03 - Savage Scars (35 page)

Brielle’s eyes tracked the pipework emerging from the suppression vent,
across the ceiling, down the bulkhead, along, to a junction box three metres
away. She crossed to it quickly, intently aware that she might only have seconds
before the lethal gases erupted from directly overhead. The box was stencilled
with a line of unfamiliar characters… she ripped the front off, and stared into
a mess of cables and blinking control studs, three blue, one red.

“Never press the red one…” she said, her fingers hovering over the blue
control studs.

The fires were taking hold, and the hissing overhead was increasing as the
fire suppression system prepared to pump oxygen-starving gases into the
communications bay. She pressed the red one.

The hissing immediately died. She turned, and saw that the fires were now
engulfing the recess, and spreading towards her. A small explosion
crumped
from somewhere nearby, followed an instant later by the sound of glass
shattering across the floor of the main bay. The damage was spreading faster
than even Brielle could have expected.

Time to be somewhere else.

The Space Marine armoured column was once more advancing through the
thoroughfares of Gel’bryn City, smashing the tau defence aside as it speared
towards its ultimate objective, the star port. As the spearhead advanced deeper
into the city, the structures became ever more imposing until the Space Marines
and their vehicles were dwarfed by the towering buildings. The tau had
disengaged soon after Sarik’s slaying of the battle suits, though the sergeant
suspected the two events were not connected. More likely, the tau had detected
the Brimlock 2nd Armoured moving to link up with the Space Marines and quite
sensibly determined they were outnumbered and outmatched.

The instant the tau assaults lessened, Sarik ordered the laagered Space
Marine vehicles to assume an attacking formation once more. Within minutes,
several hundred Space Marines of a dozen different Chapters were aboard their
transports again, which moved out in a long column punctuated by Predator battle
tanks, Whirlwind missile tanks and stomping Dreadnoughts. Space Marine assault
squads moved forwards in great bounding leaps, guarding the column’s flanks
against enemy counter-attack. The Assault Marines engaged dozens of the
laser-designator-armed spotters, slaughtering the aliens before they could bring
indirect missile fire onto the armoured vehicles. The assault squads were by now
well-practised in locating the spotters’ hiding places, and what mere days ago
had been a lethal threat was now expertly countered.

Land speeder squadrons soared overhead on screaming jets, providing Sarik
with a continuous reconnaissance of the tau defences further ahead. Several
times, the land speeders were intercepted by heavy gun drones. Two speeders were
lost in the first engagement, one belonging to the White Scars and one to the
Iron Hands, though two of their crew survived, to be rescued by an Ultramarines
assault squad and join the ground forces. Later engagements saw the land
speeders avoid dogfighting with the heavy gun drones, and call in ground-to-air
Hunter missile fire from the Whirlwinds stationed along the length of the
column.

The advance was a stop-start affair, for the tau forces were highly mobile
and well able to mount localised defences at key points in the city. Sarik soon
realised that the tau were either falling back to the star port, or they had
guessed that it was the Imperium’s objective. As the column pressed on, it
encountered hastily mounted defence positions from which the tau would attempt
to ambush the Space Marines before falling back in their on-station anti-grav
carriers. Sarik’s orders were clear—such defences were to be bypassed, and
engaged where necessary by the trailing forces of the Imperial Guard. In most
cases, the positions were abandoned long before the Imperial Guard reached them,
the tau re-deploying to the next ambush point ahead.

As the sky darkened with the approach of evening, the combined advance of the
Space Marines, Imperial Guard and Adeptus Titanicus developed into a series of
running battles against a seemingly piecemeal defence. While the Space Marines
spearheaded a focussed assault, the Imperial Guard spread out onto multiple axes
as they pressed on, the better to take advantage of their numbers. Entire
regiments of tanks rolled aside any opposition they encountered, though only the
heavy battle suits even dared make a concerted stand against such forces.
Dragoon regiments moved forward rapidly, armoured fist squads using their
Chimera transports as mobile bunkers and fire support bases as they dismounted
and cleared enemy-held positions with bayonets fixed. While the Rakarshans rode
forwards on the backs of the 2nd Armoured’s tanks, other light infantry units
followed on foot, using their skills in fieldcraft to move rapidly through the
urban terrain.

