The iron punched through the ork’s skull and launched its left eye in an impressive arc. The rest of the orks hooted. The corpse’s grip relaxed. The tool fell, clattering and bouncing through the scaffolding. It landed in front of Kusala. He was close enough to pick it up.
He mentally framed a string of curses. They were his most imaginative in at least twenty years.
He glanced left. Still no Ariq. Looked up. The ork was clambering down the scaffolding.
Left. Was that a shadow moving? It was.
The ork was on the ground. It reached for the tool.
Ariq was seconds away.
The ork grasped the tool. It saw Kusala. Its jaw hung open in stupid surprise.
Still holding the grenades, Kusala slammed his gauntleted fist against the bridge of the ork’s nose. He caved in the greenskin’s face. The brute still roared before it had the good grace to die.
‘Now!’ Kusala shouted. He threw his grenades, one at the roof, one at the wheels.
Ariq triggered the charge.
The speed of war struck the orks.
The first blast of Ariq’s explosives was dwarfed by the conflagration of the promethium. The fireball filled the centre of the chamber. It swallowed the Battlewagon. It turned orks and scaffolding into flying, burning debris. Then the tank exploded. Its wreckage was of larger mass. It flew lower, hit the ground rolling, smashing down more construction works.
The flames were still spreading when first Kusala’s grenades went off, then those hurled by Yekejin and Bokegan at the other Battlewagon. The kraks melted armour, wheels and axles. The vehicles slumped. They were far from killed, but their departure from the chamber was delayed.
The orks reacted with chaotic rage. There were explosions in three separate locations, flames and secondary blasts spreading through the cavern. The greenskins didn’t know where to shoot, so they shot everywhere, at everything that moved. For those first crucial seconds, as the Scouts made their way back towards the cave entrance, the orks saw only each other. The instinct to retaliate was too strong. Ork fired on ork. Frenzy and ferocity spread ahead of the flames. What order there had been before the attack collapsed.
The squad was just reaching the entrance when there was a roar almost as loud as the explosions. Only it came from a living throat. Kusala turned. They had been spotted by the overseers of the construction zone. Two large orks in thick armour waded out of the fire. Between them, they carried what looked like a massive stubber. Kusala realised it was a gun intended to be used as a Battlewagon’s side turret. One ork carried the barrel. The other held the stock and had its finger on the trigger.
‘Move!’ Kusala yelled. The Scouts already were.
The orks opened fire. The gun’s recoil was great, and its barrel ran hot within seconds. Though the lead ork held on, the spray still went wild. Bullets the length of a mortal’s hand ricocheted around the cavern.
The initial shots hit Bokegan full on. They stitched a trail of holes that ran the entire length of his torso and then his head. He jerked, immobilised by the severity of his wounds as the massive rounds took apart his carapace, blew out his throat, put out his eyes. The force of the blows propelled him forwards another step. Then he fell.
Ariq shot the lead ork in the head. It fell, dropping its end of the gun. The other ork howled as the gun kicked uncontrollably. It kept its finger on the trigger, spraying bullets across the entire breadth of the cavern until another round from Ariq dropped it too.
Now the other orks were breaking from their disorder. They realised that the true enemy had been found. More died as they were caught in the flames. The fireball was dissipating, but it was still touching off spills and minor reservoirs. The orks ignored their losses. Kusala doubted that they even understood the meaning of the word. They ran forwards, single-minded in aggression, heedless of anything beyond the need to kill the enemy.
There were hundreds of the orks. Not all of them joined in the rush. They climbed onto the completed Battlewagons. Kusala’s heart sank as he heard engines rumble to life, spewing clouds of blue smoke.
As the Scouts reached the entrance, so did a large contingent of orks coming from the downward slope of the tunnel. Trapped, Kusala thought. ‘For the Emperor!’ he shouted.
‘For the Khan!’ the squad answered.
Blades drawn, they threw themselves at impossible odds.
