Chapter 95: Am I Really This Unlucky?
Elias Hawthorne had begun to suspect that his luck had run out some time ago and had simply not informed him.
"Close the gap! Left-flank fire does not stop!" He drove the words from raw lungs, his voice bouncing back at him from the walls of the underground space.
The chainsword in his hand screamed against the carapace of a Hormagaunt attempting to clear the sandbag barrier and split the organism in two. Purple fluid hit him across the chest and face. He did not stop to wipe it off.
Behind the line he was holding, a massive civilian refuge filled the underground space to capacity with Imperial citizens evacuated from the surface. If the defensive line broke, those civilians became biomass for the Tyranid swarm. That was the sum of what there was to say about the stakes.
The pressure on the line was extreme.
Elias directed what was left of his command to hold the swarm's assault and, in the part of his mind that was not occupied with keeping people alive, cursed with some thoroughness.
He could not be entirely certain it was not his imagination, but ever since he had agreed to take in the young adjutant called Evan and the girl called Lena at the request of that Colonel-Commissar in the black greatcoat, his unit had not had a single day that went to plan.
His thoughts pulled back to the earlier incident, despite the shouting and the combat noise.
They had just arrived at their assigned defensive sector and established their first positions. The line had been holding reasonably well. Then the girl called Lena had grabbed her own head without warning and produced a scream that could not have been described as anything ordinary.
Before Elias had managed to get to her and find out what was happening, the boy called Evan had reached into his tactical medicae kit without a moment's hesitation, pulled out a high-strength sedative, and put it into Lena's neck. She was unconscious before the sound had fully faded from the walls.
"Overhead! Watch the ceiling!"
The current battle pulled him back. He had caught the four-armed shadows in time. He redirected several soldiers with lasrifles to elevate their aim.
The hot beams detonated across the vaulted ceiling overhead, and three Genestealers that had been working their way along the high stone surfaces in preparation for a drop-assault came apart and fell in pieces onto the front of the defensive line.
He pushed back the flashback and looked at what the engagement had cost to reach this point.
When the full swarm had arrived, the underground space had turned into something that bore no resemblance to a defensive operation. And Elias had discovered, with the particular despair of a man being proved right about something he wished he was wrong about, that his position was attracting attack pressure at ten to fifteen times the rate of the adjacent positions. The swarm had not spread itself evenly. It had concentrated on them, specifically, and driven into them without any apparent tactical rationale.
In the killing that followed, the line had been torn open. Elias still believed that the final collapse of the outer line had something to do with the disproportionate assault his position had absorbed.
"Second Platoon, 4th Company, fill that gap to your front! Heavy stubber suppression, now!"
He drove the order across the channel, pulling his attention forward, and watched his soldiers use their bodies to fill the gaps between the sandbag positions.
Then he turned his head and looked toward the rear of the position.
At the edge of the civilian crowd, Lena was lying quietly on a sheet of waterproof groundcloth, still under the sedative. Evan had taken a position on the defensive line and was fighting alongside the auxiliary troops, picking his targets with a precision that was markedly better than most of the soldiers around him.
This was not the first time Elias had considered whether these two were the reason for everything that had gone wrong.
During the long retreat from the outer approaches into Macragge City, his unit had been ambushed and surrounded by the swarm repeatedly. The Tyranids had located them with an accuracy that no amount of concealment or route variation had been able to break. They had moved like something that had a specific destination in mind and was not interested in anything else.
If not for the heavy weapons platforms covering the outer city walls, they would never have shaken the pursuit force that had been following them. By the time they cleared the outer walls, Elias had lost half his command.
And then the swarm had pushed through the outer walls into the city, and had made straight for his position again. Not the stronger positions nearby. Not the heavier concentrations of troops. His specific position, on a side approach that offered nothing of obvious tactical value.
He let the anger move through him and gripped the heavy stubber's handles.
He shoved the gunner aside without ceremony. "Up. Let me take it."
He grabbed the handles and drove his thumbs down. The weapon produced its deep, heavy voice, and large-caliber metal rounds tore through the packed alien formations in the approach corridor, throwing broken organism matter in every direction.
He had considered, in the worst moments, simply removing Evan and Lena from his unit. Detaching them to the small group of 112th soldiers they had arrived with and letting them take their chances independently.
He had not given that order.
