This story is an unofficial story based, without permission, on the Warhammer/Warhammer 40,000 intellectual property owned by Games Workshop Ltd.
"Buddy you're a young man, hard man
Shoutin' in the street gonna take on the world someday
You got blood on your face
You big disgrace
Wavin' your banner all over the place"
Callus awoke with a snap. What little sunlight there was, was filtering through the windows. Daniella moaned in her sleep and snuggled against his chest. His eyes were wide open. He immediately knew something was wrong. He was to be rotated back to the line today. But nobody had come. He sat up in bed and looked around. The bunks were empty. Everybody was gone. His vision scanned down to the hall, to the door. Ox and Jackson were standing there, in full flak, lasguns in hand, crouched in firing positions. Ox made a quieting motion with his hand.
Callus silently slipped out of his bed and moved over to his foot locker, pulling out a fresh set of BDUs and putting on his boots. He strode across the room to the nearest weapons locker and opened. Flak gauntlets to cover his boots, a chest plate, a helmet, and lasgun. Provisions, extra power packs, a bayonet with boot-sheath. The lockers were all prepared to move out early this morning. But the officers hadn't come. Callus quickly got his gear on and went to rouse Daniella.
She awoke, quietly, and he silently motioned her to get gear on herself. She did so, and once they had both loaded and charged their lasguns, they quickly moved up to Ox and Jackson. She looked a bit silly in flak armor clearly made for a man and a bit too big for her.
Callus dropped to one kneed and spoke quietly to Jackson.
"What's going on."
"Check your helm-vox."
Callus tapped the switch on his helmet's vox and static briefly filled his right ear, followed by the chatter of gun fire and shouted orders;
"PLANETARY FORCES PUSHING FROM BEHIND! ORKS PUSHING FROM THE FRONT! ALL LINES CUT OFF, CAPTAIN! I CAN FIND NO ROUTE OF ESCAPE! INCOMING FI-"
The voice was cut off. Static filled the vox again. Callus let his thumb off the vox.
"What's going on?"
"The governor has declared the Lord-General to be a traitor. He's ordered the planetary forces to mobilize against us. We're being attacked by the Orks on one side and the Gubernatorial Guard on the other. Most of the Penal Legion have remained with us, as have a good portion of the Armored Corps and Civil Air Patrol. But there's no telling really. This war zone just got a hell of a lot worse."
Callus cursed.
"Any idea what got this damn foolish idea into Gonsalves' head?"
"No idea, but I'm with the Lord-General, do or die."
Callus nodded and turned to Ox. He nodded, grim and silent as ever. Callus turned to Daniella.
"Well, this may have just got a lot more complicated."
***
Callus leaped over the pile of rubble and landed on his back, rolling deftly to his feet and rising into a crouch. He squeezed off three rounds and downed a storm trooper that had been aiming at him. Tearing a frag grenade from his belt, he thumbed the charge and hurled it over the pile of rubble the blue-clad troopers had been hiding behind. He was satisfied by the death screams that came from the resulting blast. Moving forward fast, he scrambled up his side of the rubble and found five corpses. Five. There had been six. He looked up. About thirty feet back, the last trooper had aimed his hell-pistol square at Callus. The corporal dropped his gun and raised his hands. A tiny black blur slammed into the sergeant's chest and detonated, ripping through his chest cavity and abdomen and sending his entrails spilling out across the rock. He never made a sound.
Ox was behind Callus now, hefting the grenade launcher he had confiscated from a group of Penal Legionnaires that had attacked them earlier and suffered the same fate. From what could be discerned from their helm-voxes, the Kazarkanian forces were walled off in sector 7-9-2. Callus' plan, for now, was to fight his way to that sector, reunite with his regiment, try to find Colonel Hawk, if he still lived, and see this fight through to whatever end it lay in store.
He waved his squad forward and moved along the grid. The tiny digital map screen that had been on his belt identified them as currently being in sector 7-8-9. Three map sectors away from Kazarkanian lines. Not particularly far now. Only about two and a half miles. Two and a half miles crawling with greenskins, Storm Troopers, enemy tanks, air craft, and currently being torn apart by greenskin artillery. The ground shook. Callus grinned. He liked those odds.
***
It is an extremely rare event that a Lord-General of the Imperial Guard goes so far as to personally take the field against the enemy. Usually only in the largest of movements, the most grand of battles, the most legendary of campaigns, would a Lord-General command forces from the front. This was one such event.
"FOLLOW ME!" Cried Lord-General Julian Montego, his flaming power blade crackling in the air as he ran towards enemy lines, at least a good company of his trusted Kazarkanians at his back. The enemy storm troopers fired, trying to hold their line. They managed to fell a handful of Guardsmen. Then Montego hit their lines. And when he did, he was a terrible thing to behold.
The Storm Trooper sergeant was foolish enough to leap up, knife drawn, and attempt to kill the Lord-General. The power sword hit at the top of his helm, entered through his scalp, and sliced his brain in two. It didn't stop until it exited his body from the crotch, cleaving the governor's storm trooper into two neat slices.
