With the Synapse network broken, the tactical situation across the underground battlefield reversed itself in seconds.
The Tyranid swarm, which had held the nurical advantage since the mont it entered the underground network, went from coordinated killing machine to a collection of organisms operating on individual biological impulse. The direction and the shared purpose were simply gone.
The human garrison did not require ti to recognize the opportunity. The weapons that had been holding the line at its most desperate threshold swung forward in concentrated volleys and began eliminating the disordered organisms in mass. The soldiers who had been compressed against the alloy wall, their defensive line on the edge of failing, found sothing returning to them that combat exhaustion had nearly removed, and when their officers called for the counter-charge, they answered it without hesitation.
At the front of the position, the Hive Tyrant was experiencing what the Synapse collapse felt like from the inside. Its enormous body had locked rigid for a mont, the neural disruption physical enough to arrest voluntary movent.
The fortress's heavy weapons did not pause for the biology.
The twin-linked lascannons and heavy bolter emplacents along the alloy wall rotated their combined bearing onto the six-tre organism that had, until thirty seconds ago, been untouchable. Without the Warp shield absorbing incoming fire, that carapace, which had been advertised across every engagent as the finest biological armour the Great Devourer had produced, beca a large, stationary target.
The fire tore into it. Through it. The lascannon beams cut channels through the carapace to the biology beneath. The heavy bolter rounds detonated inside the wounds they opened. The Hive Tyrant produced its first sounds of pain in the entire engagent, the enormous body staggering backward under the sustained impact, each heavy footfall less certain than the one before it.
Duvette dropped his chainsword.
The blade had been notched since before the end of the previous chapter of this engagent, and what he had done with it since had finished the job. The cutting edge was ruined. He let it fall and moved.
Anderson's power maul was on the floor where it had co to rest after the Hive Tyrant's strike had sent him into the wall. Duvette crossed the ground between them at a run, closed both hands around the weapon's grip, and activated it.
Without Limiter Break, the weapon's weight was exactly what it was. Heavy reinforced haft, heavy force-field generator head, designed for an operator with Anderson's augnted mass. The muscles in Duvette's arms went to their absolute limit the mont he picked it up and did not have enough remaining to do much beyond hold it. The blue force field arcs blazed to life around the head, disintegration energy crackling at the surface.
He recalibrated imdiately.
He could not swing this weapon. He could carry it. And he had montum, and he had a target, and he understood basic physics well enough to know that a force-field generator head moving at the end of a sprinting human body concentrated into a single point of impact was still a significant event for anything the force field touched at the mont of contact.
He aid for the knee.
The load-bearing joint of an organism six tres tall, currently staggered backward under sustained heavy-weapons fire and barely maintaining its balance. Not the carapace. The joint where the carapace was thinnest and the structural work was most concentrated.
He drove himself at the Hive Tyrant, building speed across the bloody floor, carrying the full weight of the weapon ahead of him, and brought it down on the knee joint with everything his body had left to give.
The force field's contact with the joint produced its characteristic effect.
At the molecular level, the bonding structures of the biological material dissolved. The load-bearing assembly of the Hive Tyrant's leg, which had supported its mass through combat conditions that would have destroyed any piece of equipnt the Imperium manufactured, ceased to function as a structural elent.
The sound it produced cut through the artillery noise with a clarity that was entirely disproportionate to its volu.
The leg folded. The Hive Tyrant's mass, which the leg had been supporting, ca down without it, and the impact of six tres and several tonnes of biological apex predator eting the tal floor shook the surrounding structure in a way that registered in the chest rather than the ears.
The heavy weapons on the wall continued their work on the fallen target.
Duvette stood over what was in front of him.
The lascannons had opened a wound in the Hive Tyrant's skull that made the head's interior visible. The compound eyes, crimson, enormous, carrying in their design the entire predatory logic of a galaxy-spanning consuming intelligence, were still focused. Still burning with hunger and the fury of a thing that had never been in this position before.
They were looking directly at him.
