The gunner fell out of line, his lasrifle snug at his chin, his eye staring down his sights at the greenskin hordes about them. Holding her pistol upright, Allegra stepped behind the gunner and cranked the master-vox that DuDeq was humping on his back. Snatching an ear-horn and hailer from the pack, she shouted above the roar of the beasts and waves. ‘Capricorn-Six, Capricorn-Six — this is Commander Allegra, respond.’
Allegra waited as Lyle Gohlandr splashed forwards with his gunners, assuming positions about the commander and Lord Governor amongst the wet and busy architecture. ‘Capricorn-Six,’ she persisted, ‘this is Commander Allegra with the Undine Forty-First, “Screeching Eagles”. ’
The xenos were everywhere. Allegra watched as monstrous multitudes emerged from the water, hauling themselves up out of waves. ‘We have acquired our target and are awaiting evacuation. Our position is three fifty-four fifty-two fifty-six: Primus north by north-east. Do you read, Capricorn?’
The green bastards swarming all over the architecture could see them. Allegra felt their blood-vision, their appetite, their need to smash and kill. Like rivers diverting and changing direction, the hordes came for them: hundreds upon hundreds of leathery beasts thundering up through the surf, rounding an artificial headland created by the domed roof of a freight-barbican and skidding down through the grotesques and gargoyles of shell-stone decoration. They ran at them like things of madness, all bared tooth and tusk.
Allegra searched for hope. High above them, gunships and assault carriers were drifting about the hive-heights, exchanging fire with the enemy swarms. Something big fired back from within the penetrated city shell, turning one of the aircraft into a tumbling fireball of death and wreckage. Out on the water, amongst the raining rocks and pods, was a Maritine cutter, its prow-mounted inferno cannon bathing the shoreline masses in a stream of flame.
Two shallow-hulled landing craft hit hive-city masonry further along the chemical coast. Their prow-ramps crashed down into the surf and platoons of Maritine Guard stormed up towards the dripping greenskins. Allegra saw the constellations of las-fire. She watched as the grim determination of the soldiers’ faces fell to fearful dread. Like the water washing back and forth up the shorelines, throngs of greenskin predators, newly risen from the depths, turned and thundered back at the shallows. The las-fire intensified. The landing faltered. Marineers began stumbling back towards their craft, but nothing could save them. Drawn by the panic and the screams, surrounding monsters ran at the butchery, hacking limbs and bodies apart.
‘Capricorn-Six…’ Allegra half-pleaded.
‘They’re not coming,’ Chief Gohlandr roared over the din. ‘Permission to open fire?’
After days of power conservation, Allegra gave her men the order. ‘Fire at will.’
The perimeter became a halo of scintillation. With power packs hot to the touch and lasrifles unleashing beam-snaps at full automatic, the Maritine gunners made their stand. The greenskins didn’t care. Their armour scraps and iron-hard flesh soaked up the curtain of light. Riddled bodies, searing and smoking, were stamped into the masonry by the racing hordes. Beasts barged and clawed at each other in primal desperation to be the first to land a kill. Fire from the guardsmen’s rifles was punctuated by flash of the spire guardians’ fusils and the repetitive pump-crash of the enforcers’ shotguns.
‘Chief!’ Allegra called.
‘I know!’ he barked back, but he hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t heard it. Amongst the cacophony of the brutes bearing down on his position and the drumming of his rapidly-emptying assault rifle, the chief hadn’t noticed the whine of approaching aircraft.
‘No,’ Allegra shouted, adding to the barrage a stream of las-bolts from her pistol. ‘Look.’
Dropping out of the sky were a trio of Thunderbolt fighter-bombers. They were zeroing in on the hive, coming in low and fast — which could mean only one thing. They were going to cleanse the shoreline.
‘Fall back!’ Allegra called. ‘Gunners — fall back!’
Allegra waved the Lord Governor’s valets and inbreeds back through the maintenance opening. Tearing DuDeq back with her by his vox-pack, the commander backed with them. The chief finally clocked the approaching Thunderbolts and echoed Allegra’s order.
Most of the Marineers didn’t need an excuse to run from the closing wall of blades, gaping barrels and green flesh. Some, like Gunners Friel and LaNoy, couldn’t make themselves move. Whether it was fear or faith in their weapons, the guardsmen remained, burning streams of light into the rabid ranks. They were gone in moments. Swallowed by the horde. There was no gallant defence. No sweeping bladework with broad bayonet or cutlass. The guardsmen were shreds in seconds.
As Chief Gohlandr pushed the last of the Marineers into the maintenance opening, Allegra saw the roaring masses behind him accelerate up the rockcrete. The greenskins did not heed the Thunderbolts screeching overhead. They did not see the mountain range of flame erupting up the shoreline behind them. Gohlandr, Allegra and Commandant Szekes slammed the opening cover shut. The hammer of claws on the metal was almost immediate and the cover was briefly wrenched back open, before the Marineers were suddenly thrown back as a blast of overpressure from outside hurled it closed again. About them the darkness of the tunnel quaked as the airstrike ripped its way up the shore. The scratching and frenetic thunder of fists on the metal covering died away, swallowed in the apocalyptic howl of destruction.
Eyes glinted by the light of the few lamps the Marineers had left. Precious moments passed. The enforcer commandant went to open the cover.
‘Wait!’ Allegra ordered, drifting her ear towards the hot metal. Satisfied, she nodded. The enforcer went to barge the covering open with one carapace-armoured shoulder, but it all but fell off its roasted hinges.
Smoke was swiftly clearing with the onshore breeze. As the soot and ash whirled in the wind Allegra stepped out, onto charred bodies. The shoreline was carpeted with blackened xenos corpses. The commander found herself nodding with satisfaction, but she knew the beasts would be back — and in number. Offshore, Allegra could see a few remaining guardsmen swamped by orks who were overrunning their battered landing craft. The Maritine cutter that the commander had also been pinning her hopes on was now listing horribly as some greenskin titan seized it from below. About the craft, the pontoon shanties — in chaotic disarray — had fragmented and were floating away from one another in ramshackle sections. The shoreline was overrun and the absence of their assigned evacuation had been a blow, but Allegra couldn’t afford to wait any longer. The Screeching Eagles simply couldn’t hold the perimeter.
‘The pontoons,’ the commander ordered. ‘Make for the pontoons.’
Directing the remaining guardsmen into two columns, Gohlandr barked at the Lord Governor and his freakish retinue to run into the shallows. Many of the spireborns had never been near the waters for fear of pollutant contamination. They were not keen on stumbling into the chemical shallows, but the heart-stopping vision of green fiends stomping up through the cadavers of their monster-kin lent the aristocrats resolve. Cutting a path through the surf with savage bursts of las-fire and lobbed frag grenades, Gohlandr led the way through the hazards of emerging orks.
Clambering up the side of a pontoon platform bearing part of the shattered shanty, the chief took the frail Lord Governor from his exhausted valets and hauled him up onto the amphibious community. As the Marineers and their charges climbed aboard, shanty wretches emerged from hiding. They extended emaciated arms and skeletal hands to help the screaming survivors — survivors they did not know were their palace-dwelling betters.