The Blood Angels go through at oh-nine-hundred and I give them thirty seconds.
Not caution. Timing. The gap they make is only useful if I hit it before the cultists reorient, and reorientation takes thirty to forty seconds for troops that aren't drilled, which cultists aren't. I have learned this by killing a great many cultists.
I go over at oh-nine-hundred-thirty with five hundred men behind me.
The breach stinks of promethium and blasted stone and the copper-iron of blood when there's enough of it to be a smell rather than just a presence. The cultist position that held against us for three days is no longer a position in any useful sense — it is a collection of objects that used to be a position, a record of what happens when something that doesn't stop moving comes through a wall at combat speed. I don't slow down to read the record. I step over what's in the way and keep going.
First squad is already at the corner of the commercial block when I come through. Gone prone behind the burned-out hull of a ground transport, their fire up in the window line above the approach without being told. Two years looks like this when it's working. I push past them.
"Bound up. Second squad, close the gap on their left."
Second squad moves. Third fills behind them. The Chimeras come through the breach in my wake and the sound they make is twenty tonnes of armoured vehicle on rubble — grinding, clanking, the protest of metal doing what metal was made for — and then the multi-lasers open on the elevated positions and the sponson heavy bolters sweep the ground-floor approaches and the sound changes into something that arrives in the chest before it reaches the ears.
The Leman Russes work behind me. Every forty seconds the world briefly decides to be somewhere else — battle cannon, compression wave in the chest, then the delayed crash of whatever they've hit ceasing to be a structural problem. Three of them. Not enough for a proper armoured push but enough to make any fixed position a liability.
Good. That's what they're here for.
The first cultist resistance is scattered — probing contact from the rubble fields to our left, a handful of shooters using the broken ground the way men who are afraid but not stupid use broken ground. Heads down, short bursts, falling back before we can fix their position. Testing us. Feeling for the shape of the advance.
They find it.
I'm not needed for the basics. I'm needed for the decisions that happen too fast for a vox chain.
The Hellhound angles right toward a hab block that has been converted, in the way cultists convert things, into a fortified position. Multiple floors. Fields of fire covering the main approach. The kind of building you do not want to assault with infantry if you have alternatives, and the Hellhound is the alternative. It moves fast to the approach, turret already traversing as it closes, the Inferno Cannon tracking upward to the window line — the movement of a crew that knows exactly what they're doing with it.
It works the ground floor. The promethium goes in through the window apertures — the smell of it reaching me even from here, sharp chemical accelerant and then the deeper register of burning as what's inside catches — and the screaming starts and then stops, and what's left doesn't provide covering fire anymore.
We move through the evidence of the Blood Angels ahead of us. It's not hard to find. Where they've been, things are dead in ways that standard cultist weapons don't produce — heavy weapons teams taken apart, bodies that have been subjected to forces beyond what lasguns and autoguns deliver, the kind of destruction that doesn't make you wonder what caused it so much as how anything could cause it and keep moving. A heavy bolter nest, the weapon itself warped as though something simply crushed it while the crew were still attached. A barricade that has been pushed aside — a mass of rubble and reinforced plascrete that would have taken a Chimera with a dozer blade to shift — moved out of the path and left at the side of the street like something set down by someone in a hurry. A cultist position that was manned and is no longer manned, the manning having ended with a comprehensiveness that leaves no room for interpretation.
Good. Let them clear the route. That's what they're here for.
The advance holds its rhythm. Fire and movement. Cover and bound. The district opens in front of us, one block at a time.
-DN-
-DN-
-DN-
The Hellhound dies at eleven twenty-three.
I know the time because I looked at my chrono eight seconds before it happens — a habit, marking the advance's pace against the planned timeline — and the sound of the detonation is so immediate and total that the number is printed into what came just before it.
The anti-armour round comes from an upper storey, a position that shouldn't exist because we cleared that approach forty minutes ago. Someone went back. Someone knew we'd cleared it and went back and waited with something capable of punching through the Hellhound's rear armour — not heavy, not military-grade, but enough. The round hits the promethium reservoir.
