A missile flew towards the squad. It fell short, sending up a geyser of earth and body parts a few metres in front of the Grey Knights.
Opportunity, Styer thought. ‘Rush them,’ he ordered, and the squad plunged into the veil of bloody dust. He and his brothers were fighting for mere seconds now. And there was still no contact from Gared.
The Grey Knights came out the other side of the debris cloud. They had a clear run toward the Deff Dreads. The terrain between them was churned gravestones and ork bodies. The ork walkers tried to adjust their range. Their accuracy was still off. Explosions surrounded Styer. Heavy calibre rounds chewed up the ground. Something hit his left pauldron, with enough force to jerk his torso. Damage reports appeared on his retinal lenses. Outraged by the profanation of his armour, he ran faster, shaking the earth with his steps.
‘Low and fast,’ he said, and hunched into his charge.
The Grey Knights came in under the Deff Dreads’ fire. They shot back with storm bolters, aiming for the viewing slits near the top of the bodies. The armour, primitive but massive, repelled the shells, but the explosive impacts blinded the occupants. The walkers’ response was wilder, more inaccurate. On Styer’s left, Borsam struck home, shooting through the slit of one of the lead monsters. The Deff Dread convulsed with the pilot’s death throes. The body tilted forward. It fired its rocket just before it fell. The missile detonated against Borsam’s chestplate. The explosion knocked Styer to his knees.
He was up again in the instant. Borsam’s rune started flashing red in his auto-senses. Still moving forward, Styer risked a glance in his brother’s direction. Borsam was down, slumped over the prone walker. His armour was smoking. But he was moving, struggling to push himself up with his arms.
Borsam might yet live. But for him to have a chance, the immediate battle had to be won. There could be no stopping to aid him now.
‘Hold fast, brother,’ Styer voxed.
As he spoke, two Deff Dreads closed on him. They turned, away from his brothers’ fire, and reached for him with arms that could tear a Chimera open. They were unmoved by the bolter shells battering their sides. Styer ducked beneath a snapping shear. Its jaws snapped together with such force that he could believe it would have decapitated him. Sensing the second attack from the rear, he turned and threw himself at the foe, leaping upward. The arms flailed, trying to stop him. He landed on the flat top of the Deff Dread. The other trained its fire on him. He withstood the blows and raised the daemon hammer high. To his left and right, his brothers were locked in battle with the other walkers. Another rocket strike, one well-placed blow, and the balance could turn against them. They had snatched the momentum of the struggle through speed, but in sheer destructive power, the Deff Dreads were their superiors.
At the crest of the hill, more of the monsters appeared, accompanied by two Battlewagons.
Victory was impossible. Annihilation was imminent.
Defeat was sacrilege. Styer refused it.
The psychic force of his brothers flowed through him. They were linked as a unit, a synchronised force that was greater than the sum of its superhuman parts. And the justicar was the nexus of the fusion, the fulcrum of the squad’s power. He drew on that power now. A lightning storm flashed along the length of the hammer. He was more than Styer as he brought it down. He was all of his brothers. He was the Grey Knight. He struck the Deff Dread with the force of the Emperor’s justice itself.
Thunder tore the air. Light blasted apart the evening’s gloom, and it did not dissipate. It arced between the two walkers. The hammer blow smashed the upper portion of Styer’s prey. He compacted the armour, crushed the ork inside, and ruptured its power plant. Its launcher fired a rocket at its brother. The energy weapons of both walkers overloaded. They exploded like solar flares. And the energy was still building, out of control, the next event unstoppable. Styer leapt again, away from the stricken Deff Dread. The squad, as one, retreated. Vohnum grabbed Borsam and hauled him back. They dropped flat as it came: the great explosion of both power plants. Day returned to the graveyard. The Deff Dreads vanished. The other three were crippled by the blast, limbs blasted off. They fell. They were raging, weaponised tombs.