A commissar from a dead-world trench. A mortal officer who had co up through Farrak IV's mud and the Eternal Lant and Cold Steel Ridge and a crashed transport and three floors of underground combat to stand in front of an organism that had consud entire planetary systems.
Duvette drew a breath of air that tasted of smoke and blood.
"This is humanity's victory, you bastard."
He drove the power maul's head into the wound in the skull.
The force field destroyed the biological structures it reached. The sound the impact produced was brief and final.
The Hive Tyrant's body produced one convulsive movent and went still. The compound eyes lost their focus. The light in them went out.
Duvette pressed the power maul's head against the floor and put both hands on the grip and used it to hold himself upright. He raised his head toward the low ceiling overhead.
The sound he produced was not a word or a command. It was the sound of a man who has survived sothing that was designed to end him, stripped of everything that had been protecting him, held together by nothing at the end except the refusal to stop. The sound carried the particular quality of survival confird against all reasonable expectation, and the particular quality of a declaration directed at an entire hostile universe, and it echoed in the underground space for longer than its volu had any right to produce.
---
On the command deck of Macragge's Honour, the atmosphere was heavy with the kind of focus that cos after catastrophe has passed and what remains is the accounting.
Marneus Calgar stood at the front of the command deck, facing the armoured viewport.
He had donned his Terminator power armour. For a Chapter Master whose right arm had been severed at the shoulder less than a day ago, this was not a trivial undertaking. Thick biochemical feed-cables and newly implanted chanical interfaces had been forced into connection with the armour's neural synaptic relays, the integration done in ergency rather than surgical conditions. The internal dication pumps were continuously delivering high-concentration analgesics and stimulants into his bloodstream to compensate for what the armour's weight cost a body that had not finished addressing a catastrophic battlefield wound.
He stood straight. He did not communicate the cost.
Through the viewport, the void showed him sothing he had not expected to see.
Emptiness.
Where the Tyranid fleet had been, filling the visible volu of space beyond the ship, press-fitted between every available spatial reference, obscuring the stars in every direction with the combined mass of organisms too nurous to count, there was almost nothing. Fragnts of biological material drifting without direction. Sections of Imperial warship hull turning slowly in the vacuum, catching the distant light of Macragge's sun on steel surfaces that had been part of functioning vessels a short ti ago.
The Tyranid fleet, which had been large enough to block starlight from reaching the planet's surface, had ceased to exist.
Calgar's gaze moved to the point in the void where the distortion in the starfield was still visible, a subtle wrongness in the pattern of the stars, the light bending incorrectly around the place where a Warp rift had torn open and then collapsed back on itself.
Not long ago, in that area of space, the Emperor-class battleship Planetary Overlord had driven into the heart of the Tyranid main fleet under concentrated fire from every organism that could bring its weapons to bear. Its captain, a mortal officer nad Zaraleius Lasser, had waited until the last possible mont before the swarm consud the ship entirely, and then ordered the Warp engines detonated.
The explosion had opened a rift between realspace and the Warp directly inside the formation of the hive fleet. The Warp storm that followed had no periter. It had no edge that the Tyranid ships could navigate around. It had ford in the middle of them, and it had taken nearly everything.
They had won. The Great Devourer's grip on this system had been severed. The hive mind's connection to the organisms below had been broken.
The manner of the victory required no editorial.
Calgar closed his eyes. He stood motionless for several seconds, in the particular stillness of a man paying a debt of genuine weight to those who had made what he was about to do possible. Captain Zaraleius Lasser. The crew of the Planetary Overlord. Every soldier and officer who had given everything they had and not co back from it.
He opened his eyes.
The intelligence and composure that had been in them since the mont he had walked into this command deck had not changed. He turned away from the viewport, located his adjutant, and spoke.
"All fleet." His voice crossed the command deck through the amplifiers and reached every station simultaneously. "Begin descending to lower orbital altitude. All Thunderhawk gunships and drop infantry, prepare for imdiate deploynt. Support ground combat. Eliminate remaining alien organisms."
He let a mont pass.
"This defense of Macragge." His gaze moved to the viewport one final ti, to the damaged, burning surface of his howorld visible in fragnts through the clouds. "Let it end."
****
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