Heavy-calibre fire spattered from the open hatch. Senshini spotted dark figures tumbling down the rubble slope. The volume of fire was massive and shocking, ripping into the Septiams on the slopes. It was accurate, too, and Senshini saw Septiam's fall. No lasgun could blow a man apart like that, not even the hellguns of the Guard elites.
That's not medical corps.’ said Senshini, mostly to himself.
The Executioner was within easy small arms fire of the wall and shots rang loudly off the upper plates, kicking chunks of armour from the hull. Senshini caught glimpses of the closest enemy, sheltering in the cover of fallen column sections as they swapped fire with the Jouryans - dressed in rags, skin pale and torn, covered in old open wounds that didn't bleed. He saw tatters of finery and Enforcement Division uniforms. Opaque grey eyes took aim. Hands with missing fingers held hunting rifles and salvaged Elysian lasguns.
Every single dead man was walking again, and fighting too - the whole of Septiam City and half a regiment of butchered Elysians, lost Jouryan patrols, workers from the now-ruined soulfire fields. The commanders had expected a fraction of the city's inhabitants still to be waiting at the walls. But now Senshini could see there were thousands of them, streaming down the breach into the advancing Jouryans like bloodants from a nest.
A storm of laser fire was like burning red stitches between the fallen blocks. Lascannon shots streaked from Jouryan armour moving up and explosions stitched the rubble slope where mortar and antitank volleys hit home.
The Executioner juddered to a halt. Senshini lined up another shot, paused to check the coils had charged, and sent another blastgun shot ripping into a knot of Septiams huddling in the cover of a fallen marble block. Two squads of Jouryans, no longer pinned down by the enemy fire, ran forward through the falling debris.
The Chimeras of Squadron Twenty skidded to a halt in a slew of mud. The top hatches and rear ramps swung open and the occupants leapt out, guns blazing.
'Looks like we got some glory boys.’ said Senshini. 'They must've given Squadron Twenty to the storm troopers.’
But they weren't storm troopers, Senshini realised. They were huge figures, much larger than a man, and in the few seconds before grime and flying mud turned them into a spattered dark grey he saw that they wore purple, not the dull fatigues of the Jouryans.
'Shenking gakrats.’ swore Senshini. 'Marines.’
Kaito opened the observer hatch and dared to poke his head up into the shrapnel-filled air. He pulled a pair of field glasses from inside his coat. Senshini was sure he heard a cheer go up from the Jouryan attackers, even over the din of gunfire, as the Space Marines charged into battle beside them. Every Guardsman had heard of the Adeptus Astartes and some even claimed to have seen them on the batdefield, superhuman warriors who could strike like lightning into the heart of the enemy, wore massive powered armour and had the best weapons the Imperium could provide. Preachers extolled them as paragons of humankind. Children swapped stories about their exploits. They decorated a million stained glass windows and sculpted friezes in temples and basilica across the Imperium, and now they were here on Septiam Torus.
After a long couple of seconds Kaito dropped back into the tank. 'Right, Command have sent us some Space Marines. It's the first and last time we'll see these buggers so we're going to close in and support them. If that breach can fall, they're going to be the ones to take it. Tanako, as close as you can. Senshini, I want plasma at the top of the wall, give these freaks nowhere to run. Fire at will, Now!'
The Executioner roared into the shadow of the walls, rumbling past the fallen column sections and crunching through the dead of the assault, heading for the maelstrom of the breach where the Space Marines were weaving a new kind of hell amongst the Septiams.
Jouryans were rallying all around, following the Executioner into the storm of fire, officers yelling at their men to follow in the Marines' wake. Senshini sighted the heart of the breach where the corpselike Septiams were massed, thrown back by the shock of the renewed assault.
Senshini fired the blastgun and plasma erupted as if from beneath the rubble. He spotted the Marines scrambling up the burning slope, boltguns chewing through the swarming Septiams, and he knew the battle for Septiam City was on.
EVERYTHING WAS COLD. Thaddeus couldn't feel his hands or feet. For a horrible moment he thought he might have lost them to frostbite or shrapnel flying from the disintegrating cathedral, but then a prickly, electrical pain flashed through the nerves of his arms and legs and he knew that he was whole.
He tried tensing the muscles he could feel, expecting a sunburst of pain to tell him of a broken limb or a ruptured organ. He couldn't find any obvious injuries, but he was constricted. He thought he might be lying down but he couldn't sit up or turn his head. Although the numbness from the cold kept him from being sure, it felt like his hands were encased in something that stopped him even moving his fingers.
He smelled chemicals. Preservatives, disinfectants, a substance that smelled rusty and metallic like something distilled from blood. Ruthlessly clean and sterile.
At first he thought there was no sound - but gradually he picked out layers of soft noise, fluorescent buzzing, the faint irregular ticking and scratching from some machine near his head, a faint dripping of liquid.
Finally, he tried to pry his eyes open. A slash of light burned across his vision and it was several minutes before he could begin to see - he must have been unconscious for some time and his eyes were barely able to adjust to the light. He seemed to be looking up at a square of pure light, until gradually a pair of glowstrips coalesced in the centre of a white-painted ceiling.
The walls were also white. The floor was polished metal with channels leading to a central drain to bleed away unwanted fluids - this alone told Thaddeus he was in a medical facility. The machine by his head was a medical servitor, a biological brain somewhere in its chromed casing telling the armatures jutting from its front to scribble Thaddeus's life-signs onto a long strip of parchment that spooled from the machine. Several cylinders were racked on one wall, thin transparent tubes feeding odd-coloured fluid into the gauntlets that covered his hands and wrists. The gauntlets were medical contraptions that kept veins in his hands and wrists open to keep medication flowing into him. The pains he had felt were the occasional probing of neurosensors adhering to his skin, triggering pain receptors intermittently to check his nervous system was still working.
Thaddeus listened harder. Beneath the faint thrum of the lighting and the ticking of the medical machinery, there was a distant rumbling, like a thunderstorm over the horizon. Engines - he was on a spaceship, then. It made sense, seeing as the last place he remembered being was in space.
There was a faint chiming as the light on the life signs machine blinked in response to Thaddeus's waking. A few minutes later the room's single featureless door slid open and Lord Inquisitor Kolgo walked in.
Kolgo seemed weak and wizened outside his ceremonial armour. He wore shapeless dark robes like a monk's habit, and the neuro-interfaces were red and raw on the back of his head where his armour was normally connected. To anyone else he would just look like another old man - but Thaddeus could see the authority Kolgo still carried with him, the indefinable quality that made even fellow inquisitors accept his command.
Kolgo pulled a chrome-plated chair close to the bed, and sat down.
'You are most determined, Thaddeus,' he said. 'I confess we really didn't anticipate you going this far.' There was a faint note of amusement in his voice.