Through the violently shaking viewport, Duvette finally saw what the killing zone actually looked like.
The atmosphere was choked with crimson-violet spore dust, and moving through that dust were Tyranid aerial organisms in numbers that the word numbers failed to adequately describe. They pressed against each other in the sky the way ancient accounts described sardines in the oceans of old Terra: dense past any reasonable accounting, blotting out everything above the city below them.
The ground-based anti-aircraft fire was fighting back without pause. Tracer lines and defensive laser sweeps cut through the aerial mass at intervals, clearing blood-soaked gaps. The next wave filled those gaps before the fire could reach them.
The organisms hung over Macragge City like a thick, deliberate cloud of malice, and under their cover the city's ruins were barely visible.
The transport's engines reached their absolute limit in the evasive maneuvers that followed the cloud layer breach. Not long after breaking through, the craft drove directly into a mass of Gargoyles. Escort fighters were present, putting covering fire into the approach. The side-mounted heavy bolter was firing in continuous bursts. None of it mattered. The Gargoyles ca on without breaking pace, and the ones that reached the hull locked on with the particular persistence of organisms that had never developed the concept of letting go.
The shaking inside the cabin multiplied in an instant. Duvette could hear the alien claws working on the exterior ceramite, cutting and dragging, the sound of it traveling through the hull and into the back teeth.
"Hold on! Check your harnesses!" He pressed his vox bead and put everything behind it, but the sound of tearing tal had the room to itself.
The forward-left ceramite gave.
The sound the hull produced as it failed was not an explosion. It was the sound of material that has been worked past its limits in too many places simultaneously. A large section of the forward-left plating was torn away, and the high-altitude airstream ca in through the gap instantly, a cold pressure differential that hit the cabin with the force of a decompression event.
The sudden imbalance killed several soldiers near the breach before they could react. The forces involved did not allow for struggling. The restraint fixtures beside them pulled out of the deck, and the soldiers and the fixtures both went through the gap together, into the Gargoyle mass outside, and were not there anymore.
Decompression alarms hit their maximum volu. Every red light in the cabin was cycling.
Duvette did not hesitate. He pulled his bolt pistol, locked his other hand around the seat armrest to hold himself in place, and put the muzzle at the breach. The Gargoyles pushing their heads through the opening received explosive rounds at point-blank range. The detonations handled the job from inside. Purple matter covered the surviving section of the forward wall.
The crisis did not stop.
A second impact on the right side of the hull, ceramite giving again, and more soldiers went out through the new gap before they had any warning at all. The blood on what was left of the right wall told the story of how fast it had happened.
"Fire! Everyone fire!" Duvette drove the order across the channel. The surviving soldiers fought the combined forces of partial decompression and violent motion and raised their weapons at both breaches and opened up.
Then the pilot's voice arrived in his earpiece, and what he heard in it was a man who had run out of options.
"Sir! Engines are seized! We've stalled! I can't pull her up! We're going to hit the ground!"
The cabin's shaking crossed into a different category in the sa mont.
Duvette activated Limiter Break.
The strength it put into him was imdiate and violent: his heart rate spiked, every muscle fibre was pulled to maximum tension, the load-bearing structures of his skeleton locked into the most resilient configuration his body could produce. He had no better options. He needed this skill to keep him alive through a crash that had almost no survivable outcos.
The Gargoyles were still coming through both breaches as the craft descended, pressing in with the urgency of organisms that intended to eat before the impact took the prey away from them.
Anderson moved.
The large man unbuckled his harness without hesitation. In a cabin that was tumbling and falling and losing pieces of itself from multiple locations, he did not get thrown. His own mass and core strength kept him stable where nothing else could. He gripped the power maul in both hands, the force field generator crackling with blue energy along the weapon's head, walked to the nearest breach, and began clearing it.
The sound of the power maul working was heavy enough to cut through the wind noise. Each swing produced one distinct dull impact, one alien body's structural integrity ending, one set of remains thrown clear of the opening. Anderson worked without hurrying and without stopping.
"Altitude warning! Altitude warning!"
The pilot's voice had lost the register of a trained operator and beco sothing else entirely.
The ground was close. Through what was left of the hull, Duvette had fractional visibility of the burning city walls and the devastated streets below.
"Brace for impact!"
Duvette clamped his jaw, pulled his body as compact as the harness would allow, and closed his eyes.