A Hellhound that detonates does not look like a tank being destroyed. It looks like the space the tank was occupying briefly ceasing to exist. The fireball goes up and outward simultaneously, a wall of heat that I feel on the left side of my face from the far side of the street, and in the half-second it takes my eyes to adjust from the flash the buildings on either side of the blast point are shedding their upper storeys — not collapsing, exactly, but being redistributed by the overpressure, facades peeling away and material going outward in arcs. Secondary fires catch in four buildings before the primary fireball has finished expanding. The street fills with light and then with smoke and then with the smell of promethium burning in quantities large enough to make the air itself seem like a product of the fire rather than something the fire is consuming.
The crew are gone. Four people who an hour ago were laughing about something I didn't catch. The fireball is going to burn for thirty minutes whether I do anything about it or not.
I have approximately four seconds before the gap in my right flank becomes a problem.
The vox is already in my hand.
"Daven. Right flank. Fill it."
"Already moving, sir."
Of course he is. He was watching the same thing I was watching. I redirect the nearest Chimera to cover the approach the Hellhound was working and push the right-flank squads into the building line to compensate for the lost fire support. It takes ninety seconds and costs me coverage on the left approach, which I patch by pulling back one of the Leman Russes to a fire position that covers both angles. It is not an elegant solution. It is a solution that works, which is the only kind that matters.
The fires keep burning. We advance around them.
-DN-
-DN-
-DN-
They hit the right flank at twelve oh-four.
Not the probe I've been expecting since the Hellhound went down. The probe is what you send to test a line. This is what you send when you've already tested it and found where it gives.
The weight of numbers comes out of the ruins on the right — not the stumbling fanatical mob of cultist wave attacks, not the scattered probing contact of the past hour, but something with shape and direction, pressing into the gap the Hellhound's death created — men who know where the gap is and have been told to find it. Someone told them where to push. Not military training, not proper tactical doctrine — but enough to make the mass of them function as something more coherent than a crowd.
The right-flank squad breaks. Not cowardice. They're good men, two years in, and they break the way any unit breaks under sufficient pressure with insufficient cover — they give ground because giving ground is what keeps them alive long enough to fight again, and they're right to do it, and it doesn't matter that they're right because the ground they're giving is the ground I need.
The line folds inward.
I am three hundred metres away when the vox tells me. I am at a Chimera that is stopped — engine running, hatch open, waiting for orders that haven't come because its assigned officer is currently not assigned to anything — and I am through the commander's hatch in ten seconds.
"Right flank." A beat. "Drive."
The Chimera's driver does not ask questions. The vehicle lurches forward and the external vox feeds me the sound of the engagement getting worse — more weapons, more voices, the short overlapping crack of fire that means men are shooting at close range into terrain they can't fully see because the enemy is inside it with them.
Two minutes at the Chimera's pace through rubble-choked streets. I spend them on the vox redirecting everything I can redirect toward the breach, pulling Daven's section to form a secondary line fifty metres back in case I can't hold the primary, telling the nearest Leman Russ commander to orient its battle cannon toward the approach and wait for my signal, watching through the command periscope as the smoke and fire of the main advance scrolls past and the right flank comes into view.
The cultists have gotten into the building line on our right and are firing down into the squad's position from above. Angle-shooting. The squad has gone to ground in a shell crater that is providing cover from three directions and not from the fourth.
I dismount in a run.
The ground between the Chimera and the crater is forty metres of broken street — rubble, a burned vehicle chassis, a gap in a collapsed wall that is either cover or a kill zone depending on which side of it you approach from. I go through the gap. The las-bolt that clips the edge of the plascrete above my head tells me someone saw me. I keep moving.
The crater is occupied by seven men and two who are no longer men. Sergeant Veth — not Daven, Daven is holding the secondary line, this is the corporal who had command when the squad broke — has his head up and his rifle working, which is something.
"Building," I tell him, and he doesn't ask which one because there is only one that matters. "I need eyes on the upper floors. Where are they?"
"Third and fourth. Two windows, maybe three."
I pull a grenade from my belt — the bolt pistol is down to three rounds from the last engagement, not worth burning on a building I'm about to enter — and look at the approach. Forty metres of open ground to the base, four storeys, the upper floors compromised in a way that means the structural integrity is present enough to hold armed men but probably not much else.
