Deployment was always the worst. Fraigum had been a Navis voidswoman her entire adult life. She had defended her assigned ship from attempted boardings by corsair renegades, served with a vanguard breacher team storming an ork warship, and had even seen combat in a full void-born assault on the Star Fort Spatha 6-Phi after it had been hijacked by xenos raiders. She would trade every single desperate moment from any of those battles for having to endure minutes of this; strapped to a grav-harness inside an adamantium box that shook and groaned with every maneuver its pilot put it through. The red lights of the assault bay flickered in time with the acrobatic sensations threatening to upend her stomach. She had never vomited on a deployment flight in her career and she would be damned before she let Flint make her break that streak.
"Everyone hang on back there." The pilot's voice suddenly spilled out of the Shrike's intercom speakers as if thinking of her had summoned it. "Ride might get a bit bumpy before we hit atmosphere. ETA nine minutes."
"Throne." Fraigum hissed. Nine more minutes of this shit? Deployment always threatened her sanity. At least in a battle she could act. Actually do something. But here in the belly of a flying beast all any of them could do was breathe, try not to be sick, and pray to the God-Emperor for mercy.
"Having fun, Sergeant?" Chief Sudarja nearly shouted. Her boss was strapped into the harness next to her along the Shrike's port side. The ambient noise of the craft's straining engines and the periodic screech of its stressed metal frame were loud enough that most of the near thirty passengers within the hold could only really hear the person to their left or right if they raised their voice.
"I hate flying." She answered. She didn't know why he was asking, Sudarja had served with her long enough to know that about her at least.
"Yeah." The Chief nodded. Even in the gloom of the dim red light Fraigum could see that bright smile of his. "At least they seem to be having fun."
Fraigum followed her boss' gaze to the other side of the hold. There Captain Rukowski and Lady Harper were strapped in the harnesses nearest the cockpit next to each other seemingly lost in their own conversation that Fraigum couldn't possibly hear.
"Makes you wonder, eh Sergeant?" Sudarja turned to look at Fraigum when he received no response only to see her staring directly at him through her helmet's photo visor. "What?"
Fraigum tapped the side of her helmet with a finger and then made a small series of hand signals in the voidsman's cant. A useful communication tool for when a team wanted to maintain noise discipline while clearing the halls of an enemy ship's deck...or like now when she wanted to say something on a two way vox channel that was meant for Sudarja's ears only.
"Oh." Sudarja said. He turned the frequency adjuster on his armor's vambrace to the channel Fraigum had indicated. The channel opened a second later and background static filled his ears.
"I don't buy the story everyone seems to have agreed on about how the Captain got here." She said over the link.
"Doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for a veteran guardsman to just appear out of the ether on a feudal backwater, does it?"
"The Mistress knows him from somewhere."
Sudarja looked back towards Lady Harper and then back around to Fraigum. "You don't think she knows him do you?"
Fraigum had to suppress a bark of laughter. She hadn't expected that particular question in the middle of her little conspiracy theory. "I don't think so."
"You don't sound convinced." The Chief teased.
"Can't say for sure, just a gut feeling." She imitated her boss' mocking tone. "Or call it a woman's intuition if you like but none of my exes ever wanted to shoot the shit with me after we went our separate ways."
"Can't imagine why." He could feel Fraigum's flippant look boring into him as the words left his mouth. He flashed her another smile. "I don't think its a secret that not everything about the Captain adds up. He's not a ponce or a moron which is good enough for me."
"Well you know I've heard some talk."
"From who?"
"C'mon Chief, you know how life in the navy is. Nothing secret ashore stays secret aboard for long."
"Kitchen crews, then?"
"Aye."
Sudarja was hardly surprised. It was a pretty open secret that if you wanted to keep something hushed on the Sanctus you had to keep it away from the food. If even one member of the dining staff aboard caught a whiff of whatever it was then it was guaranteed to be halfway around the ship by evening the next day. And some of the things whispered amongst the crew could be pretty crazy given the vessel's nature as a Rogue Trader ship. Sudarja was just disappointed that he hadn't heard this particular gossip first. He idly wondered where the stakes were in that betting pool about Captain Rukowski's origins he'd heard about when the man had first begun doing the rounds in the armsman's barracks.
"So what's the story, then?" Sudarja said.
"Apparently he was aboard before we even got close to Caedis III." Fraigum shrugged. "At least that's what they're saying."
"So...what?" Sudarja snorted. "He was just stowed away in The Mistress' chambers until after we left there?" He was about to snicker when he noticed Fraigum staring at him again.