The next one dropped his hell-gun and raised his hands in surrender. Montego pumped a bolter round into his throat. He grinned a feral grin when the round exploded and sent the man's head popping clean of his shoulders. His men arrived after him, bayonets fixed, and swept over the line, washing the blue-armored soldiers aside in a tsunami of death.
A fleck of blood splashed onto Julian Montego's lips and steel gray mustache. He licked it off. He was going to enjoy killing the good Governor, and his lapdog Colonel. He though of his wife, at home on Kazarkia. He had accepted now that he would never see her again. He would never return home from Abaddon's 13th Black Crusade as he had promised her that he would. Instead he would kill Governor Alphonse Gonsalves with all the fury of Rogal Dorn, and then die a hero's death making his last stand against the Orks. The fate of all followers of the Emperor, ultimately, was the same: death. Montego was determined to die well.
***
"Colonel, your performance troubles me. My reports indicate that your allegedly elite Storm Troopers are being steadily pushed back by the Kazarkanians. It seems that my loyal Penal Legionnaires have, almost to a man, sided with them, and that we have not nearly the amount of armored support that you had suggested. What am I to make of this?"
"I am confident that our lines will hold long enough to make good the escape, Governor." The colonel was as seemingly emotionless as ever.
Governor Alphonse Gonsalves rose from his seat and turned away from the governor. He had a cigarillo in his hand, and was enjoying the fine, smoky taste. His office was, as always, in near total darkness. He hit a button on the underside of his desk and the concealed windows behind him opened. It revealed that he was situated near the very top of the New Gurgenstein's main spire. Laid out before him was a city burning. Massive sections of it had been totally blown away, were smoking, and fires consumed a good majority of it. The flashes of gunfire could seen near below the tower, as guardsmen fought each other and the Orks, who had not been so kind as to cease their assault in the face of a civil war. He could see the flashes of battle also, from much lower in the Hive, where he assumed that the local populace of the city were making what futile stands they could. Beyond the burning husk that had once been New Gurgenstein, the black fields surrounding it teemed with a seemingly endless horde of the greenskins.
"Colonel, you have disappointed me. Consistently you have made inaccurate predictions about the nature of our strength and our ability to hold this city. Your failing here has forced me to perform what I do consider to be a very distasteful task; making a deal with a xenos to save myself. You have botched our attempt to turn on the Kazarkanians and now they swiftly advance towards this tower. They are led by their heroic Lord-General, whom was supposed to have been assassinated by your men. They, of course, failed in this endeavor. You have been, in general, a failure. I do not tolerate failures."
The governor's needle pistol was drawn in a flash, as he whipped around to aim. Colonel Marcus Flaviun had already drawn his hell-pistol. They fired at the same time. Two long, thin, crimson, beams of super-heated light struck out across the room. Gonsalves' beam tore through Flaviun's left shoulder, leaving a deep burn that bored directly through. Flaviun's beam slammed into the Governor's forehead, crushing his skull and slicing through his brain. It emerged from the other side of the head and sent him flying into his window.
The glass shattered and the body Governor Alphonse Gonsalves, divine Imperial commander of Hargon and ruler of the Hive of New Gurgenstein careened down a full three miles before it eventually smashed into an under-Hive bridge. The Orks that were advancing along that particular bridge would have trampled his corpse under their large, heavy boots, had it not liquefied on impact.
Colonel Marcus Flaviun smashed into the back wall of the office with a grimace, pain pulsing through is body. The door was kicked in as three blue-clad storm troopers, hell guns drawn, entered, doing an instantaneous sweep of the area and then turning to their commander. He nodded to them, curtly.
"Get an insertion team to the Gubernatorial yacht. Inform his navigators we are departing immediately."
***
Callus hit the floor hard on his stomach, narrowly missing the hell-gun shots that were screeching just over his head. They were moving through an old, shelled out hab-complex, and being fired on by a squad of storm troopers. They had a missile launcher. Another blast shook the floor. Frag missile shots. Callus tapped his helm vox;
"Ox, we gotta get that heavy weapons specialist down! What can you do?"
"Nothing, as of now! Jackson and I are cut off! Two of the enemy have laid down a field of suppressive fire against us!"
Great, Callus thought to himself, despairing.
"I'm cut off as well."
Another frag missile blast, a lot closer this time. Then, suddenly, the sounds of lasgun discharge. The missile launcher and the hell gun that had been pinning Callus down stopped. Daniella's voice cracked into his ear.
"Done and done."
Callus grinned, then leaped to his feet and, in a crouching run, turned the corner. Now that they had lost their heavy weapons support, it was only a matter of time.
***
Lord-General Julian Montego had just brandished his power sword and was about to give the order to charge when, all across the line, blue clad storm troopers pulled back, silently, as one. He had to admit, he was perplexed. The Kazarkanians were being successful in their endeavor to push back the Gubernatorial Guard, it was true, but not without heavy casualties and slow fighting. He could think of no reason why they would suddenly abandon entrenched positions.
Something was wrong.
Only a few hundred feet away, Corporal Michael Callus, leading his team back to Kazarkanian lines, was equally surprised. In fact, all over the city, the storm troopers were dropping out of entrenched positions and falling back towards the tower.
Colonel Marcus Flaviun was making good his escape.
Hive World Terra