It was the size of a small city, but had the look of a cathedral with its gothic spires and towers and covered walkways. It was a multi-layered, stepped structure, symmetrical, with four arms extending from the diamond-shaped basilica at its centre. It had once, evidently, been a burnished gold in colour, but its walls were soot-blackened, flaking and beginning to crumble.
It was a Ramilies-class star fort: a giant mobile base of operations assembled in the Imperium’s own forges. It shouldn’t have been here. It should have been out in space somewhere, proudly standing sentry over one of the Emperor’s worlds; not crippled and stranded like this, held captive by the inexorable force of gravity.
The Ramilies was its own arsenal. Its towers bristled with gun emplacements, while torpedo tubes glowered warningly through its outer walls. Its cavernous launch bays could each easily contain a cruiser or multiple flights of smaller ships.
Four aircraft were rising from one of those launch bays now, from the Ramilies’s far quadrant. Like the fort itself, they had seen better days – though possibly not much better. They were crudely constructed, with heavy guns grafted haphazardly onto their patched-together hulls. They looked too ungainly to fly, yet fly they did, as if keeping themselves in the air by sheer obduracy alone.
Ork technology; there was no mistaking it.
The shells that Sicarius had heard had been fired by the Guardsmen in the trenches, shot from Earthshaker cannons. The Earthshakers were siege guns, slow to reload and cumbersome to aim; they were built for breaking through walls, not for bringing down aerial combatants. So far, they had failed to score a direct hit on any of their four targets, only buffeting them with explosive blast waves.
One of the ork craft was thrown into a clumsy barrel roll, careening away from the rest of its flight. As Sicarius watched, however – against all odds, against all sense – its pilot managed to wrestle it back under control. All four ships were sweeping over the trenches, he realised, without deigning to return their occupants’ fire. They were bearing down on the plateau on which he stood.
He bellowed an order to the Space Marines behind him: ‘Scatter!’
The first ork craft roared over Sicarius’s head, its bomb bay doors yawning open. Three rocket-shaped casings dropped out of its belly, one by one. Forewarned, the majority of Sicarius’s brothers leapt out of harm’s way; their vehicles, however, were virtual sitting ducks.
The first bomb smacked into the prow of a Predator Destructor, its gunner barely managing to duck back into his turret before it struck. The ensuing explosion lifted the vehicle off its tracks and set its engine ablaze, forcing its crew to evacuate.
The remaining two bombs took longer to choose their targets, and Sicarius realised that they had some form of guiding intelligence. One of them swooped low over the roof of the disabled Predator, and then began to climb again. It streaked towards a bright blue Thunderhawk which had been coming in to land; two Vindicator tanks were attached to the ship’s underside, dangling helplessly.
Fortunately for their crews – not to mention the Thunderhawk’s pilot – the bomb’s controller had overreached itself. Its limited propulsion unit sputtered out and it faltered a good way short of its objective. It spiralled back to earth, some half a kilometre away, where it burst harmlessly.
‘Let them come,’ a familiar voice bellowed, defiantly. ‘I will not cower from any stinking greenskins. Let them try to shift me from this spot.’
Brother Ultracius had not sought cover like the others. He had been an Ultramarines sergeant once – but now, he was a walking tank himself, what little remained of his physical form interred inside a Dreadnought casing.
Standing at almost twice the height of his brothers, he had made himself an irresistible target. As the third and final bomb came around and dived towards him, Ultracius let rip at it with his massive twin-linked heavy bolter: a prodigious weapon that jutted from his right elbow in place of a forearm.
The bomb flew unerringly through a hail of bolt-rounds towards him, close enough to Sicarius now for him to see that machine-spirits didn’t drive it as he had expected. It had a pilot: a gretchin, a member of a stunted orkoid subspecies. It was shorter – much shorter – and punier than a typical ork; still, it couldn’t have fit easily into the bomb’s casing, not unless its legs had been amputated.
