Crawling arm over arm for the bulkhead, the major kept the monsters at bay with short, sporadic blasts behind and around him as he dragged himself across the smooth floor. Lugging his torso across the bulkhead threshold, Mortensen pulled his legs through before slamming the heavy hatch closed. He could feel the rumble of a final desperate charge as the bulkhead swung shut, but he was already spinning the wheel-lock on the other side. With the hatch locked-off and pressure sealed, Mortensen rested the back of his head against the bulkhead but found himself rapidly kicking away from the door as a thunderstorm of blows rained down on the reinforced metal from beyond. Where successive impacts found purchase the hatch had begun to warp and buckle.
Mortensen couldn’t believe it. He and Krieg had been wrong. A cult undoubtedly existed here, but not one devoted to forbidden gods as the commissar had speculated. Instead an alien sect had infected the fabricator moon, celebrating the potent brutality of their Kaligari Cradle neighbours – greenskin invaders out of the Gargasso Deeps. He shouldn’t have been so surprised: Bellona, Scythia and Calydon Prime had all been hit and the stars of a number of greenskin warlords were certainly on the rise. It wasn’t entirely unprecedented either: heretical human and greenskin alliances were not unknown, especially during extended campaigns where local populations of besieged worlds felt that their Emperor had abandoned them. The Burdock Worlds could hardly be considered major strategic targets, despite the speed with which they were sundered. Illium wasn’t some backwater agri-world and the Lazareth System was a major strategic target. Too big for a single warlord, with little more than a few crop balls of momentum under his belt. Savage greenskins simply did not operate like this. Something was deeply wrong here.
These thoughts and more haunted Mortensen in the thick darkness of the passage, with the hammer of blows ringing in his ears. He had more pressing concerns, however, like getting down to ground level, through the Titan’s labyrinthine interior, without spilling every drop of his precious blood. Pushing himself up against the wall he stumbled forward into the blackness, occasional blasts from the side arm lighting his way.
VIII
The escape had run as much to plan as Krieg had any right to expect. A toppled security tower had provided the group with some much needed cover as they exited the Spectre on the least lethal side of the quad. The commissar’s insistence that the silent heavy bolter would draw the enemy in had proved accurate with huge mobs of insurrectionists able to work their way up to within a stone’s throw from the fuselage.
Krieg was the last out, allowing Snyder, Turkle and Goinz to provide a wall of scatter shot to shield the Navy crew’s flight. Golliant had not only the weight of the heavy stubber harnessed to his wrestler’s frame, but also hauled one of the aircraft’s stretchers over the masonry-strewn court behind him. The wounded Khongkotan sniper was strapped into the bouncing gurney, crying out with every bump and feeling especially vulnerable on the occasions the aide had to drop him, reach around and awkwardly gun down approaching insurgents with his stubber.
Sprinting for the cover of the collapsed tower, Krieg kept his head low to allow the storm-trooper sniper he’d met inside room to line up his shot. Krieg had learned his name was Sarakota and that his injured compatriot was Opech: both tribesmen. There was little love lost between the two soldiers, however, Sarakota being the cold, commonsensical type and his brother-savage the militant loudmouth. Their marksmanship was the only thing the pair truly shared, as evidenced by the explosively precise cover fire provided by Sarakota’s anti-materiel rifle as the group abandoned the aircraft.
As Krieg skidded to a halt in the gravel and dust around the tower he gave the order and the sniper popped a round in the Spectre’s portside fuel tank. A chain reaction of faltering explosions tore White Thunder apart, vaporising the bloodthirsty crowds that had breached the aircraft and flooded her troop bay intent on discovering survivors. A backwash of flame and fury sanitised the surrounding area, leaving hundreds of closing revolutionaries scalded and aflame. With a small mushroom cloud of raging black smoke rising in the centre of the quad, fire from the compound roofs stuttered to a full stop. There were some isolated pockets of celebration and cheering but largely the rebel mobs were given to confused silence. Many stood up from behind cover and walked slowly towards the aircraft inferno.
