It was hell, but the marines would regroup at Checkpoint Satan.
Daimesh Phine was the last survivor. The rest of his squad had been slaughtered several minutes ago when they had run into an Alliance fireteam. It had been a brutal melee on both sides. Their blades and axes couldn't pierce their armor so they had been forced to pin down the enemy soldiers using the weight of their corpses before slowing and agonizingly tearing them limb from limb.
He clutched his captured blaster pistol tighter as he rounded a corner. He only had one working hand left. The other had been blown off by an Alliance trooper. Phine had been forced to stab said trooper to death using the exposed bone protruding from his stump. By the Warmaster, these were truly worthy foes.
If this was but a vanguard, a single battalion, then Phine knew that the Pact had to adapt or die. He would die here. But through his sacrifice, the Pact would adapt.
The next trench line was empty, of the living at least. A hundred fresh corpses laid a fleshy carpet of gore over the trench flore. Bodies, both of Pact Pioneers and of Alliance Marines laid all twisted and wrapped under and over each other in an orgasmic celebration of feral murder. Smoke plumes drifted Pact tunics where morsels of napalm still burned. Fountains of blood had splashed up the wall and firestep in some places.
He took a single step forward, the duckboards sank and bright pools of blood seeped up through the gaps. He took another step forward, but there was nowhere except bodies to step on. Corpses groaned and sighed, burped and farted as he put his weight on them, squeezing lungs and guts. It was hard balancing on the dead.
"I'll be with you soon, my brothers and sisters," he muttered, "Just one more thing I must do before I join Khaos beside his throne."
Outside this trench, he could hear the sound of walkers and blasters raging. The sound of slugthrowers and the sucking roar of flamethrowers were being drowned out. The Pioneers had done their task and pinned down the infantry. It hadn't been perfect and if they had been given any other objective this would be considered an abject failure. But through their deaths, they had provided vital combat info for high command.
Adapt or die.
Phine arrived at the doorway of an underground dugout in the trench wall. Every last iota of his strength was spent trying not to tip over. The walls turned from wood to freshly laid ferrocrete, still wet in some places. After what seemed like forever he reached the bottom. Around him on, laid neatly on pallets and shelves was a collection of heavy artillery shells, power cells, and powder bags. This had been supposed to be merely a temporary munitions depot where they would be cataloged before being distributed down the line. Too bad for the Alliance troops fighting above him that the Pact had been interrupted in their process. Several tons of exposed explosives now sat in the middle of the battle zone where Pioneers and Marines were still locked in a brutal melee.
He reached into his coat jacket and drew out a thermal detonator. He set the timer to zero. His finger hovered over the trigger.
"LONG LIVE THE WARMAS-"
36 turbolaser rounds soared overhead towards the remains of the old warehouse. If they couldn't figure out the exact location of the enemy fire, they'd simply reduce the general area to dust, and shut off whatever was in there with massive ion bursts.
It was inelegant, but it was a solution. Raven droids hovered above, just out of range of the ion bursts, scanning the area with LIDAR and heat detection. Whatever that area held, it would be found.
Wildcats slowly pushed in, using their low signatures to watch the area. They had acted as the forward spearhead, now they acted as the defensive line against whatever had hit them.
"Back up! Back up!" Kill-Team Captain Phen Asmodon shouted into his comms as the tracks of his tank began to churn once more. The moment the last plasma blast left their barrels his driver hit the reverse gear and slew them out of the ruined factory position that had been their hunting nest. The turbine engines roared, breaking their silence to inject torque into their transmission. Not only were the Sagittarius Tank Hunters stealthy, they were mobile and fast.
Still, the fact the entire world around them was disappearing in a whirlwind of fire and earth made the job harder than expected. The enemy's response was much faster than Asmodon had anticipated. Their artillery reaction time was impeccable.
They were almost out of the zone of fire, weaving between disintegrating ruins and bounding across craters when a turbo laser struck too close to one of their tank hunters. Its left track was torn clean off. Before the driver of the doomed Sagittarius could engage back-up propulsion another turbo laser struck in dead on and cracked it open like an egg. Asmodon swore, there was no chance that the crew survived that. The ruptured reactor belched massive amounts of radiation that in time would utterly poison the landscape.
"Stat update!" Asmodon ordered the moment the sky had stopped raining turbo-lasers, receiving affirmatives from the other eight survivors. Various states of damage but none detrimental to the mission.
"Captain, I'm spotting movement on the scanners ahead. Picking up several heavy and medium armor heading our way. Looks like they're screening for the walkers under repair."
