Chapter 49: The Hydra's Anti-Aircraft Fire
The wind had picked up.
Duvette watched the green spore fog rolling in from beyond the city's southern wall. One more complication on top of everything else.
Tens of thousands of pilgrims had responded to his orders and were now moving north toward the city's outskirts. The column was still dense and slow, but the prostrations had stopped and the statue was no longer being moved anywhere, and the pace was meaningfully better than it had been. People walked with their heads down in silence, the sound of it feet on stone and the occasional sound of someone weeping, nothing more.
He stood at the road's edge and watched the flow pass. He took the peaked cap from his head and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The blood on his face had dried into dark red patches that had stiffened against the skin.
"Commissar."
Evan came to his side and offered a canteen. Duvette took it, unscrewed the cap, and drank. The water was warm and tasted of the metal it had been sitting in.
"Current situation," Duvette said, his eyes still on the column.
"At current speed, full evacuation from the city will take approximately three hours," Evan said.
Duvette's brow came together. Three hours. Too long. But the arithmetic of the problem did not improve regardless of how he felt about it.
He thought it through. The front line had been two days' march from the city — but that was on foot, without vehicles, and the Orks would not be on foot. Mechanized Ork forces moved at a speed entirely different from infantry. This column of people, even at its best pace, was slow-moving mass to any vehicle. And the next prepared defensive position was eighty kilometers north: PDF fortifications and three Cadian infantry and artillery regiments holding a prepared line. Eighty kilometers. For civilian foot traffic, a minimum of two days. For mechanized Orks, potentially a few hours.
He needed another way to work this problem.
He turned and looked at the headless body lying in the center of the road behind him. Bishop Sharp's elaborate robes had been trampled by the passing column into something unrecognizable, and the blood had spread across the paving stones into a dark irregular stain. Several clergy members were attempting to move the body to the roadside, but the density of the column made it impossible for them to press in far enough.
Duvette looked at the body, looked at the blood on the stones, and spat once in its general direction.
If not for that fool's two days of obstruction, the entire column would already be clear of the city. The deaths that were coming were on his hands as much as the Orks.
"Commissar." Evan's voice carried a different note this time. "Look south."
Duvette followed the direction.
The green spore fog on the city's southern horizon had thickened and advanced. It was visibly closer than it had been even minutes ago, the forward edge of it now within a kilometer of the city walls. From inside the fog, audible now through the general background noise of the column, came a sound that was low and sustained and building — the particular quality of engine noise that a large number of internal combustion machinery produced at a distance.
On the Grand Strategic Display Module's overlay, five red contacts appeared simultaneously, moving fast out of the spore fog and toward the city, pulling clean tracks across the display as they accelerated. The speed of the movement and the direction were unambiguous.
Enemy contact.
He looked up from the overlay toward the southern sky.
Five shapes emerged from the fog's leading edge.
Ork fighter-bombers. Ugly construction, the kind only Orks produced and only Orks could make airworthy: rough red paint applied in thick uneven coats, scrap metal plates and spikes welded to the hull at angles that served no aerodynamic purpose, wings that were not quite level with each other, engines that belched rolling black smoke from every exhaust point. They should not have been capable of sustained flight. They were demonstrably flying and doing so at a speed that made the assessment irrelevant. Five of them, in a loose wedge, pushing directly at the city.
"Take cover!" Duvette's voice went to its maximum volume. "Everyone find cover! Now! Move!"
The column dissolved into panic. People threw themselves to the ground, scrambled through doorways into roadside buildings, ran in whatever direction the person in front of them was running. The silence of the march vanished under screaming, and the organized column became something that moved in every direction simultaneously.
Then, from the city's eastern side, a sound arrived that put all of it in context.
A roar, followed immediately by a second, and a third. Then continuous.
Dense tracer fire climbed from the eastern city district into the airspace above the southern approach, heavy-caliber anti-aircraft shells tearing through the atmosphere in overlapping streams, each round trailing a bright line of illumination through the amber sky. The barrage was dense enough that the intervals between rounds were shorter than the rounds themselves, the combined fire of multiple platforms weaving a crossfire network across the entire approach corridor.
The lead Ork fighter-bomber flew into it.
The aircraft shook violently mid-air, the structure failing across multiple points simultaneously, and disintegrated. The fireball it became was large enough to be its own landmark briefly, before the burning debris separated and fell, the pieces of it descending into the spore forest below and igniting additional sections of alien growth where they landed.
The remaining four had no concept of evasion. The Orks at the controls could be heard howling even at distance, their enthusiasm for the situation not diminished by what had just happened to the aircraft ahead of them. They pushed their throttles and drove directly into the barrage, descending toward the anti-aircraft positions with everything they had.
One was hit by three shells in the same moment, the rear section coming apart from the forward section, the resulting two pieces rotating separately as they fell. Another continued its dive for another two seconds toward the AA positions before its engine took a direct hit and became a fireball that finished its descent by hitting the city wall.
The last two came in side by side, firing their nose-mounted weapons at the anti-aircraft positions below in a brief exchange that lasted seconds before the crossfire took them both at once. They went into the plain outside the city wall, rolling and breaking apart on impact, the detonation shockwaves from each crash flattening substantial patches of the fungal vegetation outward in all directions.
The entire engagement ran under thirty seconds.
Duvette stood where he was and watched the sky settle back into its ordinary sickly amber.
Hydra anti-aircraft tanks. The armored regiment's Hydras, positioned in the eastern district. He had seen them on the Strategic Display.
He drew a long breath and turned to Evan. "Go find Acting Deputy Commander Dylan. Tell him to assemble all personnel immediately and prepare for engagement." He turned his head toward the unit behind him and found the bald man. "Stroud. Take a reconnaissance squad outside the northern gate and scout the plain. I want a current picture of what we're dealing with out there."
"Understood." Both acknowledged and moved.
Duvette looked at the three Battle Sisters. They were still standing near the Bishop's body, bolt rifles held at their sides, their expressions carrying the specific quality of people who had witnessed something and had not yet resolved what it meant.
He also looked at the cluster of clergy who remained nearby, and identified the one whose robes indicated the most senior rank present.
"You three," he said to the Battle Sisters. "And you," — he pointed at the senior clergyman — "continue organizing the evacuation. Faster. As fast as people are capable of moving. Drop every piece of baggage that is not food or water."
One of the Battle Sisters answered with a voice he had heard before, in a considerably less comfortable environment. "I believe we don't fall within your command structure, Commissar."
Duvette looked at her. "Given that we escaped hell together, is this really the moment for that particular conversation? We don't have the time for internal disputes." He held her gaze. "Sister Olivia Bremer."
He watched the surprise register in her eyes behind the visor.
"Juno told me your name," he said, before she could form the question about how.
He did not give her the moment to think through exactly when an unconscious Lord Inquisitor might have had the opportunity to do that. He turned to the trembling senior clergyman before the Battle Sister's expression had fully settled. "If you want to walk out of this city alive, you will do as I have said."
The man's face was the color of old paper. His lips moved without producing words for a moment. Then he nodded.
Duvette said nothing further. He put the peaked commissar's cap back on and set it straight.
"There will be more coming." He said it to the group generally, the implication clear. "I am going to meet the armored regiment's commander."
He turned east and moved with his squad toward the sound of the Hydras.