Then the ground shook while, further back in the tunnel, the sun rose.
The race was even worse this time. During the run to the base, Temur had been fighting to avert disaster. Now victory was the prize, and that hope was so slender, so delicately balanced on the horns of time, that it could vanish if the brotherhood was as little as a few seconds late in arriving.
So far, he thought. Too far.
He didn’t want to know how long it had been since he’d received Kusala’s message. But he was aware of precisely how many seconds it had been, and how many minutes it would be before they reached the site of the manufactorum. Too long.
There had been no further messages. He had tried contacting Ghazan, but to no avail there, either. Once more, they had seen the ork infantry in the distance, closing in on the bastion. They would be in the fray long before the White Scars reached their target. Temur didn’t doubt the Iron Guard’s tenacity or sense of duty. He did wonder if they had the troops. The battle would soon have very little to do with skill. The orks would have the numbers and strength to win it, and the question was only how long it would take them to smash the human defenders.
Riding past the orks, ignoring the distant sounds of their raucous laughter and songs, knowing the devastation they were bringing, was one of the hardest things Temur had done. Earlier, he had had the reasonable expectation of returning to the bastion before the slow orks and their armour arrived. Now there was no such hope. Now there was the need to strangle the ork operation at its source. Two bastions were being attacked. The first one to fall would lose the planet.
Temur’s vox-bead crackled to life. It was Tegusal, one of Kusala’s Scouts. ‘We have secured an entrance, my khan,’ Tegusal said.
‘Good. Where is it?’
‘Look right when you reach the manufactorum’s vicinity. You’ll know when you are there. It’s unmistakable. We have the entrance open. We will send up a–’
Loud, continuous static on the vox. The thread of hope frayed. Temur responded with anger. He responded with speed. He vowed to tear every ork tank apart with his hands. And he called on Tegusal. He called on every White Scar in the ork manufactorum.
Nothing but white noise. Nothing but the idiot sound of disaster.
Chapter Seven
Ghazan had time to realise the ork witch was launching an attack. He had time to raise his own defences against it. There was even time for the eldar to redirect fire against the ork. Time to know that this greenskin must be prevented from striking this blow.
All that time. But no time to stop the attack.
Ghazan saw it all go wrong in precise, acid-etched detail. He saw the irony that Tellathia must have known what was coming, and though he heard her begin to cry ‘No!’ in Gothic, the crude medium of speech was too slow. He saw the ork aim its staff not at him, but at the grid of cages. He saw the muzzle of his bolt pistol come into line with the witch’s head. He felt his finger squeeze the trigger.
All too late. Far, far too late.
The energy discharge from the staff was enormous. The flash alone heated the air to the point that flesh on the nearest orks burned. What it caused when it hit the cages was of another order again.
The concentrated psychic strength of the eldar prisoners was released all at once. The power that had teleported tanks lost all coherence. The chamber vanished from Ghazan’s sight. The defence he had raised at the last second saved his identity from being ripped apart, its particulate echoes thrown to the warp. Even so, he was c
aught in an explosion that was the death scream of a hundred souls, and sheer, physical destruction. Blasts hit his mind and body at the same time. He held fast to his consciousness. His material self was hurled through the air. He couldn’t see where he flew. There was no up, no down, no direction.
Only the blind silver shriek.
The roar of flame.
The battering by stone and iron.
The blast that came through the tunnel was not a simple explosion. The light that engulfed Kusala’s squad and the orks was not from the visible spectrum. It was not from the materium at all. Yet it blinded all the same. It struck like a spear to the brain. Kusala’s very name started to slip from his grasp. He snatched at it, and at his oath of moment, and so it was as a sergeant of the White Scars that he shouted, ‘Remember who you are! You are Adeptus Astartes. You are the sword of Chogoris! You are the sons of Jaghatai Khan!’
