Free Deathwatch by Steve Parker Page B

half a second before the rear wall blasted outwards. Voss was shoved sideways by the force of another blast a second later, but he was sure-footed and steady. He did not fall, nor did he drop his armaments.
    He reached Squad Richter a few seconds later. They were rising to their feet, shaking off clods of wet earth. Voss recognised a battle-brother called Varagrim, a heavy weapons specialist like himself. ‘Var!’ he shouted. ‘Look sharp!’
    He tossed one of the missile launchers and Varagrim caught it, knees bending momentarily with the weight of the weapon as it landed in his outstretched hands.
    ‘With me,’ ordered Voss as he leapt up onto the firing step and put the other missile launcher to his shoulder.
    Varagrim didn’t argue. Sergeant Richter had fallen to a heavy artillery barrage just two days prior. Sergeant Voss had assumed command of Squads Voss and Richter both.
    Voss poked his visor up above the lip of the trench and cursed. It wasn’t any kind of conventional armoured vehicle that had fired those shots into the trench. Before him, not three hundred metres away and scuttling forwards fast, was a multi-legged metal monstrosity. Hideous, daemonic faces cast in gold and bronze leered at the loyalists, mocking them, daring them to stand and fight. And die.
    ‘Defiler,’ spat Varagrim, joining him on the step.
    Aye , thought Voss. Curse the luck .
    Defilers were damned difficult to disable. Knock out the treads of a tank and it became a sitting target. Easy prey. But the thickly-armoured, spider-like limbs of the Defiler were harder to hit. More than that, should one of the legs be disabled, the others could compensate, keeping the Chaos abomination mobile. If one managed to stagger it, however, there was a short window of opportunity…
    ‘We’ve only two missiles,’ said Voss to Varagrim. ‘I want you to target the front right leg.’
    ‘Surely we should both fire on the hull, sergeant!’
    ‘Not while it still has full mobility. Trust me, brother. The next step that monster takes, I want you to cripple that leg.’
    Varagrim hesitated only a moment, then nodded.
    ‘As you say, brother-sergeant.’
    Behind the Defiler, a squad of Chaos Marines advanced, using the walking tank to shield themselves from the fury of the defenders. If the Defiler breached the earthworks, the Traitors would spill into the trenches and all advantage would be lost. Voss was confident of his company’s strength in hand-to-hand combat, but it was a numbers game here, and the Chaos filth outnumbered his brothers by a factor of three to one.
    What in Dorn’s holy name brought these bastards here?
    Perhaps he would never know. It was enough for now that they had to be stopped.
    ‘Fire!’ he barked to Varagrim.
    There was a shriek of igniting fuel and a bright flash of back-blast. The first missile screamed towards the Defiler on a trail of white smoke.
    It struck the leg squarely on the knee joint, staggering the unholy machine, biting off great chunks of thick armour and crippling the pistons beneath. The Defiler swayed and struggled to its articulated knees. That instant of immobility was the window Voss had been waiting for. He painted the Defiler’s hull dead-centre with his weapon’s targeting laser.
    ‘Get clear,’ he yelled, warning any behind him of the imminent back-blast.
    He pressed the firing stud and let fly.
    The launcher’s tube coughed out its deadly payload, kicking hard in Voss’s hands.
    With a piercing scream, the missile spiralled towards its mark. There was a short, sharp boom before blinding fire erupted outwards, followed immediately by a great billowing cloud of thick black smoke. As the wind pulled the smoke aside like a great curtain, Voss saw the ruined machine collapse in the mud. A secondary explosion rocked it from inside, the walker’s magazine detonating, blowing out the rest of its hull armour in a wave of deadly shrapnel that scythed into the Chaos Marines close by.
    ‘Now,’