Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [140]
‘Almost one quarter of the enemy inside this hive is embattled at the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant. You are threatening Oberon with destruction as well as desecration? Does your heresy know no end?’
It was Jurisian’s turn to abstain from the argument.
‘I have a thermal signature,’ he said, studying the dim auspex console to the left of his control throne. ‘It has a plasma shadow, much too hot to be natural flame.’
‘I see nothing. Coordinates?’
Jurisian transmitted the location codes. It was on the very edge of scanning range, and still several minutes away.
‘It is moving to the Temple.’
‘Locomotion qualifiers?’
‘Faster than us.’
The pause was almost painful, broken by Amasat’s sneering tone. ‘Then I will give you the victory you require. Talisman and Hallowed Verity – remain with the blessed weapon.’
‘Yes, princeps,’ both Warhounds responded.
Bane-Sidhe leaned forward, its armoured shoulders hunching as it moved into a straining stride. Jurisian listened to the protesting gears, the overworked joints, hearing the engine’s machine-spirit cry out in the stress of metal under tension. He said a quiet word of thanks for the sacrifice about to be made.
CHAPTER XXIII
Knightfall
Andrej and Maghernus skidded into the basilica’s first chamber, their bloody boots finding loose purchase on the mosaic-inlaid floor. Dozens of Guardsmen and militia dispersed through the vast hall, catching their breath and taking up defensive points around pillars and behind pews.
The final fallback was beginning in earnest. The graveyard outside was blanketed in enemy dead, but the last few hundred Imperials could no longer hold any ground with their own numbers depleted.
‘This room…’ the former dockmaster was breathing heavily, ‘…doesn’t have much cover.’
Andrej was unslinging his back-mounted power pack. ‘It is a nave.’
‘What?’
‘This room. It is called a nave. And you are speaking the truth – there is no defence here.’ The storm-trooper drew his pistol and started running deeper into the temple.
‘Where are you going? What about your rifle?
‘It is out of power! Now follow, we must find the priest!’
Ryken fired with his autopistol, taking a moment between shots to regain his aim. It was a custom, heavy-duty model that wouldn’t have been out of place in an underhive gangfight, and as he crouched by a black stone shrine to a saint he didn’t recognise, the gun barked hot and hard in his fist, ejecting spent cartridges that clattered off nearby gravestones.
‘Fall back, sir!’ one of his men was yelling. The alien beasts crashed through the graveyard like an apocalyptic flood, a unbreakable tide of noise.
‘Not yet…’
‘Now, you ass, come on!’ Tyro dragged at his shoulder. It threw off his aim, but to hell with it – it was like spitting into the ocean anyway. He scrambled away from the relative cover of the weeping statue just in time to miss it being shattered into chips and shards by raking fire from a fully-automatic enemy stubber.
‘Are they coming?’ he shouted to his second officer, limping badly now.
‘Who?’
‘The bloody Templars!’
They were not coming.
To the retreating human survivors, it seemed as if the black knights had lost all sense, all reason, cutting their way forward while the humans that had supported them broke ranks and fled back.
No one could see why.
No one was getting a clear answer from the vox.
Bayard was dead.
Priamus saw the great champion fall, and all flair in his killing strokes was abandoned in a heartbeat. He slew with all the grace of a peasant chopping lumber upon the face of some backwater rural world, his masterwork sword reduced to a club with a vicious edge and draped in lethal energy.
‘Nerovar!’ he screamed his brother’s name into the vox. ‘Nerovar!’
Other Templars took up the cry, summoning the Apothecary to extract the gene-seed of a Chapter hero.
Bayard stood almost slouched against the wall of an ornate mausoleum shaped from pink-veined white stone. The body had not fallen only because