Lucien found the man’s attitude unusually pragmatic for a human.
One of the Krieg men on the platform had loaded the Earthshaker. The other sighted along its long barrel – though it would have been hard for him to miss his massive target – and fired. The recoil made the Earthshaker judder fiercely, but its heavy feet kept it in position.
Lucien followed the shell with his eyes as it hurtled across the black sky like a comet. Almost six seconds passed before it struck one of the star fort’s towers; their size had made them seem closer than they were. There was a fierce, though distant, eruption of light and sound. However, when the smoke of the explosion cleared, the tower showed no signs of damage.
The star fort had prodigious shields, of course, reinforcing its robust construction. A concentrated bombardment might have broken through both, in time – shield generators could eventually be overloaded – but it wouldn’t happen quickly.
No structure is impregnable.
Three more shells streaked over no-man’s-land, from different parts of the trench network. The Krieg officer had already gone back to work, helping the rest of his crew to reload their weapon, regardless of his rank. How long had they been going through these motions, Lucien wondered? Weeks, the commissar had said, and yet still they performed their duties patiently, efficiently, like automata.
A more pressing question was why their enemies were taking it? Orks, quite literally, thrived on constant battle. If they were hunkering down in their shielded bunker, ignoring the cannons that threatened to blast its walls asunder, then that had to be for a reason. A Ramilies-class star fort had powerful weapons too, and vast ammunition stores, so why weren’t they returning fire?
Or was it simply that their leader was smarter than the typical ork? He had taken the Indestructible, after all, and dealt the Imperium a major embarrassment in the process. Did he have some cunning, longer-term scheme in mind?
For that matter, why had Khargask come to the Agides System? It contained no worlds of any particular value. And why was the Adeptus Mechanicus so keen to recover his plunder, anyway?
Lucien wished he could have attended the meeting in the dugout. He knew it was not his place to question; he would do as he was ordered, he didn’t have to know the reason. He couldn’t help but wonder, all the same, what he and his battle-brothers – perhaps even Sicarius himself – had not been told about their latest mission.
What exactly was happening inside the Indestructible – and what made it so important to the orks and to the Imperium alike?
CHAPTER III
The dugout contained no more than a few sticks of furniture.
The Krieg men folded up canvas chairs to give their visitors room to stand. Sicarius squeezed himself into one corner of the underground chamber. His helmet scraped the ceiling, causing dirt to rain on his neck and shoulders.
A collapsible table was strewn with data-slates containing tactical maps of their surroundings – onto which the Krieg trenches had been stencilled like contour lines. There were also old-fashioned paper maps, chipped and yellowing despite their plastek coatings, bearing detailed but faded schematics of the Ramilies-class star forts. These included internal layouts; though, given the age of the Indestructible, they were unlikely to be especially accurate.
A smaller, rickety trestle table supported a holo-projector, which one of the Krieg captain’s aides had just activated. A translucent shape flared brightly an inch or so above the big table: the Indestructible – the upper part of it, at least, the part that could be seen from inside the trenches – picked out in beads of light.
There was something wrong with the hololith, however; it was shot through with purple and green flares, distorting the picture. Sicarius’s eyes narrowed as he realised what he was looking at: a vid rather than a still image; the flares were a part of the recording, not a glitch as he had assumed.
‘We recorded this six days ago,’ explained Dast, ‘but we witnessed the phenomenon three times before that and once more since. As near as we can tell, the flares are being generated by the star fort itself. At first, we thought they were the product of some weapon, but they’re simply too random, unfocused.’
A weapon under construction, perhaps, Sicarius thought, one that the orks have not yet perfected, but when they do… He turned to the Techmarine to see if he had anything to say, but Renius was keeping his own counsel.
‘The flare-ups, when they come, are accompanied by an unholy racket,’ the commissar continued. ‘It rises from the bowels of the earth, like the groaning of tortured machine-spirits. We lack the equipment to capture that sound, unfortunately, and our tech-priests, frankly, can’t explain it.’
