claws stretched wide and its massive head thrown back. It was akin to a force of nature, raw and unstoppable as a typhoon and yet so unnatural as to be an abomination.
'What can men do against that,' Darron muttered to himself, unable to think.
Suddenly the trygon buckled over, struck in the thorax by a blinding beam of white light that pierced its impervious hide. A second beam struck it high in the back so that it writhed and coiled in upon itself, claws flailing now, striking the surrounding structures and bringing masonry and metallic support struts into the street.
The beams struck again simultaneously and at almost the same point. The seemingly indestructible trygon fell in two pieces, its victorious roar turned to the squealing of terror mingled with pain.
Darron's spirits soared and his men cried out, punching the air as the Hunter Killers moved laboriously into view, surrounded on either side by the white armoured troopers of Shopal's section.
'You took your blessed time, Emperor love you!' Darron cried,
The trygon twitched and twisted, screaming in its death throes as the tankers finished it off, slicing it open and spilling its steaming insides into the streets. Darron made his way over to greet Shopal, immediately picking up on the bad vibes that rolled off his in waves. That wasn't like Shopal.
The top hatch popped open and the tank commander dropped to the asphalt, a satisfied look on his face. Darron was about to hold out a hand in thanks when Shopal socked him one straight to the jaw.
Darron stood frozen in surprise as his friend proceeded to lay into the man, kicking him and punching him where he lay, curled into a ball and yelping for someone to help him.
Toal and one of the others grabbed Shopal and pulled him off the tank commander, struggling to control the frenzied sergeant.
'What the frak's going on here?' Darron enquired. Shopal, coldly calm from start to finish, simply shrugged himself free and turned to stalk away. Darron knelt to attend to the tanker.
'You okay, buddy?'
Command Jared Julians groaned as he rolled onto his back.
'Get me to a sick bay, you idiot…'
xxx
The prey-thing had ceased spitting fire. As it crouched in a fighting position in the small, bright space it gurgled in its incomprehensibly language. The soft-skinned creature had picked up a silvery talon and this was held before it, menacingly, but the fear-stench was coming off of it in waves.
The ravener swayed from side to side, weighing up its prey with gimlet eyes, drooling with anticipation, and relishing the taste of its fear.
Combat hormones rushed through its system, dulling the pain of its injuries. It didn't know that it was dying – such concepts are as alien to the Tyranid as they themselves are to humans. Death is just another part of the cycle of proliferation. All it really understood at that moment was the overwhelming urge to feast upon living flesh.
It flexed two pairs of long scything talons and the rending claws between, unconsciously deciding upon its plan of attack even as it darted forward.
One claw took the prey-thing high in the shoulder, another sliced through the meat above his hip. Blood-mist permeated the creatures sense, driving it into akilling frenzy. Another scythe missed and the sharp tip broke off as it struck the wall behind its foe. Close now, it reached out with the rending claws, seeking to crush the thing's rib-cage and spill its organs. But the prey had been waiting for this and lashed out hard with the silvery claw, hacking through the tendons in both wrists and rendering them useless.
Hissing with rage and frustration the ravener retreated, hastily withdrawing the talon that had pierced the prey and narrowly avoiding a second swing of the blade, aimed at its throat.
The prey stank of hatred as it pressed home a futile assault, swinging the heavy blade in tightly controlled arcs. The ravener deflected it with the broken scythe and lashed out with the opposing limb, slicing and chunk from the man's right cheek and only narrowly missing the major artery in its throat.
The silvery blade came back around, smashing through the chitinous exoskeleton protecting the ravener's thorax and sending ichor cascading to the slippery tiles. The ravener lashed out wildly, trying to drive the prey-thing back and make room for a concerted counter attack, but it could feel itself weakening as its lifeblood poured from it in a torrent.
The blade crashed home again, lodging in the ravener's cranial plating and sticking there. Unable to free it the prey-thing finally backed away, butting up against a long counter that dominated the back wall of the room.
Sensing a chance for victory, the ravener lunged, lashing out with scything talons and even with its useless rending claws as it threw its full weight forward. The prey-thing pulled itself up onto the counter before it could strike home and planted both feet against the ravener's shoulders, barely stopping it before the massive, needle-toothed jaws could lodge in his flesh. It flailed for a weapon, wildly, its blunt-fingered paw coming up with a bulbous metallic canister that it proceeded to use as a bludgeon.
If the Tyranid could feel anything akin to joy, this was what filled the ravener's tiny brain-stem as it flailed its head and claws to get at its struggling prey. It felt the nearness of victory and nothing would stop it now.
But the prey-thing summoned up its last reserves of strength, allowing its knees to bend under the strain of hold the ravener away. It raised the canister and brought it down hard on the ravener's cranial plating, driving the blade deeper and stunning it with the sheer concussive force of the blow.
The next thing the ravener knew, its jaws were forced wide by the metallic canister. In its frenzy it bit down, unable to crush the thing but unable to distend its jaw far enough to dislodge it either. The prey-thing shoved hard with its legs, sending the stunned Tyranid into a flailing heap.
As it managed to get upright, shaking its heavy head in a vain attempt to free its mouth-parts, it caught sight of something that made even the raveners blood ruin cold. The prey had taken up the death-spitter once more, holding it out at arms length, aimed directly as the ravener's head.
It gurgled something that might have been language. Then it fired.
That split second played out in vivid detail. The hammer fell, igniting the death-spitter's propellant and sending the hard, explosive pellet surging at massive speed down the barrel of the snub-nosed weapon, spinning as it burst with a gout of flame from the muzzle. The air was split by the dull, barking resonance of the weapon's discharge. Then the round hit the canister lodged in the ravener's jaws and both exploded.
