‘Time?’
‘Unless the composition changes, eighteen minutes.’
‘How long?’ asked Daur, shouting over the scream of the Hades in lateral thirty-nine.
‘Twenty-eight minutes,’ replied the head of the artificer crew.
‘Strike Beta reports a significantly lower estimate than that,’ said Major Pasha.
The artificer’s face was half-hidden by a grimy protective mask.
‘The alloy composite in this location is appreciably harder,’ he explained. ‘I have compared assay reports from the lateral sixteen cut. There is nine per cent more duracite in this location.’
Major Pasha looked at Daur.
‘We’ll be through when we’re through,’ she said over the noise of the cutting. He nodded glumly.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Alpha,’ said Daur.
They emerged from the Caestus into a wracked, unstable atmosphere with flames leaping around them. Several huge fires blazed through the core of the engineering depot, and sections of the roof were collapsing because of the entry wound made by the boarding ram. Some form of fuel oil had spilled from a punctured tank and covered the deck. It was alight, like a field of bright corn: yellow flames, and their reflection in the black mirror of the oil.
Eadwine, Holofurnace and Sar Af strode through the fire, heedless. Their antique, crested helms made them seem especially tall; their ornate and bulky armour gave them an even more unnatural bulk. Flame light glittered off their gilded pectoral eagles and their barred faceplates, and sparkled off their massive half-aquila boarding shields. All three had their boltguns in their right fists, drawn up to rest on the right-angled corners of their shields.
They began to fire as they advanced, gaining speed, moving from a stride to a bounding jog. Bolt rounds banged out, destroying sensors, auto-defence units, potential items of cover. Spent shell cases tumbled in the air.
Behind them, the Caestus was disgorging the rest of its cargo, the weapon servitors. Two were tracked units with multi-laser mounts, the other four were perambulatory units, burnished silver and chrome in the colours of Eadwine’s Chapter. They had faces of etched silver, wrought in the shapes of skulls, or at least the skulls of angelic beings. Their upper limbs were weapons mounts: autocannons, heavy bolters, rocket launchers. They came through the lakes of fire as obliviously as the Space Marines, advancing like reaping machines through tall crops, blasting as they came. Energy beams seared down the length of the depot space, and bright tracer shots stitched the air. Terek-8-10’s directive scans had already identified the three access points at the far end of the chamber and fed them to the Space Marines via their visor displays.
‘No human bio-traces in active opposition,’ Terek-8-10 reported over the vox link. ‘Several hundred detected trying to flee the chamber. Several dozen more detected beneath debris or rubble, fading.’
Almost immediately, as though the pilot-servitor’s report had been tempting fate, the boarding force started to take fire. It rained down from a steep angle, bursting off boarding shields and the polished chromework of the gun-servitors. Sar Af took one kinetic blow across the side of his helm from a glancing shot that was hard enough to make him grunt.
Terek-8-10 was dismayed.
‘Auspex does not read human bio-traces in opposition,’ he declared.
‘It does not have to be human to want us dead,’ replied Eadwine.
He brought his shield up like a pavise, and fended off the rain of barbs. The other Space Marines did the same.
Sar Af noted the context of the impacts, the shrapnel marks and cuts, analysing instantly.
‘Flechette rounds,’ he said.
They sourced the origination, post-human eyes hunting the dark for muzzle flash, up in the chamber roof, up the dense framework of machinery and gantries.
Movement.
‘Loxatl,’ Eadwine reported. He had clearly glimpsed one of the long, sinuous xenos reptiles. The other Space Marines didn’t reply. They were too busy trying to kill the creatures.
Terek-8-10 adjusted the parameters of his auspex scan to include the xenobiological element.
‘Holy Throne of Terra,’ he breathed.
The loxatl were pouring into the depot chamber via the ceiling vents, squirming down the girder work and vertical struts using their four grasping limbs and their tails, firing the murderous flechette blasters strapped to their bellies.
The auspex already showed sixty-eight of them, and the number was increasing with every passing second.
The assault ships of Strike Alpha followed the Caestus’s headlong rampage into the heart of the Reach. The outer hatch of the reassigned Primary Target had been disintegrated entirely. The Arvus and Falco craft had to close up and enter one or two at a time to avoid the jagged tatters of metal framing the mouth of the eviscerated docking bay.
Decompression had stopped, so the air was free of flying debris. Generator fields had been re-established to seal the bay entrance, and each troop ship juddered as it popped the field edge and entered the contained atmosphere from hard space.
‘Stand by!’ the lead pilot sang out.
The main docking bay was a disaster area. It looked as though a flash flood had sucked through it, washing debris to the mouth in a deep sediment of jetsam. That debris included whole landing ships and shuttle craft. The flash flood had been followed by a fire storm that had left most of the space ablaze.
There was no way to set down.
The Arvus pilots were following the tracer signal from the Caestus. It had punched through into the next chamber.
‘Throne, are we there yet?’ groaned Rerval.
The inner dock was little better. The landers dropped speed again, circling towards the back of the chamber. The Caestus had smashed through into yet a third chamber, but this breach was too small and treacherously sharp for the thin-skinned lighters to risk navigating.
‘Setting down!’ the pilot yelled over the comm.
The first Arvus dropped on its thrust-fans, wing profile adjusting for landing. It landed with a bruising thump on the buckled, debris-littered decking.
The rear hatch dropped. Kolea, his rebreather up over his face, led the first squad out. He carried his lasrifle and a tall oblong boarding shield that looked like the lid of a coffin.
It took him a moment to get his bearings. It had been dark and cramped in the back of the utility lifter. Now it was bright, glaringly bright, and the space around them was vast, a primary scale docking facility. The air was almost freezing cold, but the heat from the various monumental fires scorched his skin. Machines and cargo-handling rigs destroyed by the Caestus’s raid lay in their wake. Other ships were coming in through the smoke-wash and setting down behind Kolea’s lander.
Rerval called out and indicated the source of the Caestus’s tracer signal. Up ahead of them, there was another puncture in the wall, like a giant bullet hole, where the Caestus had gone through into the next compartment. Kolea ran forwards. Underfoot were burning scraps, lumps of debris and splattered organics from the dock personnel mushed by the pressure shock of the Caestus’s strike.
The puncture was big, but the lower lip was four metres off the deck level, and the edges were still glowing red hot. Getting through was going to be entertaining. Kolea looked for a hatch they could force – a blast door, an airgate…
No time. Nothing in sight.
‘Storm it!’ he yelled. ‘Grab some debris for scaling ladders. Move your arses. Living forever is not an option today!’
His squad broke away and gathered up sections of fallen gantry, dragging it over to the puncture. More sections were catching up with them, deposited by the next few landers. Baskevyl was among them. Kolea saw the concern in his eyes through the lenses of his breather mask.