Part One: The Fall of Crater AE-3.

Gunfire crackled and artillery roared as the men of Eridor V’s Planetary Defense force scrambled across the ruined battlefield, scurrying past the burnt out husks of shattered Leman Russ Battle Tanks and the twisted corpses of their comrades. The battle was not going well.

Trooper Caen winced as the man to his left, Sergeant Yael, was instantly cremated by a falling incendiary shell. The man barely had time to shriek before he vanished in a sheet of roiling flame. Caen swore and dove to the ground, landing roughly in the grimy muck that had once been verdant, rolling grasslands. With the only remaining squad leader dead, unit cohesion evaporated: the scattered elements of the PDF’s 22nd Infantry regiment broke into a scattered route.

At this rate, the defense wouldn’t last another ten minutes. Caen snorted derisively at his own assessment: who was he kidding? The defense was gone; all hope of a tactical withdrawal had gone up in smoke along with Yael. All that was left was rabble of routed troopers, most of who were already walking wounded or running dangerously low on information. Grimly he checked his rifle’s ammo counter: seven shots remained in his standard-pattern lasrifle’s ammo clip. His last clip.

Caen clambered to his feet amid the slaughter, desperately trying to block out the frenzied shrieks of his dying squad-mates. Kneeling by the broken shell of a Vanquisher tank, he keyed the micro bead communicator attached to his helmet and tried to call for assistance.

No response. The communications were either being jammed, or all vox-links in this sector had been disrupted by the sheer volume of fire raining down upon his unit.

Then it enemy charged. He didn’t hear them at first, the only sound being the deafening shelling and the distant trundling of enemy armour. Indeed, the shelling was so voluminous that he didn’t even hear the enemy until one of them was almost on top of him.

Shrieking insane and demented battle cries, the Chaos Cultist wielded a battered auto-rifle and a terrifyingly demented array of self-inflicted scars. Caen swore and cracked the butt of his rifle into his enemy’s face, catching the heretic across the chin in a violent explosion of teeth and saliva. The Cultist collapsed against the tank’s hull, and tried to pull himself up by grabbing onto the tank’s crumpled treads with a withered hand.

He never got the chance.

With a bellow of rage, Caen was upon him, screaming and hammering the rifle butt down upon the Cultist again and again, until the Cultist’s face was nothing more than a bloody pulp.

Caen, exhausted from sheer exertion, fading adrenaline and sheer terror, panted as he lay there, numbed from the carnage. A dark shadow fell across him. Caen sighed, his eyes closed in acceptance of the end.

‘Almost look better when they’re splattered all over the floor,’ sneered a gruff voice from behind him.

Caen twisted around in shock and looked up at the grizzled face of his squad’s heavy weapon operator, Thrak. He had once been a ganger from one of the Southern Hive Spires, and had the tattoos and piercings to match it. His twin-barrelled auto-cannon, long since exhausted, had been replaced by a las-gun.

‘Are we retreating?’ managed Caen.

A muscle in Thrak’s eye twitched in irritation, ‘Retreat to where? The Company’s CP has been destroyed: the bastards finally managed to zero their artillery on our HQ. Armour support is gone, so is our artillery. We’re not the only ones swimming up to our necks in feth.’

Caen nodded, for he had nothing to say. After all, what can one say when all hope is lost?

‘C’mon kid, we’ll pull back,’ said Thrak as he pulled Caen to his feet,’ Corporal Gail and a few of the others are dug in at a crater a hundred metres back toward the CP. It won’t save us from the enemy arty, but it’s better than going toe-to-toe with these crazies.’

Caen opened his mouth to reply when a flurry of steel-jacketed rounds stitched their way across Thrak’s back. Thrak managed a step forward, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish as he tottered to the ground face down, his last look a mixture of surprise mingling with confusion.

Caen snapped his las-rifle into a firing position and reflexively squeezed off two shots toward the oncoming Cultist. The first round grazed past the man’s hip, but the second caught the cultist just beneath his helmet’s chin-strap. The helmet flew away, bounced off the ground, and lay in the grass. Markings of Eridor’s 43rd Assault Regiment marked the helmet. Caen didn’t spare a moment for either Thrak or the fallen traitor, as he turned on his heels and fled to join with the remains of his unit.

