03 - Savage Scars (18 page)

“It’s the same ordnance they use on their warships,” Sarik growled.
Come
on Lahmas…

“Sergeant,” Lahmas’ voice cut in to Sarik’s chain of thought. “I have eyes
on nine enemy heavy infantry. Each has twin shoulder-mounted weapons of unknown
type. Range too great to engage.”

Another projectile struck the boulder that Brother Qaja was sheltering
behind, razor-sharp spall spraying from the opposite face and catching the
battle-brother across one cheek. Qaja gritted his teeth, one eye remaining
closed and bloody as he hefted his plasma cannon and shouted something at Sarik.

The sergeant realised only then that the tremendous pressure wave of the
impact had partially deafened him, but his hearing came back in a rush.

“…I said,” Brother Qaja repeated, “Breakout?”

“Hold your fire, brother,” Sarik said, and risked a look around the edge of
the boulder. Though he dared only expose his head for a couple of seconds, in
that moment he located the crest of Hill 3003. Atop the hill’s summit was a line
of enemy warriors, clearly wearing some sort of heavy personal armour. The
ground battle of Sy’l’kell came to Sarik’s mind, at the height of which he had
fought a tau commander wearing a battle suit of similar design. Yet these were
even larger, and bore weaponry akin to that of a battle tank.

Sarik reached to his belt and un-stowed his battle helm, placing it on his
head and re-opening the vox-link to Sergeant Lahmas. “Seen. Lahmas, I want you
to patch your sensorium exlink directly to my system. Keep eyes on, I’m calling
this one in.”

The Scythes of the Emperor sergeant signalled his understanding, and a few
seconds later Sarik’s vision froze, then dissolved into static. A moment later a
rune blinked into being, and then the view was replaced by the scene from the
other sergeant’s point of view.

“Machine communion established, brother-sergeant,” Lahmas said. “Are you
receiving?”

“Aye, brother,” Sarik replied. “Stand by and hold still.”

Sarik had to focus his thoughts and concentrate hard to control the other’s
sensorium system, but after a moment he made the view magnify as much as it was
able without the aid of magnoculars. The scene zoomed in on the summit of Hill
3003, where the enemy heavy infantry were clearly visible. Each was half as tall
again as a Space Marine, their blocky armour reminding Sarik of one of the
mighty Space Marine Dreadnoughts, though it was not quite so bulky. Like the
Dreadnought, however, the battle suit was more piloted than worn, for the large
torso must have housed the operator, who viewed the battlefield through the
armoured sensor block mounted atop the body.

A flash of blue from further down the line of battle suits caught Sarik’s
attention, and Lahmas tracked across to it, guessing correctly that Sarik would
wish to see more clearly. Before the movement was complete another boulder
nearby was split in two, the Space Marine behind it only just managing to dive
clear, and coming up near Sarik. Then the sound of the discharge rolled across
the landscape, giving Sarik some idea of the speed the projectile must have been
travelling to exceed its own report. He re-called the sensorium archive,
re-playing the last few seconds at ten times slower speed, his eye on the
timestamp as the projectile came in. He estimated that the enemy projectiles
must have been travelling at between eight and ten times the speed of sound.

No wonder Sergeant Cheren’s body had been liquefied inside his armour.

Sarik opened the crusade command channel. “Sarik, beta-nine, zero-delta,” he
said, the call sign and context routing his transmission straight through to the
fighter command duty officer.

There was a brief pause, overlaid by machine-chatter as vox-exlink systems
authenticated the identity of sender and receiver.

“Fighter command, go ahead, sergeant,” the duty officer replied. The channel
was distorted, for the signal was being routed back to the more powerful
vox-unit on board one of the nearby Rhinos, and then through hundreds of
kilometres of atmosphere and orbital space to the
Blade of Woe
.

“I need a fighter-bomber fire mission, urgent, my authority.”

“Sergeant,” Sarik knew by the man’s voice he was about to attempt to haggle.
“We have only…”

“Listen to me,” Sarik interjected. “I know assets are scarce, but you can’t
keep them hidden away like your daughters at the victory feast, I need…”

“Repeat last, sergeant…” the duty officer said.