Probably. That's a wonderful word.
"Covering fire," I say. "On my move."
Seven lasguns open up on the window line. I go.
The forty metres is the worst part. Not because it is particularly dangerous — it is extremely dangerous, but that is not what makes it the worst part. The worst part is that it takes approximately six seconds and during those six seconds there is nothing to do but run and keep running and the only thing happening is the count, one-two-three-four, rhythm not thought, keeping the legs moving when the brain would prefer to be elsewhere.
I make the wall. Three seconds behind it — back to the stone, the open ground behind me finally not my problem, getting my breathing back under control. Then through the doorframe.
The interior is dark and smells of weeks-old abandonment — damp plascrete and stale air, the residue of a space that stopped being lived in — and promethium smoke from the Hellhound's work two blocks away and something more recent — blood, recently, the iron-copper specific of it when there's enough to be a smell rather than just a presence.
Stairs. Third floor.
The cultists on the third floor hear me coming. That's fine. I want them to hear me coming. I want them oriented toward the stairwell and away from the windows, which is what they are when I come through the landing. The floor is a single open space, low ceiling, windows along the far wall flooding the room with grey light from behind them — three silhouettes, the nearest turning to bring his weapon around, the middle one already facing me, the far one still at the window, still firing down into the crater below.
The Ginunting takes the nearest one across the turn in my right hand, the forward curve of the blade doing what it is built to do in close quarters — one committed motion, the power field burning white at contact and the high whine of it filling the low room, and the smell of burnt flesh immediately, sharp and chemical. I pull the bolt pistol left-handed mid-pivot, the draw muscle memory by now, and the middle one gets the muzzle against his chest before he's finished processing what happened to the first. I brace one-handed against him to manage the kick. The detonation goes through him and into the wall behind. One round spent. The far one has turned by now and I am already past the middle one and the Ginunting is moving and he makes a decision about whether to fight or run and he makes it slightly too slowly.
Three. Fourth floor next.
The fourth floor has four, and one of them is different.
Four cultists. Four weapons. Same geometry as below — windows along the far wall, angles that cover the approach, the stairwell at my back. And one of them is watching me the way the others aren't. Not reacting. Watching.
Armed. Ritual scarring, face and arms — organised, significant, not the self-inflicted mess of the rank and file. He's talking, not shouting, and the three at the windows are moving for him.
There's the mind behind it.
I fight my way through the three. The second one gets a knife across my left forearm — a line of heat, the vambrace taking most of it but not all, and for a half-second the arm doesn't respond the way I need it to. He sees it. I close the distance before he can use it. The third puts a solid round into my pauldron that I don't have time to dodge cleanly, the impact slamming me sideways into the window frame hard enough that the ceramite cracks at the edge but holds. I log the forearm — the heat of it, the arm that didn't respond — and set it aside. Later.
The leader is gone. The window behind him is open — cold air coming through it, the sound of the street below, the absence of the low voice that had been giving orders.
He went out the window rather than fight me. Coward.
Three storeys to rubble. A man who takes that exit instead of facing me either has something under that window I couldn't see, or is augmented enough that the drop is survivable, or has decided the drop is the better risk.
I file it and go back to the stairs. I reload on the way down — the mag has two rounds left from the third floor and I want a full eight for whatever is waiting at ground level.
The right flank stabilises in the eleven minutes it takes me to clear the building. Daven holds the secondary line while the building is live, then pushes his section forward once the fire from above stops. The Leman Russ puts a round through the approach the cultists were using to feed reinforcements into the breach. The three things happen in the right order and the line closes. When I come back out at ground level the crater squad is moving again and the line has re-formed, rough but functional, twenty metres behind where it was.
Twenty metres. That's all we lost. I'm prepared to call that a success.
-DN-
-DN-
-DN-
Gamma finds me at twelve forty-one.
I am aware of the forearm. I am aware of the wrist. I am also aware, with increasing specificity, of the cut above my brow that has been leaking blood into my right eye for the past twenty minutes. I have been blinking it clear. This is a viable solution and I have no complaints.