"You can't be serious."
"I dunno, Chief." She shook her head. "But one of her gourmets swears he served Captain Rukowski during a dinner she held for honored guests of House Harper just after that business with the xenos."
"The Eldar pirates and those metal—"
"Yes those xenos." Fraigum shuddered. She had long since made peace with how her duties serving a Rogue Trader's house could differ greatly from the average Navis sailor's duties but that didn't mean she had to like it. The privileges and freedoms that such respected agents of the Emperor's will were granted in return for serving his Imperium's interests were as vast as they were extraordinary and every crewman and woman aboard the Sanctus was well aware of how keen Lady Harper was on using them to her full advantage.
"So that's it, then?" Sudarja continued, the arch in his eyebrow obvious from his bewildered tone. "Instead of just seeming to blip into existence during some noble's civil war its the same story but after the Mistress is done parleying with some mysterious xenos instead?"
Fraigum did her best not to wince. Bringing this up had been a mistake. She was suddenly keenly aware of how much this sounded like her slandering a superior to another superior. She had to backtrack. She had to salvage something from this hole she'd dug for herself.
"I'm only reporting on what I've heard, sir." She said, taking refuge in formality. "You know how the cooks are prone to making up a few tall tales to pass the time."
"But you think there's something to that?" Damn it all. He wasn't going to let her off easy. Fraigum shrank back into the seat of her harness. Had the air within the hold become warmer and drier in the past minute or was it just her?
"I think..." She said slowly, just buying time now. There was a diplomatic way to get out of this trap, she just had to find it. "I think they served together somewhere."
"The Captain and the Lady?"
"Yes sir."
Sudarja looked away, his head turned towards the Captain and Lady Harper. He couldn't make out anything they were saying but their body language at least told him that whatever was being said was at least somewhat cordial. Fraigum squirmed in her seat, the sudden silence of her boss scaring her more than the constant shift in the pitch of the engines' roaring that she'd nearly forgotten about at this point. She was about to add something more to her statements when Sudarja spoke without looking at her.
"I first met him in that bar old Dugan runs for the midship crew on deck thirty four. That one with the stage and the piano, you know the one?"
"Aye, sir."
"I'd been told to look for the out of place looking sod in a Militarum uniform amongst a throng of Navis bilge rats. I found him playing that piano while Missus Joan crooned out some old romantic waltz on stage. Joan doesn't sing anymore but apparently she thought he was good enough at the keys to play her a song."
Sudarja finally turned back to Fraigum and the Sergeant was surprised to see the look on his face. She couldn't see his eyes behind his helmet's photo visor but the part of his face she could see looked...concerned? Worried even?
"I bought him a drink, welcomed him aboard, all that stuff, you know. We did the usual song and dance. Hey you poor footslogging grunt, how's the ground? Just fine you stuck up Navis bastard, hope you get your ass blown into the vacuum of space. That sort of thing. Dugan pours the drinks, I pick up my glass and say why don't you tell me how they toast on your planet?"
The relatively unsilent silence that came after Sudarja trailed off was somehow more unnerving to Fraigum than how she'd been worried before. He hadn't told her any of this before about the Captain. Where the hell was he going with this?
"And?" She prodded.
"He just," Sudarja paused again, looking for the right words. "He got this look on his face like someone had just shot his mother right in front of him. Horrified. I asked him if he was alright and he just said something about not remembering, spun on the spot and stumbled out of the bar in a daze after that."
Fraigum's jaw worked at a few words to try to respond to that but nothing she came up with in the moment seemed to be appropriate.
"Next time I saw him was in the barracks room a few hours later and he talked to me about training regimens and breaching drills like nothing happened."
"Far be it from me to question the competence of any of the chosen agents of the honored Mistress." Fraigum said, finding it impossible to keep the grimace she wore from tainting the tone of her words. "But...do you think the Captain...I mean...is he—"
"Sound enough to lead us into combat?" Sudarja offered. "I understand the fear to ask it but one of us has to."
"Well. Is he?"
Sudarja flashed her his smile again. She was not reassured by it this time.
"Guess there's only one way to find out, huh?"
