The ammo-can clacked dry and the autocannon was useless. Corbec threw it aside and pulled his lasrifle off his shoulder, opening up again. His unit was right at the gate now, embroiled in an entirely structureless fight with the main force of the Zoican shock-troops. The fight blasted through the ruined outbuildings of the gatehouse complex and across the rubble-thick ground in the gate-mouth itself.
There were Zoicans everywhere.
Corbec had ceased to be a commander. There was nothing to command. He was simply a man fighting with every iota of strength and stamina left in him. He fought to stay alive and to kill the ochre shapes that drove at him from all sides.
It was the same for all the Ghosts in that engagement. The only thing that slowed the tide of Zoican invasion was the width of the blasted gate. In an open field, the forty or so Ghosts with Corbec would have been overrun long since.
Corbec was bleeding from a dozen light wounds. Those enemies he didn’t kill outright with las-fire he demolished with blows from his rifle-stock and stabs of his bayonet.
Dremmond was suddenly alongside him, swathing the enemy in a wide cone of flames. The flamer pack on his back stuttered. Corbec knew that sound. The tanks were almost dry.
He yelled at Dremmond to wash the gates. What little flame they had left could best be used burning the entrance out.
Dremmond swung around, his spurting fire twisting like a whip. A dozen Zoicans crumpled, armour burning and melting off them. Some became torches that stumbled a few paces before they fell.
Dremmond bought Corbec a moment to think.
Corbec crossed, firing still, towards the wound-peppered wall of an outbuilding, glad he had jammed all the energy clips he could find into his jacket pockets that dawn.
Genx was in cover by the wall. By now the pain was beginning to trickle through and Genx was pale with trauma. Without his hand, he couldn’t handle a lasrifle, although there were several fallen nearby, dropped by dead Zoicans and Tanith alike.
Corbec handed Genx his laspistol and the lad—Genx was no more than twenty, though built like a ox—began to crack away at any target in sight.
Supported by a trio of men, Sergeant Fols covered the entrance to a stairwell in the gatehouse, its roof blown off by the advance of the first flat-crab earlier. The blackened corpses of Vervun Primary gunners from the upper ramparts lay all around, amid the twisted wreckage of their fallen guns and piles of ceramite chunks.
Fols looked up at the mighty gate that they fought to protect. It was almost painful to see it with the top blown away, just two great gate towers adjoining the splintered Curtain Wall. The fort on top had fallen in and its debris made up the ground they fought over.
Fols also noticed how the Shield above them was rough- edged and intermittent. The death of the flat-crab which had blown out the arch of the massive gate had also taken down a relay station, and the Shield canopy was fraying and sparking out over them.
Fols felt wet and realised it was rain. The torrential downpour outside was still hammering and now, with the Shield ripped back for a hundred metres or so, it was falling on them too.
The ground was turning to mush as the rain made gluey soup out of the ankle-deep ash.
The Ghost next to Fols dropped wordlessly, his jaw vaporised. Streams of rain ran down them all, colouring with blood and dirt.
Fols rounded his two remaining men into the staircase, firing across the gate. The rain and smoke was killing visibility.
Fols saw the bright blurt of Dremmond’s flamer a little way off, saw how the rain made steam off the white-hot blasts and heated stones.
The man next to him yelled something and Fols realised there were Zoican shock troops spilling over the side walls behind them by the dozen.
He turned, killed three. A welter of las-shots cut his men apart and splashed the wall they had just been using for cover with their blood. Fols lost a knee, an eye, an elbow and a fourth shot tore through his belly.
He was still firing when a Zoican bayonet impaled him to the wall.
The chanting continued. The Zoican shock forces were pushing through Veyveyr Gate holding banner-poles aloft, the whipping flags marked with the symbol of Ferrozoica and with other emblems that stung the eyes and nauseated the gut: the runes and badges of the Chaos pestilence that had overwhelmed them.
Some of the Zoicans had loudhailers wired and bolted to their helmet fronts and were broadcasting abominable hymns of filth and whining prayers of destruction.
From his position, Corbec knew the Zoicans believed their victory was assured.
He wished he could deny it, but with the pitiful numbers left to him, he didn’t stand a chance.
He changed clips again, throwing the dead one away into the rubble. Next to him, Genx and two other troopers reloaded.
They would kill as many as they could. In the name of the Emperor, there was no more they could do.
Data-pulses told him the fighting was intense, bestial. But it was so very far away. It came to him only as unemphatic bursts of information, unemotional cascades of facts.
Salvador Sondar drifted in his Iron Tank. He was becoming increasingly disinterested in the trials of the hive soldiers. What was happening at Croe Gate and, more vitally, at Veyveyr was an inconsequential dream to him.
All that really mattered now to the High Master of Vervunhive was the chatter.
A rocket cremated Trooper Feax and threw Larkin into the air. He came down hard amid the rubble and the bodies, ears dead, vision swimming and his beloved rifle nowhere in sight.
He clambered up. He had been with Corbec’s unit at the gate. That was the last thing he remembered.
His hearing began to return. He heard the wretched chanting of the Zoican advance as from underwater. He saw the las-fire and banner poles as dancing bright colours in the smoke.
A Zoican was right on top of him, glaring down out of that fearsome mask-visor, stabbing with his bayonet.
Larkin lurched aside and fell off a length of wall, two metres down to a bed of debris below. Ignoring his spasming back, he yanked out his silver Tanith knife and leapt at the Zoican the moment he reappeared over the gully-lip.
The Zoican bayonet cut through Larkin’s sleeve. He slammed