The conscience he carried as an Imperial soldier, and the serious promise he had made when he looked that Colonel-Commissar in the eye, were together enough to prevent him from committing what he recognized as the abandonment of non-combatants in the face of the enemy. Whatever he thought, that was not something he was willing to put his name to.
And he could not be completely certain about any of it. He had no evidence beyond a pattern of extremely bad fortune. The swarm could simply be making life difficult for his unit because his unit had drawn genuinely poor tactical ground. He could be wrong. If he cast out two children and killed them on the basis of a suspicion with no proof behind it, he would not be able to live with that. He did not want to find out what he was.
"AHHH!"
A sound tore through the underground space without warning.
Not human. Not the ordinary noise of the engagement. This was something deep and dense and penetrating, a non-human roar with enough physical force behind it to shake the air.
On the right flank of the position, a heavy stone wall collapsed.
Rubble and dust billowed outward in a wave. From behind the wall, moving through the stone it had just destroyed, a massive serpentine organism dragged itself into the space. Two enormous forearms, each ending in a bone scythe built for a single purpose, cleared what remained of the wall's edge. A clutch of Hormagaunts pressed in behind it.
A Ravener.
"Get that target! Concentrate fire, right flank, now!"
Elias drove the heavy stubber's barrel toward the breach.
The Ravener did not behave the way Tyranid organisms were supposed to behave. It did not prioritize the armed soldiers presenting the greatest immediate threat to it. It swept its gaze across the position in a single fast pass and then, without any apparent response to the fire beginning to converge on it, drove its lower body against the rubble-covered floor and launched itself forward.
Straight toward the civilian refuge area.
Not toward the soldiers. Toward the non-combatants at the rear, with the directness of a creature that has located exactly what it came for and cannot be redirected.
The breach on the right flank drew every soldier nearby into immediate close-quarters fighting against the Hormagaunts pouring through behind the Ravener. No one had the ability to disengage and redirect to intercept. The civilian area erupted into screaming, people scattering in every direction without purpose.
In the chaos, the Ravener moved with complete focus. It drove through the crowd, its bone scythes clearing whatever was in its path, its body aimed at the groundcloth where Lena lay sleeping.
On the defensive line, Evan heard the screaming behind him. He turned his head.
What he saw took the color from his face in an instant. The Ravener's bone scythes were already raised, the arc of the downswing already beginning, the distance between that blade and his sister measured in less than a second of time.
"Lena!"
He threw everything aside. The position he had been holding, the soldiers beside him, the tactical discipline that had kept him alive through the retreat. He ran at full speed back toward the civilian area, aware as he ran that the geometry was wrong, that he was not going to reach her, that the numbers of the situation were not going to work out.
The Ravener's bone scythes came screaming down.
Then the darkness in the tunnel at the far end of the underground space produced something unexpected.
Several high-intensity laser beams came in from an extreme distance, moving fast through the length of the chamber, threading through the chaos of the swarm without deviation. They passed over the heads of the crowd at the edge of the civilian area and found the same point on the Ravener's skull with a precision that had nothing accidental in it.
The first beam and the second beam burned through the armoured cranium. The third and the fourth beam followed in the same trajectory and converted the tissue beneath it to vapor.
The Ravener produced no final sound. The killing motion it had been committed to simply stopped. The enormous body carried forward on its own momentum and came down heavily on the floor, the impact loud in the sudden break in noise.
It had come to rest less than half a metre from where Lena lay sleeping.
Elias released the heavy stubber's handles and stared across the underground space to the point from which those shots had come.
From the tunnel at the far end, the sound of boots on stone began traveling toward the position. Organized. Deliberate. The rhythm of disciplined infantry in coordinated movement.
A regiment emerged from the darkness at combat pace.
Elias's eyes went immediately to the front of the column. The soldier who had just put four shots into the same point on a Ravener's skull from the far end of an underground chamber was at the front, a Triplex Phall-pattern lasrifle held level at his side. Grey mask. Prosthetic arm. Eyes that were not entirely organic, faintly lit from within.
And standing at that sniper's shoulder, supported by a large man's arm and moving with a stride that carried the evidence of injuries not fully resolved, was a figure whose coat Elias recognized before anything else.
The battered black greatcoat. The peaked cap. Both exactly as they had been when this had all started.
Duvette swept his gaze across the position in front of him and the battle still playing out across it. Then he opened his mouth and gave his order.
"Go get Evan. Kill every last one of them."