Kuthalen shot ahead of her. ‘Let the first blow be mine, autarch,’ she said. Her jetbike’s flight was even more erratic. The strain in her voice was mortal. Will alone was keeping her alive and aloft.
‘Granted,’ said Eleira. ‘With our thanks. Safe journey, Fire Dragon.’
Kuthalen dropped low, her hull almost kissing the river bed. She held her fire. Over the din of their own engines and guns, the orks had no warning of her coming. They met in the curve, less than a dozen metres separating them. Their relative velocity was blinding. The orks appeared, and Kuthalen ploughed into them. She fired at the last second, and decapitated the leading ork. Kuthalen turned her skimmer as she hit. She crashed into two of the enemy at once even as her shuriken sliced through engines and fuel lines. Tangling metal and wraithbone erupted in flame.
Alathannas was startled by the size of the explosion. Kuthalen’s vehicle appeared to be the source of the blast, and it blew up too easily, with too much force. At least its death hurt the orks. The remaining eldar skimmers steered around the burning crash, Eleira and Passavan on the left, Alathannas on the right. They strafed the flanks of the orks. The enemy’s charge stumbled. The orks turned their bikes towards the attackers, and now they were colliding with each other, driving at cross purposes, firing across the gully. Within seconds, six bikes were caught in the confusion.
The hammering roar of the battlewagons drew closer. The delaying tactic had served its purpose. Alathannas raised his bike over the heads of the ork riders and followed the other two eldar back around the curve. A cannon shell hit the cliff wall on his left. He was buffeted by the blast. A wind of stone shards hit him and his jetbike, shredding his cloak as he drove on.
Behind him came the sound of crumpling metal as the tanks drove over the wreckage. Bullets and shells shrieked past him as the orks moved forward again.
The arch was just metres ahead. Eleira and Passavan went underneath. They kept on going, drawing the orks’ attention beyond the natural bridge. Alathannas reached it. Just as he did, another shot from one of the big guns hit the stone. He winced, expecting the rock to fall on his head and disarm the trap, but the arch held.
He was past it now. He kept moving forward, maintaining the lure, but slowed down just enough to look back.
The two battlewagons arrived. The bright lance struck the arch one more time.
From a distance, there was something almost gentle about the touch of light against stone. The effect was massive. The bridge collapsed. Thousands of tonnes of rock fell on the ork tanks. The thunder of avalanche mixed with the grind of crushed metal. The ground shook with the compressed blast of ordnance exploding. Dust rolled in both directions down the gully. Alathannas turned around again and headed into the cloud. As the echoes of the rock fall faded, he saw the stony heap that marked the grave of the tanks. From the other side came the frustrated howls of orks. Their heavy armour was destroyed, and their way forward was blocked.
Alathannas prepared to take his jetbike over the rubble and into the ork mass. The dust was an opportunity. It was perfectly suited to the path that had long been his. He would strike the orks as a phantom from the white limbo. But before he could descend, Eleira and Passavan had joined him.
‘No, ranger,’ Eleira said. ‘Your battle here is finished.’
‘Autarch?’ He could not keep the disbelief from his voice. His battle here was just beginning, he thought. The field of struggle had transformed. It had become his domain.
‘We have hurt the orks,’ Eleira told him, ‘but we are a long way from defeating them.’
‘Our losses elsewhere in this network are severe,’ Passavan added.
‘Our victory is uncertain.’ Eleira paused, letting her words sink in. ‘A loss against the orks here is far more serious than our deaths.’
‘The mission,’ Alathannas said.
‘We might fail here. There is the possibility that the humans will fail against the land train.’
Alathannas looked at Passavan. The farseer was difficult to make out in the billowing dust. His silhouette nodded. ‘The skein is tangled,’ he said. ‘I can discern the paths we must follow, but the outcome of any of them is very uncertain. Our best course is not much better than a hope.’
‘What would you have me do?’ Alathannas asked Eleira.
‘Return to the city. Your skills are suited to more than combat. Find what we seek. If we fall here, you might yet have a chance of preventing the greater evil.’