The Titans of Legio Thanataris split into smaller formations, each moving out
to support the advance on its far flanks. The Titans unleashed holy hell on
every tau defence point they encountered, flattening structures hundreds of
metres tall and striding through the high walkways, causing hundreds of
defenders to plummet to their deaths in the streets far below.

With their remaining destroyers committed to ferrying troops to the star
port, the tau were unable to oppose the Titans, though they made repeated and
numerous attempts to do so. Tau stealth suits launched desperate and often
suicidal attacks against the Titans, leaping from high structures in an effort
to board the mighty war machines.

Using fusion blasters, the stealthers attempted to cut through the Titans’
ceramite armoured shells and disable the systems within. One group swarmed over
a Reaver Battle Titan in an attempt to overwhelm its armour and inflict death by
a thousand cuts. At first, the Reaver’s princeps was dismissive of the threat,
determined to ignore the attackers as beneath his notice and deserving of no
more than contempt. Only when his Titans’ Apocalypse launcher was disabled did
he take the threat seriously. His answer to the boarding attempt was to smash
his Titan through a nearby building that was taller than his war machine. The
entire structure burst apart as the Reaver strode through it, the collapsing
debris scouring the stealthers from its body and leaving the Titan coated in a
layer of bone-white dust that lent it the aspect of a gargantuan apparition.

Soon after, the Warlord Battle Titan was assaulted by at least sixty tau
stealth suits deployed from the bowels of an armoured transport that soared high
overhead. The battle suits descended on their target like drop troops onto a
bastion, and immediately turned their fusion blasters on the turbo-laser
destructors. The Warlord’s princeps was not so fast to dismiss the threat, yet
his war machine was too tall to repeat the Reaver’s act of smashing through a
building. Instead, the princeps ordered three nearby Warhound Scout Titans to
turn their Vulcan mega-bolters on him.

The Warhounds’ princeps were loath to fire on their commander’s sacred
engine, but were ordered to do so on threat of disciplinary action. The three
Warhounds opened fire, and the Warlord’s entire upper body was stitched with
thousands upon thousands of rapid-firing, mass-reactive explosive shells. Though
the Warlord suffered multiple minor systems damage, the enemy attackers were
utterly wiped out. Their purple blood was smeared across the Titan’s upper hull
in garish patterns that would stain its livery for years to come despite the
best efforts of legions of artificers.

The battles did not go entirely in the Imperium’s favour. Inevitably, some
units became separated as the advance penetrated deeper into the city and became
encircled and destroyed entirely by rapidly counter-attacking enemy units. One
of the 4th Brimlock Dragoons heavy weapons companies was engaged by a wing of
extremely agile tau skimmers, their Chimeras outflanked and torn to shreds as
the squads attempted to deploy their heavy weapons against a foe they could not
get a fix on. The 4th Storm Trooper company turned back from its advance to
attempt a link-up with the dragoons, but was outflanked and pinned down by the
skimmers. A Warhound Titan was in turn ordered to aid the stormtroopers, but by
the time the skimmers were driven off by the war machine’s sustained Vulcan
mega-bolter fire, the dragoons were all but wiped out.

As nightfall approached, it became evident to the Departmento Tacticae
advisors, on the ground as well as in orbit, that something was awry with the
tau’s command and control systems. While many individual tau units mounted a
competent and disciplined retreat in the face of their enemy, a feat considered
amongst the hardest of manoeuvres to accomplish, coordination between the tau
units became notably degraded. It was Sarik who noted this phenomenon first, as
he witnessed two tau battle suit groups falling back as one. In previous
engagements the two groups would have coordinated their retreat, one covering
the other as it redeployed so that a constant fire-and-movement was kept up.
Before Sarik’s very eyes, both groups fled, neither offering the other any fire
support. As a consequence, both battle suit groups were cut down as the Space
Marines forced their advantage, punishing the tau for their tactical error.