"Then we'll have to clear them if we want to get another shot at those walkers-"
"Incoming aerial observation droids. Picking up pulsed lasers and possible thermal imaging."
"That's going to make any ambush impossible. Call in the Hawk battery. The General may not like me dipping my fingers in his reserves but he's the one that told us to take down those walkers at any cost."
Moments later the Hawks came racing forward through the ruins. They were anti-air modifications of the ever-versatile
Loculus APC, equipped with an
AG-2G quad laser cannon and four Anti-Air
concussion missile launchers. Thanks to their chassis they were well armored and nimble enough. Their gunners locked onto the Raven Droids and began to fire long stitching lines of lasers into the air, prioritizing volume over accuracy. These droids may be swift and agile but there was only so much space they got dodge when their world turned into a whirlwind of fire and missiles. Once the Hawks were done firing a burst they quickly shifted positions, now cognizant of the artillery threat.
Still, the Hawks were going to be a juicy target for the advancing Wildcats. Asmodon was counting on that. The nine remaining Sagittarius Tank Hunters split up into three groups of three, taking ambush positions that would overlook any approach that the Wildcats could take to engage the Hawks in the ruined urban area. Asmodon's team nestled comfortably under a thick overpass that he hoped would protect from the swift artillery response of the Hellstompers fast enough to evac out. They activated their camo-nets again, dulling their metallic signature to match the burnt-out wrecks of speeders around them.
The other two teams took positions further back. One sheltered within the ferrocrete craters of a plaza and the other on the second floor the hollowed remains of a mall. They made sure that their fire angles would hit the weaker side or even the rear armor of the Wildcats.
"Single-shot at maximum power. I want those tanks to be molten wrecks." Asmodon ordered, "One team fires and then retreats, and the other wraps up any survivors. The third covers for us while we recharge our power cells. Let's give this city another graveyard."
Whether it would be the Pact Forces or the Hellstompers would be another question entirely.
"Is that so? Surrender?" Gress's cool demeanor shined through as he took a drag of his cigar. "Don't do that here, sorry. As for the size of your troops, can't say I'm impressed. You could throw your whole planet at us and I don't think my men would flinch. How 'bout this? You keep talking, and maybe I'll consider it."
Ennenhim-General Neraddur shut off the transmission. "Did you get a lock?"
"Yessir, we've triangulated that signal to that Superheavy walker," his assistant pointed to one of the massive machines of war currently finishing off the remnants of Archcommanderim Sidrel's force. It was a true behemoth of Impervium and Durasteel. The Pact had similar titans at their disposal but none had been assigned to his theater. They hadn't expected such a heavy counter-attack from the defenders. An underestimation that had so far cost him thousands of lives. He wouldn't be surprised if that number would climb to the tens of thousands by the time this battle was done.
The Pact had blood to bleed but this was an unacceptable kill-loss ratio. But thanks to the sacrifice of the 80th Tank Regiment, Pact forces in retreat had suffered relatively little damage and began to quickly regroup. Now they had begun to dig in within a ruined urban sprawl at the backlines of the trench. Neraddur hoped that the urban terrain would slow the Alliance troopers long enough for his flanking counter-attacks to begin to mass. Until then, he had to use everything he had to slow them down.
"Status on the heavy guns?"
"Sir, Fragor Battery Fifty-Six have finished relocation but their ammo has not. They report only enough ammunition for three salvos."
"I want a fire mission on those crippled walkers at once. Everything we have."
"Sir, we still have infantry close by. At least a hundred."
"They're dead anyway. The Warmaster shall know their names."
A hundred kilometers away, ten barrels ascended.
The Fragor 406mm L/60 Mobile Howitzers were truly mammoths of artillery guns. They had been built as a siege weapon during Herodor's seven-hundred-year civil war to shatter the massive mountain fortifications that the Warmaster's foes cowered under in the final years of the conflict. Now its devastation was no longer bound to Herodor.
The monsters roared like great fire-breathing dragons. Barrels spat great flames. The light flashes were painful and immense like grounded stars being switched on and off in the night. Crews had to shelter beneath gun-shields and bafflements lest they be turned to red paste by the shockwaves. Even dozens of kilometers away, windows shattered.
Breeches opened, ejecting out superheated smoke, before the Fragor's autoloader screeched as it loaded in another multi-ton shell. Powder charges were rammed in quick succession. Five seconds after the first shot, the second salvo began. This continued until the five-round clip on the ten Fragors was exhausted.
Hypersonic superheavy shells, each containing a ton of pure
baradium-impregnated
detonite began to whoop all around the crippled walkers.