Caedis V was just like Rook remembered it; dilapidated, in complete dissaray, hollowed out and half engulfed in fire. All around him was the detritus and desolation of millennia spent in the holy labor of the Adeptus Mechanicus laid low by a century's old alien invasion that he could remember like it was only yesterday. Everywhere he looked was another ghost of those days that he had to desperately insist in his mind passed decades ago. Had that line of iron fencing along the metallic thoroughfare before him been half bent and cratered when he'd last been here or was it a recent addition to the city's ruined surface structure as a result of this new catastrophe that was unfolding within it? Were the iron skull an cog motifs stamped and welded into every towering facade and in every steel portal through those same buildings always possessed of this rusty patina that seemed to creep its way into every corner of this once proud monument to industry and silica or had he once seen them blazing and bright in the forge fires? Maybe he had seen them all like that but only in his nightmares. Maybe he was in one now and he just hadn't woken up yet. There was a comforting thought.
"Captain, I've got our squads spread out as you ordered." Sudarja's voice was in his ear through the static laden comm channel wired directly into Rook's helmet. "What's our next move?"
Rook looked up from the datapad mounted into one of his armor's vambraces. He was starting to see why stormtroopers weren't caught dead without this sort of gear available to them. He could think of more than a few situations where access to some of these sorts of tools would have saved his fellow guardsmen whole buckets of blood and sweat. His helmet's visor-born heads up display quickly scanned and marked out figures hidden in the urban ruins all around him with green glowing outlines. Sudarja's and Fraigum's squads who he'd ordered to go to ground mere moments after they'd disembarked from the belly of the Shrike and watched it ascend back up into the sky, tracer fire tracking it the entire way. At least they weren't hurting for places to hide, it seemed like every fourth or fifth building along these metal strewn streets was half cratered into near oblivion. Entire edifices that had fallen into some streets had yet to be completely cleaned; piles of bricks as tall as a man sat forlorn in vehicle yards and the rusted out forms of skeletal looking electrical transformer towers sagged drunkenly over boulevards bent and twisted, their cables a long abandoned and tangled ruin of frayed wiring. It was such a mess that it had become impossible to tell where the old devastation ended and the new cataclysm began in this city.
"We haven't seen more than a handful of civilians since we made planetfall." That was Fraigum in his ear this time, suspicious as ever. "This is supposed to be one of the most heavily inhabited cities on the planet. Where is everyone?"
"Shit, sarge." He didn't recognize that voice. Try as he might, Rook had still yet to memorize all of the voidsmens' names. "If this city is all I had to look forward to I wouldn't spend much time above ground either."
"The attack just happened, right?" Another confused voice asked over the vox net. "How have the rebels done this much damage already."
"They haven't." Rook cut in. "Most of the damage you see around you was left here courtesy of Warboss Gorkanak and his ork filth."
"Orks?" That was Krayl. "Thought that business was done a century ago."
"One of the first things you learn in the guard, Krayl," Rook said while looking back down at his datapad and the glowing symbols that were moving across it. "If you ever think you killed all the orks that dared set foot on one of the Emperor's worlds actually no you didn't."
Rook sighed. This little platoon of his had managed to find some good cover in mostly standing hab blocks, debris choked alleys and abandoned warehouses but the same things that provided them shelter and concealment would also protect the rebels as they spread throughout the city. There was only half a kilometer between them and the regent's position but if they'd have to fight through a half destroyed forge-city like Salvator to get there it might as well have been on the other side of the planet; the amount of murderous ambushes they'd encounter would decimate them before they even got close. He had to come up with something. There was no great way to get where they needed to go through subtlety...unless he wanted to try to find a way to access the sewers.
He shuddered at the thought. He'd been in Salvator's sewers once. He didn't really fancy going down there again.
"Do you think we could face orks down here, Captain?" Sudarja asked. At least he was listening when his subordinates spoke even if they might technically be doing it out of turn. It was a good trait for a leader to have.
"I can only hope not, Chief." Rook replied as a few more symbols appeared on his datapad. He cocked his head to one side, wondering if he was seeing this correctly. Up above them all the Shrike's auspex scanners were putting in work even if Flint was currently unable to get the craft low enough to give them direct support. She was transmitting direct surveillance information to his armor's systems that he could use to create a holographic map of their surroundings and what sort of enemy units were around them, their concentrations, and where they were headed. This sort of real time battlefield intelligence was something a lot of Militarum officers would give their right arms for and here it was in the palm of his hand. Damn, he really should have started working for a Rogue Trader sooner. "But orks or no orks we've got a job to do and I think I just figured out how we're going to do it."
"Well don't leave us all in suspense then, groundpounder." Sudarja said. "You're the expert here so you call the play."
