Nemiel looked skyward to see a shower of blazing meteors plunging through the clouds in the direction of the coast. Many burned out as they fell, carving bright trails of green and orange across the sky, while several larger pieces continued to fall until they disappeared over the horizon. It was an awe-inspiring sight, but one that filled Nemiel with dread. He'd seen such things many times before, at war-torn worlds like Barrakan and Leantris. Those meteors had been pieces of a starship that had been blown up in high orbit. The attack on Diamat had begun.
Las-bolts snapped and howled through the air from the end of the access road. One hit Kohl in the chest, dispersing harmlessly against his breastplate. The squad returned fire, and a pair of skitarii broke cover and retreated back around the corner of a low-slung building.
'That was an observation team!' Nemiel warned his squadmates. 'We'll be coming up on their outer perimeter in another minute. Ephrial, get ready with that meltagun!'
As they approached the end of the access road, Nemiel summoned up the layout of the perimeter fortifications in his memory. Just ahead and to the right was a lascannon post, with a heavy stubber post further west. Just ahead and to the left was another heavy stubber. He waved Ephrial to the corner of the furthest building to the right, while he angled off to the left.
Nemiel put his back to the wall of the manufactory and glanced across the road at Ephrial. He battle-signed for the Astartes to hit the target to his right. Ephrial nodded, and without hesitation he whirled around the corner and fired a shot with the meltagun. There was an immediate, crackling boom as the lascannon's power supply detonated, followed by the screams of its maimed and dying crew.
Immediately the heavy stubber to Nemiel's left opened fire, spitting a long burst of tracer rounds at Ephrial's back. He spun around the corner and levelled his bolt pistol at the four men in the sandbagged emplacement just five metres away. The Redemptor fired four quick shots, and the skitarii slumped to the ground.
Nemiel turned back to the squad and waved them forward. They left the foundry sector and headed quickly for the sheltering warehouses further south, taking fire from two more heavy stubber emplacements as they went. Vardus was limping from an unlucky hit in his leg. Askelon was driving himself onward with ruthless determination, but Nemiel could tell that he was fighting the weight of his own armour, and was nearing the point of exhaustion. The Redemptor ran on, dropping the empty magazine from his bolt pistol and slamming in a fresh one.
He reckoned they were four-and-a-half kilometres from the warehouse barracks of the ground force. Nemiel could still hear the sounds of bolter fire up ahead, so he knew at least some of his brothers were still fighting. Several times he tried to call out over the vox, but the jamming was still underway. Pillars of black smoke were rising from more than a dozen points out beyond the forge's curtain wall, and he feared the worst for Kulik's brave Dragoons.
As they drew closer to the barracks, Nemiel suddenly heard a flurry of lasgun and stubber fire, answered by the snarl of an assault cannon. It was Brother Titus, he realised; the Dreadnought had been standing watch outside 2nd Company's barracks when they'd left on their reconnaissance mission earlier that night. On impulse, he led the squad in that direction, listening as the sounds of battle increased.
By the time they drew within sight of the warehouse, a pitched battle was raging on the street outside. They found Brother Titus guarding the warehouse's side entrance from what amounted to a platoon of skitarii. Dozens of broken bodies lay around the Dreadnought's wide feet, denoting a failed assault by the enemy. Scores more of the Tech-Guard were sprawled on the permacrete, torn apart by the Dreadnought's fearsome cannon. Still more were arriving from the direction of the southern gateway, however, taking up firing positions and unleashing a storm of fire against Titus's front armour.
Nemiel brought the squad to a halt. 'It's only a matter of time before those Tech-Guard bring up a missile launcher or a lascannon and destroy Titus,' he said. 'We're going to swing around and hit them from the rear. Askelon, can you still keep up?'
The Techmarine's armoured shoulders were heaving after the terrible exertions of the run. His bloodied face was pale, but he looked up at Nemiel and smiled. 'Brother-Sergeant Kohl's been saying I need to get more exercise,' he said breathlessly. 'Don't worry about me.'
'He's just worried about having to carry your dead weight around,' Kohl growled. 'Now let's get moving.'
The squad set off to the northwest, moving past a pair of warehouse buildings before cutting south again. They listened to the sounds of battle raging off to their left, gauging their position relative to the enemy and moving five hundred metres behind them. Then they cut back east, gathering speed as they prepared to swing around and strike the enemy from behind.
They'd run for only a few hundred metres when just ahead they saw a platoon of skitarii jog into view, dragging four lascannons mounted on wheeled gun carriages. They saw the Astartes at almost the same instant; with three hundred metres between them, the enemy troops hurriedly dropped the trails on the four guns and began to frantically wheel them around to bear on the squad.
'Charge!' Nemiel cried, but the rest of squad hardly needed prompting. They broke into a full run, firing their bolters as they went.
Nemiel watched the mass-reactive shells strike the armoured splinter plates of the gun carriages and ricochet harmlessly away. The crews worked quickly and with remarkable precision, connecting the weapons to their power units and energising the guns in the space of seconds. If they had been preparing to fire on human troops, it might have been enough, but the Astartes reached the enemy with seconds to spare.
They leapt up and over the lascannons' splinter shields and came down among the shocked gun crews. Nemiel shot two of them point-blank, then slew two more with his crozius. Brother-Sergeant Kohl and Brother Ephrial killed almost a dozen more before the rest of the platoon broke and fled back the way they'd come.
Nemiel paused amid the carnage, his autosenses detecting more sounds of activity to the south as still more enemy troops headed their way. He was about to order Askelon to disable the abandoned lascannons when the heavens split and trails of fire descended on the forge from on high.
These were no simple meteors, falling in thin streaks of light before vanishing into oblivion. Nemiel counted eight separate streaks of smoke and flame, plunging down in a steep arc and converging on a common point: the heart of the forge complex, some thirty kilometres away. When they struck, the entire northern horizon blazed with terrible, white light.
Nemiel had witnessed more than one orbital bombardment in his time, but those had been blazing trails of lance fire that carved across the ground like a burning blade, or salvoes of poorly-aimed macro cannon fire that saturated a target area with huge shells. He'd never been close enough to experience the fury of a barrage of bombardment cannons, and wasn't prepared for what followed.
The eight shells struck the target area more or less simultaneously, their magma warheads detonating with the heat and force of a fusion bomb. His onboard systems registered the overpressure from the blast and had just enough time to yell, 'Get down!' before the blast wave hit.
He dropped to the ground and pressed his helmet to the permacrete as a roaring wall of superheated air howled over him. His temperature sensors spiked, pushing into the red zone, and the force of the wind lifted him off the ground and tossed him like a toy down the narrow lane. The thunder of the blast was something he felt through his armour, reverberating down into his bones. His autosenses overloaded and shut down at once to prevent permanent damage.