The crackling, burning day faded. For a dozen metres in every direction, the ork infantry had been decimated. The survivors were injured, stunned, unable to mount an assault. The Grey Knights rose, surrounded by a blackened wasteland.
But this was no victory. It was the gain of a few paltry seconds. Ahead came the next line of ork heavy armour. A Battlewagon fired its big gun. The shell shrieked past Styer.
He felt a new crater form behind him.
A very few seconds. There would be no more.
And still there was no word from Gared.
‘Cease fire,’ said Furia.
‘Inquisitor?’ Montgelas asked.
‘The enemy ship’s engines have stopped.’ She pointed at the pict screen. The flare from the kroozer’s stern had died. The ship still glowed, though. The veins of fire pulsed the length and breadth of its hull. The enormous hulk looked almost fragile, on the verge of flying apart from internal pressure. If it did, it would take the Tyndaris with it. Furia said, ‘I won’t take the chance of triggering a chain reaction.’
The bow of the kroozer was embedded in the Tyndaris’s flank like a Cretacian saurian with its jaws locked on its prey. Its guns had fallen silent. Perhaps, Furia thought, ramming the strike cruiser had been the ork ship’s final act. Though its body was still dangerous, was its crew dead?
The Tyndaris’s cannons still fired, but with more deliberation. The bombardments were aimed at the bow of the kroozer, not far from where it was fused with the Tyndaris’s hull.
‘They’re trying to dislodge it?’ said Montgelas.
‘Yes.’
‘They could trigger a catastrophic–’
Furia cut him off. ‘There is no choice.’ Then, disgusted by the necessity of the move, she said, ‘Shipmaster, withdraw this ship to a safe distance.’
The stricken Tyndaris fired again, and again, beating away at the corpse of the predator. The glow from the kroozer became uglier, the fissures longer. Furia braced herself for a detonation that would destroy both vessels.
The warp tendril was diseased. It was disease. When it took Gared, he fell into infinite depths. He knew that his sense of plummeting was a lie because there was no gravity in the warp – no up, no down, and no true space at all. But his consciousness experienced a plunge. It was the pull of the malevolence in the warp. Writhing intelligences and ravenous impulses clutched at him. Things that were still hungers, but on the verge of breaking into pestilent existence clutched at him. Tendrils within the tendril wrapped themselves around him, a falseness with powers beyond the real, driven to spread its contagion.
And the hunger was rotten, infected. What sought entrance to the materium would be an embodied volition of illness and rot. It was very close to finding a shape whose consolidation would mean decay for all it touched. Close enough to hold him, and as in the act of grasping, it gave itself definition. The tendrils became the possibility of hands.
Gared fought back. He centred his awareness in the reality of his identity, and of the material reality of his body. He reinforced his psychic shield against the assaults, and gathered his strength, weaving it into a counterattack. The assault he was weathering exposed the nature of the enemy. Knowing its desire gave him a target, and his strike a deadly precision.
Disease pressed harder around him. It tried to pry apart his armour. It tried to be inside his bones. He held it at bay. He completed the weaving. The non-space that held him broke out in pustules. Something began to babble. It was not yet a voice. It was a liquid, idiot gargle, fumbling towards words of decomposition.
Gared struck. His weapon was a great severing. It was a psychic guillotine blade, slicing through the tendril, cutting it off from the source of
its power and the greater sentience beyond. The tendril convulsed. It exploded with a corruption of intensity. With its ebbing will, it stabbed into Gared’s skull. The blow felt like the point of a dagger, one that was rusted and caked with putrefaction. He took the pain and refused the thing entry to his mind. It howled, mindless and frustrated. The howl was torn from no throat and many, and then the potential collapsed. The root of the tendril found no purchase, nothing to devour except its own pseudo-being. Its purchase on the materium and on Gared fell away.