Rook felt a smile creep across his face underneath the respirator of his helmet. "Oh don't worry, its a plan simple enough even you grox-brained Navis types could wrap your head around it." He flicked the activation rune on his datapad turning off the display, grabbed the meltagun he'd leaned against a ruined wall and stood up from his crouch. He turned to look out of what was left of the second story window in the hab he was currently standing in. The building used to have many more stories, that much was obvious by the fact that the entirety of this one was open to Salvatore's soot filled sky, but where they had gone only the Omnissiah knew he supposed. He looked across the street, down into a storage yard where several armored figures were arrayed behind stacks of iron piping and shipping containers in their green outlines on his visor's display. He caught the eye of one of the figures who turned to look towards his position in the protracted silence and gave the man a thumbs up.
"But first we're going to need a Militarum grade battering ram."
They had spent the last ten minutes since planetfall starting and stopping. The echoing gunfire and thundering report of some kind of artillery kept him on edge as he cleared streets and alleys with his squadmates in front of him and behind him. Three or four times he had turned a corner and nearly pulled the trigger of his lasgun on some poor fab worker just looking for a place to hide. They looked at him with wide eyes set into sunken sockets and wrinkled, pockmarked faces. They mumbled apologies and pleas to spare them in the local dialect of gothic. They scrambled away from him and his team, sometimes on hands and knees, through puddle slicked potholes in claustrophobic back alleys or grit strewn hab rooms. Some clutched the hands of children who were just as confused and scared as their parents and guardians were. He wished he could stop and speak to them. He wished he could tell them that things would be okay even though he knew they probably wouldn't. He wished they didn't have to be here. He wished he didn't either.
"Merri, you got any idea why the fuck we stopped here?" Vanzik asked him. The Captain had led them down a few more boulevards after stopping to confer with Chief Sudarja and Sergeant Fraigum. Then they'd all moved out in good order in patrol formation and it had been nothing but marching through these nearly deserted city streets just waiting for a sniper to pick one of them off from concealed position behind a distant window or for a surprise grenade to roll out from a balcony and blow half of them to hell ever since. To hell with this, Merri thought, no wonder Militarum soldiers were uniformly dour, this ground combat groxshit had him on edge and he'd only been in it for less than half an hour.
"I dunno." Merri shrugged. He and a few of his squadmates were spread out on the third floor of what looked to be some kind of Administratum office building. Overturned cubicle desks and the exploded silica guts of cogitators littered the floors along with heaps of ruined parchments containing supply and logistics data reports that no one would ever read. Not like the flunkies that used to work in this building would have put any of it to good use anyway. "I think the Captain split us all up into fireteams. Chief Sudarja's a bit down the street in that commercia block and I think the Sarge is up at the corner there behind the rolled over cargo hauler."
Armsman Merralum Chal, his friends called him Merri, didn't know a hell of a lot about their new captain but he knew the Chief seemed to trust the Militarum officer which was good enough for him. Be that as it may, this course of action was causing him to scratch his head a bit. Why were they stopped again and finding boltholes along this street to bunker down in? Didn't they need to keep moving toward the regent's position? The Sarge's briefing aboard the Shrike as they made their way down the planet had been pretty clear; the regent faced poor odds and it was their job to even them out. So how did what they were doing accomplish that?
A set of quick bootfalls on broken tiles brought him back to the present and he clutched his lasgun to his chest as he stood next to a half closed window. Corporal Maizal jogged through the door into the office space he and Vanzik were currently holed up in. She took a spot further along the wall than them and peered through her own window down to the street below.
"Word's come down. Get ready for contact." She ordered.
"The fuck?" Vanzik spat. "Here? We're nowhere near the regent's position!"
"Have any of you actually seen the Captain in the last few minutes?" Merri cut in. "I can make out the Sarge's team, Chief Sudarja's team, Krayl's and Bodjac's from here but I haven't seen him since we split up."
"Think I saw him scramble up that high rise over there." Gronnir said from his corner. Merri almost jumped out of his skin at the sound of the large trooper's low voice. The man practically never used it unless addressed directly so one tended to almost forget about his presence. Gronnir took a hand off the furniture of his las volley he had set up on the edge of desk to point out to the street below to point at the tallest building on their block; a clock tower that seemed to also function as some sort of shrine to the machine god of the cogboys. The top of the tower's spire was at least twenty stories above the concrete courtyard below and even if the giant analog chronometer, no doubt some sort of artisanal display of the precision of Salvator's machine artisans, was defunct, it was still pretty amazing to all the voidsmen that the tower seemed relatively untouched by the wars that had been fought here in the past.
"The hell's he doing up there?" Vanzik asked.
Gronnir went back to sighting in his weapon on the street below him but graced the other trooper with a shrug. "He looked awful silly carting around that grav chute though."