One hundred metres further down the line, Crater AE-3 was minutes away from falling. Here, inside a crater dug by enemy fire weeks ago, remnants of the 22nd Eridorian Infantry made their last stand, a dozen soldiers picking off carefully placed shots at the oncoming tide of enemies, a host of traitors and cultists at least five times their number. Accuracy and the occasionally well placed grenade kept the enemy at bay, but the magazines and ammo supplies could only last for so long.

Of the twelve men occupying AE-3 only eight were combat fit, three of them lying rumpled at the base of the crater, being seen to by diminutive Medic Rell, who was desperately trying to stem a tide of blood erupting from the neck of his comrade, Trooper Zan. The other wounded men, nursing broken bones and shrapnel wounds, could only look on helplessly as their friend bled to death.

Meanwhile, at the lip of the crater, Corporal Gail had other concerns.

‘Shift the .50 cal’s arc of fire over to the left, don’t let those bastards flanks us Gunner Spayin!’

‘Sir!’ gritted Spayin through clenched teeth. The heavy gun-emplacement bucked violently in his hands as it chattered a swarm of lead into a squad of twelve traitors, who had made the strategically suicidal error of charging an embedded machine-gun. Their bodies danced and jerked like grisly puppets as they collapsed in a bloody mess.

With little concept of tactics or strategy, the Chaos Cultists of the Black Legion simply charged en masse toward the crosshairs of the 22nd Eridorian Infantry. Whole squads were mowed down by the heavy weapon, only to be replaced by scores more of howling heretics. Strategic satellite info would later account one hundred and sixty-five confirmed kills for Corporal Gail’s last stand, although this would quickly fade into history, overshadowed by the slaughter that was to come to Eridor.

For the moment the crater was secure, but the steady stream of suicidal Cultists served only to chew up the Corporal’s supplies of ammunition and shells, providing a crude shield behind which more effective clumps of well-trained, highly disciplined Eridorian Traitors moved up behind. Spotters zeroed the range of the PDF’s position, and within moments long range mortar fire began impacting all around the crater. For the men of Crater AE-3, time was running out.

Caen’s chest and lungs heaved from exertion as bounded for the rendezvous point, las-rounds and tracer fire hissing past his ears and churning up chunks of dirt around his heels as he weaved through line after line of broken half-tracks and smouldering, broken tanks. He didn’t need this: the carnage, the death, the mortar fire. He was no hero. He was a soldier, and not a particularly good one at that.

Caen yelped as a las-round nicked his shoulder, singeing the flesh beneath his combat jacket’s material. Although his thighs burned from fatigue, Caen still managed to run just a slight bit faster. After all, if there was anything Caen was good at, it was saving his own skin.

The sounds of gunfire from ahead grew thicker: he was nearing the Crater, and yet from far away all he could see were dozens of the enemy’s wretched Cultists, seemingly clamouring for a chance to attack the source of all the gunfire as they bounded away from Caen toward the maelstrom of battle. Behind them crouched smaller fire-teams of well disciplined heretics, turn-coats who had once been members of the Eridorian PDF, taking careful positions behind whatever cover was available to them as they leap-frogged toward the last surviving elements of the 22nd Infantry.

Suddenly the swarm of bullets from the gun-emplacement disappeared, to be replaced with an ominous clicking sound. Spayin’s eyes brimmed with panic.

‘Sir, we may have a problem—‘

His last words.

A flurry of rounds from a bolt pistol impacted noisily with his forehead, jerking his head back and efficiently removing the top of his head in a bloody mist. His almost-headless form slumped forward onto the weapon, both his weapon and his head trailing smoke.

‘Damn it!’ exclaimed Gail as he stabbed a finger toward another man huddled in the crater, ‘You, Hanner! Get that weapon reloaded and firing, it’s the only chance we’ve got!’

Hanner mutely pushed Spayin’s body to one side and began fumbling with the weapon.

Enemy infantry fire began to fall upon the crater in larger and larger amounts, cutting into both the ground and the men who inside the crater. Corporal Gail winced as a las-round snapped past his ear, temporarily deafening him.

Hanner, having no luck with the .50 cal, turned to Gail and shook his head, ‘No good, sir: the firing mechanism is completely shot out – it bought it when Spayin did.’