Remaining concealed, the soldiers loped out of the complex with the bedraggled remains of the Navy crew in tow. This would have been a flawless escape, but for a Spetzghastian immigrant worker and his son waiting behind the ruined foundations of the tower. The smoke-stained face of the father swung out from behind a crumbling wall as he blasted the injured crew chief full in the face with a scavenged skitarii lasrifle. Simultaneously his street-urchin son took Hoyt in the shoulder with a similarly liberated pistol. The co-pilot fell back into Krieg’s arms and immediately fired back, cutting the boy in two with a beam from his own laspistol. Sarakota ran up beside, his weighty anti-materiel rifle shouldered during the run, and plugged the father several times in the chest with assured semi-automatic rounds from his autopistol side arm.
Hoyt stood stunned at what he’d done. Slaughter must have appeared different from the cockpit. The child’s screaming was already drawing unwelcome attention. Krieg handed the unsteady co-pilot to one of the Spectre door gunners and stepped forward, drawing his hellpistol.
‘Move,’ he ordered, prompting the crew on: Snyder and his cronies certainly wouldn’t wait for them. Sarakota and Golliant nodded grimly and pushed on, motioning the Navy crewmen onwards.
The commissar stood over the broken body of the child. The boy’s squeals had an odd quality to them. His eyes seemed impassive and blank. His were not cries of pain or fear. They were intended as a warning, despite their result. What had happened to this planet? Krieg could hardly imagine. ‘Because you had not the courage to be loyal…’ he informed the young rebel coldly and levelled his humming pistol.
At that moment the warning went home and scores of surrounding insurgents turned their weapons on Krieg and the fleeing line of Navy crewmen. After the lull, the firepower was explosive and harsh on the ears. Poorly aimed las-bolts cut the tower foundations to pieces, forcing Krieg to slip behind a puncture-riddled wall. He made one further attempt to implement Imperial justice but had to pull back further at the whine of a rocket winding its way down on their position. The frag-blast blew Krieg back off his feet and took apart what remained of the tower foundations and anyone else inside. Brushing grit from his eyes, the commissar stumbled to his feet, whacking his left ear with his palm until the hearing came back.
Another barrage of laser fire descended on his position and he bolted after the others with hundreds of armed Illians climbing down from the compounds and flying across the quad after him.
As he burst out of the other side of the derelict compound he found himself in a wide, dusty alleyway. Alone. His heart leapt as he saw Volscian colours flash past the far end of the freightway. Centaur after Centaur rocketed past, chewing up the sandy avenue: the convoy was here. He took a step forward but the air in front of his eyes suddenly spat with light and energy. Rifle barrels cleared broken plas from storm windows on the far side of the alley and lanced the freightway with a gauntlet of las-fire.
‘Krieg!’ came a voice from above, accompanied by the raucous bombast of shotgun fire. Scatter shot blasted out the remaining plas of the storm windows, forcing the barrels to retract. Staring up the commissar saw Snyder, Turkle and Goinz on the roof of the opposite building – a huge depository warehouse adjoining the compound complex – feverishly working their slide actions to keep up a sufficient onslaught of fire.
Further along the roof of the gargantuan warehouse Krieg could make out the Navy crewmen with Golliant and Sarakota, on each end of the stretcher, making for the convoy at a sprint. The freightway was clearly a suicide run and the hivers had directed them up an escarpment of rubble and wreckage left behind from Vertigo’s earl
ier rocket run. With shouting and gunfire already on his coat-tails the commissar had little option but to do likewise and threw himself up the mound, clawing his way skyward.
Turkle’s sweaty palm was waiting for him at the bolt-bathed summit and Krieg allowed the Volscian to heave him over the lip of the depository roof. Breathless and exhausted Krieg pushed himself to his feet and began the scramble for the convoy. For the second time in as many minutes the cadet-commissar found himself alone.
Turning, he found the Zombie Squad standing behind him, their combat shotguns held at the hip, the gaping muzzles pointed squarely at him. Krieg twitched for his pistol, but Snyder shook his head darkly.
‘Ah-ah. Lose the piece. Slowly.’
