‘Of course. It’s almost like you wantthem to attack here. What I don’t understand is why we are letting them when we should be taking the fight to them.’

‘The Death Guard advance like a surge tide,’ said Remus. ‘If we meet them head on, their strength will sweep us away. But we pull back, drawing them ever onwards until they are thin and spent. Thenwe will strike them.’

‘This is your plan?’

‘No,’ said Remus. ‘It is our strategy as decreed by the primarch’s writings.’

‘Permission to speak freely, captain?’ asked Barkha.

‘Granted.’

‘Are we really going to play this out basing our tactics on a book?’

‘The primarch’s book,’ Remus reminded him.

‘I know, and I mean no disrespect by these questions, but can any book – even one written by a primarch – cover everytactical eventuality?’

‘I suppose we are about to find out,’ said Remus, as he heard chatter over the vox.

Death Guard units were moving into the lower reaches of the valley.

‘Stand the men to arms, sergeant,’ ordered Remus.

‘Aye, captain,’ said Barkha. He saluted and turned to get the 4th Company moving.

Remus Ventanus stared off into the distance, seeing a glitter of fires from further down the mountains. Castra Publius was gone, Ultramarines were being lost and the Death Guard were coming to destroy them.

How had it come to this?

THE DEATH GUARD attacked fifty-two minutes later, a brutal assault spearheaded by heavy armour and Dreadnoughts. It was a mailed fist, calculated to bludgeon the defenders into insensibility before the follow-up punch slammed home to complete their destruction. Mechanised infantry squads rumbled forwards in the wake of olive-painted Land Raiders that hurled incandescent bolts at the defenders. Disciplined phalanxes of warriors armoured in the same livery deployed from the armoured transports and began their inexorable advance upon the Ultramarines position.

Laser fire and bolters hammered the advancing warriors, punching holes in the advance but slowing it not at all. What little artillery they had dropped specially manufactured munitions into the enemy ranks, felling enemy squads in shrieks of light and sound. Enemy Dreadnoughts waded into the fight, weaponised arms sawing through the defenders with machine-like precision and lethality.

Remus saw an entire squad of Ultramarines put down by two Dreadnoughts working in concert, and bellowed to his one remaining heavy weapons team to take them out. A trio of missiles leapt towards the Dreadnoughts, and one fell silent as it was struck in the flank by two warheads. The second was dealt with moments later as a multi-melta scored a direct hit on its sarcophagus.

These were fleeting victories, bright moments in the face of overwhelming odds. The Death Guard fought like machines, driving forwards with the unthinking, unfeeling ardour of something soulless and mechanical. Remus was a warrior, a gene-crafted killer of superlative ability, but he had been created to be so much more than that. He took pride in his abilities as a warrior, relishing the chance to match his skill against another, but to see the Death Guard at war was to face an opponent to whom war was simply attrition.

But Remus had no intention of dancing to the Death Guard’s war drums.

Tactical feeds flickered and scrolled on his visor, casualty rates, kill-ratios, projected outcomes, and a dozen other battlefield variables. The flow of information would have left even an augmented Imperial Army Tacticus overwhelmed, but Remus’s genhanced cognitive architecture processed it in the time it took to blink.

As the Death Guard regrouped for another assault on the walls, Remus’s eidetic memory accessed the parameters of battle as contained in the primarch’s tactical schematics. He found a match, following the logic path through its predetermined courses of action. Now was the time to pull back.

Remus clamped his bolter to his thigh and issued the withdrawal order, one of two dozen permitted options available to him. With smooth precision, the Ultramarines began falling back by squads as the Talassar Auxilia filled the killing ground before the wall with las-fire. The Mechanicum engine, though not designed as a war machine, was nevertheless equipped with a fearsome array of defensive weaponry. As its enormous treads ground it away from the battle, the barking roar of its close-in guns ripped overhead, the sound strangely flat and without the usual percussive banging of massed bolters. Artillery pieces launched a last volley over the walls before turning and racing up the winding road through the mountains.

Remus turned and dropped from the wall, joining Sergeant Barkha and the depleted ranks of his command squad. Ithus, Helika and Pilus were gone, which left his squad dangerously under strength, but the primarch’s writings had considered such an eventuality, and Remus acquired replacements from those squads who had come through the fighting unscathed.

Behind them, the Death Guard finally reached the wall, forcing their way over it as the defenders made their escape. As the Ultramarines crested the ridge behind the wall, Remus sent a coded burst transmission to the Mechanicum adept in the gargantuan construction engine. Seconds later, a controlled series of detonations brought down the valley walls in a thunderous avalanche. It was little more than a delaying tactic. The Death Guard would break through before long, but it was enough for now.

Barkha nodded to him as they retreated into the mountains.

‘We’re running out of room,’ said Barkha. ‘You think we’ve done enough to break them against the walls of Castra Tanagra?’

Remus didn’t answer right away. The tactical plots of kill-to-casualty ratios were scrolling down his screen. It made for grim reading, but they were still within the parameters set by the predicted conditions of the engagement. Overviews from the grand strategium filtered through the tactical information, revealing the extent to which the Death Guard had been bled white by constantly hammering the Ultramarines fortifications.

‘It looks like it,’ he replied. ‘The other Chapters have done well.’

‘Not as well as us, though?’ asked Barkha.

‘No, not as well as us,’ said Remus. ‘No one outdoes the Troublesome Fourth, eh?’

‘Not on my watch,’ agreed Barkha.

Remus liked the heart his sergeant displayed, pleased to hear such proud aggression in the warrior’s voice. It seemed the primarch’s purely doctrinal approach to war was holding up to the vagaries of battle.

But this was simply one fight, and one opponent of many ranged against them.

The real tests would come later.

Engagement 136

THE HOLO-PICT projected above the glossy surface of the plotter cast a stark light around the grand strategium. It folded sharp shadows around the gleaming walls and bleached deeply tanned faces of colour. The air was thick and close, redolent with the toxic oils and caustic unguents smouldering in the Mechanicum’s censers. It smelled of engine oil mixed with at least a dozen poisonous elements, and though it was Mechanicum witchery, it was certainly effective. The Legiones Astartes endured these effluvia without effect, but the mortals within the grand strategium coughed and rubbed eyes that constantly streamed with tears.

Remus Ventanus didn’t know if they were tears engendered by the petrochemical irritants in the burners or the sight of so beautiful a world being destroyed. A measure of both, he surmised.

He stared at the desolation of Prandium and wanted to weep. The most beautiful world of Ultramar by any reckoning, its wondrous forests, sculpted mountains and shimmering lakes were either burning or wreathed in smoke and choked with pollutants.

Never afraid of extreme measures, Angron had let slip his World Eaters in the most vicious way imaginable. Remus had once heard his primarch say that Angron’s Legion could succeed where all others would fail because the Red Angel was willing to go further than any other Legion, to countenance behaviour that any civilised code of war would deem abhorrent.