Merri opened his mouth to cut in but stopped himself as he became suddenly aware of a certain feeling. There was a distinct rumble in the air that hadn't been there a few moments ago. On instinct he kept quiet and tried to filter out his fellow troopers' conversation so he could recognize whatever it was that he could sense right at the edge of his hearing.
"What?" Vanzik hissed. "What's he need one of those for?"
"Shut up Vanzik." Merri blurted out.
"Maybe he's thinking of doing the same thing the cogboys did earlier?" Maizal said, adjusting the sights on her own lasgun.
Vanzik's tone was a bit desperate now. "From where?!"
"Shut UP, Vanzik!" Merri spat at the other trooper. He turned back towards the window and now with none of their talk breaking the silence they could all hear what Merri had just barely felt a few moments ago getting louder by the second.
Engines. Multiple. And the unmistakable sound of roaring transmissions powering clanking treads over paved roadways.
"They're coming." Maizal said, swallowing in a vain attempt to relieve her suddenly dry throat as she lowered herself into a crouch by her window. "Get ready and don't open fire until the signal is given."
The Captain's intel and their own ears hadn't steered them wrong. Down the street not a minute later a Chimera APC turned onto the avenue around which Rook's hastily prepared ambush laid in waiting. Behind it trundled a five ton cargo truck, its bed occupied by near two full squads of armed men identically cowled in the same roughspun brown hoods the voidsmen had seen in the pict recording upon the Shrike. There was no conversation amongst the hiding Navis troopers. This was the enemy, there could be no doubting it now. The Chimera clanked along the road, its engines revving as it turned its way around great shell craters and long abandoned vehicles at barely more than a walking pace. Its blocky, multilaser bearing turret scanned the street and the surrounding buildings in a slow arc as it went along. The insurgents in the back of the truck stirred not at all, no doubt lost in their own thoughts as they approached the battle happening further towards the core of the city. They wouldn't have to worry about making it that far.
As the Chimera rounded another corner at the far end of the street a figure shifted from his spot under the awning of a storage shed atop the roof of a derelict forge and fab complex. Armsman Krayl, unseen by his targets below, depressed the firing studs on his rotor cannon and its motor sprang to life with the whirring whine of galvanic motive forces. It was followed by the deafening mechanical rip of the weapon's barrels spitting high caliber death at an insane amount of rounds per minute in a display that exemplified the reason why voidsmen grimly referred to the rotor cannon as the 'deck clearer.'
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Krayl had waited for the cargo truck to pass by his building, ensuring he'd have the best line of sight possible on his target's profile; the squad of troops riding in the truck stories below him on the street. The cacophony of his weapon's report served as the signal for the other fire teams to begin their attack, the air was suddenly full of ionized cracks and the bright red spears of lasbolts flying from random windows and doorways on both sides of the boulevard. Half of the rebels in the back of the open topped vehicle were dead before they even knew what happened. A storm of tracer rounds turned the vehicle into a rolling pile of scrap metal and its occupants into the gore colored paint lining that scrap metal. Five or six rebels yelped and threw themselves over the sides of the truck bed in a desperate bid to escape their disintegrating vehicle but three were picked off before they could even fully rise to their feet, the others scrambling as fast as their legs could carry them to anywhere but where they were currently. The driver made a last ditch attempt at swinging his mortally wounded truck about perhaps in order to speed off in the opposite direction but only got about halfway around before a fusillade of lasbolts and stub rounds punctured the cabin through the windshield. He managed to get a hand onto the driver door's opening latch before before slumping forward onto the wheel while his life's blood ran in rivulets down the dashboard in front of him. The truck rolled forward without a living operator until it jumped the curb and crashed through the window of a small street shop before finally coming to a halt in a shower of broken glass.
The Chimera's driver slammed the vehicle's brakes, slewing the the bulky armored box of its hull in a wide U turn in the middle of the street as its gunner desperately spun the turret around and began firing wildly, indiscriminately at the muzzle flashes in the windows around it. The door at the back of the vehicle slammed open and from within spilled a squad of rebel troops firing their weapons with an alarmed fervor displayed only by soldiers who suddenly find their backs against a wall with an unseen enemy pressing down on them from multiple directions. Naturally, with no other cover in the immediate vicinity each of them sprinted behind the Chimera's armored side, proceeding to lean around its edges in order to aim and fire their lasguns in the direction of their attackers.