He didn’t know if he was heard. The words were being spoken by someone a great distance away. Perhaps he spoke them only to himself. But they were the truth, and the truth was a potent weapon against the chaos that sought to devour them all. He could not see. He could not feel his limbs. But he knew they were there, and when he commanded his arm to swing, he was sure that it did. Even in the midst of a storm of disintegration, he attacked the enemy.
The wave receded, taking the pain with it. Kusala could see again. Another Scout, Yekejin, was down, perhaps felled by the psychic explosion, but now hacked apart by the orks’ chainblades. Most of the greenskins who had been in the tunnel were also down. Some were dead. Others were writhing on the ground, clutching their heads. Their eyes had burst. Bloody foam was at their mouths. A few – the largest – still stood, and were fighting, but their movements were slow, their blows inaccurate. The orks in the cavern had been spared the worst of the blast, but they were stunned, sluggish.
With quick, vicious jabs of his tulwar, Kusala eviscerated the ork before him. He saw that Ariq was still dazed. He step-lunged forward, caught another ork in the chest. The brute rocked back but came at them again. Kusala shook Ariq’s shoulder as he blocked another of the ork’s blows. ‘Scout!’ he shouted. ‘You are at war!’ Ariq returned to the present moment and shot the ork. It took three shells to kill it.
Kusala and Ariq retreated up the slope. From inside the assembly bay came the sounds of pursuit as the orks recovered. The Battlewagons had stalled. Now they growled once more. The green horde and its machines of destruction were on the move.
‘Do we stand and fight?’ Ariq asked.
‘Our duty is not martyrdom,’ Kusala snapped. He led them upwards at a run. ‘Our duty is to delay the orks long enough for the rest of the minghan to arrive.’
‘Two of us?’ Ariq sounded game, but sceptical.
‘Three,’ Kusala allowed himself a moment of grim humour. ‘We will rejoin Tegusal. We will not defeat the greenskins. But we can slow them down.’
The slope went on for at least another thousand metres. Some of the turns were sharp, though the width was always enough to allow the passage of the tanks. The sides of the walls were scraped where the orks had barrelled through with more speed than care. Kusala saw daylight after the third twist. One more turn, and there was Tegusal. A few dozen ork corpses were stacked on either side of the exit to the surface. The door was a single steel slab ten metres long, held open by hydraulic arms.
From back in the tunnel came the clamour of the orks.
‘Any word from the khan?’ Kusala asked Tegusal.
‘He is coming, brother-sergeant. They all are.’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know. The vox went out when we were hit by that…’ He hesitated, lacking an adequate word for the event.
‘A surge of some kind,’ Kusala said. ‘It doesn’t matter what it was. What is important is that the orks do not break out until our brothers reach us.’
‘We might be able to collapse the tunnel,’ Ariq offered. ‘We could seal them in.’
The sounds of riot were louder yet.
Kusala shook his head. ‘No time.’ He pointed at the arms. ‘Drop this door.’
Two krak grenades were enough to melt the supports at their base. The White Scars moved outside as the door slammed down with a reverberating boom.
‘This won’t hold them long,’ Ariq said. ‘They’ll burn or blast their way through.’
‘And we will be here when they do,’ Kusala said.
‘Brother-sergeant, I know I could have rigged the ceiling in time.’
‘Perhaps. And are you sure this is their only exit?’
‘No,’ Ariq admitted.
‘We have their heavy armour held at this spot. They won’t retreat before a simple shut door. You’re right. They will break it down.’
He turned to scan the horizon. In the distance, he could see a cloud of dust. The full strength of the Fifth Brotherhood was coming to punish the temerity of the greenskins. ‘When the orks open that door,’ he said, ‘they’ll be letting us in.’
The heat faded before the psychic glare did. Ghazan knew this only because the cavern was already cooling when he could think again. The ripples of the soul-death subsided. He was no longer being swamped by the doom of others.
The details of the material world returned in stages. First he realised that he was no longer in motion. He was lying on his back. Then the darkness registered as being the actual absence of light. Next came the awareness of great weight. Last was the warmth of his blood on his face. The wounds on his forehead had already sealed.
