Chapter 62: Breaching the Military Facility

Chapter 62: Breaching the Military Facility

The fifteen Astartes, now separated into three 5-man squads, began their assault. From his helm-vox, Petros gave the order.

"Execute as planned. Our objective is the planetary shield generator."

Petros's boots crunched on the dry, brown, hardened soil of Calth-Loth Prime. The ground here was dead, poisoned by millennia of industrial chemical-waste. This land was no longer fit for life.

Only the desperate—scavengers cast out from the hive—dared to wander this wasteland, searching for long-forgotten tech. The toxins, thousands of times over the safe limit, would kill them in weeks. There was a reason even the lowest of the hive-undercity dwellers never came out here.

For the Astartes, the poison was irrelevant. Their superhuman bodies had been forged for exactly this kind of toxic hellscape.

Petros's squad—Antonios, Phelon, the neophyte Alexios, and one other—had their weapons hot. This was an infiltration, but they were expecting a hard fight.

They moved fast across the barrens. Even weighing nearly a ton each with armor and jump packs, they ran at a ground-eating lope. An industrial ruin blocked their path. Petros fired his jump pack, and his team followed, soaring over the collapsed gantries. Their target was an underground entrance, hidden deep within the abandoned factory.

They used the terrain, approaching the entrance without a sound. From a high vantage, Petros signaled a halt. He unclipped his auspex and scanned the entrance below.

The auspex-return was clear: one PDF platoon. Thirty-odd mortals with light weapons and a single Tauros Assault Vehicle armed with a twin-linked multi-laser.

The light guard was not surprising. Hiding a critical facility in a remote location, only to post a massive garrison, would be a dead giveaway. Their luck held; the low-quality PDF sentries hadn't detected their approach.

Petros gave the hand-signal. The squad fanned out, forming a perfect, encircling kill-zone.

"Targets acquired," he voxed. "Exterminate."

The five Astartes ignited their jump packs, leaping from the ruins and descending on the sentries, firing in mid-air.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP! The roar of bolters was deafening. A dozen PDF troopers were blown apart before they could even unsling their lasguns. The gunner on the Tauros didn't even have time to turn before his head exploded in a red mist.

As the squad landed, Petros methodically, and without haste, shot out the six cameras—three obvious, three hidden—that guarded the entrance.

Phelon, his hand-flamer useless at this range, had used his jump pack to target the platoon leader, who was fumbling for his sidearm. The Warpsmith hit the man with the force of a drop-pod.

"Hahaha, I'm here!" Phelon's laugh boomed from his external vox as his ceramite boots crushed the PDF officer into a thin, red paste.

Ignoring the headless corpses, the five Astartes advanced on the heavy alloy blast door. At the same time, miles away, the other two squads were launching their own simultaneous attacks. The three-pronged strike was designed to confuse the defenders, to make it impossible to know which was the main assault.

In truth, all of them were the main assault.

"Alexios," Petros ordered. "Melt the door."

The neophyte, carrying the squad's meltagun, stepped forward and began to cut. As he worked, Petros, Antonios, and Phelon hit the quick-release runes on their chests. Their heavy jump packs fell to the ground with a thud. They were a liability in the close-confines of a tunnel-fight.

Alexios finished the cut. The five warriors kicked the molten slag aside and entered the darkness.

They moved like panthers, or, more accurately, like a five-man armored column crashing through a tunnel. Their bolters were precise, every shot a kill. The few scattered guards and tech-adepts in the upper corridors died before they could even raise an alarm. Any time they approached a fortified hardpoint, Phelon's hand-flamer or Alexios's meltagun reduced it to slag.

Suddenly, the lights in the corridor went out, plunging them into absolute blackness. It didn't slow them. Through their helmet-lenses' auto-senses, the slaughter continued.

"Vornab's squad," Petros noted, his voice flat. "They've destroyed the primary generator."

Thirty seconds later, the red emergency-lumes flickered on. A secondary power source. As expected.

The resistance grew fiercer as they descended. A heavy stubber opened up from a barricaded junction, its heavy-caliber rounds hammering at their armor. Petros and his team took cover. He watched the stream of tracers, his internal chronometer counting...

...five, four, three, two, one...

The gun stopped. The gunner was reloading.

Petros stepped out, raised his bolter, and ignored the las-fire that sparked harmlessly off his pauldron. THUMP. The heavy stubber gunner vanished. THUMP. A second bolt struck the stubber's ammo-feed, destroying the weapon.

"Advance."

They charged, their boots slamming on the concrete, and annihilated the last defenders guarding the generator's main blast door. As they secured the junction, more PDF troopers charged from two side-corridors—a desperate, final counter-attack.

Phelon bathed the left corridor in a torrent of promethium. Antonios charged into the right, his chainaxe screaming as he waded into the mortals.

Alexios didn't wait for the order. He was already at the final blast door, his meltagun glowing white-hot as he began to cut the way.