‘The convoy is just down there,’ Krieg told them, taking his hellpistol from its holster by the tips of his fingers and unclipping his belt power pack.
‘Vox, too.’
The cadet-commissar unplugged his earpiece and wound it up with the side-arm. He tossed it to Turkle who snatched it out of the air with admiration. Krieg remained silent, flicking his eyes all around the roof for anything that might tip the odds in his favour. The roof was bare, however, bar the ragged holes the Spectres had blasted into it earlier and it was onto the edge of one of these the hivers had backed him.
‘It’s nothing personal,’ Turkle told him. ‘Eckhardt was an effete pig. But he’s a Volscian pig. Clan code, you see?’
‘One day, they’re gonna stop sending you schola-swine,’ Snyder blurted with venom, ‘but until they do, there’s a saying of Volscia – You got the shot, you better take it.’
Krieg’s mind whirled: at first he thought this was Mortensen’s doing. He’d only ever heard of Eckhardt from literature on the 1001st’s revolt.
Turkle gave him a cruel grin and brought his weapon up.
‘Wait…’ Krieg managed, but Goinz had already fired.
The impact alone was nauseating, beyond the untold damage wrought by the deadly weapon. The air was knocked clean out of Krieg’s lungs and the shot threw him backwards. Successive blasts caught his side and shoulder, spinning him around and towards the hole in the warehouse roof. A crippling shot square in the small of his back, flung the desperate commissar through the dark opening. As he fell, twisting and turning like an abandoned corpse, he caught brief, woozy glimpses of his three assassins – now standing around the hole, spewing gouts of optimistic shot after him.
Eventually his assassins faded – as did the boom of their target practice as the range became untenable. The darkness of the enormous warehouse swallowed him and Krieg waited the flailing eternity it took to reach solid ground and the end of his life.
His landing came sooner than he could have anticipated and to his utter astonishment, he bounced.
The depository housed a small mountain of some kind of green crop – a fleshy pod, no doubt some kind of off-world foodstuff harvested on a distant agri-world, imported to feed the army of immigrant workers that kept Illium a productive powerhouse. Krieg’s bounce soon turned into a floundering tumble that picked up speed as he rolled down the side of the pod mega-mound. Many of the vegetative cases split and cracked under the commissar’s rough treatment and by the time Krieg actually hit the dirt of the warehouse floor, he was thoroughly splattered with the pods’ thick, jaundiced discharge.
He lay there for a moment in an unceremonious heap, pain coursing through his very being. Sitting slowly upright in the dust, surrounded by smashed pod cases, the cadet-commissar unbuckled his greatcoat and allowed the heavy leather to fall to the ground – heavier than usual due to the extra flak plates Krieg had instructed Golliant to sew into the garment. Udeskee’s advice had been warranted after all. He still felt like four ogryns had gone to work on him with iron bars and his uniform was torn and bloody where pellets had actually found their mark.
Probing his clothing at the shoulder, where the worst of the damage seemed to have been done, Krieg’s eye caught movement on the floor beside him. Something was moving inside one of the pods. Curious and appalled, the commissar slipped a slim blade from out of a sheath in his boot. He’d had the blade since basic training on Galtinore: it was his Legionnaire’s bayonet and it went everywhere with him. Poking the knife inside the split and twisting the blade, Krieg cracked open the pod. A small creature rolled out, enveloped in a stringy juice. Krieg retracted his hand immediately. The thing was clearly alien in origin and must have violated a thousand different quarantine and importation by-laws just by lying there. It was roughly bipedal and had beady red eyes and a tough, leathery green hide. Its strange body was largely dominated by its man-trap maw, however, and as the docile horror yawned, it showed off its immature dagger-like fangs.
Krieg had seen these things before. Any soldier that fought orks and their foetid kind had. They had an equally repulsive name that the commissar could not recall, even staring at the nasty thing. To his knowledge the horrors went everywhere with the monstrous green degenerates. In turn it was widely believed that greenskin reproduction had a hierarchical biology relying heavily on spores and the pods that grew from them. Life in the 123rd Pontificals had been rarely dull: inquisitors had unhealthy interests. At that moment, Krieg reasoned, he was sitting amongst a giga-warehouse of greenskin pods, harvested and stored in an Adeptus Mechanicus facility at the heart of the Illian capital for some nefarious purpose.