‘Even if I find it, what can I do alone?’
‘You won’t be alone. We will spare who we can to join you. If you succeed that far, then nothing else matters. We will abandon the struggle here, and do what must be done.’
‘I see.’ He did. He didn’t have to walk the path of the seer to know what the consequences would be. No matter what happened, none of the Saim-Hann on this planet would live to the next dawn. Their doom was a certainty. His heart felt heavy with the weight of his race’s tragedy. The Fall continued to echo in every death, in every lost cause.
Perhaps this cause was not yet lost. The success of the mission would be worth his own death.
He used the cover of the dust to rise out of the gully.
Behrasi heard the huge rumble to the north-east of his position. A few moments later, the dust cloud billowed into the air above the gullies.
‘That could have been the work of either side,’ Rhamm said.
‘True.’ He watched the cloud. After a minute, an eldar bike emerged from the dust. It headed west. Back to Reclamation.
‘They can’t have won already,’ Gheara said.
Behrasi tracked the flight of the lone warrior. Just as the xenos was disappearing into the distance, three more jetbikes appeared and flew off in the same direction. ‘They haven’t won,’ he said. ‘That’s why we’re seeing this. Only a few warriors being sent? This is an act of desperation. They think they might lose.’
‘What do they hope to accomplish?’ Gheara wondered.
‘That is our mission to discover.’ He waited until the eldar were out of sight and he was certain no others would be leaving the fight with the orks. He contacted Krevaan over the vox. ‘Some of the eldar are heading for Reclamation,’ he reported.
The Shadow Captain grunted. ‘Follow them,’ he ordered.
‘We are on the point of doing so.’
‘Good. See what they do. Keep me informed as best you can,’ Krevaan said and broke the connection.
The captain, Behrasi thought, had not sounded surprised at the news. If anything, there had been the satisfaction of having been proven correct in his tone. Behrasi, for his part, felt something closer to disappointment. Perhaps even sadness. He would not go as far as to say that he had trusted the eldar. But he had wanted to believe in their honour. He had thought he had seen something of that order in Alathannas when the two forces had parleyed in the city.
As his jump pack took him on the first leap towards Reclamation, the disappointment turned into resentment. He did not like being fooled. By the time he and his squad were halfway to the city, he was furious. He was ready to exact lethal punishment for the xenos’ treachery.
Chapter Seven
There would only be one chance to board the land train. It would come as the ork juggernaut started up the slope towards Reclamation. The road that the train followed passed through a cut in a low hill at the foot of the main slope. The cliff walls on either side of the road were sheer, and about ten metres high. They were close together, too. There would barely be space for the train to pass between them. When it did, that would be Eighth Company’s best chance to board. Staying just beneath the brow of the hill, the Raven Guard would be invisible to the orks until the last moment.
Even so, a distraction was needed. If the greenskin engineer had the time to trigger the defences, they might still be enough to sweep Krevaan and his men from the roof
. And then the savage machine would not stop until Reclamation was a ruin. Krevaan needed all of the engineer’s attention focused elsewhere. His strategy called for a secondary attack, one ferocious enough to resemble the main event.
He would take the strength of one combat squad onto the train. As he disembarked from the Claw of Deliverance on the other side of the hill from the train’s approach, he addressed the company over the vox. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘I want a direct, frontal assault on the enemy. Step out of the shadows, and you will create the ones from which our death blow will come.’
A chorus of acknowledgements followed as he took his squad to the ambush point.
‘We will attempt to gain access through a roof hatch?’ Thaene asked.
‘No,’ Krevaan told the Techmarine. ‘We should keep our exposure in that position to the bare minimum. As soon as that greenskin tech has any idea of what we are doing, it will hit us with that armament. We’ll go down in between the cars.’
In position, the five Space Marines listened to the land train close in. They could not see it, but the reports of their brothers painted the picture of the battle. The Claw of Deliverance launched the assault, raining missiles at the locomotive. The engine drove through the flames. One of the rockets gouged a crater in the road before it. This was no obstacle. The treaded beast dealt with it as it would a simple unevenness in the road. There was no pause in the train’s relentless drive forward.
