He was still dazed, disoriented, when they thrust him forwards again.
No soldiers remained ahead of him to follow, none that Kenjari could see, just the space where they had been – until he felt the soft wetness of their dismembered bodies underfoot and, looking down, saw their blood spattering his fatigues.
A voice, his sergeant’s voice, burst over his comm-bead at that moment, with a bluster of hollow encouragement. ‘Almost there,’ he insisted, ‘less than half a kilometre to go.’ A moment later, it was four hundred metres, then three hundred…
He could no longer see the star fort’s towers, he was too close to it. Instead, he was beginning to make out more intricate details: arched walkways and battlements and decorative mouldings – and a cannon barrel pointed squarely at him. The blank glare of the barrel transfixed him; he knew he was at its mercy. He could only pray for the greater mercy of the Emperor, if only he had had the breath.
He must have been heard, anyway, because the cannon didn’t fire. The Imperial tanks must have knocked it out already. Kenjari had survived. He had made it across the killing field. He was footsore, exhausted and only wanted to collapse into a quivering heap, and yet somehow he had made it.
He had made it – all the way to the place of his nightmares.
At least he would be safe from the castle’s remaining guns here, too close to their hidey-holes in the walls for them to get an angle on him. He was still in danger from friendly fire, however, as he realised when a shell burst too close over his head, peppering him with hot shrapnel. For the first time, he began to worry about the other perils ahead of him, the ones he hadn’t expected to have to face.
New shapes were forming ahead of him through the smoke, hulking figures with stooped postures and arms hanging down to their knees. Kenjari caught a glimpse of wild eyes beneath a heavy brow and tusks jutting out of a drooling mouth. The orks, he thought. The orks were coming out of their castle, pouring over its ramparts to greet the would-be invaders, impatient to engage them in physical combat.
He remembered how he had seen them tearing soldiers apart.
He stumbled to a halt and almost fled, momentarily forgetting how afraid he was of the Korpsmen and their leaders behind him; remembering, before he took his first step, how afraid he had been of the star fort’s guns, finding himself paralysed between a choice of violent deaths.
‘Trooper 3117-Delta,’ his sergeant’s voice bellowed. ‘You have a weapon. Use it!’
At least, against the orks, he could try to defend himself. His fingers had slipped from his lasgun’s trigger guard and he fumbled to find it again.
Many of the Korpsmen around him and behind him had dropped to one knee, bracing the butts of their weapons against their shoulders; so, clumsily, he followed their lead. He located his sights and squinted through them with his right eye, but couldn’t keep them steady. He saw a mass of green brutes thundering towards him, bearing down on him, swinging axes and crude chainswords.
One of them wielded a cobbled-together automatic weapon, and was spraying out bullets ahead of itself, indiscriminately. The Death Korpsmen had begun to return fire, and Kenjari’s sergeant’s voice was screaming in his good ear, urging him to do the same.
He screwed his eyes shut and squeezed his trigger.
CHAPTER VIII
The orks were massing ahead of them.
Sicarius could hear their guttural voices, grunting half-formed words in their own crude language. He understood enough to know that they were gathering for battle. They spoke of intruders in the mine tunnels.
The missing gretchin had found its masters, after all; with that, his hopes of reaching the star fort undetected were finally dashed.
‘We have a fight on our hands,’ he told his combat squad over their shared vox-channel. He saw no point in keeping radio silence now.
The tunnel they were following was narrow, and they had to proceed in single file. Sicarius took the lead, making no attempt to quiet his ringing footsteps. He could hear orks ahead, waiting out of sight, and could smell their xenos stink.
He detected Khargask’s hand in their actions again. It wasn’t the way of these brutes to wait patiently in ambush, and he guessed that some of them would be chafing at their orders, as he would have been himself. He decided to test his theory.
He stopped short of the tunnel’s end, activated the Talassarian Tempest Blade’s energy field and bellowed one of his Chapter’s war cries: ‘Courage and honour!’