He had the sensation of a final, murderous, gurgling snarl, and he was back in the materium. He was crouched beside the ruins of the sarcophagus. It had crumbled, the marble eaten away as if it had turned into sponge. There fragments were covered by a sheen of slime. The bottom of the grave had vanished. Below was a bottomless darkness. The sides of the shaft were stone, the bedrock of the hillside. It had been reshaped. There were patterns in it, descending as far as Gared could see into the gloom. They had something in common with engravings, but there was something that went much deeper. The stone had flowed, become flesh and been twisted, and now it was a language without words or alphabet, a perpetual spell. A summoning.
But as he stared at the ruinous shapes, and felt the fading heat of transformation, Gared understood that he had not revealed the obscenity by blasting through the sarcophagus.
He had called it into being.
‘Shipmaster Saalfrank,’ Furia voxed, ‘do you understand the risks of what you are attempting.’
‘I do, inquisitor.’ His voice was that of a man who was surrounded by nothing but bad situations and worse choices.
The guns of the Tyndaris continued to beat the kroozer. The Scouring Light had retreated to a point just before the curvature of Squire’s Rest would have hidden the other ships from view. Montgelas had brought the sloop around so it would be in a position for a quick return. The oculus was filled by the image of the strike cruiser’s attempt to break free of the toxic wreck.
‘What is the state of your engines?’ Furia asked Saalfrank.
‘Inoperative.’
Without motive power, what Saalfrank was attempting had an even greater chance of disaster. The Tyndaris would not be able to pull away even if the two vessels were parted.
Furia did not reply to the shipmaster. She watched the pict screens. The auspex scan could say nothing of use about the kroozer. Its construction and capabilities, even in its death, were too alien to understand. So she watched. She watched the shells hit. The pict resolution was insufficient to show her the damage being done to the bow’s armour. She watched the spread of the fissures. She watched the intensification of the glow. She watched for the inevitable.
And then, to her surprise, she watched the rebirth of hope as the hulk at last released the Tyndaris. The two ships parted. The movement was slow enough to be the floating of continental plates, but it was steady. The force that had dislodged the kroozer had given it momentum. The space between the vessels grew from sliver to gap.
‘Holding fire,’ Saalfrank voxed.
Furia’s eyes moved back and forth between the damaged ship and the dying one. She wished the Scouring Light could move closer to assist, and provide her with a clearer idea of the extent of the damage to the Tyndaris.
Montgelas had the same thought. ‘Inquisitor,’ he began, ‘we should approach. We should be providing aid.’
‘What aid would you give?’ Furia snapped. ‘Subjecting both our vessels to catastrophic damage? Hold this position, shipmaster.’
The kroozer continued to move away. There was malevolence in its slow drift, as if the ship were revelling in the threat of its death. The fissures became a web of jagged fire over the hull. The greatest concentration of wounds and intensity of light was around the engines. Furia looked back and forth between the kroozer and the Tyndaris. She measured the speed of their separation and the spread of damage on the ork vessel. She foresaw the inevitable.
She came close to predicting the very moment of the blast.
The orks’ plasma reactors went critical. The aft of the kroozer bulged, and then gave birth to a sun. For a brief second, the forward half of the kroozer was visible in silhouette. Its broken jaws looked like they were laughing. Then it vanished in the killing light. The shockwave raced through the close orbit of Squire’s Rest.
A great flame washed over the Tyndaris.
The end of shelter had come. The Grey Knights had centred the orks’ attention on themselves, and that had meant a few more moments of life for the settlers around the mausoleum. But the ork numbers had swollen to the point where any diversion mattered. The greenskins filled the cemetery. Most of them were clambering over each other in the effort to reach and kill the Space Marines. Most of them. The others were a horde of their own. They surrounded the mausoleum. They rampaged around vaults and gravestones, and the settlers who were slow to retreat to the mausoleum itself were slaughtered. The battles were more than close quarters now. They were point blank. The orks cut their prey down with blades, chainaxes and power claws. Brauner’s comrades were being annihilated, their bodies hacked and smashed to boneless, unrecognizable pulp.
