Uriel felt the heat of the blast wash over him, keeping his bolter pulled in tight to his chest. Smoke obscured his vision, and the ringing echoes of the detonation pounded within his helmet. He rolled to his feet, instantly regaining his sense of spatial awareness as his auto-senses picked up the crunch of earth underfoot, and shouted, 'Incoming. On my mark.'
Figures moved in the billowing cloud of dust and falling debris, and he pulled the trigger, firing off a rapid volley into the emerging shapes. He heard screams and three of them dropped instantly. A blazing beam of light punched into his chest, and he staggered as his breastplate hissed and spat bright gobbets of molten ceramite.
He fired another burst, and ducked beneath a spray of gunfire as the Fire Warriors advanced under the shadow of the bombardment. Uriel slung his bolter and drew his sword, the rest of Squad Ventris following his example. The tau expected to find them battered and disorientated, and Uriel relished the chance to make them pay for that error.
He lifted his sword to his shoulder and shouted, 'Into them!'
Uriel saw a Fire Warrior ahead of him, and swung his sword in a two-handed blow that split him from collarbone to pelvis. The alien soldier fell without a sound, and Uriel dropped to his knees as another white-hot bolt slashed the air above him. Space Marines fanned out around him, shooting as they charged, and each round blasted through olive green armour plates with a resounding crack.
A shadow loomed over Uriel, and he dived to one side as a pair of heavy, mechanical feet slammed down with a terrific crash of alien armour on stone. A battlesuit with a tubular cannon on one arm and a crackling khopesh blade mounted on the other towered over him, a rippling heat haze shimmering above its rear-mounted jets.
The khopesh slashed down, and Uriel blocked the blow with his sword. The impact was tremendous, and sent the sword spinning from his grip. Uriel was driven to his knees by the force of the blow as his warriors turned to face this new threat in their midst. More explosions rocked the earth, the deafening crescendo punctuated by barks of heavy gunfire and the sound of shells on armour.
An alien blade flashed, and two Space Marines went down, their armour cloven by the energy field sheathing the blade. Another warrior was clubbed down by the battlesuit's heavy fist, his helmet a crumpled mass of shattered plate and bone.
Another battlesuit hammered down, and then a third. Uriel scrambled back as the battlesuit turned to face him, and a blinding stream of light erupted from the tubular weapon. He rolled again, trying to put one of the other battlesuits between him and the plasma weapon as a second white-hot blast turned the ground molten. The third battlesuit stepped in towards Uriel, and he kicked out, hammering his boot against its knee joint.
The machine staggered, but it didn't fall. Uriel's instinctive reaction had bought him a few seconds, but it was all he needed to retrieve his sword. As it came at him again, he swung the blade at its thigh, the energised blade hacking the lower half of the battlesuit's leg from its body.
The alien battle machine collapsed, and Uriel sprang to his feet as the second stepped in. Space Marines swarmed the battlesuits, firing their bolters at point-blank range. Another Space Marine was pummelled to the ground as yet more Fire Warriors charged into the fight. Uriel swayed aside from a roaring blast of heavy calibre shells, and spun inside the battlesuit's guard to ram his sword up into its torso.
He buried the blade up to its eagle hilt, and wrenched it out through the machine's hip. A wash of sparks, hissing black hydraulics and blood flowed from the crackling wound, and the battlesuit fell to its knees, the light in its helmet lenses dying along with its pilot.
Uriel turned from the destroyed machine in time to see the lead battlesuit's khopesh slash towards him. Desperately, he tried to block, but the blade slammed into his shoulder-guard, and tore through the exterior plates before sliding up over his helmet and slicing through the upper layers of protection.
Red light flooded Uriel's vision, and he threw up his sword to block the reverse cut he instinctively knew would be coming to finish him. He angled the blade to direct the impact away, but was driven to the ground by the force of the impact. The battlesuit lashed out with its heavy foot, and Uriel was hurled back, the plates of his armour buckling in protest.
Uriel rolled onto his back as the battlesuit loomed over him, its khopesh poised to deliver the deathblow.
A deafening roar, like tearing steel, sounded, and a blazing plume of sparks obscured the top half of the battlesuit. A flaring line drew across the machine's midriff, as if a monstrous buzz-saw was slicing through it. Uriel saw the angular form of an armoured giant standing behind the battlesuit as its top half was smashed from its lower half. The machine's legs crumpled, and Uriel saw the welcome sight of Brother Zethus standing before him.
The Dreadnought stood with the barrels of its assault cannon still spinning and fragments of the battlesuit's armour falling from its enormous power fist. Behind the Old One, Uriel saw a pair of Whirlwind support tanks appear alongside the massively powerful form of a Land Raider. A rippling salvo of multiple rocket launches streamed from the Whirlwind's missile rack as the Land Raider began systematically destroying the tau vehicles still fighting.
'Supporting forces on station as ordered, Captain Ventris,' said Brother Zethus.
THIRTEEN
Pride. Certainty. Excitement. These emotions were uppermost in Nathaniel Winterbourne's mind as he watched his forces ride to battle. Leman Russ Conquerors and Vanquishers rumbled through the wide, fume-choked streets of Brandon Gate's outer fabriks.
Within the star-shaped city, the buildings were fine edifices of stone, steel and marble, but beyond the rarefied atmosphere of the walls, the blackened reality of the industry that lay at the heart of Pavonis reasserted itself.
Tangled warrens of giant, portal-framed hangars, towering ore silos, hammering weapon shops and thousands of kilometres of hissing pipe-work spread out from the oasis at the centre of the industrial hinterlands.
It was, thought Winterbourne, a lousy place to fight a battle.
Tanks were never safe in such an urbanised landscape, where a single infantryman armed with a rocket launcher could disable or kill an armoured vehicle. This landscape was the domain of the foot soldier, but Winterbourne wasn't about to let that fact of war dissuade him from meeting the tau offensive head-on.
The 44th's tanks within Brandon Gate - fifteen Leman Russ Conquerors and half a dozen Chimeras - had rendezvoused in Liberation Square before rolling south-west along the gilded streets of the Via Commercia towards the city's southern gateway. PDF vehicles were assembling at road junctions, as heavy earth movers formed berms of rubble and Lavrentian combat engineers unspooled barriers of razor wire.
Winterbourne had little faith that these PDF units would hold against a concerted push by the tau, but if the enemy reached this far into the city, the fight was already lost. A few outraged civilians argued with PDF officers about the destruction of the roadway, but the majority of the city's populace were barricading themselves in their homes, desperate to protect what few possessions remained to them.
He felt a moment of contempt for these people. Any Imperial citizen able to hold a gun ought to be on the streets and manning a barricade. The Eastern Fringe was no place for shirkers, and to sit idly by while others fought an alien foe at their very gates spoke of the lowest cowardice.