Sergeant Fraigum and her team had been lying in wait as the other fireteams opened up for exactly this moment and as soon as their foes came scrambling out of the relative protection of the Chimera she was suddenly there in the street charging out from behind the overturned truck her and four others had crouched behind earlier. Her cutlass was in her hand, its blade sheathed in the sparkling blue energy of its power field as she strode forwards and pulled the trigger on the weapon in her other hand; a gunmetal grey bolt pistol roaring with sound and fury, its action bucking back with each shot. Across the street behind market stalls in the commercia courtyard Chief Sudarja suddenly stood, a plasma pistol, its fuel cells burning a bright blue as he waited for the shot to overcharge, held aloft in his own hand. Before the Chimera could prioritize this new threat a migraine bright lance of energy shot out of the pistol's ancient muzzle and arced its way into the Chimera turret's mantlet where it exploded in a brilliant azure flash of superheated air that left molten, orange-white slag in its wake. The multilaser fell silent as smoke and sparks poured out of its barrel. The stricken APC's driver tried desperately to turn and back the vehicle down the street it had come from but even as it began its slow retreat Fraigum's team had closed the distance with bayonets, lasguns, and shotguns bared. Whatever was left of the squad taking cover behind the Chimera had no hope to stop her voidsmens' charge as lasbolts and stub rounds continued to rain around them and pin them down, sparking off the vehicle's armored flanks. The bow mounted heavy bolter on the APC tried in vain to shoot at the Sergeant but the driver's mad maneuvers had left it in a poor position to aim well and all the gunner within managed to do was ruin the masonry on several buildings lining the street as the vehicle's treads continued to take it backwards. In another few moments Fraigum's troopers were within arm's reach of the vehicle and it was only a moment's work for one of them to round the still open rear door and toss a pair of frag grenades deep within the hull. The remainder of the squad of rebels that had been within the vehicle mere minutes before had no choice but to turn tail and flee into nearby allies as the grenades went off with a dull krump, they scrambled by each other taking potshots at their assailants over their shoulders in a mad bid at escape. The bright spears of lasfire and the scattered shot of shotgun rounds peppered the alley walls behind them until they vanished out of sight to anyone on the street.
"Pursue, sarge?" One of Fraigum's troopers asked as they stuck their shotgun's muzzle into the shadows of the Chimera to make sure nobody inside was still moving.
"Negative." Fraigum huffed. She'd deactivated the field on her sword and was now wiping its blade length with a cloth to remove the blood stuck to its polished surface. "I think that's all of them." She put a hand up to the side of her helmet. "Chief do you see any others from your position?"
"Negative." Came the terse reply over their comms. "Few stragglers may have hightailed it down other side streets. Any idea where they're going?"
"Probably away from the scary sailors that just kicked their asses." One of Fraigum's troops said with a smirk as he reloaded his lasgun.
"Not a clue, skipper." Fraigum shrugged as she surveyed the street. The echoes of the cracking lasfire and booming shotguns still reverberated through her, ringing in her ears. Some piece of the cargo truck had been shot off in a crumpled metal mess and was now burning in the middle of the road as a slick of engine fluid formed a puddle around it. The firefight had started and ended all within the same two minutes. Throne in flames they always felt like hours, she thought. "But I think we should rally, retrieve whatever it is the Captain wanted from this and—"
"Wait one, Sergeant."
Fraigum's irritation at being cut off mid sentence was short lived. One of her troopers spoke next.
"Sarge, is the Chimera's engine idling?"
Fraigum looked around, confusion replacing frustration. The Chimera was at a dead stop, its engine still running but all activity within having been ceased after the grenades Voidsman Heldek had thrown in went off.
"Yes?"
"Then what the hell is that?"
The trooper pointed in the direction of the alleys the rebels had scrambled down mere minutes ago and Fraigum craned her neck in that direction to hear what he meant. There, on the wind was a set of sounds like the ones they had heard the Chimera make as it approached their street only...louder, deeper, broader.
And getting closer.
"Chief?" Fraigum asked into her comm bead.
"I hear it, Sergeant." He then raised his voice to everyone on the relay. "All hands to battlestations this fight isn't—"
Whatever else he had ordered them to do was lost in the roar of a building exploding.
Something had hit the commercia block. More specifically, something had hit the floor of the building directly above the street level commercia block because every single window facing the street on that side of the building had exploded into a torrent of glass and chunks of masonry that rained down onto Chief Sudarja's team. The explosion had thrown Merri and the rest of his team to the floor of their perch in the Administratum block house. His ears were ringing, he worked his jaw to try to pop his drums back into normalcy as he groped for his weapon on the ground.
"Saint's blood what the fuck was that?!" Vanzik screamed. He didn't have to wait long for his answer.
