He was the judgement of reason, and he brought destruction to the unthinking war of the beasts.
Guilliman felt the engines go critical. The hull tremors became violent and erratic, a heart in fibrillation. He jumped again, off the rear of the vehicle. He landed in the midst of more orks. He was killing again as the machine rumbled and juddered away from him. The clanking of its mechanism turned into the screech of tearing metal. The greenskins aboard ignored him now. They wailed as they fought to preserve the giant engine. Their efforts were futile. They did not understand how they had made their wonder. They knew even less how to preserve it.
The machine exploded. Its death was even more violent than that of Ozirus. It was as if all the brute energy of the species had been contained within the hull, and now it was unleashed in a single gigantic blast. The explosion formed a crater. Fire, earth, wind and metal slammed into Guilliman. It flattened the orks around him. It burned them. A chunk of shrapnel larger than a man sailed past him and cut a greenskin in half. Guilliman rooted himself. He turned his face from the explosion, but stood fast in the holocaust. Before the light faded, he heard another deep-throated explosion, and then another. The destruction of the vehicle was so huge it had reached the machines that had followed it so closely. They died for clinging to the irrational logic of survivors. They had clustered with the perceived victor, and now they perished.
The firestorm spread. It gathered strength. Guilliman had avenged the killing of Ozirus and its crew, but that was not enough. This instant was another moment to seize.
All plans must adapt to contingent realities, or they are not plans. They are dreams.
'All units open fire!' he voxed to the other Chapters. The battle was only a few minutes old, and the leading phalanx had still not fully plunged into the green tide. But this moment must be amplified. 'Choose your enemies and destroy them. Artillery, we have more vehicular concentration. Target my coordinates. I want a massive bombardment now'.
He shouted from deep within the firestorm. He could barely hear his own voice in the blank thunder of the flames. But he heard the new thunder when it came. He heard the shrieking of the shells. And he heard the shattering percussion of the shells landing. He strode through the devastation, killing the few orks that managed to withstand the gunship cluster bombs and the earthshaker ordnance. He moved through the blasts, listening for the roar of Thunderhawk engines and the whistle of descending shells, his hearing so fine he knew where the explosives would fall. He moved back and forth across the fiery plain, wrapped in the storm he had summoned.
He emerged from the destruction. He left behind a new graveyard of ork vehicles. Ahead, the companies of the First Chapter kept faith with the strategy and continued to plough a thousand-yard-wide furrow through the orks. Guilliman stormed forwards, Incandor held high. He passed through one company after another, joining his sons in the purging slaughter, and when they saw him, they shouted to him, and tore into the enemy with redoubled fury.
Onwards, from company to company, until he was leading again, marching ahead of the line of tanks, scything the orks with gladius and shell. Always advancing. This was the coherence of a battle with no ground yet to hold. Always towards the east, towards the mountains. Towards the ruins, bringing the new glory of humanity to reclaim the old.
The orks were still fighting to reach the phalanx of the First Chapter when the rest of the Legion reached them. The line of the advance went from a thousand yards wide to ten times that. The orks covered an even greater area, but they had taken Guilliman's bait. They were concentrated but focused on the wrong target. The main attack of the Ultramarines swept over them like a volcanic blast. Sirras ran with his command squad between and just ahead of the Land Raiders, leading the 223rd's destruction of the orks. He thought of Hierax on the Cavascor. He wished for his old friend's presence. The opening moments of the campaign were deeply satisfying.
The extermination of the enemy would be complete, even without the Destroyers' weapons. The final end of this ork empire was preordained, and Hierax deserved his share of the glory. An hour later, Sirras was wishing for Hierax's arsenal. The orks shook off the impact of the initial shock. They were still dying, and the Ultramarines were still advancing through them. But the orks were not fighting a defensive war. They didn't care about positions or held territory. All that mattered to them was the battle itself. They hurled themselves against the XIII Legion formations, but they also pulled back and circled around for a new angle of attack. There were so many of them, they attacked and retreated simultaneously. The contradictory movements were just eddies and currents in the green sea.
