Supported by a trio of men, Sergeant Fols covered the entrance to a stairwell in the gatehouse, its roof blown off by the advance of the first flat-crab earlier. The blackened corpses of Vervun Primary gunners from the upper ramparts lay all around, amid the twisted wreckage of their fallen guns and piles of ceramite chunks.
Fols looked up at the mighty gate that they fought to protect. It was almost painful to see it with the top blown away, just two great gate towers adjoining the splintered Curtain Wall. The fort on top had fallen in and its debris made up the ground they fought over.
Fols also noticed how the Shield above them was rough-edged and intermittent. The death of the flat-crab which had blown out the arch of the massive gate had also taken down a relay station, and the Shield canopy was fraying and sparking out over them.
Fols felt wet and realised it was rain. The torrential downpour outside was still hammering and now, with the Shield ripped back for a hundred metres or so, it was falling on them too.
The ground was turning to mush as the rain made gluey soup out of the ankle-deep ash.
The Ghost next to Fols dropped wordlessly, his jaw vaporised. Streams of rain ran down them all, colouring with blood and dirt.
Fols rounded his two remaining men into the staircase, firing across the gate. The rain and smoke was killing visibility.
Fols saw the bright blurt of Dremmond’s flamer a little way off, saw how the rain made steam off the white-hot blasts and heated stones.
The man next to him yelled something and Fols realised there were Zoican shock troops spilling over the side walls behind them by the dozen.
He turned, killed three. A welter of las-shots cut his men apart and splashed the wall they had just been using for cover with their blood. Fols lost a knee, an eye, an elbow and a fourth shot tore through his belly.
He was still firing when a Zoican bayonet impaled him to the wall.
The chanting continued. The Zoican shock forces were pushing through Veyveyr Gate holding banner-poles aloft, the whipping flags marked with the symbol of Ferrozoica and with other emblems that stung the eyes and nauseated the gut: the runes and badges of the Chaos pestilence that had overwhelmed them.
Some of the Zoicans had loudhailers wired and bolted to their helmet fronts and were broadcasting abominable hymns of filth and whining prayers of destruction.
From his position, Corbec knew the Zoicans believed their victory was assured.
He wished he could deny it, but with the pitiful numbers left to him, he didn’t stand a chance.
He changed clips again, throwing the dead one away into the rubble. Next to him, Genx and two other troopers reloaded.
They would kill as many as they could. In the name of the Emperor, there was no more they could do.
Data-pulses told him the fighting was intense, bestial. But it was so very far away. It came to him only as unemphatic bursts of information, unemotional cascades of facts.
Salvador Sondar drifted in his Iron Tank. He was becoming increasingly disinterested in the trials of the hive soldiers. What was happening at Croe Gate and, more vitally, at Veyveyr was an inconsequential dream to him.
All that really mattered now to the High Master of Vervunhive was the chatter.
A rocket cremated Trooper Feax and threw Larkin into the air. He came down hard amid the rubble and the bodies, ears dead, vision swimming and his beloved rifle nowhere in sight.
He clambered up. He had been with Corbec’s unit at the gate. That was the last thing he remembered.
His hearing began to return. He heard the wretched chanting of the Zoican advance as from underwater. He saw the las-fire and banner poles as dancing bright colours in the smoke.
A Zoican was right on top of him, glaring down out of that fearsome mask-visor, stabbing with his bayonet.
Larkin lurched aside and fell off a length of wall, two metres down to a bed of debris below. Ignoring his spasming back, he yanked out his silver Tanith knife and leapt at the Zoican the moment he reappeared over the gully-lip.
The Zoican bayonet cut through Larkin’s sleeve. He slammed the brute back over into the rubble and pushed his blade in, trying to find a space between the ochre armour plating.
It went in, just below the neck seal of the battle-suit. Foul-smelling blood began to spurt out over Larkin’s arm and hand, and it stung like acid.
The Zoican thrashed and spasmed. Larkin fought back, clawing, kicking and wrenching on his blade’s grip.
He and the Zoican rolled twenty metres down the rubble slope. At the foot, Larkin’s frantic efforts ripped the Zoican’s helmet off.
He was the first person in Vervunhive to see the face of the enemy, square on, naked, shorn of armour or mask or visor.
Larkin screamed.
And then stabbed and stabbed and stabbed.
A torrent of las-fire cut across the gate from the west. Zoicans crumpled, falling on their banner poles, loudspeakers exploding as they died. Corbec and his men, amazed, pushed around to support, hammering into the halted storm force with renewed vigour.
Nine platoons of Vervun Primary troops funnelled in across the open gate from the west with Commissar Kowle at the head.
Kowle had headed for Veyveyr Gate from House Command the moment the action began at dawn and it had taken him until now—almost noon—to reach the front. Unable to reach Modile or any Vervun command group, he had grabbed Vervun troops by force of authority and personality alone and led them towards the gate flanked by Bulwar’s men and armour.
Kowle was singing an Imperial hymn at the top of his lungs and firing with a storm bolter.
Bulwar’s NorthCol units pressed in behind, and Bulwar had the sense to spread them east to reinforce the failing Tanith line.
Corbec couldn’t believe his eyes. At last, a co-ordinated effort. He rallied his remaining men and scoured the eastern flank of the gate for signs of Zoicans. His support helped Kowle reach the gate itself, a gate that had been held by the Tanith alone for more than an hour.
The three prongs—Tanith, Vervun and NorthCol—pushed the Zoicans back out into the outer habs and the torrential rain. Kowle moved his units aside to allow Bulwar’s armour to finish the job and block the gate, though not before the commissar had posed for propaganda shots that were quickly relayed across the entire public-address system of the hive: Kowle, victorious in the blasted mouth of Veyveyr; Kowle, blasting at the enemy; Kowle, holding the Vervun banner aloft on a heap of rubble as Vervun Primary troops mobbed to help him plant the flag-spike in the ground.
By early afternoon, the gate was held fast by fifty tanks of the NorthCol armoured. Kowle was once more the People’s Hero. The battle for Veyveyr Gate was over.
At Croe Gate, as news of the overturn reached the Zoican elements, the fighting diminished. Nash sighed in relief as the enemy withdrew from the smouldering gate-hatches. He ordered the wall guns to punish them anyway.
None of the victorious public-address messages mentioned the losses: 440 Vervun Primary and 200 Roane Deepers at Croe Gate, 500 Vervun “Spoilers” along the Spoil, 3,500 Vervun Primary, 900 NorthCol and almost a hundred Tanith at Veyveyr. They had a victory and a hero, and that was all that mattered.
Gaunt and his small reinforcement group reached Veyveyr just as the battle was ending. Gaunt was hot with anger and determination.
Daur led him down a trench to the Vervun Primary Command post where Colonel Modile was rallying men and directing vox-links.
Modile looked around as Gaunt strode into the culvert shelter, stony-faced.
“The battle is over. We have won. Vervunhive is victorious,” Modile said blankly into Gaunt’s face.
“I’ve been listening to the vox. I know what occurred here. You balked, Modile. You lost control. You hid. You shut down the vox-channels when you didn’t like what you heard.”
Modile shrugged vacuously at Gaunt. “But we won…”
The Tanith troops stepped into the command post around Gaunt. Even Daur, grim-faced, had a weapon drawn.