A solid wall of brick, mortar, and steel that had been all that was left standing of a Mechanicus warehouse further down the street gutted in the ork invasion a century ago suddenly came crashing down as the lumbering form of a behemoth machine drove through it on two sets of clattering metal treads. Merri rose just high enough to see what had sent his world for a spin over the bottom of the nearest window sill.
"God Emperor save us." He whispered.
The monster was at least two times the height of a man and might have been as wide as a whole squad shoulder to shoulder. It slowly turned its ponderous turret to aim at the building at the far end of the street corner as it inexorably rolled into view through its baptism of brick dust kicked up by the falling wall. The autocannon that served as the coaxial for its massive main gun barked in a heavy, steady staccato of explosive rounds that raked the roofing of the fab-forge where Krayl's team had been taking cover. The storage shed upon the roof shuddered and collapsed under the fusillade. A rebel trooper standing on the monster's back held the firing handle of a heavy stubber bolted to the roof of the turret in his hands and before the autocannon had even finished its volley was already spraying bursts into every side alley and darkened doorway he could see. Merri watched as Chief Sudarja and his team ran at full sprint across the street towards the corner bend and the relative safety of the stalled Chimera Sergeant Fraigum's team was hunkered behind. A sound not unlike the ripping roar of Krayl's rotor cannon once again filled the air and so loud was it that Merri had to hold his ears to prevent them from throbbing. The multibarreled gun mounted in the monster's hull spat fury and death at the retreating voidsmen, a line of rounds stitching a series of kicked up clouds of shredded pavement that sawed into the back of Trooper Indrize who dropped to the ground mid stride in a crimson arterial spray, nearly cut in two.
"What the fuck are we supposed to do against that?!" Vanzik yelled in desperation, seeing what Merri was seeing. Merri could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears. He felt a pang of guilt as he sent a silent prayer of thanks to the Golden Throne that the massive tank hadn't turned its attention towards them yet.
"Maizal!" Vanzik was yelling. "Maizal we don't have anything that can even scratch that thing what are we supposed to do?!"
Maizal didn't respond. She was sitting with her back to the wall underneath the window where she had been standing mere moments before. Her armor was covered in grit that the explosion had shaken from the ceiling. She cradled her lasgun in her hands and rocked back and forth, her eyes unfocused and unblinking. Vanzik went to her side and shook her by the shoulders.
"Maizal!" He insisted. "Maizal, what the fuck are we supposed to do!?"
"I think the Captain has an idea." Gronnir said from his corner where he crouched, unmoved. He pointed out the window into the sky above and Merri wordlessly followed it with his eyes.
There was a tinny whine and the shrill hiss of thruster wash just barely audible over the throaty tumult of the tank's engine spewing oilsmoke into the air. It was a sound Merri would take with him to his grave along with the image that accompanied it. Captain Jace Rukowski, in his full panoply of war, descended through air on wings of blue jet nozzle flame, a red power fist held clenched and crackling with energy high above his head.
He struck like a thunderbolt from a clear sky.
The rebel manning the tank's rear mounted stubber didn't even have time to register the shadow falling over him before his head was vaporized by the Captain's gauntlet. Merri watched, somehow even more dumbfounded than he had been seconds before, as the soldier none of them knew a damn thing about landed with aplomb on the rear of the enemy tank with the hard impact of steel shod boot soles and shoved the now lifeless, headless body of the gunner off the side of it. If the Captain was perturbed by the spray of blood and brain matter that now dripped in chunky globules from his armor and helmet he didn't show it at all. He simply moved to the commander's hatch after climbing onto the turret as if doing so was just another obstacle to reach and surmount on the proving course in basic training. That power fist crackled and struck again, this time plunging its fingers into the seal between the hatch and the turret. Merri and his entire team could only gawk, stunned into silence, as this man, this guardsman, planted his feet wide upon the turret's roof and pulled with all his might, letting out a strained grunt as the bulk of every single muscle in his upper body fought against the surety of steel. The hatch was ripped free of its cupola after a moment of groaning metal, flying open on its hinge to reveal the horrified face of the tank crewman crouched inside
The cheeriness in Rook's voice was marred by the snarl of his helmet's vox grille. "Good morning!"
He drew his laspistol and shot the man in the face.
"One dead, four wounded." Sudarja said. His medic had set up a makeshift triage station behind the Chimera after the noise of battle had died down and all the fireteams had assembled back into their squads. He stood in front of the massive tank as Captain Rukowski examined the inside of it from the forward hatch. They'd had a bitch of a time hauling the bodies of the crew out of it after the Captain's little stunt. It looked like a rabid ambull had been let loose in there.