Two greenskins took the bait.
They tumbled out of hiding, jostling with each other to be the first through the tunnel entrance. The winner stampeded towards Sicarius, with bloodlust in its eyes and a blood-caked axe raised over its head. He had time to snap off a single plasma pistol shot before it reached him. The bolt of superheated energy struck the ork in its shoulder, burning through flesh, and it howled in pain but didn’t flinch from him.
As it brought its axe head down, Sicarius ducked under it and parried it with his energy-wreathed blade. The blow was strong, but not as strong as he had expected, perhaps weakened by its wielder’s injury. He thrust the axe away from him and plunged his blade sideways into the ork’s chest. It coughed up blood and the axe fell from its numbed fingers; still, it managed to shift its falling weight onto him. It yanked at his helmet as if trying to dislodge it or snap his neck, and he couldn’t break its grip.
Instead, he lowered his head and thrust himself forwards. Surprised, the ork was lifted off its feet and carried along with him. He slammed it into its comrade, coming up the tunnel behind it, and felt its bones being crushed between them.
The ork let out a half-grunt, half-groan and let go of the Ultramarine’s head. It was still on its feet, albeit with support from the second brute behind it, so he tore its torso open with a double-handed, downward stroke.
He stepped back and loosed off a series of plasma bolts at the second ork. It tried to use its dead comrade as a shield, with limited success. It let the body drop to the ground instead, trampling and tripping over it to get to its tormentor. By the time it stumbled within striking range of Sicarius, the second ork was half-dead itself, and his Tempest Blade finished the job.
Two down, and neither of them had landed a blow on him. These narrow confines gave him a distinct advantage, forcing the orks to engage him one by one despite their greater numbers. Sicarius amplified his voice and yelled along the tunnel again: ‘Is that the best you can do? Send me your real fighters. I need a challenge!’
He heard a choked splutter from ahead of him. This time, however, no orks responded to his taunt; they had learned the folly of that. Had he had more time, Sicarius might have tried again. As it was, he had no choice. His enemy wouldn’t come to him, so he had to go to them – even if it meant marching into a trap.
He fingered a frag grenade on his belt as he stepped forwards. He thought about rolling it ahead of him: it would scatter the waiting orks, at least, and likely injure a few of them. An explosion, however, could have brought down the roof and cost him more time than he could afford to lose. He couldn’t risk it.
Nor, however, would he approach his enemy timorously. Sicarius picked up speed along the tunnel, his pistol levelled, his Tempest Blade ready, knowing that the rest of his combat squad would follow him, intending to burst upon the cowering orks like the Emperor’s wrath personified.
He was six steps from the tunnel’s end when a gretchin popped up in front of him. With a wide-mouthed cackle, it lobbed a small object his way. His Space Marine reflexes kicked in and he shot the creature before it could duck back out of sight. The thrown object, in the meantime, skipped across the tunnel floor between Sicarius’s feet, and he shouted a warning to his battle-brothers behind him: ‘Grenade!’
It was a stick bomb, like the ones they had seen before.
There wasn’t enough space for the Ultramarines to scatter away from it;
chances were, their armour would be proof against it, anyway. The danger, once again, was that it might collapse the tunnel and slow them down, even divide their forces.
There was no time for Sicarius to issue an order. Brother Filion acted on his own initiative. He dropped to his hands and knees on top of the bomb, which bounced into his plastron and burst. He hadn’t quite smothered the blast, but he did absorb the brunt of it. The tunnel trembled – as did Filion, though his arms remained locked into position – and sweated dirt, but maintained its integrity.
Sicarius never broke his stride.
He erupted from the tunnel mouth like an oncoming tank, swinging his blade and firing his plasma pistol blindly, a war cry in his throat. As he had expected, he was immediately attacked from both sides. At least six orks piled onto him, battering him with clubs and meaty fists. They weren’t prepared for the momentum he had built up, however, and he carried them several steps before they wrestled him to a halt.