And that error was being repeated all over the front. Sarik communicated his
observation to Colonel Armak of the Brimlock 2nd Armoured while the Tacticae
ensured it was disseminated to all other commands. Fleet intelligence turned its
efforts to uncovering the roots of the degradation, and the elite Codes and
Ciphers division under Tacticae-Primaris Kilindini reported that command and
control signals between the tau ground forces and off-world contacts had become
garbled and weak. It was soon discerned that the tau defending Gel’bryn had been
coordinated by a higher command echelon in space nearby. It appeared that the
tau’s much vaunted and feared technology was turning against them, though none
amongst the Tacticae could offer a plausible explanation as to the cause.

As darkness engulfed the city, the battlefield was illuminated by strobing
explosions, the glowing contrails of missiles streaking high overhead and a
thousand lasguns and boltguns gunning down the tau wherever they were
encountered. The only sound audible was that of the engines of the Space
Marines’ armoured transports and the tanks and carriers of the Imperial Guard.
The air was filled with the stink of exhaust fumes, ozone and fyceline. The sky
was etched with tracer fire and the flaring jets of hundreds of battle suits and
anti-grav transports as they fell back in a long stream towards the star port.

Three hours after nightfall, the advance elements of Sarik’s column were
within five kilometres of the star port, and the tau’s defences appeared to have
collapsed entirely. The column paused while Sarik sent his land speeder
squadrons forwards to undertake a reconnaissance of the objective. Minutes
later, the land speeders reported that the traffic around the star port was now
entirely in one direction: outwards. At some point during the closing hours of
the day the tau had ceased ferrying reinforcements into the city and were now
ferrying those same troops out as fast as the destroyers could carry them. The
land speeder crews relayed images of masses of alien troops and machines
flooding towards the star port’s multiple landing pads. The activity was
disciplined, but the intent was clear: the tau were retreating.

The Tacticae advisors passed word to the Commissariat, who approved the
dissemination of a simple communication to the troops. Word that the tau were in
full flight was welcomed with cheers and celebration, but the morale officers
were sure to impress upon the men that there was much fighting yet to be done.

Higher up the chain of command, a debate was set in motion. Some commanders
pressed for the advance to continue without delay and the tau to be slaughtered
even as they fled. Others counselled that there was scant honour to be earned in
slaying a retreating enemy, even the xenos tau who, it was largely accepted, had
fought thus far with honour and tenacity.

A brief operational pause set in as high command considered the next phase of
Operation Hydra. And all the while, unknown to most of those on the surface of
Dal’yth Prime, the countdown to Exterminatus ticked inexorably down to zero…

General Gauge stood calmly in the midst of the controlled chaos that had
engulfed his command centre aboard the Blade of Woe, his arms folded across his
chest. He was the calm at the centre of the storm, his razor-sharp mind the cold
focus of the entire invasion of Dal’yth Prime. His expert eye took in the reams
of information scrolling across a dozen pict screens. First-hand accounts and
tactical updates streamed in from the surface, Tacticae officers rushing to and
fro as they collated the data and entered it into cogitation banks. Maps and
charts were updated on a minute-by-minute basis, the information becoming
obsolete within moments of being entered. Staff officers yelled into vox-horns
as they sought clarification from their opposite numbers on the ground,
desperately trying to piece together a coherent picture of exactly what was
happening as the crusade army advanced.

Gauge glanced to his chron. It was almost an hour since his last vox
conversation with Colonel Armak, and it would soon be time for another. He was
just about to order his aide-de-camp to patch him through to the colonel when
the officer appeared at his side and handed him a data-slate coded for his
personal attention.

His eyes narrowing, Gauge entered his personal cipher and scanned the message
header. It was from Tacticae-Primaris Kilindini and penned by the man’s own
hand.

My lord general. My division has traced the enemy’s command and control
net to a node in high orbit on the far side of Dal’yth Prime. My staff conclude
that enemy ground forces are being coordinated via a tight-beam conduit from a
high command element off world. Back-trace cogitation reveals that this node has
been controlling enemy ground forces for at least twelve hours, but the signal
has been steadily degrading. At zero-nine-nine, the signal cut out entirely. My
conclusion: enemy operational command and control capacity has been severed and
is at this time defunct. Recommend this intelligence be acted upon as best you
see fit.