Sirras took apart a hulking chieftain with his lightning claws, then jumped on top of his command Rhino Eknomos for a better vantage of the battlefield. He looked back. He saw the orks flooding around the rear of his company, opening up another front there. The advance suddenly meant nothing. Wherever he looked, there were greenskins beyond counting. The artillery barrage and the actions of the First Chapter had destroyed virtually all of what passed for ork heavy armour. But the enemy's numbers had not been affected at all.
Cursing, he turned around, surveying the battlefield. The 22nd Chapter was operating at the northernmost edge of the Ultramarines front. To the north, there was nothing but orks, and also to the west, as if the Legion had never passed through. To the east, with orks now visibly pouring down their slopes, the mountains were closer, along with the endless twilight. Above, the sky was already lighter, the stars more dim. To the south, the upheaval of war, the companies of twelve Chapters turning the plain into a vista of smoke and fire and blood. There Sirras saw the illusion of progress. The orks hit the forward edge of the companies, and the primarch's great engine of war ground them to mulch. No ork attacking from the east was alive by the time the last battle-brothers marched over the point of initial contact.
It was all illusion, Sirras thought. The orks had an inexhaustible supply of warriors. The mob descended mountainsides along a line at least ten miles long. The entire span of the Chapters was no more than the central portion of the greenskin wave. Tens of thousands of orks could not enter the war from the front, and so they looped around. The battles at the rear of the companies were already ferocious, and they were slowing down the pace of the advance as a whole.
They've surrounded us, Sirras thought. They'll try to drown us.
He refused to accept the possibility of defeat. Instead, he looked for the means to prevent it.
He looked north again. The land sloped away gradually in that direction. His gaze stopped on a deep shadow. It was much darker than the others cast over the plain by the mountains. It was long and jagged, its edges sharply defined. And the orks were going around it.
Sirras blinked through levels of magnification of his helmet's photolenses. The shadow was a chasm in the plain, a narrow canyon, perhaps five hundred yards across at its widest. Its nearest point was less than a mile away.
There were ways of ensuring what fell into those depths never emerged.
He opened the Rhino's hatch and dropped inside. Techmarine Nicandrus looked up from the banks of command screens and auspex arrays. 'I want a topographical scan,' Sirras told him. 'North, approximately two thousand yards from our position.'
He stood over Nicandrus and watched the image appear, layer by layer on the pict screen. The gorge was a deep one. The sides were close to the vertical. 'A unique feature in this area,' Nicandrus said.
'One to be exploited,' said Sirras. He opened a vox-channel to Iasus. 'Chapter Master,' he said, 'we have an opportunity. I propose to take the 223rd north of our current position to force the orks into a canyon.' The correct manoeuvre could doom thousands of the greenskins. And the gorge was a real barrier to their movements.
'Negative!' said Iasus. 'Maintain position and vector of advance.'
The answer came back so quickly, Sirras wondered whether Iasus had understood him. He tried again. Theoretical: any strategy whose result is the faster
extermination of the enemy must be explored. Practical: a drive to the canyon would accomplish just that. 'We would lure the orks to us, while forcing them back over the cliffs.'
'I am aware of the potential in what you propose', Iasus replied. 'My answer is the same. Request denied.'
Sirras spoke through gritted teeth. '"Dogmatic adherence to initial strategies is the surest warranty of defeat,"' he said, quoting the Prologomena.
'My refusal is not the product of rigidity, captain. It is the result of analysis. Practical - your manoeuvre would open up a gap in our lines. Theoretical - the opportunity you would provide the orks is of more potential value to them than any possible benefit to us. You have your orders.' Iasus cut the channel.
Sirras clenched his fists. Nicandrus kept his attention carefully focused on the screens.
