‘We’ve got a problem,’ Baskevyl said.
‘The breach?’
‘Screw that, the landing. There’s no space!’
Kolea assessed the options. There were now six lighters on the deck, and space for perhaps three more. The Falcos and longbodies coming in behind would soon be stacking up with no room to land.
‘We have to get the empties up and away,’ Kolea yelled to Baskevyl.
‘Agreed!’
‘Get the message through to the pilots,’ Kolea ordered. ‘They have to make room on the ground once they’ve discharged their complements, and the incomers have to make room in the air to let the outgoing pass through the dock area and get clear.’
‘We can’t keep them on station,’ said Baskevyl.
‘No, we can’t,’ Kolea agreed. ‘Good thing we plan on staying here, huh?’
Baskevyl headed back towards the landing zone. Kolea joined his assault squad at the puncture. Under the supervision of Derin and Caober, sections of smouldering metal wreckage had been dragged up to the wall and hoisted to form makeshift scaling ramps into the puncture.
‘Is it safe?’ asked Kolea.
Derin just laughed.
‘I know,’ replied Kolea. ‘Stupid question.’ He lifted his boarding shield and clambered onto the tubular frame, going up hand and foot. As assault commander, he wasn’t about to let anyone else show him how it was done.
‘Come on!’ he yelled at the men behind him. Most of them seemed particularly keen to help hold the debris steady.
‘You heard the major,’ Commissar Fazekiel yelled, arriving at a run from her transport. ‘Get up that ramp!’
The Ghosts began to swarm up the girders behind Kolea.
Kolea reached the summit, and gazed through the massive tear in the compartment wall. He could see the fires burning in the depot space beyond, feel the backwash heat. He could see the Space Marines across the vast floor. He could see what they were blasting at.
‘Oh, holy gak,’ he said.
‘They’re fething well waving them off!’ Costin exclaimed, his voice sounding dull and stupid inside his rebreather. ‘Look at them. Baskevyl’s just waving them off!’
Meryn looked. He saw what Costin was talking about. E Company had just begun to deploy from their Falcos, and the landing zone was packed about as tightly as anyone would ever want. He could see Major Baskevyl and some of the other company officers signalling empty landers to lift off and clear the debris-strewn deck to make room for more.
That meant if they needed to pull out in a hurry, there wouldn’t be enough transports waiting.
‘Gak, that’s just great,’ snapped Gendler.
‘I know! Fething marvellous, right?’ Costin agreed.
Gendler didn’t reply. Meryn pretended to be too busy shouting at some laggards to get down the ramp.
The truth was, Costin wasn’t their best friend right then and there. Just before load up and launch, he’d come to them, shit-scared about something Rawne had said. The pathetic idiot had just dumped it on them, right in the middle of the pre-combat build up and the stress that brought with it. Costin was a liability. He couldn’t handle a thing, least of all his drink any more. He was paranoid and raving. Best guess was Rawne had somehow sniffed out a trace of the sweet little deal they had been running. If that was true, then it sucked like a chest wound. It didn’t suck quite as much as the assault run they were now in the middle of, but in the long term – provided there was going to be a long term – it could potentially suck even worse. If ‘they’ did know, things could turn very ugly for Meryn and his close confederates.
As ugly as Costin’s face.
What had he done? What had the drunken shithead managed to do? How had he given them away? Loose talk over some sacra? Some dumb slip?
Whatever it was, Meryn was sure of one thing. ‘They’ had Costin. Rawne wouldn’t have gone to Costin if he hadn’t known for sure Costin was in it. Otherwise, it was probably a fishing trip. Costin was probably all they had, because only Costin was stupid enough to give himself away, and even then he wasn’t stupid enough to blow the whole thing.
Rawne was baiting. Rawne was counting on Costin being so panicked he’d do anything he could to save his neck.
And he would. Costin always would.
So if they made it out of the Reach alive, Meryn had some serious damage-control to manage.
The rain of fire from the xenos became torrential. Flechette rounds detonated all around the advancing Space Marines in razorbursts. Eadwine felt ultra-sharp splinters slice off his armour. One actually punctured the ceramite. He felt it dig into the meat of his thigh. The sheer shot rate and penetrative effect of the loxatl blasters would finish them. Even three of the Adeptus Astartes would be brought to their knees, and then their deaths, by such a deluge.
His shield was still up. Sighting down his boltgun, he began to blast up into the roof space, blowing out rigs and gantries. Debris rained down. He saw one writhing reptile body tumble and burst on the deck. Scans now showed close to one hundred and eighty loxatl flooding down into the chamber. Some were racing down the chamber walls to attack from the ground. Eadwine directed the fields of fire of the weapon servitors as they pushed forwards in the face of the onslaught.
A large adult loxatl launched itself off an overhead gantry and dropped onto Holofurnace, dewclaws extended to slash. Holofurnace caught the animal on his shield and smashed it aside. It bounced off the deck, rolling, its blaster harness torn so that flechette ammunition scattered loose. Switching around, Sar Af put a single bolt through the loxatl’s skull before it could rise. Its brain matter splattered across the deck, and its massive, blue-grey trunk and tail went into muscle spasms.
Another leapt. Sar Af blew it in half in the air. A third came down. Holofurnace had clamped his boltgun and drawn his spear off his back. He threw himself forwards to meet the close combat attack, decapitating the third loxatl with his circling spear blade.
‘Ithaka!’ the Iron Snake yelled.
The next loxatl to come at him lost its front limbs at the elbow joints in one fluid slice. The one after that died from an impaling wound. The next, which attacked as Holofurnace was ripping his spear out of his previous kill, had its back broken by a backhand smash of the Iron Snake’s boarding shield.
It was something, but it was only a start. Auspex now showed two hundred and seventy-one xenos contacts in the chamber. There were so many coming down the roof pylons they were pushing the front runners off the hand holds, forcing them to drop, claws out, onto the Space Marines. Sar Af slugged them out of the air with bolt rounds, blowing open skulls and ribcages, severing whip tails, showering the fight zone with meat and viscera. Then two flechette rounds hit his right shoulder guard almost simultaneously and drove him down onto one knee.
Terek-8-10 raised the Caestus into the air behind them, ramps still gaping open. He got the damaged craft up to about eight metres, and swung it in over the heads of the advancing Space Marines. The armoured bulk of the Caestus formed a hefty shield, soaking up the majority of the blaster fire that had been raking the Space Marines and their servitors. In its shadow, Eadwine saw that the deck plates were peppered and grazed by the flechette fire to such an extent they resembled a lunar surface. The deck was also littered with bloody xenos meat and slimy, plum-coloured organs.
Flechette fire raked the Caestus. Loxatl dropped on to it, leaping down onto the hull booms, gripping onto the ragged wings. Some fell. Others clung on. They swarmed over the upper surface. Terek-8-10 retracted the open ramps, but several of them had already slithered inside, like lizards skipping across a rock in the sun. He could hear them skittering and chirring inside the vacated compartments. He could smell the stink of rancid milk and crushed mint that oozed from their flesh and breath. Another animal scrambled up the hull fairing right in front of him, and started firing its blaster point blank at the little armoured window port in front of the pilot’s position. After eight frenetic shots, the armoured glass actually began to craze.