Its squat body was hunched over a tiny control stick, its pointed ears trembling with malevolent laughter.
One of Ultracius’s bolts had found its mark, and the guided bomb exploded barely a metre in front of the aquila symbol on the Dreadnought’s chassis. A fraction of a second later and it would have hit him squarely, cracking even his armour plating. As it was, he weathered the blast, though it forced him onto his back foot and almost made his knee joints buckle.
The gretchin pilot perished in flames.
Less than three seconds had passed since the bombs had dropped.
In that time, however, the vox-net had exploded with urgent chatter. The pilots of the grounded Thunderhawks were hauling them back into the air; while those still carrying tanks and other vital equipment were flying evasive manoeuvres, looking for a chance to set down their heavy burdens.
The second and third ork bombers, delayed by the Earthshakers’ covering fire, were intercepted before they could reach the plateau. One of them was crippled almost instantly, holed by an explosive punch from a Thunderhawk’s battle cannon; the other craft put up a better fight. Its hull may have seemed less than aerodynamic, but it was tough enough to shrug off a fusillade from four twin-linked heavy bolters.
The bomber fought back. Its pilot was a fully-grown ork, looking somewhat out of place behind a glacis, a pair of goggles perched ridiculously on its green snout. Its primary weapons were a pair of automatic ballistic guns slung underneath its wings. Like most ork ‘shootas’, they were noisier than they were accurate.
In a one-on-one dogfight, the clumsy ork craft was probably outmatched. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a threat, however.
The fourth bomber – the one the Earthshaker cannons had sent into a spin – was finally coming up on the plateau; while the first – the one that had made one bombing run already – was coming around to make another. They found that the Ultramarines had three more gunships in the air, waiting for them.
We should have set down further behind the lines, Sicarius thought. His eagerness for battle and inexperience of command had made him incautious. He blamed himself, but, stuck on the ground as he was now, there wasn’t much he could do to put things right. He could only watch as the opposing flights circled each other, spitting at each other venomously.
‘The Emperor is with you,’ he encouraged his pilots by vox, but resisted the urge to bellow instructions at them. They knew what they had to do and how to do it. They wouldn’t have been sitting in those cockpits if their instincts weren’t as finely honed as they could be.
He ordered his tanks to advance, separating as they did. They were moving targets now, grinding their way down the broad, winding trails that led to the plateau’s base; still, moving all the same. In addition, the Stormravens had closed ranks to keep their enemies at bay, and were beginning to drive them back.
Nevertheless, one of the bombers opened its bay to eject two guided casings, but their intended targets were beyond their limited range. They detonated on the ground, and claimed no casualties other than their own hapless occupants.
Another ork bomber was fatally holed and sent screaming, nose over tail, out of Sicarius’s sight. A moment later, a fiery cloud blossomed over the horizon to the north, reassuring him that the threat had been dealt with. In its turn a Stormraven gunship had also been damaged, smoke belching out of one of its engines; the pilot, however, sounded confident that he could make an emergency landing.
Sicarius stepped off the edge of the plateau. The drop was short enough for his armour to completely absorb the impact of his landing.
He voxed his battle-brothers: ‘Form up on me.’ The first of the tanks was already pulling up behind him, while the situation in the sky seemed to be under control.
Then, a pilot’s voice rasped urgently through his earpiece: ‘The last ork, captain – it’s coming right at you… gambling everything on a suicide dive…’ He could hear the rattling of patched-together engines growing in volume above him.
Sicarius wasn’t worried. Three Stormravens had already dropped onto the bomber’s tail, with their lascannons flaring. It wouldn’t get close to him.
The inevitable explosion, when it came, made it seem as if a new sun was blazing in the sky, turning night into day for just a moment. The light glinted off blue ceramite and plasteel, and cast the shadows of a hundred armoured warriors and their powerful engines ahead of them. It was in that light that the Ultramarines strikeforce began their march across the small moon’s barren surface; a spectacle that would surely have caused their enemies to quail, had any of them only seen it.