Getting stiffly to his knees and then with even more care and forethought, his feet, Krieg pulled his flak-reinforced coat back on and fished around in the webbing for an arc lamp. Clutching the bayonet in one hand – his only remaining weapon – and snapping the torch to life he pierced the vast darkness of the depository searching for an exit. He found something else entirely.
Krieg gave a violent start as the arc beam cut through several dark figures in the dusty twilight. His bayonet came up, but the figures failed to respond. Every bone in his body wanted to turn back but with the warehouse wall to wall with the pods that had saved his life in the other direction, there was little choice but to creep forward.
Hugging the deeper shadow of the depository wall, the commissar sidled along, both knife and torch extended towards the statuesque figures. They could almost be sculptures but for the rise and fall of their barrel-chests and the epileptic flutter of their armoured eyelids. Hundreds and hundreds of ork savages: adorned with scraps of salvaged flak mail, spikes, and dripping with all manner of brute weaponry. They stood as if on parade – although Krieg realised that the comparison was ridiculous, second only to the fact that he was actually witnessing such antithetical behaviour – swaying slightly, a few metres equidistant from one another in the cavernous space of the depository.
The cadet dared not intentionally interact with the small army of hulking, sadistic man-eaters, but his lamplight and the scrape of his footfalls did little to disturb them. The tightness in his chest begged him to bolt for it but Krieg could not bring himself to do so – feeling as though one does in the presence of a rabid dog. He wanted to run but knew that he shouldn’t. His calm, measured steps took all the longer to take, however and gave him further opportunity to make observations as he shuffled along the warehouse wall. The further he got, the stranger circumstances became.
Some of the creatures drooled from their snaggle-tusked jaws as they stood in their trance-like stupor. Instead of glooping to the ground, though, the slobber dribbled upwards, finally dashing the depository roof above.
Orks on Illium was one thing; the same orks entranced in a warehouse was already one step beyond, but now with the laws of physics failing to apply, Krieg was ready to start questioning his own sanity. Had one of those shotgun blasts taken his head off: was he dead?
That wasn’t all. Strange orbs of light proceeded to glide above and around the stationary monsters and the air crackled between them, resulting in the occasional blue spark leaping from one alien to another.
No one could pretend t
o know very much about the minds of orks, but Krieg had been told that greenskins generated a psychic field that individually accounted for their technological mastery and under communal circumstances could create unnatural social and physical effects. Krieg couldn’t tell whether or not he was witnessing some of this bizarre phenomenon at that moment, but he did know that he’d never seen orks act this way before and he’d met them on the field of battle both as a Legionnaire and a Pontifical.
The worst moments were in fact those closest to the door. He could imagine reaching the postern gate and the barbaric horde coming back to their brutal senses. Forcing the lock quietly with the flat of his blade, Krieg stepped out into the deserted avenue and closed the door steadily behind him. Resting his back against it he slid to the dirt, the nervous tension evaporating from his body with such collective force that the relief made him feel light-headed and weak. Sitting in the road he didn’t know what scared him more: the fact that the convoy had left him behind in enemy-held territory or the possibility that each of the gargantuan storehouses that surrounded him and the mighty cathedra beyond held a sizeable warband of battle-seasoned greenskins.
Getting to his feet Krieg started to jog in the direction of the Mortis Maximus. Deleval’s fast moving column would have to rendezvous with Mortensen’s Redemption Corps in order to move out the Titan crew and if he could move fast enough, that was Krieg’s best bet. Either way, the commissar had to reach a vox-link: the 364th Volscian Shadow Brigade were being drawn into an insidious trap of monumental proportions and that warehouse was a target begging for an Imperial air strike. He could only hope that he’d make it in time.
Honour Imperialis - Braden Campbell & Aaron Dembski-Bowden & Chris Dows & Steve Lyons & Rob Sanders Page 42