He awoke invigorated, the pain and fatigue had left his body. Looking across at Mesarine she was still sitting in a listless fugue state, just on the edge of sleep. Jhon checked the crack in the wall to his right and fell backwards with shock. He grabbed Mesarine and shook her awake, she groaned as he pulled her by the shoulders over to the wall. Through the gaps he could see hundreds of cultists, standing three rows deep in a ring around the building. They gnashed their teeth and gripped their weapons so hard he could see the white of their bleeding knuckles. At the front of the crowd Jhon could see the Cult Leader, the same one who had been used as the mouthpiece of the Genestealer Lord. The leader stood there with more of a wry smile on his face, clearly taking pleasure in how he had trapped them like rats.
The sun had started to set on the benighted world. With that and the smoke in the air from the war aging outside, darkness was descending rapidly. The crowd were carrying industrial lumens and were further lit with the pilot lights of crude conical flamers. It gave an ominous glow to the cruel faces that surrounded them. This was their city now, it had fallen a long way from the Emperor's grace and now they were going to rid their city of those who were still loyal to the Throne. The leader lifted a cruel articulated claw from his coat and pointed it towards them and the crowd of cultists advanced slowly. They didn't need to rush, their quarry had nowhere to go now. To his surprise one of the cultists exploded as he neared their building. A large hole was blown in his torso taking off his right arm at the same time. Jhon looked up from his crouched position to see Mesarine, on her feet and firing hard with her bolt pistol.
He shoved the barrel of his Hellgun through an already broken section of the wall and started to sweep the beam back and forth across the crowd. Hard rounds from autoguns started to snap back at him, passing through the thin wall as if it was paper. Neither of them were covering the stairs but the flashes coming from behind him told him that the Genator was his strange and powerful weaponry energising the energy and making Jhon taste iron. It should have been frantic, it should have been a terrifying fight for their lives. But all Jhon felt was a sense of calm, it allowed him to take his time. It allowed him to line up his shots and punch through ranks of cultists scoring headshots on each one of them.
Even so, it wasn't enough, the throng was so thick that they just kept coming. They just kept walking forwards inexorably, ignoring their dead and injured. Jhon could hear that they were in the building behind him and he spun around to the stairwell where the Genator had been pushed back. Both he and Mesarine brought their weapons to bear on the bottleneck of the stairs killing and killing as the cultists slowly gained ground up the wooden steps.
Just as Jhon's weapon bored a hole in the bulbous head of another grinning nightmare he had an impulse. He shouted over the noise to Mesarine "Ma'am, try the extraction channel again!" "What!?" She shouted back. "The Vox Ma'am, try to raise the Fleet. I think the channel may be clear now". She should have shouted back at him, should have ignored him and carried on fighting. But instead maybe she had been struck the same way that he had, as she reached for the handset.
"3rd Battalion 836th Psian Pegasi to Fleet Command. Come in Fleet Command." Mesarine repeated. They kept firing, without thought that there would be a response. Jhon missed two shots in shock as a grainy and static laced response came over his earbuds and over the external vox-horn mounted on his back. "Fleet Command. [static] confirm extraction of [static]". Mesarine snatched up the handset again, her other arm outstretched, shaking against the recoil of her bolt pistol. "Acknowledged Fleet Command. Extraction confirmed. Repeat, Extraction Confirmed. Send an exfiltration flight immediately. Repeat send exfiltration flight. Please acknowledge?"
The voice on the other end of the line was vaguely mechanical, not quite a servitor but definitely augmented. It was fatigued, as if this was one of many such requests that it was processing simultaneously. There may have been more words to the message, but all they heard were the sweetest words he'd heard for a long time, "Exfiltration Inbound".
They had to keep fighting, they had a chance now, but the Valkyrie would take time to arrive from orbit. They had to keep the Genator alive now, he was their objective Alpha, the whole reason that they had been sent to this planet in the first place. The cultists were getting higher and higher up the stairs, they were managing to loose some shots as they charged heedlessly up towards them. At one point a cultist squad leader, who looked like he had been a warehouse Overseer, threw a frag grenade; just before Jhon put a Hellgun beam through his neck. The grenade clattered to Mesarine's feet, but she managed to sweep down a hand and scoop it up while she continued to fire. The grade detonated just as she pushed it back through one of the holes in the wall behind get. The shrapnel blasted back into the room and peppered the back of Jhon's carapace.
They were being pushed further and further back, Jhon couldn't see that they were having any effect. More and more of the cultists were arriving, swelling the crowd as if something was calling them to that spot. Mesarine had dropped her bolt pistol now and was just tearing through cultists with her chainsword. Visera and gore flew everywhere, stinking blood coating his armour and filling his nostrils. Jhon too dropped his rifle and unclipped his bayonet to use as a combat knife. He immediately thrust it through the throat of a cultist who was about to bludgeon him with the butt of an autorifle. The Genator too was bludgeoning at the crowd with his Mechandrites, pinning cultists against walls or punching straight through them. Jhon should have felt hopeless, but they had support inbound and more importantly he had faith. He felt his faith in the Emperor strengthen his arm and drive his knife home in thrust after thrust and slash after slash.
