by C. L. Werner
The only thing a mere mortal could hope for was to keep out of their way.
Rhodaan brought the screaming edge of his chain-sword crunching through the ork’s body. The greenskin flailed on the gnawing blade, yet even as its spine was cut in half, the alien struggled to bring its wide-barrelled pistol towards the Iron Warrior’s head. The Space Marine twisted aside at the last instant as the ork’s finger tightened on the trigger, the violent flash of the discharged weapon causing the left lens of Rhodaan’s helmet to darken its display for a moment. The slug whipped past his head, burying itself in the side of a pneumatic press. The next moment, the bisected ork’s body was flopping on the floor.
The Iron Warrior stared contemptuously at the mutilated alien, then pointed his bolt pistol at its head. Where the ork had missed, Rhodaan’s aim proved more accurate, exploding the brute’s skull with a single shot.
Sounds of battle slowly faded from the processing plant, only a few scattered howls and the occasional stutter of gunfire where moments before bedlam had reigned. The other members of Squad Kyrith were taking their share of the alien invaders. The stormboyz who had pursued the crippled assault boat were learning what it meant to oppose the Iron Warriors. They had thought the Space Marines destroyed in the crash. Now they knew better. Not that the lesson would do them any good. A dead ork didn’t perform new tricks.
Rhodaan fired a few rounds at an ork rising off the floor, trying to use its rocket pack to reach the hole in the wall and escape. The shots crippled the creature’s pack, causing a stream of flame to erupt from the side of the mechanism and sending the rocket careening through the factory on an erratic trajectory which ended in a ball of fire when the alien smacked headfirst into one of the walls.
Rhodaan had already dismissed the alien from his thoughts. With the ork incursion in the factory effectively eliminated, he turned his attention back to the bigger situation.
‘Squad Kyrith to Bastion,’ Rhodaan growled into his helmet’s vox-unit. ‘Assault craft destroyed. Request extraction and redeployment. Our location is Processing Plant Secundus Minorus. Minimal xenos presence at our position.’
The captain waited while his report was relayed by the Bastion’s servitors. Warily, he watched the breach in the wall, ready to spot any more orks trying to enter or leave the factory. The building was still being shaken by the bombs the aliens were continuing to rain down on the district. Simple logic dictated that the orks wouldn’t be deploying troops in this area, only an idiot or a madman would bomb his own soldiers. But Rhodaan had fought orks before and knew that the aliens were both idiots and madmen. The only thing they could be depended upon to do was to be undependable.
‘Captain Rhodaan, this is the Bastion.’ Rhodaan stiffened slightly as he heard the voice of Sergeant Ipos over his vox. ‘Over-Captain Vallax reported your craft destroyed with all personnel. It is good to hear that his report was in error.’
Rhodaan took a second to drain the emotion from his voice before responding. Again, he considered the eerie accuracy of the shots which had disabled the assault boat’s dorsal engine. So, Vallax had thought Squad Kyrith destroyed, had he?
‘Squad Kyrith is fully operational,’ Rhodaan said, his tone as tempered and mechanical as that of a servitor. ‘We require only extraction to pursue our objective.’ If Vallax thought he would reap the glory of assaulting Dirgas on his own, then the Over-Captain was going to be disappointed.
‘Negative, Captain Rhodaan,’ Ipos replied. ‘The Dirgas mission has been cancelled. The xenos have descended upon Vorago in considerable force. They must not be allowed to establish a beachhead. Warsmith Andraaz has made the extermination of the xenos within Vorago top priority for all brothers of the Third Grand Company.’
‘Squad Kyrith obeys,’ Rhodaan said, slamming his fist against his chest plate in an almost automatic gesture of fealty. Beneath his helmet, his lip curled in a sneer. If his men were denied the opportunity to win glory in the raid on Dirgas, then at least Vallax wouldn’t be adding any laurels to his name either.
‘Brothers!’ Rhodaan called over the inter-squad vox frequency. ‘Cleanse this place swiftly. We have been given new orders from the Bastion. The foul xenos seek to gain a foothold within Vorago.
‘We will see that the only ground they keep is the pit we dump their carcasses into.’