“Never mind,” Sarik said. “I need a fire mission, right now, and if you can’t
process it I’ll have to speak to General Gauge directly. Do you understand?”

There was a brief pause before the duty officer replied “Understood,
sergeant. Call it in.”

“Better,” Sarik growled. Before he could continue, the enemy battle suits
opened fire again, blue pulses rippling up and down their firing line. Viewing
the scene from another’s point of view was faintly disconcerting, but Sarik
focussed on the task at hand.

The channel clicked several times as the transmission was shunted through
multiple relay and encryption conduits. The background whine of powerful jets
cut in, telling Sarik he was through to a fighter pilot. “This is Silver Eagle
leader, holding pattern east of your position. Go ahead, sergeant.”

“Good to hear you, Silver Eagle leader,” Sarik said. “I have multiple hard
targets atop Hill 3003. Heavy battle suits. I want a rapid-fire pass, full
effect, from one-sixty, over.”

“Understood, sergeant,” the squadron leader replied, the background sound
changing pitch as his fighter dropped five thousand metres in mere seconds.
“Splash two-zero,” the pilot said, his voice strained by the g-force inflicted
on his body by the rapid dive. “Keep your heads down, and good luck.”

Splash two zero. Twenty seconds to attack.

Sarik disengaged the sensorium link to Sergeant Lahmas, his vision locking
for a moment before being replaced by a wall of static. After a few more seconds
his armour’s war spirit awakened and his vision was returned to his own
perspective.

Craning his neck upwards, Sarik searched the eastern skies for the
Thunderbolt ground attack squadron. Within seconds a distant roar filled the
skies, but the fighters were travelling too low and too fast for Sarik to make
them out.

The sound grew in volume, until it was almost upon the Space Marines. Four
dark shapes appeared to the east, diving in low and following the undulating
terrain, lines of bright shock diamonds trailing behind their engines. The tau
heavy infantry turned towards the oncoming fighters, some raising their twin
hyper-velocity projectile weapons towards the oncoming threat. But none fired;
there would have been no point with the fighters travelling in excess of fifteen
hundred kilometres per hour.

In the final seconds, the tau battle suits took a ponderous step backwards,
evidently lacking the short-burn jump jets that made the smaller stealthers so
agile.

The roar of the fighters’ turbofans became a deafening scream, and then the
Thunderbolts opened fire. The first shots were from their nose-mounted
lascannons, lancing out towards the tau in an incandescent blast.

One battle suit was struck square in the torso, vanishing in a pulsating
explosion and leaving just shrapnel scattered across the ground. Another
las-bolt struck its target a glancing blow to one of its arm-like appendages,
its end terminating in a boxy weapons mount that must have been some sort of
short-ranged, anti-personnel multiple missile launcher. The missiles in the
weapon’s tubes detonated spectacularly, causing the battle suit to stumble
sideways as the one next to it was peppered with shrapnel. The last two beams
split the air between two of the battle suits, setting the scrub behind them
alight.

But the lascannon blasts were just the beginning. As the Thunderbolts
screamed onwards they came within the range of their nose-mounted autocannons.
The relentless hammering of multiple rounds split the air and the tau were
caught in a storm of metal as thick as driving rain. Though many rounds churned
into the ground around the battle suits’ mechanical feet, so heavy was the
torrent of fire that dozens struck their targets. Smoke and dust was thrown
upwards, small white flashes of incandescence shining through, each sent up by
an autocannon round striking its target and turning for a brief instant into a
small, superheated ball of plasma. Sarik’s helmet autosenses activated,
momentarily darkening his field of vision so that his eyes were not damaged by
the searing white lights that flickered up and down the entire crest of Hill
3003.

Before Sarik’s vision had entirely cleared, he felt the sharp impact of a
metallic object rebounding from his shoulder plate to patter to the dry ground
at his feet. It was a brass shell casing, ejected from the first of the
Thunderbolts as it screamed overhead, and it was followed by hundreds more
raining down on Sarik and the other Space Marines. In a split second, all four
Thunderbolts had passed overhead and were already gaining altitude as they
banked east in the jade skies.