The Ultramarines were marching to war.
CHAPTER II
A knot of figures emerged from the trenches to meet them.
They were wrapped from neck to boots in thick black greatcoats; their shoulder flashes revealed them to be members of the 319th Krieg Regiment of the Imperial Guard. Sergeant Lucien had never met a Krieg Korpsman before, but others had spoken highly of their courage and commitment.
Like the Ultramarines, they didn’t show their faces. Thick rubber tubes snaked from the gasmasks they wore to rebreather units in battered leather casings slung from their webbing. The only features of the masks were pairs of opaque, round lenses, which gave the wearers a blank-eyed, expressionless look.
The masks were crowned by steel helmets, stamped with the image of the Imperial aquila; all but for one of them, who wore a commissar’s peaked cap. It was he who headed the welcoming committee: a barrel-chested man with a long, assured stride. Marching a step behind him was a shorter, wirier figure, who wore a captain’s rank insignia but, unusually, displayed no medals or other decorations.
The Krieg captain halted and saluted smartly, and Sicarius returned the gesture. The commissar began to extend a hand towards him, noticed the size of the Space Marine’s gauntlets and thought again. He introduced himself as Dast, but named none of the rest of his party. Even the captain he identified only by his rank.
Dast, with his captain, led the way down a flight of shallow steps, chiselled out of the hard ground. Only Sicarius and his command squad, which included Lucien as the captain’s second-in-command, followed them. They left the bulk of the strikeforce behind with their vehicles to await further orders.
Ultracius was left behind too. The trenches were a tight enough squeeze for an ordinary Space Marine, so the Dreadnought would have struggled to negotiate them.
The remaining members of the squad included the captain’s standard bearer, his Apothecary and the Company Champion. They were joined by a Techmarine called Renius. While a loyal battle-brother, in some ways he seemed to stand apart from the other Ultramarines, in power armour the rust-red of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Some recent rain had left the trenches spotted with puddles of water: stagnant, foul-smelling and, according to Lucien’s auto-senses, mildly acidic. Improvised walkways of corrugated metal sheets spanned the largest of the trenches; more than one snapped, however, as the Ultramarines trampled over it.
Passing a Termite burrowing vehicle, parked in a small, muddy enclosure of its own, they could hear the Death Korps’ guns still firing ahead of them, but the sound of aircraft engines had faded away.
Commissar Dast had noticed it too, his eyes searching the sky to confirm the evidence of his ears. ‘I thought you might have kept the Thunderhawks on station,’ he said over his shoulder as they walked. ‘We could certainly use them.’
Sicarius’s only response was a grunt of acknowledgement.
‘I, ah, feel I must apologise for the reception you encountered,’ Dast persevered. He was slightly in awe of the armoured giants behind him – in Lucien’s experience men always were – though the commissar hid it better than most. ‘Before today, we had only seen two ork fighter-bombers, and we thought we had crippled one of them.’
‘It isn’t like the orks to hold back resources,’ said Renius.
‘No,’ agreed Sicarius, thoughtfully. ‘Not like most greenskins.’
‘We know they’re in there,’ said Dast, ‘inside the star fort. They’ve made a few bombing runs, sent out the occasional raiding party, but they haven’t attacked us en masse. We know they have a leader, a warboss, by the name of Khargask.’
Lucien clenched his teeth. The name was familiar to him.
‘Obviously, he over-reacted when you arrived,’ said Dast, ‘and hoped to destroy the equipment you were bringing with you. Otherwise, for the most part, he has been sitting tight behind his shields and ramparts. The orks we have encountered, we believe, have slipped out against his orders.’
‘You’ve been briefed on the Indestructible itself?’ asked Sicarius.
‘We know about the, ah, incident,’ said Dast.
‘The Imperial Navy would like its property back – intact, if that is at all possible.’