The impact was not a sound. It was a physical force that arrived from everywhere simultaneously and did not discriminate between the craft and anything aboard it. The anti-impact properties of the crash seats were not rated for what they were receiving. Duvette felt his internal organs register the deceleration as if they had briefly considered occupying different positions. The cabin ca apart around him: ceramite twisting into shapes it had not been built to hold, plasteel snapping, equipnt and weapons turning into projectiles and moving at velocities that had nothing to do with direction.
Then, with the particular cruelty of combat, a cold pain arrived in his right shoulder.
A ceramite pipe had been torn from its housing by the impact, its broken edge sharp as a milling blade. It had gone through his greatcoat and deep into the shoulder in one clean line.
The pain had not fully registered before the next phase of the crash's violence removed all perception entirely.
So duration passed. It may have been seconds. It felt longer.
The burning wreckage of the transport plowed several hundred tres along the surface, gouging a trench through rubble and demolishing what remained of the structures in its path, before everything stopped moving.
Duvette had not lost consciousness.
He breathed in hard, feeling the burning in his chest that told him his lungs had taken impact damage. Limiter Break and Indomitable's passive defences had kept the most lethal penetrating wounds from finding their marks. Both skills had perford the function they existed for and had pulled him through a crash that should, by most calculations, have killed everyone aboard.
He muttered sothing that was not fit for formal record and felt his throat bring up the taste of iron. He turned his head and coughed dark red blood onto the wreckage beside him.
He blinked. Tried to make sense of what his vision was giving him.
The transport's roof was gone. The open dark sky above him was filtered through the crimson-violet spore layer. Around him: burning machinery, severed power cables, the scattered wreckage of a hull that no longer resembled an aircraft. The bodies of his soldiers were among it.
I survived this, he thought. He was not entirely sure what to do with that.
The silence registered as wrong. No weapons fire. No alien shrieks. Just an absence of everything.
He understood a mont later. Not silence. Damage. His eardrums had taken the impact and were currently not doing what eardrums are supposed to do. A sustained, sharp tinnitus occupied the space where hearing had been. He was temporarily deaf.
He reached for his bolt pistol.
Gone. Sowhere in the tumbling, soti before the impact, it had separated from him.
He closed his left hand around the first thing he could find in the wreckage beside him: a piece of broken ceramite with an edge that would do what he needed it to do. His right shoulder was not cooperating with any movent he attempted.
Sothing was approaching through the wreckage. He could feel it through the surface under him.
The shape that appeared against the damaged sky above was not alien.
Anderson. Dust on every surface. A gash across his head bleeding steadily, the blood mixed with the dust to a dark red streak down his face. The power maul still in his hand. The armour badly scratched. Otherwise, structurally, the large man appeared intact.
Anderson dropped to a half-kneel in front of him. His mouth was moving in sothing urgent and continuous. Duvette could read the shape of it without any of the sound reaching him.
He shook his head. Pointed to his ears. Then pointed to the ceramite pipe in his right shoulder.
Anderson understood both pieces of information simultaneously. He closed both hands around the pipe at the point where it entered the shoulder.
Duvette set his teeth against what was coming.
Anderson pulled the pipe out in a single committed motion. The pain was sufficient to make the periter of his vision go white, and for a mont the question of consciousness was genuinely open. Anderson had the ergency haemostatic gel applied to the wound and rough bandaging wrapped tight before Duvette's vision had finished restoring itself.
With the obstruction removed, the compressed tissue released, and his right side beca capable of movent again, painful and limited, but present.
Anderson got an arm under him and brought him upright. Duvette's legs found the floor. He stood, unsteadily at first, with Anderson's support making the difference.
As his circulation normalized, the tinnitus began retreating. His hearing ca back increntally: the wind moving through the ruins first, then the crackle of fires burning through tal, then Anderson's heavy breathing directly beside him.
They looked at where they were.
Rubble. The ruins of a city block that had already been subjected to extended bombardnt before the crash added a trench to it. Destroyed buildings on every axis. No sky visible beyond the spore-layer overcast.
No other transports had co down in this section of the city.
The sky held no friendly aircraft. The surrounding ruins held no assembly signals, no vox contact, no sound of 112th soldiers regrouping. The distant artillery was continuing sowhere beyond the visible range. The Great Devourer's shadow was still over the planet.
This transport had carried dozens of elite soldiers into the descent.
In the blood and the wreckage and the silence, two of them had co through it.
Duvette and Anderson, alone, in the ruins of Macragge City.
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