As the engine passed through the fire of the Thunderhawk’s assault, the second phase of the attack began. Just beyond the cut, waiting on either side of the hill, were the Venerable Brothers Karom and Raust. The Dreadnoughts of Eighth Company, dropped off by the gunship, now had their moment in a war that had, since the first ambush, been a series of rapid deployments. They were not fast, but they too were creatures of the shadows. They were the hammerblow of night, their attacks as devastating as they were unexpected. They lit up the ork tech’s blister with fire that could level a fortress. Karom struck with lascannon, Raust with multi-melta.
Any other vehicle would have died in that moment, its armour pierced and melted to slag. The ork engineer’s mad genius of excess stymied the Dreadnoughts. The force field, powerful beyond any rational conception, absorbed the hits and dissipated their energy along the entire length of the train. For a second after each blast from the Dreadnoughts’ weapons, the line of cars flashed a sun-bright green and crackled with violet lightning. The locomotive was undamaged. The engineer exulted inside its blister. Karom and Raust continued firing. They could not overload the force field, but the blinding discharge of energy dazzled the ork.
The rest of the company joined the attack. Seven assault squads poured fire at the greenskin. Their shells came at it from all angles. Seventy Space Marines, manoeuvring by jump pack, rose and fell before the land train. Their movements were constant, rapid, erratic. They gave the ork engineer no concentration of targets upon which to retaliate. They were a jagged constellation of war, stretching across the arc of the horizon. The assault squads, Dreadnoughts and Thunderhawk hit the train with a force to level cities. The craters multiplied, turning the land into a moonscape. The ork machine roared on, as if it were the brutal war lust of the greenskins given metal form.
Perhaps it was, Krevaan thought as the disbelieving reports flooded the vox. He had seen enough earlier to know that they would not stop the train through direct means. All of his brothers had, too. But the force field’s strength defied reason. There was something malign at work on Lepidus Prime. It manifested itself in everything from the unusual size and strength of the ork foot soldiers to the mad invincibility of the land train. This was different from what the Imperium had fought on Armageddon. There, the greenskins had been directed by a leader of unholy skill, one whose threat, Krevaan was certain, was still not fully appreciated. The orks on Lepidus Prime seemed… transformed. It wasn’t leadership that was animating them. It was something else, something that touched their very being, and all the works that flowed from it.
Unharmed though the train was, the ork tech retaliated as though threatened with imminent destruction. It unleashed the armament in full. Turret cannons opened up. Rockets flew in swarms. The accuracy of the bombardment was non-existent, but it blanketed everything ahead of the train. The engineer didn’t have to aim. If it made the world explode, its enemies would die in that fireball. Krevaan blinked through the readouts of his helmet lenses. He saw one rune after another turn red, then dark, his brothers giving their lives in an attack that was only a diversion, an attack that was, by its nature, doomed to failure.
The battle had been raging for less than a minute. The train was still pulling its length though the cut.
Thaene said, ‘Our losses are growing.’ He was hearing the same reports. He spoke without emotion, offering an observation, evaluating a situation on the point of deteriorating.
‘Yes,’ Krevaan said. I will honour every death, he thought. Every battle-brother who had fallen had purchased them the hope of victory. ‘Now,’ he snarled.
Shadows flowed over the hill. Giants in armour became wraiths. Though it was day, the lethal touch of the night reached for the train. Krevaan leapt. He landed on the roof of the second car. The rest of the squad followed. The sound of the impact of their boots vanished under the hill-shaking din of the guns and the engine. The Space Marines stayed low, beneath the fire of the turrets. Krevaan looked across the roof of the next car to the locomotive. The engineer was visible in its bubble. The hunched figure was facing forward, riveted by the unfolding inferno of war.
‘Over the roofs?’ Dvarax voxed. Natural speech was impossible, even if it wouldn’t have given their position away.
‘No,’ Krevaan said. If the greenskin’s attention wavered from the front for an instant and it saw them, it would redirect the turrets their way. They had to use the time bought for them to get beyond the reach of the guns.
