For the Alpha Legion warfare is a game. A web of feints, sabotage and lies. The last thing the Alpha Legion wants to find itself in is an honest fight, they don't even know the meaning of the word. But that is exactly what Harrowmaster Solomon Akurra has gotten his warbands into. And unfortunately for them they face an enemy that is completely lacking in imagination, the Death Korps of Krieg.
The Death Korps of Krieg swarmed forward in an indistinguishable mass under the first drops of dawn rain, faceless behind their respirators and apparently heedless of losses. They were as easy to kill as insects too, by and large: the heavy greatcoats they wore provided little real protection against lasgun or autogun fire, let alone bolters or heavier weaponry. Nonetheless, the withering barrage of las fire they laid down in return as they advanced in grim lockstep over the corpses of their fellows was taking its toll. Savionus’ defenders had constructed the best defensive positions they could, but the city had never been fortified in any real manner, since the planet had not contained any hostile species upon settling and the aeldari raiders struck only at the smaller moons and mining colonies in the outer system.
Still, Solomon could not fathom why the Death Korps were here. They were not the sort of fast-moving, fluid ground force he would send to capture a city, with its maze of streets that were filled with strategic choke points and crucial junctions. They were a grinding tide that, yes, could potentially overwhelm an enemy with weight of numbers, but would struggle to bring those numbers to bear in the comparatively narrow gaps between Savionus’ blocks of buildings. Where was the mechanised infantry, or the spearhead of tanks and light vehicles?
Perhaps that was why they were here, he reflected. There was something almost intimidating about the sheer inhumanity of the enemy, in that it was difficult to find his usual angles of attack. The Alpha Legion specialised in feints and hidden strikes, in off-balancing and outmanoeuvring a foe. A plodding enemy that simply didn’t react to feints, and which fought so ponderously that it was never moving fast enough to have a balance that could be disrupted, was almost a double-bluff of mystery. Accepting them for what they were, and simply shooting them as they advanced into the teeth of your guns, felt like falling into a trap. Instead of fighting complexity with complexity, the Imperium had gone for maddening simplicity instead. What was even more infuriating was that, given Solomon was actively second-guessing easy kills, it was at least partially working.
He shook himself out of his momentary reverie. The tide of the Death Korps were nearly across the deadzone of cleared land that marked the city’s edge, and were encroaching upon the raised earthworks and barricades that were the best fortifications the defenders were able to construct in the limited time they’d had. It was time to strike back. Solomon activated his vox, and spoke a single command.‘Charge.’
...His command was akin to a dam bursting. Portions of barricade which looked simply like sheets of metal were slammed aside and revealed as the sally ports they were, and body after body swarmed out. The Death Korps’ ceaseless hail of fire dropped some as soon as they appeared, but these were beastmen – horned mutants superior to any mortal human in strength, resiliency, and brute savagery.
They hit the Krieg line in a thunder of hooves and braying voices, whereupon primitive firearms were discharged at point-blank range and simple, bladed weapons began to bite deep into Death Korps bodies. Solomon saw one particularly large abhuman skewer a Korpsman on its horns and rear up, throwing the luckless Imperial bodily back over its head to land beneath the trampling hooves of its herdmates.
...He led his brothers straight across the Imperium’s advance, thrusting into it like a knife into a wound, and they left a trail of destruction in their wake. Solomon contemptuously swatted aside a bayonet aimed at his helmet’s eye-lenses and simply punched the Korpsman in the face, without bothering to alter the shape or composition of his fist. The respirator disintegrated under the force of his blow, swiftly followed by the head behind it, and the Imperial dropped bonelessly to the ground. One of the fallen warrior’s companions, their main weapon apparently lost in the press of combat, swung a sharp-bladed shovel as an improvised bludgeon. It was an act borne of desperation: Solomon let the blow skitter off his pauldron, then grabbed the human by the neck with his left hand, pressed his bolter against their stomach, and blew their spine out of their back.
...There was little opportunity for further musing, however, because the Death Korps were pressing forward with renewed intensity, literally climbing over the bodies of their fallen comrades in an effort to get to grips with the Ghost Legion. Solomon and his companions continued to cut them down as fast as they came, but there was still something unnerving about their single-minded fanaticism. While Solomon had no compunctions about dealing death to his enemies, these felt more like the metal automata of the necrons he had encountered in the Eastern Fringes.
'Is this what the Imperium calls – unf! – humanity?’ Kyrin asked, hurling one soldier back into two more with an audible snapping of bones, so they all collapsed into the mud beneath their feet. ‘One wonders why they object so greatly to us, when this is what they have reduced their own people to!’
"Such is the way of empires,’ Solomon replied. ‘Anything is permissible in defence of the structure, even that which is reviled in the outsider.’ He stepped back half a pace to allow a frenzied bayonet swing to miss him, then broke the human’s neck with a quick thrust of his hand. ‘Still,’ he added, as two more lunged at him and were each blown backwards by boltrounds from his weapon, ‘this is more frenzied than I would have expected even from this regiment.
’‘Look at Lord Evale!’ someone shouted, and Solomon risked a glance sideways. Drab-coated bodies were swarming forward and piling up as they tried to reach the lord of the Penitent Sons, accumulating faster than Evale and the legionnaires with him could kill them. The Imperials were not even trying to bring weapons to bear; they simply latched on to the Space Marines and clung grimly on, seeking to weigh them down. But to what purpose? To allow their companions to slide a knife into a neck joint, or pry loose a helmet seal?
Then, over the din of battle, Solomon felt the ground shake with a series of vibrations, an earthbound thunder. Long experience of fighting the Imperium told him what was coming next, but what was the target?
Then he looked again at the Death Korps clinging to Vyrun Evale and anchoring him in place, and remembered what Tulava had said about them being just as willing to die for the Emperor as kill for Him.
'Disengage!’ he yelled, as comprehension dawned. ‘Disengage and retreat!’
He turned and ran, just as the screaming of shells began to fill the air. He was some two hundred yards from Vyrun Evale when the bombardment hit.
It was not enough.Earthshaker rounds, the stock-in-trade of Basilisk artillery pieces, rained down in a curtain of tapered steel. The world disintegrated. Direction became meaningless. The ground shook underfoot so wildly that Solomon tripped and stumbled, unable to determine which way was up; shrapnel and concussion waves hammered into him from multiple directions, rendering futile any attempt to make progress. The landscape was blasted apart, any semblance of order and settlement rent asunder by the titanic forces being unleashed. Spun around, he saw another legionnaire take the full force of a warhead detonating practically next to him: the Space Marine came apart in a blast of light so bright it caused the visual sensors in Solomon’s helmet to briefly black out, and when his vision cleared again he was on his back, where the shockwave had knocked him.
...Movement was essentially at random, but staying still was a recipe for death. Solomon scrambled and crawled, dignity long since fled in the face of the Imperial bombardment, and the fire of anger and resentment burned brighter inside him at every moment. To be reduced to this, by the weapons of snivelling mortals that were not even in view! To have the end of his life come down to random chance, and depend on whether or not he happened to stumble directly into the path of a shell launched by an Imperial gunner who might be miles behind the front line, simply obeying orders to fire upon specific coordinates! He would make them pay.
Now some may see this as just Death Korp wank, which it partially is, but it's also the epitome of the Imperium. A vast unfeeling, unthinking, juggernaut that's more than happy to drown you in bodies.