'Alert me of any other such geological features,' Sirras said, keeping what face he could.
'As you wish, captain,' Nicandrus answered.
Sirras climbed back out of the hatch. With a snarl of anger he jumped from Eknomos at a charging ork. The brute wore thick plates of crude armour. It carried an axe whose blade was half the size of Sirras. He ducked under the swing and stabbed upwards with his lightning claws. The blades sliced through the armour as easily as the flesh. Sirras brought them all the way up through the greenskin's jaw and out the top of its skull. Sirras withdrew the claws and the ork fell. Behind it came more. Infinitely more, Sirras thought.
Hierax, you should be here, he thought. And you should be leading Nemesis.
Where the plain ended, the ground rose steeply. When the First Chapter reached it, the flood of orks coming from this sector of the cordillera had dwindled. Guilliman could see large steady flows still heading to the battle to the north and south. The spearhead had taken its toll, though. Here, at least, the orks could no longer attempt to sweep away the Ultramarines in a wave of brute force.
There was a way up the slope for the tanks. The orbital scans of the mountains had revealed the telltale switchback patterns of roads at regular intervals leading up from the plain. Now he could see the state of those roads. They were badly pitted and cracked.
Rock falls had caused further damage. Guilliman moved the Vindicators to the lead, and as the column made its way up, the tanks' siege blades saw heavy use. The blades and cannons were needed to clear rubble to such a degree, the climb was tantamount to a siege.
From midway down the column, Gage voxed, 'How long have the orks been on Thoas? They seem to have been very busy.'
'No more than a century or two,' Guilliman said. The figure was approximate, based on incomplete records pieced together from the other reclaimed worlds. There was enough consensus in the fragments to gather some sense of the systems' histories during the Age of Strife. This damage is not all the doing of orks,' he said. He doubted any significant amount had been caused by the greenskins. He saw the scorch marks and scrapes caused by the passage of the xenos army. They were clearly recent. The collapses and piles of debris were older. He saw the workings of erosion. The road had not been maintained for a long time. He frowned. This was not what he had expected to find.
The final switchback led to a wide approach to the main gates of the ruins. The advancing Legion had forced the remaining orks back. They rallied now before huge doors. The entrance to the ruins was a hundred feet high and sixty wide. The doors had a dark sheen. Though they were blackened, they showed none of the wear of the road. Guilliman suspected they were an alloy of adamantium and iron. They were engraved with huge runes in a language Guilliman did not know.
The doorway was built into the wall of a structure as monumental as its entrance. The decaying pyramid emerged from the mountainside as if it were being extruded by the rock. Seen closer, the stone of its construction, though it had come from the mountains, had been machined to the point of being unrecognisable. The stone was smooth, deep black, and formed into gigantic slabs. The structure rose to a position just below the mountain peaks. It was angular, suggestive of being a half-buried octagon. The walls of each terraced level leaned outwards. Their angle, combined with the vertical thrust of the pyramid, made the ruin seem to loom over the two armies, perpetually toppling, yet unyielding.
At regular intervals along the face of the mountain chain were more pyramids, all half emerging from the rock, all with their battered roads leading to their entrances. Narrow spires of the same black rock emerged here and there from the peaks themselves. Between the pyramids were clusters of huge pillars and collapsed structures that could have been temples or palaces. Where the structures had fallen, they seemed to be merging back into the mountainsides. The most visible aspects of the ruins were the gigantic pyramids. In the regularity of their spacing, Guilliman thought they resembled battlement towers, with the mountains themselves serving as the ramparts.
The orks howled their challenge and rushed down the incline of the approach. 'Bolter fire only' Guilliman ordered. 'We will preserve the ruins.' The tanks held back, and Guilliman charged forwards with the legionaries of the First Chapter. Their stream of mass-reactive shells shredded the front lines of the orks. When the two forces met, the greenskins had already lost half their number. They still fought hard. For the first time in this campaign, it seemed to Guilliman the orks were struggling to keep a possession. The ruins were theirs, and there was outrage in their snarls as they tried to push the Ultramarines back down the mountains.
