Guided by the Grand Strategic Display, the combined force of 112th Regint soldiers, Ultramar auxiliaries, Cadian remnants, and civilians made its way through the intricate underground passage network beneath Macragge.
Duvette ran the navigation with cold precision, reading the display and adjusting the route continuously. He took them around the swarm's main concentrations where the map permitted, and more than once used advance warning from the display to intercept Genestealer ambushes before they could develop. The civilians were kept at the centre of the column at all tis.
The casualties ca anyway. In an underground space this compromised, they were unavoidable. Every brief exchange of fire cost lives. Blood had dried black on the tal decking behind them, and the air in the passages carried a heaviness that accumulated with each engagent.
But through everything, the soldiers held to sothing.
The veterans of the 112th, Elias's Cadians, the Ultramar auxiliaries, every one of them kept the civilians shielded inside the formation without exception. And the civilians, displaced and frightened as they were, showed a restraint that had cost them real effort to maintain. They supported each other through the dark passages. They held their children quiet with both hands pressed over small mouths. Not one of them panicked in a way that would have compromised the column. They listened to every tactical instruction given to them and did what they were told.
With the collective effort of all of them, and with sothing added from Lena that had no na anyone present would have recognized, they drew within reach of their destination.
Two large passages short of the main gate to the core fortress, Duvette raised his right hand and brought the entire column to a halt.
The Grand Strategic Display showed him what was waiting ahead. The area around the main gate was saturated with red contacts. The swarm's indicators and the defenders' blue markers were locked together in a mass that showed no clean boundaries, flashing at a rate that communicated the intensity of the engagent without requiring further analysis.
He took Elias and the Ultramar auxiliary officer aside into cover and spoke quietly beneath the continuous dull thunder of the fighting ahead.
"We are approaching the outer periter of the core fortress. The swarm's main force is pressing the gate hard. To reach the garrison inside, we will have to co at them from directly behind and cut through the encirclent." He paused for a mont, and his gaze moved past them to where the civilians were waiting, looking at their officers with faces that did not try to conceal what was in them. "That raises a question." He looked back at both n. "What happens to the civilians?"
The level of fighting at the gate was not compatible with keeping non-combatants alive. Charging an entrenched swarm assault with a civilian column in the centre was not a tactical option. Both n knew this.
Elias considered for a fraction of a second. When he spoke, his face showed nothing but certainty.
"We perform our duty, Commissar." His voice was even and carried no performance. "Cadians do not leave civilians to the alien. We will carve a path through the swarm with our own bodies. They will co through unhard."
The Ultramar auxiliary officer looked at Duvette's expression for a mont, reading what was behind the question. Then he drew a breath and answered.
"Sir. They are the people of Ultramar. This is our ho. Protecting them is our responsibility, regardless of the cost. To the last man."
Duvette listened to both answers without expression. He gave a single nod. Then he turned and walked to where the full column could see him.
Several hundred faces looked back at him. Civilians alongside soldiers, the young and the old, people who had followed instructions through an underground network while a war ran over their heads. The fear in their faces was real and it had earned the right to be there.
Duvette made himself relax the muscles of his face. On a face that carried blood and propellant residue in equal asure, he produced a smile. It cost him sothing to make it look like he ant it, but he managed.
"Citizens of the Imperium. Listen to ."
He kept his voice clear and steady.
"The core fortress is ahead of us. It is our path through this." He let them hear the certainty in it. "There are Tyranid organisms between us and that gate. They will not stop us." He looked across the faces in front of him. "The soldiers around you are the Imperium's finest. Cadians, warriors of Ultramar, and my regint behind . Every one of us stands between you and what is ahead. Close your eyes if you need to. Stay with the column. I give you my word: every person here walks through that gate alive."
The assurance moved through the crowd and took so of the uncontrolled edge off the fear.
The formation adjustnt took very little ti.