‘How long do these episodes last?’ Sicarius asked.
‘No more than twenty seconds, or sometimes less, before the flares – and the sounds – die down again,’ the commissar told him.
‘We have an ork prisoner,’ the Krieg captain spoke up.
‘It was part of a mob that attacked us a couple of weeks ago,’ said Dast. ‘It made it all the way into the trenches before we finally put it down. It has certain, ah, augmentations that might bear closer scrutiny. I thought, perhaps, with the resources available to you, you might wish to–’
‘Let me see this creature,’ said Sicarius.
Dast led the way back out of the dugout, round several tight corners in quick succession and then some way along a northward-running trench.
Sicarius’s standard bearer fell into step behind him. The rest of his command squad had found ways to make themselves useful: mostly routine maintenance work to their armour and weapons or praying. Sicarius kept Renius close to him.
They negotiated one more turn then, four strides to the east, they reached a small, open-topped enclosure, guarded by two Korpsmen. The prisoner knelt inside it, almost filling it. It was wrapped in chains, tight enough to prevent it from standing or sitting comfortably, and shackled to four wooden stakes driven into the ground.
It looked like any ork to Sicarius, with its jutting brow, lower-jaw tusks and flat nose, its shoulders broader but its legs stumpier than those of a man. On a second look, however, he saw that its right arm was metallic and that its eyepieces, which he had mistaken for pilot’s goggles, were fused into the flesh of its face.
He had heard the ork howling and struggling violently as his party had neared the enclosure. Its chest was scarred with lasgun burns and bayonet wounds, and the lenses of its mechanical eyes had been shattered. It had been tortured.
The ork spat at its two armoured visitors – evidently, it could see them well enough – and bellowed angrily at them in its ugly native tongue. Among the unfamiliar words, Sicarius made out the name ‘Khargask’.
‘The prisoner was also in possession of a weapon, captain,’ Dast volunteered. ‘Quite unlike any we have seen before. It–’
Renius interrupted him. ‘Ork bionics are nothing new. This merely confirms what we suspected.’
‘That Khargask is no ordinary warboss,’ Sicarius agreed, ‘but rather what the greenskins call a “big mek” or a “mek boss”.’ He explained for the benefit of the Krieg men, who may have lacked his Chapter’s extensive knowledge of the subject: ‘Orks seem to have an instinct for making things, but that’s all it is: an instinct. Few of them have the intellect to actually know what they’re doing.’
‘It’s unusual for a more intelligent ork to gain power,’ said Renius, ‘in a culture that values strength and savagery above all else, but it can happen.’
‘If the ork is smart and strong and savage,’ Sicarius muttered.
‘This brute here is not smart. If it were, it would have reined in its primitive bloodlust and remained inside the Indestructible as it was told. I doubt we will learn anything useful by studying it – or its equipment.’
‘I assume we have no one who can speak its language?’ said Sicarius.
&nb
sp; ‘Even if we had,’ said Renius, ‘it’s unlikely that Khargask would have taken it into his confidence – or that it would have understood him if he had.’
‘We tried to find out how many orks are inside the star fort,’ explained Dast, ‘but as you say, there is a language barrier. It also seems that the prisoner can count no higher than five, maybe, so, ah…’
‘The ork is no use to us, captain,’ insisted Renius. ‘We should execute it and be done with it.’
He was probably right. It struck Sicarius, however, that he had been too keen to speak up, to see the captive ork dead, to preclude any possible further investigations. The thought – and its likely implications – rankled with him. He was sorely tempted to gainsay the Techmarine, if only to gauge his reaction.
He decided to bide his time. He gave a grunt of assent, then turned smartly and marched away. Renius followed him gladly.
Behind them, the Krieg captain issued an order to one of his sentries. They heard the distinctive crack of a lasgun being fired, followed by another bellow of injured rage, a fierce rattling of chains and the sound of at least one heavy wooden stake being shattered.