Another volley of fire cut down Trooper Mel on his left, whose weapon continued to fire in his still twitching hands as he rolled deeper into the recess of the crater. The accidentally discharged rounds cut into one of the wounded men, the dying Zel, ending his suffering with a round to the temple. Rell bellowed a curse in frustration, and turned his attentions to another of the wounded.

Trooper Gorith sighted his las-rifle, fired, sighted again. There were too many of them and, that aside, there was simply no way to destroy the morale of an enemy that simply didn’t care about survival. As it stood, the enemy had more bodies than the 22nd had bullets, and so, even as scores of the forces of Chaos fell, the inexorable jaws of fate began to close.

Rell the medic was the next to die, shrapnel from a grenade lodging itself into the side of his throat. He died writhing in agony, a geyser of his own blood mingling with that of his dead patient.

And so, one by one, the men of Crater AE-3 began to fall, each one scavenging ammunition from the pockets of their recently slain friends before ultimately they too were cut down. Hopelessly out-matched, some men even charged to their deaths voluntarily, bolting from the safety of crater with nothing to defend themselves but their bayonets. Soon, it was only Hanner and Gail left – both of whom had long since run out of ammo.

Enemies began swarming into the crater.

Corporal Gail looked up to the smoke-filled sky in despair as the enemy spilled into the crater, falling upon Hanner with knives and rifle-butts. He barely had time to scream before he disappeared under the sea of oncoming psychotics.

‘God-Emperor deliver us.’ whispered Gail.

Within a heartbeat his prayer had been answered, the impact of a stray shell disintegrating both him and the hordes of Chaos that swarmed over him.

Trooper Caen emerged from the maze of destroyed vehicles, his eyes watering from the plumes of smoke that rolled up from the carnage.

He had reached Crater AE-3.

Bodies. So many bodies. Broken, torn up, perforated with bullet holes, swathes of the enemy lay shredded around the edge of the crater, either riddled with las-rounds or filled with shrapnel. The only trace of his comrades’ heroism was the smoking stump of a .50 calibre mounted auto-cannon, which lay fused to a gnarled hand.

Inside the crater, the char grilled clumps of flesh were indistinguishable from friend or foe, as the devastation had made the crater one large pit of death.

He stepped gingerly into the crater, almost reverential of the carnage that had been wrought. This wasn’t war. This was butchery.

The war-cries of the enemy sounded in the distance. They were coming. Enraged at the slaughter of his fellow soldiers, Caen turned to face the enemy.

There were dozens of them, hundreds, thousands. He didn’t care. He had five las-rounds left.

Dropping to one knee, Caen squinted down the sight of his las-rifle and placed a shot directly in the left eye of an oncoming Cultist.

Four shots.

Pivoting, Caen took aim and sent another round slicing through the air. Another Cultist fell, uttering a hollow death rattle from a ruined throat. The Cultists were ten feet away from him, readying their glistening knives for the final kill. Beside them, Traitor Guardsmen rushed in, bayonets glinting hungrily in the daylight.

Three.

The next Traitor Guardsman to fall barely was quickly trampled underfoot by the his own men. Caen, barely five feet from the enemy, didn’t even need to take aim as he squeezed his finger on the trigger.

Two.

A Cultist flew backward into the rest of his men, a smoking hole in his chest. The horde were almost upon him. Caen was close enough to the Cultists to smell the rotting stench of decay that cloyed their clothing.

One.

Caen gunned down one heretic, then slammed his rifle into the belly of another. A savage blow from a las-gun’s butt struck him on the side of the head and Caen went down, reeling.

Once more he closed his eyes as he curled up into a foetal position.

Suddenly, with a roar more deafening than anything he ever heard, an auto-cannon behind him whined to life. The rotating barrels poured fire into the Chaos ranks, parting them as quickly as darkness flees from light. Caen twisted around and laughed in astonishment.

The armoured hull of an Ultramarines Dreadnought stomped forward, its weapons blazing as it led a sea of towering figures in gleaming Power Armour. The enemy host recoiled, stopped in their tracks, and then fled, their will entirely broken.

The Space Marines had come.

But, for the planet Eridor V, the war had just gotten started.