The short stretch of ground thus gained by him proved crucial, allowing his brothers space to emerge from the tunnel behind him.
Lumic and Gallo fired up their chainswords and laid into the captain’s attackers. He felt them beginning to fall away from him and dislodged another himself, with a hefty punch to its stomach, but was borne to the ground all the same. An axe head slammed into his helmet, making it ring, and his blade was knocked out of his hand.
He jabbed his elbow into an ork’s throat, and suddenly only one remained.
He managed to turn the tables on the brute, pinning it beneath one knee. He jammed his pistol into its slavering mouth. Its comrade, the one with the fractured larynx, leapt onto his shoulders, gasping and spluttering incoherently, but couldn’t stop him from pulling the trigger.
The ork on his back was trying to throttle him. Sicarius reached over his head and seized it by its brawny forearms. It was strong, but its strength was waning quickly. He managed to lever himself to his feet and propel his opponent backwards, slamming it against a rock wall. He felt its fingers losing their hold on him, and threw the ork over his shoulder. It landed on its back and, thanks to its throat injury, couldn’t regain its breath. Sicarius saw his Tempest Blade on the ground and snatched it up. He sliced through the ork’s neck, so it wouldn’t have to worry about breathing again.
For the first time unencumbered, he took a good look at his surroundings.
He was in another cavern, man-made and smaller than the last one, little more in fact than a confluence of several tunnels. It was heaving with green-skinned orks, many more than had initially leapt on him – but his strategy of punching a hole through their ambush had proven effective. His blue-armoured battle-brothers – and one in red – had ploughed right into their midst and were cutting a bloody swathe through them.
Sicarius could see the Indestructible: a part of it, at least. The star fort, he recalled, had extra landing pads and gun towers on its underside, the better to defend itself in its natural environment of space where up and down had no meaning. One of those towers had crashed through the roof of one of the tunnels. In the process, it had been reduced to scrap. Beneath its burnished armour plating, the tower was fashioned from something that looked like stone – a super-dense stone, he had learned from the schematics, mined on one particular world – but this too had been shattered.
There had to be a way up through the wreckage, Sicarius thought, and into the Ramilies itself. His gaze strayed upwards, but alighted upon something else instead: the rounded edge of another large structure, relatively intact, welded to the star fort’s hull; something that had not been in the plans.
It’s an engine pod, he realised. They were fighting almost directly underneath an engine pod! Was it operational, he wondered? If so, then Khargask only had to fire it, only had to operate a series of control runes somewhere, and Sicarius, the other members of his combat squad and their enemies would all be incinerated.
He wondered why a Ramilies-class star fort – never meant to fly under its own power – had been fitted with an engine in the first place, and by whom? Khargask could have been the culprit, of course; Sicarius, however, suspected otherwise. There would have to be more of them, he thought. There would have to be hundreds of engine pods on the hull to stand a chance of lifting such a colossal mass.
He needed to talk to Techmarine Renius.
These thoughts – and more – raced through his mind in a second. A second too long, the captain chided himself inwardly. His brothers appeared to be getting the better of their enemies, but he knew how suddenly the tides of battle could turn.
He saw an ork wielding a huge but primitive-looking blunderbuss, apparently fashioned from a pair of cannon barrels roped together. It brought the weapon to bear on Brother Lumic, and Sicarius shoulder-charged it, throwing off its aim as it fired.
The ork peppered its own allies with explosive pellets. In its blind fury, it turned its gun around and clubbed Sicarius with the butt. The impact did more damage to the blunderbuss than it did to his power armour. An answering blow from his sword to the greenskin’s shoulder drew blood.
There was no turning back now, even had he wanted to.
If that engine should fire, then its superheated exhaust fumes would billow out through the surrounding tunnels. There would be no escaping them; not even an Ultramarine would be able to outrun them. The only safe place from the inferno would be inside the star fort itself – and the only way to reach the star fort was through the orks.
Now, then, more than ever, it was imperative that they won this battle quickly.
