The air was thick with blood and screaming as the tattered regiment consolidated into the clearing they’d made. Not so much a column now, the slowly diminishing circle of bodies offered feeble resistance to the aliens and their scaled beasts. It was no place for a last stand and soon the Imperial Army was running again, back through the darkness. Branch tendrils came alive, snagging wrists and ankles; sucking bogs opened up to swallow men whole. Insect hordes rallied, filling mouths and ears as the entire jungle animated to repel the interlopers.
“Forward for Terra!” an overseer began before his throat was speared by an alien lance. Its bearer shucked his body free with a desultory jerk before rearing over a band of wounded Phaerians on its saurian steed. The meaning in the alien’s glowering gaze was clear.
Death to intruders.
It charged. A reverberant war cry shot through the jungle like lighting, calling its rider kindred, and in moments the Phaerians were engulfed by a stampede. The crack of scatter-locks and auto-carbines was brief and ineffectual. Rear rankers, far enough from the fighting to not yet be skewered, crushed or shredded, just ran. These men, these death-worlder brutes, wailed as they scrambled through the heat and the mire. Winged beasts, let loose in the rein, dived on prey at leisure, picking off morsels wherever they appeared, all to the grim satisfaction of their eldritch masters.
It was a massacre, the humans a flesh feast for the coldblooded saurian monsters.
High above, the forest was an ocean of fire. Leaves of red and ochre filled the swollen canopy like veins of blood rippling on water. Hunting pterosaurs were visible darting through the unseen fissures in the solid orange sea.
A voice echoed in the darkness of a ship’s belly.
“They have engaged the Army vanguard, my lord.”
A large figure near the back of the hold breathed in the scent of ash and cinder. Somewhere behind him, the last embers of a ritual fire were slowly fading. Brazier-flame lit his eyes as he looked up. In the gloom, he appeared as scaled and saurian as the monsters in the jungle below.
Abyssal deep, his reply was emphatic.
“Send in the Legion.”
A HEAVY ENGINE throb forced its way into the jungle. Below, where the chaos played out and the reaping of human life went unabated, a few surviving Phaerians looked up. As if by some unseen hand, the canopy parted to reveal the slab-sided base of a gunship. Its boarding ramp was down and the darkness within the Stormbird’s belly lit up with a host of fire-red lenses as its occupants concluded their oaths of moment.
The first of the warriors hit the ground with a thunderous boom. Chain-blade whirring, the giant in forest-green levelled his bolt pistol.
“Rally! For the freedom of humanity and the glory of Terra!”
Like thunderbolts striking the earth, he was joined by others, armour-clad crusaders bearing the symbol of the snarling drake on their shoulder guards.
We are fire-born.
They roared as one.
“Vulkan!”
HE HAD FOUGHT the eldar before, though not like this. Attached to the 154th Expeditionary Fleet, he’d been charged with fighting off piratical raiders, an entirely different alien breed to the jungle-dwellers. They had been succubus horrors, draped in leather and festooned with charnel blades. Emerging from space as if an autonomous part of the void had detached itself from the whole, the raiders had gutted two frigates before the XVIII Legion intervened and repelled them. Nocturneans called them “dusk-wraiths”. They were phantoms, soul-thieves, and he hated them with all the ingrained cultural memory of his people.
Heka’tan had not crossed blades with the dragon-riders before this battle. These forest-bound aliens were not as technologically advanced as their cousins but they were still eldar. And they were fast.
“Cutting left.” The warning vocalised through his squad’s comm-feed also displayed as an icon in his retinal lens. His bolt pistol was still scanning, spitting out semi-auto at an enemy so fleet of foot his targeter couldn’t keep up. Foliage split apart under the barrage.
“Burst fire.”
The Legionaries stopped aiming and focussed on areas instead. A furious combined salvo brought down the rider and three of its kindred.
Heka’tan saw Brother Kaitar kneel and daub a finger of ash down his shoulder guard from the smouldering remains of one of the fires littering the clearing.
“Unto the anvil, captain.”
Heka’tan smiled behind his faceplate and gave Kaitar a curt salute. He opened up the company-band feed.
“All of the 14th. Advance.”
Multiple Stormbirds had broken through the forest canopy bringing warriors of the XVIII Legion to relieve the beleaguered Army. They consolidated quickly and methodically, Vulkan’s sons as exacting as their father when it came to warmaking.
Several squads from Heka’tan’s company came together and a wall of bolter fire lit up the jungle, chasing back the darkness and chewing up trees into kindling. The eldar vanguard withered before it. Pterosaurs took flight, spearing through gaps in the leaf canopy, calling out vengeance. A blockade of stegosaurs emerged from behind a fleeing screen of raptor riders in an attempt to impede the Legionaries.
With clipped battle-sign, Heka’tan brought up a division of heavies.
Capacitors powered from a soft drone to a hard thrum as the conversion beamers reached fire-ready status. A crackling foomrushed from the aiming nozzles as the energy weapons sliced foliage apart to detonate with purpose against the stegosaurs. An explosion engulfed the beasts leaving nothing behind but wet bone chunks.
Two fingers snapping forwards in a quick chop-chopmotion brought up the bolters again. Heka’tan led the line, holstering his pistol as the Salamanders took control of the battlefield. Slowly, the resolve of the Army units was returning. The appearance of the Legiones Astartes had emboldened them as they marched implacably through the shaken Phaerians.
Heka’tan glowered at an Army overseer who was trying to restore order in his platoon.
“Bring your men with me, soldier.”
The overseer gave a sharp salute at the captain. “For the glory of Terra and the Emperor!” He turned to bellow at his men with greater vigour. Across the jungle expanse, Salamanders were wrangling control of the Army units and clearing a path. With the Legion as spear-point, the Army would move behind them in support.
Despite the death of the stegosaurs and the multiple defeats being inflicted across the two-kilometre stretch of jungle where the Salamanders had touched down, the eldar were tenacious. From the backs of their lizard-steeds, riders put up a whickering salvo of rifle fire. Pterosaurs executed lightning attacks on the Legionaries until they’d lost too many to the Salamanders’ bolters. A baying stegosaur stomped defiantly until a missile burst tore it open. As the beast died, it rolled over and crushed a pair of raptor riders.
Against the Legiones Astartes, the hit and run tactics of the eldar were blunted.
As they advanced, the jungle ahead of the Salamanders began to change. Branches entwined together, leaves and vines thickened to form a union. Within minutes an arboreal impasse had grown in front of the Legionaries. Through the retinal lenses of his battle-helm, Heka’tan could still detect multiple body traces from the enemy where they waited in the gloom. The faster-moving elements of the eldar force were already circling again. Raptor packs bounded across his peripheral vision in a colourful heat blur while pterosaur kindreds found perches in the highest trees from where they could launch an ambush.
The icon of Fifth-Sergeant Bannon flashed up alongside targeting data on Heka’tan’s left retinal lens as the captain opened up a channel.
“Hell and flame, brother.”
An affirmation symbol flashed once before the entire Salamander front line withdrew and fell back to suppressing fire protocols.