Sarik readied himself to issue the order to press on and assault the hill,
for nothing could have survived that hail of autocannon fire. Sarik studied the
distant crest as the smoke and dust was caught on a gust of wind and drifted
clear, revealing the destruction the Imperial Navy fighter squadron had
unleashed on the tau.

As the scene cleared, it became evident that somehow, at least three of the
tau had survived. Sarik had seen even the fell war machines of the followers of
Chaos reduced to smoking wreckage by such attacks and could scarcely believe
that the tau battle suits, even as heavy as they were, could be so well armoured
as to survive. Though each of the surviving battle suits was visibly damaged,
the ochre yellow of their armour blackened and dented by numerous impact scars,
two of them were regaining their feet and levelling their heavy,
shoulder-mounted hyper-velocity weapons on the Space Marines.

“Silver Eagle leader to Sarik,” the squadron leader’s voice came over the
net. “Report status, over?”

“Silver Eagle leader,” Sarik called back. “Multiple effective survivors,
over.”

There was a pause, then a crackle on the line before the squadron leader
replied, “Understood, sergeant. Remain in position. Returning to previous
heading for full-effect bomb drop.”

The four Thunderbolts continued their wide bank towards the east, dropping
low as they came about for a second pass.

A whip-crack report split the air not three metres from Sarik’s position as
the first of the tau opened fire again. Sarik guessed that whatever fire control
systems they used must have been disrupted by the Thunderbolts’ attack, for it
was the first shot to have missed the boulders behind which the Space Marines
waited. And a good thing too, for the huge boulder near Sarik was fractured in
several places and would not provide cover for much longer.

Two more shots cracked the air, sounding like a steel cable at full tension
suddenly cut. Sarik opened the vox-channel to address his force. “All squads.
The navy are going to flatten that hilltop. The second the bombs are down I want
all units moving, tactical dispersion delta delta nine. I want that hill taken.
Out.”

“Silver Eagle leader to Sarik,” the squadron commander’s voice came over the
vox-net again. “Beginning attack run. Be advised, this is going to make a mess
of everything within half a kilometre of that hill. Good lu…”

“Repeat last, Silver Eagle leader?” Sarik said.

“Stand by, sergeant…”

The squadron came in low across the eastern plains, then split into two
pairs, one piling on the G’s as it sped south, the other executing a tight turn
that brought it on an approach vector back towards Hill 3003.

“…not falling for it…” the squadron leader’s voice cut into the command
channel. “Half loop, execute!”

The group heading back towards the target rose suddenly into the air, the
pilots executing one half of a loop. As one completed its manoeuvre and streaked
back east, the other was engulfed by fire as its starboard wing was torn apart
by a storm of gunfire.

“Silver Eagle leader is down,” a new voice filled the command channel. “Eagle
four, complete the run, I’ll try to draw them off…”

As the squadron leader’s Thunderbolt exploded across the sky shedding
multiple smoking contrails behind it, his wingman dived towards the ground, the
air rippling two kilometres behind. The other two Thunderbolts executed a
rolling turn and came back on the attack vector, arrowing towards Hill 3003 at
supersonic speed.

“All squads!” Sarik yelled into the vox-net. “Brace for air strike, then
follow me!”

The sound of the approaching jets increased to a deafening roar,
doppler-shifting as they screamed overhead so low the backwash sent up plumes of
dust from the ground.

“Payload deployed!” one of the pilots called, and Sarik went down on one knee
beside the boulder as four 1,000 kilogram bombs dropped from the rapidly
receding Thunderbolts, directly towards the crest of Hill 3003.

The hilltop erupted in such a devastating explosion that the entire rise was
consumed in a plume of black smoke that blossomed rapidly into the air. An
instant later the sound and pressure wave struck Sarik, showering his armour
with grit and small stones pushed before it by the blast. Had he not been
wearing his helmet the breath would have been torn from his lungs. Just a few
hundred metres closer to the hill and his lungs might have been torn from his
chest.

Then debris began to rain from the sky, large chunks of rock thrown up in all
directions by the massive explosion. Sarik forced himself to his feet, still
fighting the blast wave which continued to rage as the air pressure sought to
right itself. He opened the vox-channel again, and bellowed, “With me! If
there’s anything left on that hill I want it dead!”