grey blur of the mangled outhabs.
On the twenty-ninth day, spotters on the Wall near Sondar Gate sighted a small group of Zoican tanks moving along a transit track adjacent to the Southern Highway, two kilometres out. With hurried permission from House Command in the Main Spine, they addressed six missile batteries and a trio of earthshaker guns and opened fire. There was jubilation all along the defence line, for no greater reasons than the soldiers finally had a visible enemy to target and the fighting drought was broken. The engagement lasted twelve minutes. No fire was returned from the enemy. When the shell-smoke cleared, there was no sign of the tanks that had been fired upon—not even wreckage.
During the evening of that day, the machine noises from outside grumbled and clanked again, sporadically. Marshal Croe made a morale-boosting speech to the population and the troops over the public-address plates. It helped ease the tension, but Gaunt knew Croe should have been making such speeches daily for the last week. Croe had only spoken now on the advice of Commissar Kowle. Despite his dislike of the man, Gaunt saw that Kowle truly understood the political necessities of war. He was enormously capable. Kowle issued a directive that evening urging all commissarial officers, both the VPHC and the regular Guard, to tour the lines and raise the mood. Gaunt had been doing just that since his units went into position, shuttling between Hass West and Veyveyr. On these tours, he had been impressed by the resolve and discipline of the Vervun Primary troopers who manned the defences alongside his men. He prayed dearly to the beloved Emperor that combat wouldn’t sour that determination.
On that evening, riding his staff car down the inner transits to check on Rawne’s units at Hass West, Gaunt found the seal Lord Chass’ bodyguard had given to him in his coat pocket. There had been no time thus far to pay the noble a visit. Gaunt turned the token over in his gloved hand as the car roared down a colonnaded avenue. Perhaps tonight, after his inspection of Hass West.
He never got the chance. Just before midnight, as Gaunt was still climbing the stairs of the fort’s main tower, the first Zoican storm began.
Despite the military preparations, no one in the hive was really prepared for the onslaught. It fell so suddenly. Its herald was a simultaneous salvo from thousands of tanks and self-propelled guns prowling forward through the outer-hab wastes less than a kilometre from the Wall. The roar shook the hive and the explosive display lit the night sky. For the first time, the enemy was firing up at the Curtain Wall, point-blank in armour terms, hitting wall-top ramparts and fracturing them apart. Precision mortar bombardments were landing on the wall-top itself, finding the vulnerable slit between Wall and Shield. Other ferocious rains of explosive force hammered at the gates or chipped and flaked ceramite armour off the Wall’s face.
The defenders reeled, stunned. Hundreds were already dead or seriously injured and the ramparts were significantly damaged in dozens of places. Officers rallied the dazed soldiery and the reply began. With its rocket towers, heavy guns, support-weapon emplacements, mortars and the thousands of individual troopers on the ramparts, that reply was monumental. Once they began to fight, a gleeful fury seized the men of Vervunhive. To address the enemy at last. To fire in anger. It felt good after all the waiting. It was absolving.
The Curtain Wall firepower decimated the Zoican forces now advancing towards the Wall-foot outside. Vervunhive laid down a killing field four hundred metres deep outside their Wall and obliterated tanks and men as they churned forward. It was later estimated that 40-50,000 Zoican troops and upwards of 6,000 fighting vehicles were lost to Vervunhive fire in the first hour of attack.
But the sheer numbers of the enemy were overwhelming, both physically and psychologically. No matter how many hundreds were killed, thousands more moved forward relentlessly to take their place, marching over the corpses of the slain. They were mindless and without fear in the face of the mass slaughter. Observing this from his trench position just inside Veyveyr Gate, Brin Milo reflected that this was precisely what he had been afraid of: the insane tactics of Chaos that Vervunhive’s war plans simply did not take into account.
“You could fire a lasgun on full auto from the wall-top,” wrote General Xance of the NorthCol forces later, “and kill dozens, only to see the hole you’d made in their ranks close in the time it took to change power cells. If war is measured by the number of casualties inflicted, then even in that first night, we had won. Sadly, that is not the case.”
“So many, so many…” were the last words spoken into his vox-set by a mind-numb Vervun Primary officer at Sondar Gate just before one of the VPHC shot him and took control of his frazzled forces.
At Hass West, Gaunt arrived on the main rampart just after a mortar round had taken out a section of wall-lip and blown the head off Colonel Frader, the commander of the area section. Gaunt took command, calling up a Vervun Primary vox-officer and grabbing the handset from his pack. Gaunt was accompanied by Liaison Officer Daur, who confidently relayed vocal commands to the troops in earshot. Gaunt was glad of him. Daur knew the tower and knew the men from his time stationed here, and they responded better to an officer of their own. Many had seemed overawed by the Imperial commissar. Gaunt accepted that fear was a command tool, but he loathed what the iron rule of the VPHC had done to the resolve of the local troops.
Gaunt reached Rawne on the vox-link. The major had the Tanith strength spread out along the lower towers and wall-line below the main fort.
“No casualties here,” the major reported, his voice punctuated by cracks and pops of static. “We’re pouring it on, but there are so many!”
“Stay as you are! Keep up the address! We know they won’t break like a normal army, but you and I have faced this enemy before, Rawne. You know how to win this!”
“Kill them all, colonel-commissar?”
“Kill them all, Major Rawne!” And for all he personally trusted the man no further than he could throw him, Gaunt knew that was exactly what Rawne would do.
“What’s that?” bellowed Feygor, firing over the buttress. Rawne ducked along to him. “What?”
Feygor pointed down. An armoured machine, three times the size of a main battle tank, was advancing towards the wall’s skirt, a huge derrick of armour-plated scaffolding growing out of its top.
“Siege engine! For feth’s sake! Get on the vox, tell Gaunt!”
Feygor nodded.
Rawne scrambled closer to the lip and the las-storm below. “Bragg! Bragg!”
The big trooper crawled over, hefting his missile launcher.
“Kill it!”
Bragg nodded and raised the launcher to his shoulder, then banged off three rockets that curled down towards the vast engine on plumes of blue smoke. They hit the superstructure and ignited, but no serious damage was done.
“Reload! Again!”
The monstrous siege engine reached the foot of the Wall and there was a shrieking sound as the metal tower scraped against the ceramite and stone facings. Gas-fired anchor ropes were shot into the Curtain Wall to hold the engine in place. Hydraulic feet extended beneath the armour skirts of the engine to steady it on the broken ground. With a wail of metal, the derrick tower began to telescope up, extending to match the height of the wall. Segmented armour, badged with the Zoican crest and other, less human insignias that made Rawne sick to see them, unfurled upwards to protect the rising throat of the siege tower.