The ravener knew no more.
xxx
Of the eleven tanks involved in Colonel Sidellus' spearhead, only four remained operational. The Colonel's own tank was stranded. Another had been quickly overwhelmed and was now a burning wreck. The Commissar, catching to tail end of the spearhead far too quickly, had accidentally rammed into the back of an Exterminator, resulting in a catastrophic explosion that had killed seven of Corgan's man and crippled another Russ. Two more had overshot the spearhead and, in trying to turn, they'd exposed their rear armour to the venom cannons of a warrior brood. They burned as readily as dry tinder.
The five remaining tanks had lined up and jammed their gears into reverse, backing towards the barricades. Corgan had never seen anything quite so ridiculous as a Leman Russ Battle Tank going backwards. One of them had stalled in the attempt to go into reverse and rather than spend precious minutes trying to get it going, the tank's commander had ordered his men out, remaining behind himself to make the attempt. The 'Nids had prised him out of his steed like a canned sardine.
The defence of the forward positions lasted another ten minutes or so before the Imperial Guards were forced back by their losses, unable to fully man the defences.
Corgan kept the retreat ordered and controlled, making the Tyranids pay once more for every yard they retook. He staggered his way back across the carpet of rendered corpses to mount his Chimera, dropping into the cupola to man the storm bolter.
His exhaustion was given no quarter. The pain of his wound throbbed in the back of his brain, demanding his attention. His sinuses were bunged up with the fine, greasy ash of burnt flesh but at least that meant he couldn't smell the sour stench of roasting bodies.
His ears rang with the constant bombardment of hi-ex detonanations. The cries of his men seemed to come from far off even when they were standing next to him.
So it was that he didn't hear Wheln at first. The vox-officer had opened the top-hatch behind the turret and was bawling to try and get his attention. When finally he turned it was to see Wheln and all the rest of his squad pointing up at the smoke-filled sky with expressions of bewilderment on their hard, lined faces.
He followed their eyes to see that even the sky was aflame. The grey-stained atmosphere was streaked with black contrails, fanning out behind myriad burning comets that picked up speed as they fell. With dull horror weighing leaden in his gut he realised that several of them were homing in on their position, while yet more seemed to be falling farther to the north-east.
His first thought was that this was the second Tyranid seeding ship having made orbit and offloaded its mycetic spores, but he had somehow expected such an event would be far more terrifying than this display. He counted ten comets coming their way, five or six more to the north, nowhere near enough for it to be Tyranids.
His heart surged. This could only mean one thing!
As the comets reached a hundred and fifty feet or so their tips exploded, firing retro-burners that slowed the descent exponentially. The comet-flames died back, revealing charred black pods that fair glowed with the friction of atmospheric re-entry. Then they impacted, causing the ground beneath the Chimera to buck violently and sending up a shower of charred earth and bone-meal.
As smoke swirled about the impact craters a flickering of light could be seen within, accompanied by the staccato bark of bolter fire. Hugely armoured forms materialised like shadows out of legend, fanning out from the craters and bringing death to the Tyranids that found themselves, once again, stranded in the open.
'Space Marines!' cried one of the men, or perhaps it was all of them in unison. Corgan couldn't tell, a shock-wave of relief almost caused him to pass out as he watched the warriors of the Emperor bring retribution to the foe.
Disciplined volleys of bolter fire tore swathes of destruction in the milling Tyranids as no less than eight full squads emerged from their drop pods. The remaining two gave violent birth to the massive armoured forms of twin dreadnoughts, assault cannons spitting streams of ripping death throughout the Tyranid ranks.
'It's a beautiful thing,' Frocar intoned, seemingly for a great distance, when really he'd hoisted his heavily augmented frame up onto the roof of the Chimera and was perched next to the turret.
'I couldn't agree more,' Corgan replied as he watched the Tyranids break and melt back into the jungle.
Wheln was busy taking down scribbled notes from the vox traffic and issuing acknowledgements down in the bed of the Chimera. From what he was saying Corgan was able to piece together the bigger picture. The Tyranids were in full retreat, proving that their hive mind was intelligent enough to recognise an untenable situation. The Catachans were employing full scale hit and run attacks, intending to take out large chunks of the enemy force as they fled. Impotent until this moment, the jungle-fighters' work had begun in earnest.
The Marines were stoically silent on the vox channels, but as the last of the Tyranids disappeared into the shadowy tree-line they about-faced and started the trek back towards the Imperial defences.
Corgan sensed that the Battle of Gurshun had been saved from a pitiful defeat, but that the Battle for Gunga IV yet hung in the balance.
A/N - So this concludes the first phase of the Battle for Gunga IV. In the next few chapters, the Imperial Guard and Space Marines will have to find a way to purge this virgin world of the xenos filth, while in the darkness of deep space, the Imperial Navy fights to stave off the full might of a Tyranid invasion fleet that could render all their sacrifices vain.
Thanks to everyone that's reviewed, so far. I don't seem to get many, but the quality more than makes up for the lack of quantity. I think this is mainly because my stories are not "contraversial" and generally stick to the fluff, but what can I say, I'm a traditionalist. Look out for some slightly less conventional stories coming up in the wake of this one. I'm working on a short "Rainbow Six" style of thing and also one inspired by "The Godfather (in the 41st Millenium)". We may also see a brief (but needless to say; bloody) "Return to Necromunda".