Chapter V
I-Day Plus Thirty
A blossom of flame and smoke rose from the hab-pen, an incandescent mushroom of atomised stone and vaporised metal that spiralled into the greasy sky. Somewhere within that pillar of devastation, the ashes of six thousand slaves reached towards the heavens before sinking back into the rubble of their bombed-out cage.
Better them than me, thought Group-Captain Xiaowang as he stared from the cockpit of his ebon-winged Spine-ripper. The swept-back intrusion-bomber represented the latest word in Castellax design templates, a vicious fusion of human engineering and xenos technology. Capable of incredible atmospheric speeds, the Spineripper had earned its name for its uncompromising manoeuvrability, far in excess of what the human body could safely endure. Even competent pilots like Xiaowang, with years of hypno-conditioning and training behind them, had to be vigilant lest the aircraft get out of control. Sometimes, when he looked at the alien crystal relays scattered across the control console, the pilot wondered if some malignant intelligence was staring back at him, waiting for him to make the slightest mistake.
‘Hab-blocks six and seven now eliminated,’ a quivering voice reported over the squadron comms channel. Xiaowang pressed his thumb against the activation rune for his vox-unit.
‘They’re better off dead,’ he snarled at the other pilot. There were twelve Spinerippers in his command and he wasn’t certain which man made the report. He didn’t want to know. Skylord Morax was extremely unforgiving when it came to displays of emotion. A favourite punishment for such displays of weakness was for the offender to be shackled to a bomb and dropped in the very next run. Xiaowang had seen it happen more times than he cared to admit. Mercy was something only a complete idiot expected from the Iron Warriors. Do your job with efficiency and diligence and they might ignore you – anything less was playing with death.
Xiaowang turned his attention back to the flight path of his squadron. Pillars of fire sprouted from the city below, like some hellish grove with leaves of ash and smoke. It was sobering to think of the many thousands of dead those pillars represented, the atomised destruction of so many men and women who had been alive before the Iron Bats appeared in the skies over Oramis.
The orks had descended en masse on the city of Oramis in the early days of the invasion. The local defence forces had been overwhelmed in a matter of days and the Kreisleiter of the city had been slow implementing the murderous abandonment measures demanded by the Iron Warriors. Instead of leaving a desolate city, the Kreisleiter had allowed the foul xenos to capture a populated metropolis with most of its industry still intact. The orks had quickly started using the city to manufacture weaponry to facilitate their conquest, impressing the population into their workforce.
Xiaowang grimaced as he pictured the brutal, monstrous aliens. The people of Oramis had fallen from the pot into the fire. The Iron Warriors were merciless and unforgiving, but at least they didn’t think of their slaves as a supplemental food supply.
The very thought of food brought a growl from Xiaowang’s stomach. Since the onset of the siege, the people of Castellax had been subsisting from an even lower quality protein sludge than normal. The loss of the orbital algae swamps had reduced their rations to a noxious mix of synthetics and protein supplements. At best, the villainous paste lacked any semblance of taste. At worst, it was like trying to eat sand after a silica rain.
Xiaowang shook his head. It was a poor metaphor, but naturally his mind had turned to thoughts of water. There was little left on Castellax, most of it so polluted by the planet’s industry that a sump-ghoul couldn’t drink it. Even more than food, water was becoming a dire scarcity. Th
e reserves maintained in Vorago and the other cities wouldn’t last forever, whatever the Iron Warriors might claim. It was fine for the Space Marines – as far as Xiaowang knew, they didn’t need to eat or drink or sleep for that matter – but for mere mortals it was mighty important to know where the next drink was coming from. Or if there was even going to be a next drink.
Another blossom of fire boiled upwards as the last of the Spinerippers released its payload. The visor of Xiaowang’s helmet darkened as the bright blast burned across the sky. How many had perished in that blast, he wondered? Perhaps it was better not to know.
He turned his face from the explosion, scowling as his gaze stared out across the sweeping panorama of factories and processing plants which made up the industrial section of Oramis. Many of the structures were blackened and burned, but not from the attentions of the Castellax Air Cohort. Skylord Morax had given them strict orders against bombing Oramis’s industry. What damage the factories had suffered was caused by the orks when they captured the city. From the deranged confusion of derricks, gantries and improvised balustrades arrayed around the buildings, it appeared the conquerors had gone to great pains to put everything into working order again.
