“I’m down,” he commed with a mental shrug, fighting the instinctive desire to brush himself off. The sand was settling around him. He’d left quite a crater.
The other battlesuits executed textbook drops on either side, Vre’Wyr perching on a ruined building incline to survey the territory.
“Most impressive, Shas’el...” Tong’ata enthused with characteristic understatement. “I’ve never seen a drop so low.”
The battledrones arced out of the sky at bullet speed and came to a perfect halt without appearing to decelerate at all. Lusha felt, for a paranoid moment, like they were making fun of him.
“Heavy ordnance half a tor’kan north,” Vre’Wyr communicated from his vantage point. “Can’t identify the source from here, but it’s an enemy position.”
“Given that they were shooting at us on the way down,” Lusha grumbled, “I’d say that was a fair assumption.”
“Shas’el?” Kol’tae sounded uncertain. “Who exactly are we fighting?”
He remembered Kais’s words on the comm. Was the youth still alive?
Mont’au. Mont’au!
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s move out.”
Ardias scowled into the shifting warsmog and consulted the rune icons on his auspex scanner. The third and fifth squads were creeping implacably into position, outflanking the artillery dugout they’d identified as a priority target.
“Head east,” he grunted. The Space Marine beside him nodded, twisting the control stick and sending the land speeder gliding, cautious of ambushes, along the smoke-shrouded streets. Ardias ignored the creeping view and kept his eyes on the scanner. The whispering urge to rage and kill was stronger than ever. He breathed deep and remembered the Codex.
Somewhere beyond the blasted remains of these few streets, perhaps three blocks from his current position, a wedge of Chaos Marines manning an anti-aircraft cannon and at least three mortar units were raining fire and death upon Lettica.
“Brother-captain,” Sergeant Larynz voxed. “I have an audio bearing upon the warp filth.”
“And?”
“They’re laughing.”
“Not for long,” Ardias replied, lip curling.
The basso report of cannonfire was a constant annoyance, reverberating from buildings and shaking the air, punctuated every now and again by the distinctive foom of mortar shells curving upwards. Whole districts away, sooty detonations fed a fire that raged obscenely, threatening to consume the entire southern district. Citizens fighting the blaze in simple workers’ clothing, desperate to protect their homes and families, were cut down by the gore-drenched Chaos things that prowled the streets, or else caught in a vicious crossfire and sent jerking to the sand, overalls punctured and bloody. Ardias had seen the footage, relayed by the scout squad he’d deployed southwards.
Most of the human troopers — guardsmen from the Dolumar barracks and storm-troopers deployed from orbit — had dug themselves into defensive positions and were engaged in a spirited attempt to contain the blossoming daemon army. It wasn’t working.
Portals yawned open seemingly at random, disgorging more and more Chaos Marines, more cackling daemon vermin, more rumbling perversions of Imperial vehicles and machines. Did they have objectives, he wondered? Did they have a single goal?
Just to kill.
The whole city was going straight to hell.
As if to prop up his wandering mind, he remembered long sermon tutorials in the schola lecturae of the barracks upon Macragge, tactical training and deployment conventions passed directly from Codex to student via a veteran-sergeant, soaked up by the young minds eager to prove their readiness for the mantle of superhumanity.
The flanking manoeuvre his squads were undertaking, miniaturised and given an unreal cheeriness by the bright lights of the scanner, was an exact replica of the standard deployment he’d been taught all those years ago. By the book. No mistakes. The Ultramarine way.
In exactly thirty-three seconds the Third tactical squad, lightly armed with bolters and grenades, would open fire from concealed positions upon the enemy dugout. They had little chance of hitting anything significant, of course, but as the gun crew scrabbled to return fire, the Fifth squad — devastators armed with a withering array of heavy weaponry — would crest the ridge directly behind them and blow the Chaos filth into several million tiny fragments of gore and bone. By the Codex. No mistakes.
Except...
Except he hadn’t been lying when he’d told the xeno there were no rules where Chaos was involved. You couldn’t anticipate disorder.
Ardias had served the Emperor for many, many years. He’d fought the eldar. Theirs was a discipline of intractable grace, stunningly swift, stunningly effective. Every unit had its role, its niche to fulfil, and would cling to it grimly. Their inflexibility — their inability to adapt — was their weakness.
He’d fought the tyranids. Theirs was a simple goal. There were no complexities buried beneath the lust to devour, no unpredictable tangents in behaviour behind the simple biological imperative to consume and propagate. They were adaptable, oh yes, but predictably so. There was no randomness in their behaviour and it could therefore be anticipated.
Even the orks, in their way, followed a set of rules. Theirs was a madness borne from utter dislocation with reason and rationality; they made up for their obvious intellectual shortcomings with a bloody-minded determination to surprise, to take the road less travelled. Their wanton disregard for convention, bizarrely, gave them a convention all of their own. Again, in their own unique way, they were predictable.
But Chaos...
Chaos wasn’t even madness. Chaos went beyond the wilful randomness of the orks into a realm of almost “rational irrationality”. It espoused a considered form of anarchy, an almost educated approach to uneducating. It was a thing of contradictions and adaptations, of ceaseless change and unrelenting unknowability. The greatest thing Ardias had learnt throughout his years of captaincy, that wasn’t inscribed in the scriptures of the Codex, was this: The only thing you can predict about Chaos is that you can’t predict it at all.
“Captain?” Larynz’s voice, distorted by the vox, sounded confused.
“Go ahead.”
“We’re at the dugout... They’ve gone, sir. There’s nobody here.”
Ardias realised with a start that the cannon had fallen silent. He’d been too intent on the auspex — and too immersed in his thoughts — to notice. He felt a cold shiver in his spine.
“Where are they?”
“There’s a trenchline buried nearby. The filth must have crawled out as we approached. Techmarine Achellus is preparing to scan the surroundings now.”
“Larynz...”
“What action, Brother-cap—”
“Larynz — you get out of there.”
“Wh—?”
Get out!
The explosion shook the world.
It was felt by Marria Sleva, cowering beneath the crude table in her two-room hab, hugging herself and crying. Jonas had gone out to help fight the fire, bless him, but... oh, God-Emperor — it seemed like hours ago and she was scared but, oh, but the baby was due any day and he’d told her — he’d told her — stay put, don’t move at all! I’ll be back, he said. And now there were explosions outside and the house was rocking and something was knocking on the door and laughing, and she was sure she could hear chainsaws-