It took another two las-beams to penetrate the prisoner’s dense hide and silence it at last. The Krieg captain had taken the Ultramarine’s suggestion as an order. He hadn’t questioned it, hadn’t tried to advance an opinion of his own despite his greater experience here.
Renius was silent again as they made their way back to the command dugout. Sicarius opened a private vox-channel to the Dreadnought.
‘You were right,’ he told Ultracius. ‘I only suspected it before, but now I’m certain. The Techmarine is keeping something from us.’
In the dugout, Sicarius studied the data-slates and ancient papers more closely, but they told him little that he hadn’t already known.
‘This moon was a mining colony, yes?’ he barked. ‘I need a plan of the mine tunnels.’ The Krieg captain immediately despatched an aide to fetch one.
‘Ah, most of the tunnels in this sector collapsed,’ Commissar Dast pointed out, apologetically, ‘when the Indestructible landed on top of them.’
Sicarius nodded curtly. ‘Of course they did. It’s a miracle the star fort itself wasn’t disintegrated upon impact, shields or no shields.’
He threw a pointed glance at Renius, who didn’t take the bait. ‘Are the Ramilies’ guns operational?’ asked the Techmarine.
‘Most of them,’ said Dast, ‘but Khargask employs them sparingly: a few warning shots when we venture too close to him, that’s all.’
‘He’s conserving ammunition,’ Sicarius deduced, ‘the same as with the fighter-bombers. He didn’t plan on getting into trouble out here. He didn’t plan on his star fort falling out of the sky. His stores are probably depleted and he has no supply lines. He isn’t trying to win this battle, just prolong it long enough for… what?’
‘For reinforcements to arrive,’ Dast suggested.
‘Perhaps, yes. It would have required a fleet of tug ships to drag the Ramilies through the warp to this system, more than can be hiding in its bays. What happened to the rest of them? You’ve found no other crash sites?’
The commissar confirmed that they had not.
‘Do we keep up the shelling, captain?’ the Krieg captain asked.
‘And step it up,’ Sicarius confirmed. ‘I will add my personnel and armour – my Predator and Vindicator tanks – to your own. We will concentrate our attack upon the most damaged quadrant, here.’ He tapped a piece of paper. ‘Once the shields are down, however, and the ramparts have been breached, we hold our fire.’
The basilica was the Ramilies’ heart, he thought. So long as that remained relatively undamaged, then the Adeptus Mechanicus ought to be satisfied.
Renius spoke up: ‘Captain. It is possible that, when Khargask sees he is beaten, he might destroy the Ramilies himself rather than allow it to be recaptured.’
‘I had thought of that,’ said Sicarius.
The Krieg captain’s aide had returned with another data-slate, which the Ultramarine took from him. The slate seemed fragile in his massive gauntleted hand, and he held it carefully. ‘The bombardment will serve primarily as a distraction. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of pairs of eyes inside the Indestructible – I want them looking this way. If we can tempt a few more orks out here, all the better. Otherwise, I want them defending the ramparts, manning their weapon emplacements, anything to keep them busy.’
He plugged the data-slate into the interface jacks on his right gauntlet and loaded its contents into his armour. ‘In the meantime, I will lead a combat squad through the mine tunnels – yes, commissar, what remains of them – and attack the Indestructible from below.’
‘Permission to join that squad, captain,’ Renius requested immediately.
Sicarius said nothing, only nodded. ‘The star fort’s base will have taken the brunt of the crash,’ he continued aloud. ‘If we’re lucky, it might already have been holed. Either way, that’s where it will be most vulnerable. With the Emperor’s grace, we can climb up right inside the basilica itself.’
‘We have tried that, captain,’ Dast cautioned. ‘We used a Termite to bypass the blocked tunnels, but the greenskins heard us coming and were ready for us. They laid ambushes for us underground. They set traps for us. We couldn’t get through their defences, couldn’t even get close to our objective.’
‘We lost close to two hundred soldiers in the attempt,’ the Krieg captain mumbled. His tone was rueful.