Duvette arranged the combined force into a spearhead. The 112th veterans ford the tip: the sharpest elent, responsible for the frontal breach. Elias's Cadians spread across both flanks, providing crossing fire to protect the column's sides from organisms attempting to close. The Ultramar auxiliaries took the rear, holding against anything pressing in from behind. The civilians were locked in the protected centre.
Duvette took his position at the very front of the spearhead, chainsword in hand.
The wounds that had been slowing him since the crash had not fully healed, but Indomitable and Veteran's Fra had done their passive work, and Doctor Wayne had done the rest of what was possible with what he had. Duvette's right shoulder and leg were not at full capacity, but neither would prevent him from swinging the blade at whatever required it.
Anderson was on his left. The power maul was already crackling with energy along its head, and the large man had the stillness of sothing that had already decided what it was about to do. Stroud stood on his right, the combat shotgun held loosely at his side, eyes moving across the passage ahead with the unhurried attention of a man in a very familiar situation.
Duvette did not look back.
He raised his left hand and swept it forward.
"Advance."
The column moved into the dark passage like a heavy engine that has been released.
They turned the corner of a wide corridor, and the sound of the engagent hit them like a physical force. Termagants, Hormagaunts, and Tyranid Warriors packed the open space leading to the main gate, covering the corpses and wreckage underfoot in a moving mass, driving against the fortress's outer defensive line without pause.
"Fire!"
The front ranks of the spearhead discharged simultaneously. Hundreds of lasrifles produced their sharp combined crack, and the volley vaporized the near end of the swarm mass into a cloud of purple vapor before the organisms had any warning of what had co in behind them.
The swarm's rear echelon went from organized assault to confused reaction in the space of a breath.
"For the Emperor! Forward!"
Anderson hit the swarm like sothing the swarm had not been built to stop. The power maul connected with a sound that carried through the noise of everything else, force fields and raw mass combining in each swing, crushing organisms and throwing them back into the ones behind them. He opened a corridor through the mass by sheer physical impact and walked forward through it.
Stroud's shotgun discharged in a continuous rhythm, the close-range spread tearing through the lighter organisms with the chanical efficiency of sothing doing exactly what it was designed for.
On the fortress walls above, the garrison had seen what was happening. Weapons adjusted their bearing.
"Friendly forces! Those are friendly forces! Covering fire, forward of their position!"
The fortress's heavy bolters and twin-linked lascannons swung to bear on the swarm mass ahead of the spearhead, laying fire that compressed the killing ground from both directions.
They pushed forward through it in steps, each step bought with fire and the weight of bodies against chitin. The Cadians on the flanks held the encirclent attempts at the civilian safety line without giving ground. The rearguard kept the passage behind them from closing.
Thirty minutes. Hundreds of casualties. The advance asured in tres against the alien tide pressing from every direction.
When they finally reached the main gate, they ca through on the bodies of the organisms beneath them.
Duvette stopped at the foot of the alloy blast door. He was covered in blood. So was every soldier within eyesight. He looked up at the fortress walls and identified the officer responsible for the gate.
"Open this gate. Now."
The officer's response ca down with genuine distress in it.
"Commissar. I cannot. The fortress is beyond capacity." He raised his voice above the ambient noise to make himself heard. "The corridors are full. Wounded, retreating soldiers. Civilians already sheltering inside have no floor space. There is not room for a single person more."
Behind Duvette, the swarm was reorganizing. The brief montum of their breakthrough had spent itself. The organisms were pressing back in, the available space contracting under continuous alien pressure. Weapons fire and the voices of soldiers under close assault competed with each other across the periter. On the Grand Strategic Display, the red contacts along the map's edges were increasing in density, and among them, several deep-crimson markers burned with the particular intensity that indicated high-tier organisms closing on the position.
Duvette turned back to the gate, locked his eyes on the officer above, and drew his bolt pistol.
