‘None shall pass, Fire-born!’ raged Kadai, the furious zeal of Vulkan, his progenitor, filling him with righteous purpose. Endure – it was one of the central tenets of the Promethean Cult, endure and conquer.

The bullet storms crossed each other over a shortening distance as the cultist thousands poured intense fire into the Salamanders’ defensive positions. Chunks of perimeter wall, and massive sections of the fallen statue, were chipped apart in the maelstrom.

Brother Zo’tan took a round in the left pauldron, then another in the neck, grunted and fell to his knees. Dak’ir moved to cover him, armour shuddering as he let rip with a borrowed bolter. Insurgent bodies were destroyed in the furious barrage, torn apart by explosive rounds, sundered by salvos from heavy bolters, shredded by the withering hail from assault cannons whining red-hot.

Still the cultists came.

Dak’ir gritted his teeth and roared.

‘No retreat!’

Slowly, inevitably, the hordes began to thin. Kadai ordered a halt to the sustained barrage. Like smoke dispersing from a doused pyre, the insurgents were drifting away, backing off silently into the gloom until they were at last gone from sight.

The tenacity of the Salamanders had kept the foe at bay this time. Aereon Square was held.

‘Are they giving up?’ asked Dak’ir, breathing hard underneath his power armour as he tried to slow his body down from its ultra-heightened battle-state.

‘They crawl back to their nests,’ Kadai growled. His jaw clenched with impotent anger. ‘The city is theirs… for now.’

Stalking from the defence line, Kadai quickly set up sentries to watch the approaches to the square, whilst at the same time contacting Techmarine Argos to send reinforcements from Vulkan’s Wrath, and a Thunderhawk to extract the dead and wounded. The toll was much heavier than he had expected. Fourteen wounded and six dead. Most keenly felt of all, though, was the loss of Fugis.

The Salamanders were a small Chapter, their near-annihilation during one of the worst atrocities of the Heresy, when they were betrayed by their erstwhile brothers, still felt some ten thousand years later. They had been Legion then, but now they were merely some eight hundred Astartes. Induction of new recruits was slow and only compounded their low fighting strength.

Without their Apothecary and his prodigious medical skills, the most severe injuries suffered by Kadai’s Third Company would remain untended and further debilitate their combat effectiveness. Worse still, the gene-seeds of those killed in action would be unharvested, for only Fugis possessed the knowledge and ability to remove these progenoids safely. And it was through these precious organs that future Space Marines were engineered, allowing even the slain to serve their Chapter in death. The losses suffered by Third Company, then, became permanent with the loss of their Apothecary, a solemn fact that put Kadai in a black mood.

‘We will re-assault the city proper as soon as we’re reinforced,’ he raged.

‘We should level the full weight of the company against them. Then these heretics will break,’ asserted Tsu’gan, clenching a fist to emphasise his vehemence.