Gamma appears at my left side and looks at my face.
"You have a head wound."
"I am aware."
"It is bleeding into your eye."
"I am also aware. Can you patch it?"
A pause that has its own content.
"I am not a medic."
"You have medical instrumentation."
"I have autosanguine and a basic wound-seal applicator because you keep doing this. This is the third time I have patched a head wound on a battlefield. This is not what the equipment is for. This is not what I am for."
"Patch it and complain."
He patches it. He complains. The wound-seal applicator makes a sound I associate with things not enjoying being done to them and my brow goes numb and the bleeding stops. I blink my right eye clear for the first time in twenty minutes, which is an improvement.
"I would not have this cut if I were allowed to wear a helmet," I say.
"You are allowed to wear a helmet."
"Not with the hat."
"No."
"Commissars must wear the hat."
"Yes."
There is a beat in which I sulk.
"The Leman Russ with the damaged power coupling," he says.
"What about it."
"The coupling failed twelve minutes ago. The engine is cold."
I stop walking. Turn to look at him.
"How damaged."
"Extensively. The original hit destabilised the primary power feed. When the coupling failed, the secondary took the load and overheated. You have one battle cannon that is not currently capable of firing."
The next objective is a fortified transit hub. The walls are thick enough to require direct-fire demolition to breach. Without the battle cannon I am looking at an infantry assault against a hardened position, which is the kind of mathematical problem that produces a specific and depressing answer.
"Can you fix it."
A pause. The pause of a man who is about to say something technically accurate but contextually unpleasant.
"I can restart it. Potentia Coil, direct to the engine — bypass the coupling entirely. Four minutes of contact with the power housing. It will hold for approximately twenty minutes before the draw becomes prohibitive."
"And after."
"The bypass will hold for approximately twenty minutes before the load on the coil becomes prohibitive and I am forced to disengage. After that, the engine will fail again and cannot be restarted without a proper repair facility."
"Twenty minutes."
"Approximately."
Twenty minutes. The transit hub's outer wall is forty metres of ferrocrete and rubble reinforcement, and I have a battle cannon that can fire for twenty minutes if Gamma keeps his hand on the engine.
"Do it."
Gamma nods and goes. The Leman Russ is sitting cold at a fire position two blocks behind the advance line, its crew out and standing around it with the helplessness of men who understand their machine is broken and have no idea what is happening to it now. Gamma approaches it the way he approaches anything technical — already done with it in his head, the body just catching up — places both hands and two mechadendrites on the engine access panel on the right hull, and goes still.
The Potentia Coil's operation is not visible from the outside. There is a faint smell — ozone and hot metal, the specific register of large amounts of current moving through systems not designed to carry it — and the crew take two steps back from instinct. The engine turns over once, coughs, and catches. The vibration of it moves through the hull and into the mechadendrites, and Gamma holds his position for three more seconds before stepping back.
"Interface stable," he says. "Use it."
The tank commander looks at Gamma. Looks at his engine. Looks at Gamma.
"Twenty minutes," Gamma says, without moving or opening his eyes. "I recommend you use them."
Gamma holds the interface through the firing — four minutes of contact to establish the bypass, then the battle cannon opening up with him still attached to the hull. He tells me afterward it is unpleasant. The battle cannon puts three rounds through the transit hub's outer wall and the infantry is moving through the breach before the dust has finished falling.
-DN-
-DN-
-DN-
The transit hub's interior is large — vaulted ceiling, the remnants of what were once passenger platforms, the kind of space that was built to move thousands of people and now moves nothing at all. It smells of old stone and newer smoke and something chemical that the burning Hellhound two kilometres back has been contributing to the air since eleven twenty-three.
The Blood Angels fought here.
That much is obvious from the first step through the breach. What's less obvious, for the first few seconds, is what they fought.
The cultists are present — or what remains of them is present — but the scale of it is wrong for cultists. The fire density that would produce these casualties requires weapons heavier than anything the infantry assault could account for. Heavy bolters. Meltas. Weapons that the cultist forces in this district have not demonstrated. The bodies are arranged, if that is the right word, in the specific shape of a unit that was trying to hold a position and failed — layered from the outer walls inward, the furthest-in most concentrated, the defensive perimeter having contracted and contracted and contracted until there was nowhere left to contract to.