Xiaowang clenched his fist. The target priority established by Morax was beyond callous. The Iron Bats were to eliminate the workforce to disrupt ork activity in Oramis. Another squadron was to bomb the rail-lines to hinder transport of materiel from the city to other ork positions. But the factories, they were sacrosanct. Any pilot who dropped his payload in the industrial area was to be skinned alive before his entire wing and then thrown into the acid-flats of Teramis.
The city, Xiaowang understood, was to be the focus of a future campaign. The goal of that campaign was recapturing the factories. For the Iron Warriors, that was the only thing that made the city worth possessing. The fate of the humans living in Oramis was less than nothing to them. They could always cultivate a new generation of slaves from the embryo farms.
‘Bandits! Bandits!’ a voice screamed across the vox. Xiaowang’s head snapped around, his eyes darting to the proximity display. True to the panicked report, there were a dozen blips rising from the midst of the industrial centre. Xiaowang didn’t need visual confirmation to know they were ork fighters. After three sorties against Oramis, the aliens had figured out the pattern and moved their hangars into the inviolate part of the city.
‘Iron Bats,’ Xiaowang snarled into his vox-bead. ‘Hostiles at our five. Xenos-pattern craft!’ He almost laughed at that classification. When it came to ork aircraft, there was no pattern. Every plane was as different from the next as one alkali crystal from another. Until each example was actually engaged there was no way to gauge its speed or manoeuvrability. Or its armament.
‘All wings, drop bombs and scatter,’ Xiaowang ordered. Loaded down with ordnance, there was small chance of outmanoeuvring the fighters. Oramis had been too distant from the aerodrome for the Spinerippers to bring their own fighter cover. Even Morax would have to agree that a discreet withdrawal was the smart thing. He might execute Xiaowang anyway, of course.
The Spineripper was jostled violently as the last bombers dropped their loads onto the smouldering hab-blocks. Watching the pillars of fire and ash rise into the sky, Xiaowang smiled. The ring of destruction was between the Iron Bats and the approaching orks. He hadn’t planned it this way, but he couldn’t have asked for a better screen to cover the squadron’s retreat.
‘All wings, peel off at your nine. Keep the blast-area between you and the bandits as long as possible.’ Xiaowang pulled back on the control stick, putting his bomber into a steep-angled turn. With one eye on the proximity-slate, he watched the ork fighters continuing their approach. Some of the aliens were initiating steep climbs or drastic turns to avoid the ash clouds, others seemed intent on just ploughing straight through the radioactive pillars. A flicker of relief spread through him. The orks weren’t going to catch them now.
‘Incoming!’ came a frantic shriek, shattering the moment of calm Xiaowang had taken possession of. He looked back at the proximity-slate. It was peppered with a confusion of little specks. In his ears, Xiaowang could hear the clatter of bullets glancing off the fuselage of his Spineripper.
Whatever air detection devices the orks had, it wasn’t very good. The Iron Bats had been able to sortie over Oramis with relative impunity before. In the past, however, their flight path had taken them well away from the city before turning back to the aerodrome. This time, they were crossing their own tail and flying over a city infested with kill-crazy aliens fully aware of them. Looking down from the cockpit, Xiaowang could see rooftops swarming with orks, every one of them armed with a gun of some kind and firing wildly into the sky. It wasn’t a question of accuracy or precision, the sheer amount of fire being thrown into the air made it impossible to avoid. It was like trying to fly through an ash-storm of lead.
The only saving grace was that the ork weaponry was of too low a calibre to bring down a Spineripper at such distance. Even as that comforting thought came to Xiaowang, an agonised scream shrieked across the vox. Through the cockpit, he could see his wingman descending in flames, his Spineripper trailing smoke from its mangled fuselage. On the ground below, an ork rocket battery belched a salvo of twenty warheads into the sky. He saw several of the rockets detonate soon after, probably struck by the wild fire of small arms, but there were still a half-dozen left when they reached the Iron Bats’ altitude. Xiaowang stabbed his thumb against a rune on the control panel, releasing a bundle of metallic chaff to misdirect the rockets. He felt his body go cold when they ignored the bait, shifting course to match his own. Whatever machine-spirit the orks had pounded into their weapons to guide them, it was too primitive to change targets once it was unleashed.