And with the Emperor’s blessing, thought Sicarius as he plunged into the heart of the melee, Khargask’s attention may just be held elsewhere. He may not have understood that he is facing not flesh-and-blood soldiers this time, but something more deadly, more powerful by far – and we may surprise him yet.
CHAPTER IX
Dast had left the shelter of the command dugout.
He strode through the trenches purposefully. He had never seen them so devoid of life before. He had already passed three abandoned cannon emplacements.
The captain had dismissed him without argument or question, with barely a glance at him. He had been too busy counting the casualty reports.
As a commissar, he had been trained to be dispassionate. Sometimes, however, a feeling took him by surprise. Right now, he was feeling angry. He was keeping it in check, clenching his fists tightly.
He was looking for Sergeant Lucien. He was surprisingly hard to find, considering his size; he moved more quietly than Dast would have imagined.
At last, he caught a glimpse of shiny blue inside one of the enclosures. He stood in the entranceway and cleared his throat, calling attention to himself.
Lucien was lost in thought, or perhaps he was voxing orders inside his helmet. Dast didn’t doubt that his presence had been noted, however. He waited impatiently until the Ultramarine deigned to acknowledge him.
‘Sergeant,’ he said, crisply. ‘I hoped we could talk.’ What he had to say, he couldn’t broadcast, especially not where the captain could overhear him.
Lucien looked at him. His helmet rendered him expressionless, but Dast was more than used to that. ‘The battle is going well,’ he rumbled finally, as if that meant there could be nothing more to talk about.
‘For your Space Marines, perhaps. My regiment has lost a third of its strength, hundreds of men.’ Reports were still coming in from Krieg sergeants and quartermasters at the front, an endless litany of bloodshed in his ear.
‘Your soldiers fight with exceptional courage,’ said Sergeant Lucien.
‘They always do,’ said Dast, ‘even when they are sent to the slaughter.’
Lucien stepped towards him, but the commissar stood his ground. He had never seen a Space Marine up close before today, and it was hard not to feel small and vulnerable in their presence. However, he refused to be
intimidated.
‘The Ramilies’s generators are failing,’ said Lucien. ‘Its shields have already collapsed in several key areas. We have silenced most of its guns – and all this was made possible by the sacrifice of the Krieg Korpsmen. Had they not drawn the orks’ fire as they did, then our tanks would have been–’
‘Your tanks could have bided their time,’ insisted Dast. ‘Your captain, Sicarius, only asked for a distraction.’
‘I saw a chance to do more,’ Lucien snapped. ‘Your captain offered me that chance. It was he who offered to send his men out there – I did not ask him. If you have a problem with his decision, you should take it up with him.’
He was right. Dast made himself breathe before he answered.
Before he could, there came a renewed peal of thunder from the east, and the vox-net was flooded with fresh incident reports. The orks had got their big guns working again – a whole battery of them – and shells were raining down around the Imperial forces. Perhaps, thought Dast, the guns were never out of action in the first place, and Khargask lured us into a trap.
His soldiers, those caught in the open, were being eradicated again, by the phalanx. The spiralling numbers of the dead were reported in a flat tone by the voice of a servitor. It was easy to feel detached about those numbers from a distance. Nor was Dast especially concerned about individual Krieg lives. As the captain had said, dying was his people’s sole purpose.
‘What would you have me do?’ asked Lucien, unexpectedly. ‘Summon your Guardsmen back here? Have them run the gauntlet of the Ramilies’s guns again?’
‘No,’ said Dast. ‘No, I–’
Lucien clenched a fist. ‘This is only a temporary setback. Khargask believes he can outthink us, but an ork is still an ork.’
‘The Death Korps of Krieg are courageous,’ insisted Dast. ‘To a man, they are fearless, loyal and highly disciplined.’ They were the most disciplined soldiers he had encountered; they hardly needed a commissar. ‘Any one of them would surrender his life in a heartbeat, for the smallest advantage.’
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