Just then the sounds of rescue started, he could almost hear the Ecclesiarchy litergy in the drum of the heavy bolter shells that he heard coming from outside the walls. The furious shouting turned to screams as Jhon heard the woosh of multiple rocket pods fire off into the crowd. The building itself shook as Jhon counted at least three Thunderbolt fighters passing over their heads. The sweetest thing he heard was the distinctive hammering, buzzing noise of Punisher cannons firing on full auto. The fleet must have authorized Vulture gunships, truly the Emperor had blessed them this day.
The cultists kept coming, they didn't seem to be affected by their losses. Instead the three of them continued to hack, slash and bludgeon their way through the last of those that had made it past the hail of fire from the aerial assault. One of the last of them came barrelling towards Jhon, crazed and bloodshot eyes fixed on him with a brutal powered pick raised above his head. His knife would have done nothing to block the weight of the weapon. Instead he drew on his combat training and charged directly forward, hoping to throw the berserker off balance. The pick came down where his head had been moments before, causing the cultist to stumble with his momentum. Jhon too fell forwards into a roll, but jumped back onto his feet and delivered three stabbing strikes into his assailant's lower back as he stumbled. Jhon straightened up, expecting the fight to be over. Amazingly the cultist was still standing, rounding on him and swinging his pick two handed; his bolt pistol discarded.
Jhon had no time to move and stood ready to find himself before the Golden Throne, but instead, for the second time since during this mission, the blow failed to land. He heard Mesarine's chainsword passing in front of his face. Jhon opened his eyes and saw two bloody stumps held out towards him while the cultist's pick clattered to the floor. It's electric field sputtering and shorting out with a popping sound as it did so. The cultist finally fell, a stupid look of confusion on his hideous face.
Mesarine pulled Jhon and the Genator back and they used the break in the attack to regroup, pick-up their weapons and for Mesarine to reload. Jhon levelled his rifle again towards the door. His power pack was almost entirely depleted, but he was determined to give a good account of himself for the Regiment and for the Emperor. Instead a voice came over the vox and into his ears. It wasn't the broken and static laced Fleet channel - instead it was crisp and clear as if it was from the other side of the wall.
He let his rifle lower a bit as they heard someone coming up the ruined stairs. Mesarine's pistol was aimed at the stop and the Genator held his weapon arm out, jittery. He tried to contact them over the short range vox, it failed. So he pulled off his mask and shouted to them both "Friendlies! Friendlies in the building". The voice in his ear was commanding him to lower his weapons and let them approach. The voice was harsh and commanding and he felt as if he would be unable to disobey even if he had wanted to. A corresponding shadow appeared on the stairs. It was huge and Jhon suddenly felt a prick of fear. Perhaps it had been a psychic message to him, designed to bring down their weapons as another of those mutated hulks was sent in to finish them off. Heavy steps rocked the damaged stairs as the shadow casting them continued to grow.
Jhon's unmasked eyes went wide and his weapon went slack in his hands. A shining figure in bright yellow armour approached them. He must have been over two and a half meters tall, huge shoulder guards and glowing red eye lenses. His enormous bolt rifle was held in one hand at his side, the weapon was almost as long as Jhon was tall.
The Emperor's own Astarties had come for them. Jhon's hand went to his face and came away wet, he was weeping with awe at the figure before them. The Astarties crossed the room in two steps and walked up to the Genator, he plugged something from his armour into the Genator's chest. The Tech Priest did not seem to object and seemed to be in silent conversation with this personification of the Emperor's will. The two of them then disconnected and left together down the stairs, one word came over the vox into Jhon's ears "Follow." Jhon and Mesarine scrambled to follow the Astarties out of the building and back into the street.
It was a scene of total carnage outside. Stinking piles of corpses were heaped around them and blood ran down the streets in streams. The fighting wasn't over, Vulture gunships were still running strafing runs around them. Two squads of Navel Armsmen who had come down in the two waiting Valkyries fired from the hastily assembled perimeter. Most of the death was being dealt by the two other glorious Astarties. Their huge bolt rifles were pumping fire into the now retreating crowd to his right, fleeing down the street as mass reactive rounds detonated amongst them. The Astarties were glorious to watch, expertly moving to wherever the fighting was thickest. They were constantly on the move, weapons held outstretched in front of them. They fired constantly, with every shot apparently hitting its target in their central mass, blasting them apart half a second later. The two of them worked in unison, covering each other at all times and compensating for their respective flanks.
Before long the entire crowd had fled and they were only surrounded by the dead and dying. The Vultures flew back into a tight loop of the landing site as the Astarties beckoned him and Mesarine onto the waiting Valkyrie. The Genator was already onboard. Jhon stowed his equipment and strapped himself into a bucket seat. The Armsmen were the last to board; grim faced, bald and pallid men with brutal looking shotguns. As far as Jhon could tell they had hardly been involved in any of the fighting once they had landed, instead they just held the perimeter while the three Astarties dealt a devastating hammer blow to the enemy. Jhon hoped that more Astarties would come, squads of them landing to cleanse the foulness in the Alcazar with bolter and promethium. He'd heard that there were thirty of them accompanying the fleet, led by a Captain. He couldn't imagine meeting such a hero, but he took solace from the idea during their bone rattling return to orbit. He sat back and his mind was filled with images of a golden yellow boot stamping down on the head of that foul bloated Genestealer that had taunted and murdered them. He would never forget that hideous Xenos face or the feel of its mind crawling into his own. He knew it would always haunt him, just as the image of the Astarties would be there to bolster him.