‘I don’t want to die in Oramis,’ Xiaowang cursed as the first of the rockets slammed into his tail.
A moment later, his world vanished in a sheet of flame, his broken Spineripper spiralling downwards until it evaporated in the mushroom cloud rising from the rubble of hab-block six.
Captain Rhodaan prowled along the marble crypt, inspecting the artefacts entombed in their stasis-field niches. The segments of a massive crystal, the spider-web of flaws marring its face still weeping the same tears of blood as when he had ripped it from the shell of an eldar wraithguard. The sceptre of an ecclesiarch, its thorns as keen as the day the priest had vainly tried to bludgeon Rhodaan with it, little specks of the cleric’s brain still clinging to the ornate baton. The talon of a tyranid hive tyrant, its alien flesh still squirming and striving to regenerate itself five centuries after it was chopped from the monster’s arm.
Rhodaan paused before one of the niches, letting his gaze linger upon the pride of his collection, the centrepiece of his own private reliquary.
The still-leering head of a Space Marine, a captain from the Imperial Fists Chapter, one of the servile fools who yet slaved for the False Emperor. Preserved at the very moment Rhodaan had hewed it from the man’s shoulders, he could still see the hate in the dead Imperial Fist’s eyes. It was validation, a testament to his prowess and might. It was tangible proof that he, Rhodaan, was a true Iron Warrior, a son of Perturabo, proud inheritor of the legacy of the Legion.
He turned away from the decapitated head, all doubt vanquished in his mind. It did not need the calculated flattery of Skylord Morax or the grudging acknowledgement of Over-Captain Vallax or even the regard of Warsmith Andraaz to justify Rhodaan’s sense of purpose. It took only one look into the dead eyes of a butchered enemy. Hate was his purpose, to avenge his Legion’s betrayal upon the galaxy. Millions had already been sacrificed to his hate, but it was not enough to scratch the surface. The Imperium’s suffering had only begun. So long as there was a breath in his body, a beat in one of his hearts, Rhodaan would prosecute the Long War.
‘Revenge is my honour,’ the Iron Warrior growled, his words echoing from the marble walls. Rhodaan’s voice was an alchemy of pride and bitterness. After mi
llennia of unending war, he knew the Legion’s thirst for revenge would never be quenched and so he was doomed to die without honour. The moment the Legion’s flesh-rippers had claimed him, he had become one of the damned. They had given him strength and power beyond anything a mere mortal could possess, but in return they had taken everything.
Rhodaan closed his eyes, picturing that final moment when the flesh-rippers had come. He could see their chainaxes tearing through the sealed door of the hab-unit, shredding the furniture that had been piled behind it to strengthen the barrier. He could hear the death agonies of his parents and sister as the slavers butchered them before his eyes. The Iron Warrior felt no kinship to these people now. The only feeling that stirred within him was disgust at the sloppy tactics displayed by the flesh-rippers. It was insufferable to think such vermin served the Third Grand Company, dared call themselves vassals of Warsmith Andraaz.
The Space Marine stalked through the empty halls of his reliquary, abandoning thoughts of the past and turning his mind to promises of the future. Skylord Morax was pushing for the recapture of Oramis, promising that his Air Cohort could immobilise the orks infesting the city long enough for ten divisions of janissaries to sweep in and seize the initiative. The Iron Warriors themselves would strike at the vital industrial district, exterminating every alien lurking within the factories. Morax was quite confident that the entire operation could be organised and put into action in as little as a week.
Of course, there had been voices raised in protest. Algol and Gamgin were concerned about maintaining the strength of the garrison manning the Witch Wall and the Mare Ossius fortifications. Already bemoaning the reserves that had been detached from the Mare Ossius area of operations in order to assist Project Malice – Ipos’s plan for dealing with the orks should they breach the Witch Wall and cross the dry ocean – the two captains weren’t about to lose more men to Morax’s offensive.