Dast looked at Sicarius as if surprised, though it was difficult to tell with his face covered. ‘You do know the Indestructible is ancient? Thousands of years old. It had been damaged and was under repair apart when Khargask took it – and as we have seen, he couldn’t keep it aloft for long.’
‘I have my orders,’ said Sicarius.
The commissar nodded his acceptance.
‘Well, fortunately, perhaps,’ he reported, ‘the Indestructible still lives up to its name. We’ve been bombarding it for weeks, but–’
The Krieg captain interrupted him, speaking for the first time. His voice was low and husky, muffled by his facemask. ‘But no structure is impregnable,’ he growled.
‘There is another matter that concerns us,’ ventured Dast.
At that moment, however, they reached the sunken entranceway to a dugout. The Krieg captain disappeared through it, followed by his aides. Dast paused, eyeing up his armoured guests. ‘Unfortunately, space is, ah, severely limited down here.’
Sicarius nodded. He asked Renius to join him inside the dugout, the others to wait outside. Lucien couldn’t help but feel a little slighted. He hadn’t yet been given the opportunity to earn the Knight of Talassar’s trust and, at this rate, he never would.
Even Dast had to duck to fit through the square opening, so the two Space Marines were forced to bend almost double, but the claw arm on the Techmarine’s servo-harness still caught on a support beam and almost tore it down.
Lucien decided to take a tour of the earthworks. It behoved him to learn about the resources available here, and the men alongside whom he would be fighting. The latter he began to encounter almost immediately.
Following the sounds of shelling, he found his path teeming with Krieg Guardsmen in their hundreds, like industrious ants scuttling around a giant nest. Many of them carried digging equipment and were busy extending the already-expansive trench network. They moved aside for Lucien to pass, but always returned to their work as soon as he had. They never spoke to him.
The Earthshakers, he discerned, had been placed as far apart as possible, the better to protect them from enemy bombs. He made for the nearest emplacement. The trench he was following eventually opened up into a large, square pit. There were four Korpsmen here: two of them stood on the cannon’s firing platform, behind its plasteel shield, while two more handed them shells from a pyramid-shaped stack.
The gun itself was anchored to an X-form base, with four broad feet stretching to the pit’s four corners. It was broader than the passageways that led here, and so must have been lowered into its current position.
The long barrel was set at a thirty-degree ang
le, peering over the emplacement’s edge. When Lucien lifted his head, he could see the towers of the Ramilies-class star fort, far closer and looming even larger now than before. He could also see tangles of razor wire, with several bloodied ork corpses caught up in it.
‘When was the last attack?’ he asked.
One of the Krieg men answered him, even as he hefted another shell up to his comrades on the platform. ‘It happened sixteen hours ago, my lord. An ork mob came at us across no-man’s-land. Most of them were slowed by the wire, enough for our lasguns to put them down before they could reach us.’
‘And the rest?’
‘The captain ordered a bayonet charge.’
Lucien was surprised. ‘You went over the top? Why didn’t you use the cannons? If the greenskins were struggling with the wire, they’d have made easy targets. You could have simply blasted them to shreds.’
No trace of emotion inflected the Krieg man’s voice as he answered, ‘Artillery shells are valuable.’
Lucien had heard that Krieg men never showed emotion. He had heard that they never removed their masks in front of outsiders, even where the atmosphere was breathable. He was starting to believe it.
This Krieg man was an officer, he realised. His coat was spattered with dry mud, which had obscured his stripes. This one – just like his captain, earlier – seemed especially deferential.
‘How many casualties, lieutenant?’ asked Lucien. He had encountered some orks in his time that were almost – not quite – a match for a Space Marine. They could probably have snapped a Death Korpsman’s fragile neck with one flex of their clumsy fingers, especially when worked into a frenzy.
‘Eighty-three Korpsmen were expended in the battle,’ the lieutenant answered, ‘but the threat of the orks was neutralised, so those lives were worthwhile.’
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