Crouching, Krevaan moved to the gap between the first and second cars. He looked down. There was no platform between them. The coupling was a grotesque conglomeration of pistons, chains and spikes. It made little mechanical sense. It was excessive, it was inefficient, and it was dangerous. Every element of the land train had been weaponised. Any being not heavily armoured that tried to stand on the coupling would be ground to blood and meat by the moving metal.
There were doors leading into each car. By contrast to the coupling, they were simple affairs, nothing more than hinged, uneven rectangles. It was as if the makers of the train had grown bored with any elements that could not be put to killing use.
Krevaan pointed to Dvarax, Revaal and Akrallas, then down at the car they were on. He indicated that he and Thaene would take the forward car. The squad understood his intent: kill the sentries, prevent any warning from reaching the engineer.
Krevaan and Thaene leapt over the gap between the cars. Krevaan waited for the other three to get into position. Akrallas took point. He nodded at the Shadow Captain.
Shadows moved again, shadows with mass and force. Krevaan and Akrallas dropped to the coupling. Krevaan felt motion beneath his boots like a sea with claws. Gaps opened and closed between the metal with every jolt of movement as the train rumbled over the craters. Krevaan grounded himself. His legs moved, adjusting for the motions of the grasping iron. His upper body was motionless. He reached out and grasped the door by a protrusion on its right edge. ‘Ready?’ he voxed Akrallas.
‘Ready.’
The doors opened out, so they struck in two beats. Krevaan yanked his door off its hinges. He lunged inside as Akrallas hauled the other open. The other members of the squad followed. Krevaan knew Thaene was at his back before he had taken two steps into the car. Before him was a cluster of surprised orks. There were four infantry, aiming their guns outside the metal-shuttered windows. They struggled to bring their weapons back in, getting the barrels stuck against the narrow frames. Krevaan dismissed them to the e
dge of his attention. They were already dead.
The fifth ork was a concern. It was another of the hulking, armoured brutes. This one wasn’t quite as massively plated as the others Krevaan had encountered on Lepidus Prime. The armour bore enough spikes to turn its shoulder guards into weapons in their own right, but it wasn’t powered. The ork, though, was huge. It didn’t need an exoskeleton when its own frame was so gigantic. One hand wielded a clip-fed pistol the size of a bolter. The other carried a thick, short blade. The monster almost reached the ceiling in the car, but it was prepared for close-quarters fighting. It had decided to leave the ranged combat to its underlings and to the train’s defences. It thought ahead. That made it dangerous.
Krevaan lunged at the warboss, slashing at its exposed face with his lightning claws. The ork took a step back, tucked its chin in, and raised its pistol. It fired a volley of bullets at Krevaan and Thaene. The rounds were huge. They punched into the interior walls of the car. Four of them slammed into Krevaan’s chest. His armour held, but the inertia of the blows was enormous. They stopped his charge.
The other orks brought their weapons to bear as their leader emptied its clip. Krevaan ducked beneath the swing of the chieftain’s blade. He struck out with his right arm and impaled the nearest greenskin through the chest. The ork howled and dropped its gun. Krevaan hauled the ork in and hurled it at the chieftain. The big ork’s blade sliced into the minion’s ribs and stuck.
Behind Krevaan, Thaene took down the other ork on the right with bolter fire. He trained his servo-arm’s plasma cutter on the left-hand enemies. One died immediately, the upper half of its head sheared off. The other pulled the pin on a long-handled grenade.
Krevaan saw the gesture in the corner of his eye. He had fractions of a second to brace himself before the grenade blew up in the ork’s hand, setting off all the other explosives the greenskin carried. Inside the confined space of the car, the blast was huge. These were no mere frag grenades. They were another product of the ork engineer’s obscene inspiration. The devices were as much incendiary as fragmenting, and they filled the car with flame and shrapnel. The explosions scorched the surface of Krevaan’s armour and knocked him sideways. Thaene, closer to the centre of the blast, was knocked to the ground.
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