But they had held the mausoleum. And they were still holding.
The remaining force was a tight cluster around the tomb’s entrance. There were enough guns to lay down a constant barrage of las. In the centre of the forward rank was Orbiana. Only two of her acolytes were still alive, but her xenos weapon carved the orks who rushed her out of existence. And still the orks came in such strength and fury that weapon fire wasn’t enough. Some would reach the defenders, and the battles then became hand to hand. The human concentration of force gave them the edge to delay the end.
Brauner knew the delay was measured now in moments. The end they had all foreseen was upon them. And as he fought, as he killed, as he expected his own death from one second to the next, he rejoiced. The veterans of Squire’s Rest were dying. In this spot, and everywhere else on the planet, their last, hopeless stand had begun. But the Emperor had sent a gift to him and Stumar and the men and women who were dying with them. Brauner had known the end was here, and he had known he would fight until he met it. His death would be ugly. His body would have no burial. Xenos brutes would trample his remains into the mud. But that fate had been written when the first contrails had cut across the sky. His death would also have glory. His fight had meaning.
When he had retired from the Cadian Shock Troops, he had told himself that war was done with him, and that he was glad of it. But in recent years, as his body slowed, and its pains had gone from occasional to chronic, and sleep had receded from his grasp, he had faced the spectre of slow, inconsequential death, and it had troubled him.
So he was grinning now.
He should thank the orks. And he did. With las and blade.
The green tide pressed closer. An ork launched for him, jaws gaping. He shot it through its mouth. Twice. Its throat seared and closed by las, it collapsed, gaping for air gone forever. Another grabbed the barrel of his gun and yanked up. He held on. It leaned over him, metal plates beneath its jaw and on its shoulders absorbing the shots of Brauner’s comrades. Before it could strike him with the axe in its other hand, Stumar slipped between them and ran it through the eye with her sword. Her blade stuck in its skull. The greenskin fell hard, snapping the blade off. It snapped Stumar’s wrist too. She grunted and stepped back into the ranks.
Brauner exchanged a look with her as she brushed past him. He saw his feral gratitude mirrored in her face. Her features were pinched in agony. They glowed with zeal.
The grand death.
He smelled smoke. Fire approached. The flamer orks again. Their fellows scattered before their indiscriminate streams of burning fuel. Those not fast enough became howling, charging torches. They ran into the defenders. Fire sprayed over the defenders’ formation.
The order broke down.
&
nbsp; ‘Inside!’ Orbiana shouted. She raised an arm up, protecting her head as the flames washed over her armour. She retaliated with her gun. The ork’s promethium tanks exploded. More came behind it. The flames came in a torrent. The air was thick with the stench of burning flesh.
Brauner was one of the last in behind Orbiana. So few of them left now, though it was still crowded in the mausoleum’s entrance corridor. It was hard to shoot out.
Almost over now, Brauner thought. Nowhere left to retreat. The final seconds of the final stand.
A huge presence rushed forward from inside the tomb. Brauner didn’t turn, but he could feel the impact of the Grey Knights Librarian like the blow of a physical shadow. He dropped to the ground. A terrible force was coming. Even Orbiana threw herself to one side of the corridor.
Outside, a bit behind and above the first ranks of the orks, the night screamed. It twisted itself into a spiral. The spiral became a vortex, and the vortex was a wound, a howling maw in the real. Brauner tried to look away. He could not. The foundations of his sanity shook.
The realisation that there were beings of such power on this battlefield filled him with religious terror.
The whirlpool of madness seized the orks. It pulled them off the ground and into itself. Grunts and warbosses tumbled into the raging gulf of the immaterium. Energies released by the destruction of rationality lashed out. The ground was wracked by explosions as fuel tanks went up one after another. A wind shrieked over the cemetery. It was a wind that Brauner felt inside his head, and now he did squeeze his eyes shut against the pain and the madness.
Grey Knights: Sons of Titan Page 8