Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [55]
The wave would break soon.
Sarren watched the flickering icons depicting his forces across the immense map. It would come soon, that perfect moment in the shifting winds of battle when the enemy’s first push would falter and slow as the advance elements outpaced their slower support units. The initial hordes of infantry would crash against Steel Legion resistance in the outer city streets that they could never break without support from their tanks and wreck-Titans.
And at that moment, the wave would break like the tide against the shore. With the ferocious momentum of the first attack lost, the defence would begin in earnest.
Counterattacks would be mounted in some streets, especially those close to Invigilata’s engines or Legion armour units. In other zones, the Guard would stand fast, unable to take ground back but entrenched well enough to hold it.
All that mattered was keeping the enemy from reaching Hel’s Highway.
At the last meeting, when the commanders had gathered in their battle armour, Sarren had outlined once more the necessity to holding the highway.
‘It is the key to the siege,’ he’d said. ‘Once they reach Hel’s Highway, the city becomes twice as difficult to defend. They will have access to the entire hive. Think of it as an artery, ladies and gentlemen. The artery. Once it is severed, the body will bleed out. Once the enemy takes the highway, the city is lost.’
Grave expressions had answered this statement.
The colonel hunched over the table now, his squinting eyes taking the scene in, road by road, building by building, unit by unit.
He watched the war in silence, waiting for the wave to break.
Barasath had hit the ground hard.
He’d seen Helika fall from the sky – and heard her, too. That’d been difficult to deal with. The night they’d spent together sharing a bunk had been almost three years ago now, when they’d both pretended to be drunker than they were, but Korten had never forgotten it, nor had he wished it to be the only one. Hearing her die had chilled his blood, and he had to fight not to deactivate his vox as she screamed on the way down, her engine trailing fire.
Her Lightning, with its white-painted wings, had ploughed into the chest of an alien god-walker. The Titan had shuddered for a moment, then vented flames and wreckage from its spine as Helika’s bird – now nothing more than spinning debris – burst through its back.
The gargant kept walking as if unharmed, even with a hole blown clear through it.
That had been in the first run. Helika didn’t even get time to fire.
A wicked, weaving scrap of a battle through the alien fighters saw most of them spiralling groundward on dying engines. He’d taken cannon-fire along his hull, but a lucky shot saw him bleeding fuel instead of turned into a fireball in the sky. With the way clear and only a handful of his flyers down, Barasath’s second and third waves were inbound.
That’s when things had gotten really nasty.
The enemy god-walkers weren’t marching idly. Turrets on their shoulders and heads aimed up into the sky spat both laser fire and solid shells at the Imperial fighters. Dodging these alone would have been a chore. Dodging these when they were joined by more ork scrap-flyers and anti-air fire from the tanks below turned the situation into the nightmare that Colonel Sarren had promised.
Barasath’s first wave scattered, boosting toward the primitive landing strips the enemy had formed in the desert.
Hundreds of ork fighters still waited on the ground, unable to take off yet, consigned to waiting their turn on the scraped-flat runways. A more pessimistic man might have noted there was little he could do to such a massive, grounded force when he led the remaining birds of an air superiority squadron. A more pessimistic man might also have circled the enemy airbase and waited for his Thunderbolt bombers in the second wave.
Korten Barasath was not a pessimistic man, and his patience took a backseat when it came to necessity. In graceful arcing dives and strafing runs,