Sicarius smiled grimly beneath his helmet. So, there was a route through the mine tunnels to the star fort, he thought; the orks’ presence down there proved it. ‘With all due respect, captain, commissar,’ he said, ‘you sent two hundred men into those tunnels – Imperial Guardsmen, perhaps, but just ordinary men all the same.
‘Five veteran Ultramarines are a different matter.’
CHAPTER IV
Kenjari bent his knees.
He lifted another shell off the pile and onto his shoulder. It was heavy, but no heavier than the loads he was used to lifting. The repetitive nature of the work was also something he was used to, and it gave him some comfort.
He straightened up. He turned and took three steps across the earthen enclosure. He waited for the loader up on the platform to turn towards him. He hefted the shell into his arms and turned away. Three steps took him back to the pile of shells. He bent his knees again. He didn’t have to think too hard about what he was doing.
Kenjari heard the blast of the Earthshaker cannon behind him. Once, he had thought he would never get used to that noise, but now he barely noticed it. He thought he might be losing his hearing, for want of ear protectors.
This wasn’t too different to working the mines, he told himself, to swinging his pickaxe at an unyielding wall of rock. Except that, if he dropped one of these shells, it could kill him. And an accident in the mines couldn’t?
Working the mines had been different.
Kenjari had known how he would likely die, then, and had resigned himself to face it. His future, now, was uncertain and terrifying to him. He had seen the xenos that lived inside the castle – the one that had fallen from the sky – tearing soldiers apart. Others, he had seen cut down by the xenos’ guns or shredded by their bombs.
The soldiers were supposed to have rescued him. He remembered the flutter of hope he had felt upon seeing their ships, new stars shooting across the firmament.
He didn’t know how long he had survived, waiting for them, waiting for the Emperor to send someone. Days had passed, but he had had no way to count them.
He had taken rebreathers from the broken corpses of his workmates, when the filters in his own had become rotten. He had taken their food and water too, though it hadn’t been enough. He had buried himself in the debris of the mine workings, to shelter from the moon’s acidic rainstorms.<
br />
He had seen them, occasionally: the xenos, green-skinned and heavy-browed, on the ramparts of their fortress. He had kept his head down and hoped not to be seen in return. Sometimes, the xenos had spilled out across the moon, apparently in search of salvage, and he had been forced to hide from them.
They had found a survivor, once. They had dragged him from underneath the wreckage and slaughtered him for sport, making noises that sounded like barks of laughter. Kenjari had told himself it was a mercy; the man was crippled and dehydrated. He felt guilty, all the same, because he might have been able to help him.
He had thought about searching for other survivors like him, but he had lacked the courage. He had stayed in hiding, except for when he needed new filters or when hunger and thirst overwhelmed him. He had kept on waiting.
The ships had vanished over the horizon. They must have landed, but some distance away from the castle. Kenjari had waited another day, perhaps two, for the occupants of the ships to come and find him. Then, he had plucked up the nerve and marshalled the last of his strength to go and look for them.
He couldn’t remember what had happened next. He could only surmise that fatigue had finally claimed him and he had collapsed.
He had woken in a hospital tent, with something heavy on his chest and a faceless figure hovering over him like an angel of death.
The figure had been wearing a mask, he had realised; he was wearing one too, in place of his smaller rebreather. The weight on his chest was a mechanical unit, connected to the mask by rubber hoses. Kenjari’s cuts had been dressed and his broken shoulder set. God-Emperor be praised, he had been saved!
Less than an hour later, he had had a pickaxe in his hand again.
He had been given a tube of nutrient paste, a mug of water and thirty seconds to ingest both. He had been issued with combat fatigues and a heavy black coat and told to dress in them. A pair of aides had attached flak armour to his shoulders, legs and chest; it was torn and bloodied, leaving no doubt as to the fates of its previous wearers. Heavy belts and holsters and a bulging rucksack had been added to his burden. A helmet, too small for him, had been jammed onto his head.
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