He was buried. He pushed against the wreckage. Metal, a great deal of it, but not stone. He pushed harder. The weight shifted. It gave him hope that there had not been a cave-in. He worked both his hands up to chest level, then shoved outwards. His arms were great pistons, and the remains of the ork machines fell away from him.
Ghazan stood up, testing bones and armour. Vital systems still intact. The heaviness was worse, but he could compensate for it. His body was as unbroken as his mind.
He was the only thing unbroken in the cave. The machine had spread its death across the entire width of the chamber. The explosion had reduced it to melted slag and blackened, twisted bars. The corpses of its prisoners were contorted husks enmeshed in the metal. The only light in the cavern came from the blue flame burning at the mouths of broken conduits.
The orks were all dead. Their bodies were incinerated. Many had died from forces other than fire. Ghazan saw skull after skull that had split open, the grey matter inside bursting out like a violent cancer. No eldar was still standing, either. The elegance of their armour was destroyed. It was fragments and angles, as ruined as the bodies inside.
The door to the teleporter cave had been peeled back by the force of the blast. The space beyond was just as wrecked. The platform appeared to have exploded. Large chunks of metal shrapnel were scattered about the cavern. Ghazan saw several corpses that had been cut in half by the flying debris.
There was no sign of the ork psyker in either cavern. The engineer, too, had made its escape.
Ghazan clenched his fists. His frustration was mixed with the intimation of destiny that still tormented him. He had thought the moment of the battle had come in this chamber. Its delay was maddening. The full reckoning still waited.
He heard movement behind him. He turned. Where the grid’s control mechanisms had been, the rubble shifted. Ghazan approached, bolt pistol at the ready.
The movement stopped. Ghazan pulled the wreckage away. Tellathia lay beneath it, broken but still breathing. Ghazan didn’t think she would be for much longer.
‘The ork…’ she said. Her helmet’s amplifier still worked, giving her voice a volume at odds with the terminal pain.
‘Escaped,’ Ghazan said.
‘Yes.’ She spoke with resignation, not surprise. ‘You will find it.’
‘I know.’
‘When you do, please, finish what we came to do.’
Ghazan looked at the bodies in the wrecked cages. ‘It is finished,’ he said. ‘Your kin are no longer enslaved.’
‘No...’ A long pause, and an even longer one between her breaths. Each exhalation seemed to expel a bit more of her being. ‘Our great mission is as incomplete as yours.’
‘There are more prisoners?’
‘One more. The orks must not have him. Free Merentallas. Please.’ When Ghazan hesitated, she said, ‘It is what you are called to do. Just as we were called to die for your mission.’
He stared at her, wishing he could see behind the ornate but faceless helmet. ‘Called?’
‘By necessity.’
The implications of what she was saying sank in. ‘You knew you were going to die?’
‘It was…’ Pause. Rattling breath. ‘It was the only way to ensure your success. And through you, the ultimate fulfilment of our duty.’
‘You assume much.’
‘No. Nothing. You will see. Our fates this day are not our own. They are but steps in the culmination of another’s. There was never any choice.’ A very long breath, like a sigh down an endless tunnel.
‘My fate is dictated by that of the White Scars,’ Ghazan said.
There was no answer. He waited. She was still.
He knew the eldar had spoken the truth, at least as she understood it. He suspected that her perception of time’s unravelling was more acute than his own. Though being indebted to anything xenos was distasteful to him, he had incurred a debt of honour here. He looked down at the psyker. ‘I will free him,’ he said. Their missions were still braided.
Never any choice. Wasn’t that what he maintained? Then why did the words haunt him?
Outside the vehicle entrance to the complex, the vox-network started functioning again. At the same time, the blows began on the other side of the door. Based on the sounds Kusala heard, the orks were beginning by hammering the metal with fists and weapons, as if sheer aggression would open the way for them.
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