And between the bodies of the cultists, the equipment. That's what tells me.
Heavy weapons emplacements. Not cultist improvisation — proper Imperial-pattern heavy bolter mounts, autocannon tripods, an anti-armour position set up with field-manual precision. The barrels are still warm. I put my hand near one and feel it. Recently fired, recently abandoned. Someone trained these men. Someone equipped them with materiel that didn't come from the cultist arsenals we've been recovering all day. Someone put them in a position and told them to hold it and came back to find them not holding it, and moved on.
I stand in the middle of the transit hub and do the math I've been building toward for the last three hours.
The cultists who hit my right flank. They had a mind behind them. Someone directing.
The heavy weapons teams the Blood Angels rolled over. Someone equipped and positioned them.
This isn't a berserker. This is a tactician.
I look at Gamma. He has his eyes open again — the Potentia Coil work is done, the tank is cold somewhere behind us, the twenty minutes are spent. He is looking at the same equipment I am looking at and arriving at the same conclusions at a rate determined by the processing speed of someone with cranial augmentation, which means he is probably already past where I am.
"Someone organised this," I say.
"Yes," he says. "It was not the cultists."
"No."
We look at each other. Neither of us has anything to add.
I get the regiment moving again.
-DN-
-DN-
-DN-
Fourteen hundred hours finds us in the outer ruins of the tertiary district, past the transit hub, past the main cultist defensive line, into the approach zones that exist between defended positions. The fighting is thin here — not absent, but thin, the occasional contact quickly resolved, the regiment's pattern of movement well-established enough that it handles it without being directed.
I am walking.
My left forearm has been wrapped by Gamma. The bolt pistol wrist is a sustained complaint from the elbow down, the accumulated recoil of a full engagement sitting in the joint and the tendons around it. My coat is heavy with everything the day has put on it. The Ginunting needs cleaning again — the power field burns most of it but not all, and the blade is dark from tip to hilt.
The men are moving correctly. That's what I notice, the way I always notice it — not the casualties, not the gaps in the line where people were this morning and aren't now, but the fact that the regiment is still functioning as a regiment, still doing what regiments do. I have seen regiments stop being regiments. I have seen the specific moment when a collection of armed men stops being a military unit and becomes a crowd with weapons. This regiment has not done that. After two years and a day like this one, they have not done that. Two years. Still a regiment. I am proud of them.
Gamma is at my left shoulder. He has been at my left shoulder, with brief exceptions, since oh-nine-hundred. His robes are worse than they were at the start of the day. The mechadendrites have been working continuously since we entered the district and the stress shows in the slight imprecision of their movement — nothing that affects function, but enough that I notice it, which means he's been running hard.
The ruins around us are quiet in the way that ruins are quiet when nothing has been living in them recently — the particular silence that follows sustained fire, where the ringing in the ears has faded enough to notice that the ambient sound of a city has been replaced by wind through broken stone and the regiment's boots on rubble. Broken structures, collapsed walls, the kind of silence that comes after fighting.
We are perhaps two hundred metres into the approach zone when Gamma stops.
Not slows. Stops. The bionic eye goes very still and the mechadendrites freeze mid-motion, and I have learned what this means over two years of standing next to it.
He's receiving something precise and close.
I stop moving. Put my hand up. The nearest squad halts. The vox stays silent because I don't key it.
Gamma's voice is quiet and flat and carries no more inflection than a damage report.
"Contact at twelve o'clock. Singular Astartes, inbound. Thirty seconds."
A beat.
"We're fucked."
Singular. One.
One Astartes.
Not a squad. Not a kill team. One Chaos Space Marine, moving toward us through the ruins, and Gamma's sensors have picked it up at thirty seconds out, which means it is moving at a pace that covers the ground between here and there in thirty seconds, which tells me something useful about what I'm dealing with.
One.
I key the vox.
"We got this."
The vox opens regiment-wide.
"Form up. Orient towards twelve o'clock. I want all heavy weapons aimed that way."