Damnos (Space Marine Battles) by Nick Kyme

Author:Nick Kyme [Kyme, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Sicarius signalled the retreat. He’d cut a path through the necrons, dispatching one with every blow of the Tempest Blade. The air was thick with the stench of phasal shift. At their captain’s command, the Ultramarines bled back into the ice-fog, their forms lit by the star-flash of bolter muzzle flares. Slow to react to the lightning assault, the necrons didn’t even attempt to give chase. They settled for a desultory salvo of gauss-fire and then continued their advance towards Kellenport.

‘Does this seem too easy to you, brother-captain?’ asked Daceus when they were clear. He reaped a heavy toll with his power fist and was sweating with the effort of killing, but they’d barely dented the enemy’s forces.

Sicarius’s initial silence betrayed his anger. ‘It’s ineffective, sergeant,’ he replied at last. ‘Our attacks are of no consequence.’ He opened up the battle-force-wide comms-feed. Though the necrons were blocking most vox-signals, it was only long distance communication that was affected.

The leaders of the attack groups he’d deployed to harry the necron phalanxes returned with similar replies. The mechanoids were defending themselves but otherwise had ignored them. Since their first foray, this was the fifth engagement. No one had, as of yet, managed to get close enough to the core of the force to ascertain if a high-level lord was present.

Sicarius clenched his fist, his rage impotent for now. ‘Regroup, all squads.’

‘Sir?’ asked Daceus when his captain didn’t make any move.

‘This isn’t working. I have to draw it out, Daceus.’

‘My lord,’ the voice of Sergeant Manorian crackled over the feed.

Sicarius was brusque. ‘Speak.’

‘The necrons have stopped moving.’

Sicarius acknowledged then cut the link. ‘Something has changed.’

‘A new weapon in their arsenal? Perhaps they’re consolidating after our raids? They might be having an effect after all,’ suggested Daceus.

‘No, I don’t think it’s that.’ Sicarius eyed the fog, as if searching it for the answer he wanted. ‘But I will know the answer before we’re done.’

Sicarius stared through Praxor’s magnoculars, waiting for the rest of the force to join them. The Ultramarines would regroup in an area of sparse ruins, part of one of Arcona City’s commercia districts. Most of the megalopolis had been levelled by necron heavy artillery. These blackened nubs of debris were a rare feature on an otherwise bland and flattened landscape. The squads filtered in from the north and south; west was where the necron advance was coming from – though, in truth, they dominated most of the planet – and east led back to Kellenport. Ixion and Strabo, redeployed from the Thanatos Operation, arrived first on contrails of fire. Several of their number were wounded but they’d sustained no casualties.

Venatio was patching up the injured and stopped in front of his captain.

‘I’ll need to see that,’ he said.

Lowering the scopes, Sicarius glared at him. ‘Why do you think they’ve stalled their advance, Brother-Apothecary?’

‘That’s not my concern at this time. The injury to your shoulder is, however.’

A long cleft split part of the captain’s pauldron and there was blood gumming the wound.

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