"Not a bad trade for...How many of theirs did we get?" Rook asked.
"Final count's near thirty all told. Including the vehicle crews." Sudarja stated. He continued standing in place, observing as his troopers took up watch positions on the street around them while others prepared to move out.
"Thirty!" Rook whistled. "Now that's a good day's work. But the day's not over yet."
"Yes, sir." Sudarja said.
"You got something else to tell me, Chief?"
A moment of silence passed where all that could be heard was the Captain fiddling with something mechanical at the driver's console within the tank. The battle in the center of the city could still be heard on the wind. They had to move out momentarily if they were to have any hope of affecting its outcome.
"Why didn't you tell me about the tank, sir?" Sudarja asked evenly.
"Because you're asking me that question, Chief."
"Sir?" Sudarja tilted his head. "I don't understand."
Rook looked up from the tank's innards to meet Sudarja's look of confusion and...something like betrayal in those eyes.
"If I'd have explained every little detail of what I was thinking to you and Fraigum would you have just accepted it? Or would you have called me insane and tried to protest? Maybe you'd have brought up the differing command structures between the Militarum and Navis in an attempt to dissuade me or, hell, gotten Lady Harper over there involved."
Sudarja spared a look over towards Lady Harper who was busying herself giving some of his troopers orders and perhaps a little encouragement further down the road.
"By the time we got done arguing," Rook continued. "Our chance would have passed us by and we wouldn't currently be having this conversation in the shade of this beauty."
Rook patted the hull of the tank with one of his hands. Sudarja took in the savage majesty of this Militarum grade machine of war. Captain Rukowski had called it a "Rogal Dorn" battle tank, apparently a type that the Guard utilized that they had named in honor of the holy primarch of the Imperial Fists chapter of Adeptus Astartes.
"You don't look satisfied." Rook said, getting to his feet atop the running boards of the tank's track housings.
"Can't say that I am, sir." Sudarja said, the sour expression not leaving his face.
"Throne's sake, Nilam." Rook sighed. Sudarja could feel himself bristle ever so slightly at the use of his given name for some reason he couldn't place. "Do you ever take a poll of your troops to see if they like your methods of command? You get orders. You follow them. At the end of the day most of us go home. That's the job."
"Most." Sudarja said almost under his breath. He took a step back as the Captain vaulted down to the ground from his spot aboard the tank. Rising back up to his full height, he met Sudarja at eye level.
"Yeah, most, Chief. Its a dangerous job and its ours." Sudarja stared into the Captain's eyes. He found no remorse there. "And if you don't like the job I'm doing feel free to go petition Lady Harper to have me replaced."
"Will that be all, sir?" Sudarja asked, unable to disguise the hint of acid in his tone. Rook knew this wouldn't be the last time he'd hear about this.
"Dismissed, Chief."
Sudarja marched away to busy himself conferring with other troopers under his command. Rook watched him go and thought about calculations. About probabilities and outcomes. Thirty enemy to one of his own. Hells of the Damocles Gulf, wasn't that something to be celebrated? He'd been an officer for all of three months by his own reckoning, not that any of these poor bastards knew about all that. Wasn't he doing just fine so far? He'd lost friends, lost all of them in fact, fighting the Emperor's wars. What the hell gave Sudarja or that hawk eyed bitch Fraigum any right to judge his calls? He wiped oil and unguent off his hands onto his fatigue trousers and shook his head. He didn't owe any of them an explanation, he thought as he turned to look up at the still form of the tank again. The results spoke for themselves.
"Alright, listen up you lot!" He yelled, cutting through every side conversation the troopers around him were holding. "We're moving out in five minutes! Bring forward the wounded! The Emperor protects so all we've got are walking injured and that means you've just been accepted into the prestigious ranks of Captain Rukowski's school of armored warfare!"
Five minutes later the tank was loaded with its crew after recieving a rather rough crash course in its system's operation from their new armored commander. Rook spied Lady Harper just meters away as he began to ascend to take his place in the cupola of the commander's hatch. He put his helmet under the crook of one arm and gave her his best filthy street tramp self assured smile; the broad grin only a crazy bastard who steals tanks for a living could give someone right after stealing a tank.
"We really have to try to not make a habit out of this, my lady!" He shouted as the tank's driver rolled the engines over and they came to life with a roar of pistons firing. "You, me, some friendlies and a stolen war machine against the whole city of Salvatore yet again, eh?" He laughed. It was the first genuine laugh he'd had all day.
"Lets go save this stupid, Throne forsaken world!" He shouted.
