I saw people die in their hundreds, trampled underfoot or crushed in the sheer press of bodies. In some cases, the dead were so squeezed by their neighbours, they were carried along for many metres before being freed to slither to the ground.
I saw troopers from the retinues, and arbites, firing into the crowd in terror before they were run down. Barricades collapsed. Standards swayed and toppled. Walkways over the drain canals alongside the Avenue cracked and fell in, spilling hundreds down into the rockcrete trenches.
I'd lost sight of Madorthene in the pandemonium. I tried to push out from the arch into the sunlight, but fleeing bodies slammed into me. The entire approach to the Spatian Gate was a mass of twisted wreckage and fire from the impact high above. Several dozen guardsmen lay twisted and dead amid the wreckage, killed by falling metal and stone, their dress uniforms dusted white with powdered aethercite or scorched by fire.
Through the sea of screaming humanity, I could see several of the massive aurochotheres stampeding out of control, rearing up, shaking their riders from their backs, trampling into the multitude. Lifeless bodies were tossed high into the air by their swishing tails.
I managed to slide along the outer edge of the gate until I could look north, towards the distant Monument of the Ecclesiarch. Right along the wide Avenue, the scene was repeated. The procession of the Triumph was overrun by the sheer numbers of the terrified public.
There was fire too, great plumes of it, rising from the crowd spaces on either side of the road in three places and on the Avenue of the Victor Bel-lum itself, about seven hundred metres beyond the Gate. It also seemed to me that fire also rose from other open areas beyond the next spire, off the roadway into the artisans' quarter. By my estimation, at least five more of the stricken Lightnings had fallen from the sky, ripping into the mass of the citizenry teeming in panic on the Avenue.
Soot and ash fogged the air. Distantly, above the milling nightmare of bodies, I could see the vast shapes of the Titans, turning on their metal hips, hesitant, as if utterly confused.
I doubt I saw the other Lightnings before anyone else. But I was transfixed. They were all I could see. There were four more of them, presumably the only survivors of the disastrous flyby. They had turned, and were sweeping back down the Avenue. Their formation was nothing like as precise or pretty as it had been just before the accident.
But they were much lower. And much faster.
And I knew what that meant, for I had seen it before.
An attack run.
Emperor spare me, my heart almost stopped as I saw the insane intention taking shape before me.
I screamed out something, but it was futile. One voice against two billion.
Streams of tracer rounds spat from the heavy cannons under their noses. Wing-mounted lascannons sparkled soundlessly.
Two went low over the crowd, slaughtering thousands. The other two followed the Avenue itself, raking the Great Triumph.
The destruction was extraordinary, as if invisible, white-hot ploughs had been set into the sea of bodies, slicing long, straight, explosive furrows out
of the Imperial citizenry below. Or as if some fast-moving, burrowing force was scattering them from below. Stippled lines of explosions sawed through the populace, casting up both human and mechanical wreckage. There was an actual fog of liquefied tissue in the air. I saw tanks struck on the highway, detonating in the mob. Hundreds of Guarsdmen and Space Marines in the rained cavalcade opened fire into the air, chasing the planes, churning the sky with bright, criss-crossed lines.
A Lightning swept by almost overhead, cutting to the left of the Spatian Gate. Its strafing firepower explosively mangled hundreds of people perilously close to me, showering me and the white stone of the Gate's side face with cooked blood.
Hundreds of batteries in the procession were now firing into the sky, the Hydras blitzing the air. Even tanks were firing – out of anger, I suppose, for they hadn't a hope in hell of hitting the fast-moving aircraft.