"Open this gate." His voice carried to every ear in range. "Under my authority as Colonel-Commissar and by the direct order of Chapter Master Calgar, I am commanding you to open this gate."
Beside him, Elias and the Ultramar auxiliary officer put their voices into it together.
"Open it! Every soldier here with a weapon stays outside and fights! But those civilians go in! Open the gate!"
Above them, the fortress officer went silent for a mont that felt longer than it was.
Then the chanical sound of gears engaging and hydraulic seals releasing moved through the alloy door, and the blast gate, several tres of solid alloy, slid apart to a gap just wide enough for two people to pass abreast.
The officer had not been lying about what was inside. Through that narrow gap, Duvette could see a wall of desperate faces, people crowded together to the limit of what the space would hold, compressed into the interior corridors with no space left between them. The gap they had created by pressing themselves to the walls was barely enough to admit the column of people about to co through.
"Civilians first. Wounded and non-combatants. Move."
Under the 112th veterans' physical escorting, pushing, directing, keeping the movent continuous, hundreds of terrified civilians flowed through the gap in an organized stream. dics. Logistics personnel. Evan and Lena, both pushed toward the gate by the soldiers around them.
Evan turned his head as he was moved through. Lena turned with him.
Duvette t both their eyes for a mont. He said nothing.
The alloy blast door ground shut on the other side of that look, and sealed.
Outside the fortress now: Duvette, and fewer than four thousand Astra Militarum survivors. No tanks. No Astartes. No fire support except what the fortress walls could provide.
The Grand Strategic Display was still running in his field of vision. He gave it one look.
[Limiter Break: cooling down]
[Focused Volley: cooling down]
[Silence: cooling down]
[Emperor's Wrath remaining: 0]
The board was against him. He could recognize that clearly.
He let the recognition sit for exactly as long as it needed to, and then he set it aside.
He had clawed his way out of impossible ground before. Every ti the situation had produced nothing but dead ends, he had found a way out regardless. He was a Colonel-Commissar forged in blood and fire across an engagent record that should have killed him a dozen tis over. This was not different. He would co through. He would bring the 112th through.
From the far end of the passage, sothing moved into the light.
Enormous. The scale of it reduced the surrounding architecture to context rather than structure. It erged from the smoke at a asured pace, the Tyrant Guards flanking it in heavy carapace, Tyranid Warriors and Raveners spreading through the passage ahead of it like a tide finding its shape.
A Hive Tyrant.
Not the one Calgar had killed at Cold Steel Ridge. A different one. This underground theater had its own apex organism, and it had been waiting for the mont the last of the Astartes support was gone.
The psychic pressure it exerted reached Duvette as physical pain the mont it ca into visual range. A driving headache that pressed against the inside of his skull, the weight of a Synapse organism operating at close quarters forcing itself into the awareness of every mortal within the field it radiated. His legs responded to the accumulated damage of the last several days with a faint tremor.
He drove the tip of the chainsword into the rockcrete floor in front of him and used it to hold himself upright. He engaged the motor. The chain roared.
The Hive Tyrant's gaze moved across the defensive line and ca to rest on the one figure standing at the very front of it.
Across the smoke and the blood, those enormous crimson compound eyes t a pair of human ones with nothing rational in them at all. A Colonel-Commissar who had long since crossed the line between courage and sothing that the Hive Tyrant's hierarchy of predation may not have encountered before.
The Hive Tyrant opened its throat and produced a sound designed to end rational thought.
Duvette pulled the chainsword out of the floor and raised it.
He turned to face the regint at his back, four thousand exhausted, wounded, almost empty soldiers who had fought for longer than bodies were built to fight, in a place with no exit and no reinforcent coming, and he gave the last order available.
"There is no ground left to give!"
His voice was raw and it reached every one of them.
"Show these creatures what human courage is made of!"
He turned back toward the Hive Tyrant and the black tide rolling forward with it.
"Let the Emperor witness our faith! We fight to the death! KILL!!!"
****
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