Guilliman held the trigger down on the Arbitrator. He sent death before him, and when he reached the bleeding horde, he struck with another weapon of death. Incandor flashed in his hand, severing limbs and throats with every gesture. He used his own body like a battering ram, slamming into brutes who cried out with pained surprise when it was they, and not their prey, who were sent flying backwards in the collision. He trampled over bones and skulls. He was a machine of efficient slaughter. He wasted no
energy or gestures on any one foe. He butchered with grim conviction, but not with pleasure. The xenos had no place on Thoas, and it offended him that they should try to claim a human relic as their own. But he was not Angron. Guilliman killed with brutal efficiency. He took satisfaction in victory, and in the validation of strategy.
When he and his sons trampled the orks out of existence, they were extinguishing animalistic war with reasoned war. The brutish gave way to thought. This was the inevitable movement across the galaxy. His father brought enlightenment, and the old savageries had no choice but to fall away.
The clash before the gate was brief. The Ultramarines outnumbered and outgunned the orks. When the smell of fyceline cleared, the enemy was a mix of blood and shattered corpses covering the ground before the doorway.
Guilliman advanced to the doors. 'Marius,' he voxed in a playful tone, 'will you join me?'
Flanked by his Invictarii honour guard, he studied the runes on the doors while he waited for the Chapter Master Primus.
'Can you read them?' Gage asked when he arrived.
'No. The language is definitely human, but pre-Gothic.'
'How can you tell?'
Guilliman pointed to a rune a third of the way up the left-hand door. 'The parallel lines on that one, and the linked curve. There is a family resemblance there to the runic inscriptions we found on Aletho Two. These are older.'
'You were correct, then. Human inhabitation of Thoas has a very long history.'
'Yes...'
'You sound uncertain.' And Gage sounded alarmed.
Guilliman smiled. 'Not to be at this moment would be intellectually dishonest.' He gestured at the ruins visible along the curve of the mountainside. To the north and south, the columns of the other Chapters were fighting their way up the slopes to their designated pyramids. 'The damage to this civilisation strikes me as being very old too.'
'Then the orks have been here longer than we supposed?'
'Perhaps. Let us see what waits for us inside.'
The doors opened easily for their size. Guilliman had chains attache
d to each door, which were then pulled by Rhinos. Metal ground against stone, and the way yawned open, igniting Roboute's desire to thrust in and conquer. Guilliman walked in first with Gage at his side. Behind them marched the massed companies of the First Chapter. The heavy armour came next. The entrance was wide enough for the tanks. While the Predators entered the pyramid, Guilliman ordered a line of Vindicators to remain at the entrance, facing outwards as the first line of defence against an attempt by the confused mass of orks at the base of the mountains to reclaim the ruins.
Beyond the doorway was a chamber so vast the air felt hollow. The roof of the pyramid had fallen in, revealing the grey of the cordillera's perpetual dawn. Helmet torches and vehicle lights shone their beams over the walls. There had once been many levels inside the structure, but they were gone now. Scraps of metal marked where they had been, level with each of the exterior terraces of the pyramid. The flagstones of the ground floor were deep in greenskin refuse. Heaps of metal wreckage combined with organic filth. Guilliman could see twisted, jagged and tom fragments that might have once been stairs or decking. On the walls were murals. They were so faded it was impossible to tell what, if anything, they once represented. On the lower levels, the orks had defaced the interior with their own crude artwork - red and black grotesques in the shape of horned, snarling faces.
'So this is where the orks scavenged their material,' Gage said.
'So it would appear.' Guilliman looked up the height of the pyramid. If all the levels had had metal decking, the orks would have found untold thousands of tonnes to use. Guilliman stared at one
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