by David Annandale, Justin D Hill, Toby Frost, Braden Campbell (epub)
‘Orks!’ a Guardsman screamed from the top of the barricade. ‘Orks!’
Straken spun round, away from the commissar. ‘To your positions!’ he shouted. ‘Full alert! Commissar? I’ll take the east barricade.’
Yells tore the air. Straken ran back towards his men. Hollister stood in the doorway of the makeshift infirmary, lasgun in his hands. ‘Get ready to go,’ Straken barked. ‘If anyone asks, tell them I said so.’ He ran on, weaving down corridors, past soldiers scrambling to man the lines. ‘Get moving, Guardsmen! Do I have to do everything myself?’
Orks, he thought, and anger rose in him, fired him like a dog on a scent.
He saw the barricade. Two troopers crouched beside a mortar, ready to lob shells over the wall. Sellen had propped his missile launcher on the parapet. Ferricus crouched next to him, ready to load.
From far away, Straken heard roars and the thumping of heavy boots. Dust trickled from the roof.
Men leaned over the edge of the barricade and pulled up several Catachan scouts.
Straken strode towards them. ‘You!’ he shouted, pointing. ‘How many are there?’
‘Hundreds, sir,’ the scout replied. ‘A whole legion of ’em. They’ve got big guns, and heavy armour as well.’
‘Get ready, then.’ Straken climbed up the barricade, over broken furniture and sheets of dented metal. Around him, soldiers checked their guns, loosened their knives in their sheaths. ‘Listen! I want none of these scumbags anywhere near this barricade. If you can’t hit ’em in the head, take their legs out. Heavy weapons, pick your targets. Shoot the big ones and any special gear they’ve got. Take out anything that’s too thick for a lasgun to go through. Make those shots count, Catachans!’
He paused. The acoustics were bad; it was hard to make out where the orks were, let alone how close they might be.
I could live a thousand years, he thought, and there would still be orks to kill.
‘I see ‘em!’ a woman yelled at the far end of the balcony.
‘Then what are you waiting for?’ Straken roared back. ‘Kill them! Kill them all!’
Shadows moved in the dark and the wall came alive in gunfire. For a moment, the dust obscured the orks, and Straken couldn’t quite make them out. Then he saw that they were covered in chunks of armour, square plates like paving-slabs. Las-shots ricocheted off the metal. A Mordian blew a hole in the mass of orks, killing one of the beasts, but another alien scrambled over its fallen comrade and advanced. A missile blasted two of the great orks apart in a shower of torn metal and alien flesh, but others rushed to take their place.
This time, the orks didn’t sprint at the barricade. Gunfire came from gaps between the armoured bodies: fat bullets ripped through the barricade. A long barrel, drilled with rows of ventilation holes, was thrust between the rows of orks, and high-calibre shells scythed across the parapet. One Mordian was cut in half; a Catachan toppled back, his scalp suddenly red. Worse, soldiers took cover, and as they ducked, the orks closed in.
‘Frag grenades!’ Straken shouted. ‘Aim low!’
His men pulled out their bombs, yanked the pins and hurled them over the parapet. The grenades looked tiny as they hit the walls and ork armour, disappearing from view.
A moment later, he heard the muffled boom of grenades. Orks still roared, but with pain as well as rage. ‘Now!’ Straken yelled.
They sprang up. The orks had paused; several had fallen. As one, the Guardsmen poured las-fire into the aliens. The corridor strobed with light and drummed with explosions. Orks fell by the dozen. Human voices shouted, cursed and screamed.
Suddenly, there were no more orks to kill. The alien advance was stalled. From beyond, out of view, ork voices called and bellowed.
Other orks answered, and, under them, other creatures. They sounded like grox.
A swarm of bodies dashed around the corner. Red things ran between the orks, no higher than the aliens’ knees. They looked the heads of monsters: round creatures that seemed to be nothing but snarling teeth and scrabbling legs.
Squigs, Straken realised, as the lasguns cracked out.
The squigs were much faster than their masters and harder to hit. Straken used his shotgun, brought one down, then another, but a third slipped through. One of the squigs reached the barricade and tried to jump up. Others joined it, and then Straken saw the packs strapped to some of them, the wads of explosive and wires–
‘Down!’ he cried, and the bomb-squigs detonated.
The barricade burst. Men and women were thrown in all directions. Bodies were ripped apart, soldiers smashed against the roof and walls, Guardsmen stabbed and lacerated by debris. Something crashed into Straken’s metal arm and he fell, tumbling down, pieces of the barricade hitting his hip and side like the blows of a club. He struck the ground, rolled onto his front, clambered upright with his ears ringing. He heard snarls from behind, and turned back to see the first ork soldiers tearing through the barricade.
‘Fall back!’ Straken roared. ‘The orks are inside! Fall back!’
They pulled back. The orks swarmed over the barricade. Straken saw Doc Hollister helping two Mordian orderlies carry a wounded Catachan. Myers, the gunner, shouted wordlessly and fired his heavy bolter, blasting orks apart.
Men ran in, Mordians and Catachans. They saw the orks and began firing, using doorways and support joists as cover. Lieutenant Krall was among them, yelling orders and encouragement.
‘Montara!’ Straken shouted. ‘Help the Mordians.’
‘What about you?’
Straken drew his plasma pistol. ‘I’m getting the commissar.’
The boltgun bucked and shook in Verryn’s gloved hands as it punched shells into the ork horde. The aliens had reached the west barricade – partly through covering fire, partly through force of numbers – and they were climbing up faster than they could be shot down. Behind him, someone shouted about the eastern barricade going down. The boltgun ran dry.
This is it, Verryn thought, tearing the magazine out and slapping the last one into place.
‘For the saints!’ he cried.
Then something huge ran at the barricade, and he knew that this was indeed the end.
It was an ork warboss, twice man-height and wider again, its chest bare, its left leg and lower jaw replaced by crude bionics. It had a chainaxe in one hand and a whirring, oversized buzzsaw in the other.
Lasgun shots hit its warty hide: those that penetrated did not slow it. A grenade blew a hole in the beast’s shoulder-armour, revealing pistons inside. The monster waded over and through the barricade, its weight snapping and twisting the defences. Every sweep of its weapons threw soldiers into the air, a bowing wave of mangled bodies.
Verryn sighted the ork and fired.
It threw its arm up, and the bolter shells burst against metal. Stray shells caught the ork’s body, wounding and enraging it. The ork’s chainaxe clipped a man and threw blood across the ceiling.
‘Hold your ground!’ Verryn shouted, over the screaming. ‘To the death, Guardsmen! Together we–’
His gun ran out. The warboss towered over him, its shadow entirely eclipsing the commissar. The words stopped in his throat.
‘Verryn!’
He spun round. Straken ran forward, out of the mayhem behind him, and drew his arm back. He lobbed something – not a grenade, but a gun. ‘Use it!’
Verryn snatched the plasma pistol out of the air. The warboss pulled itself over the parapet of the barricade, and then ork and commissar were eye-to-eye.
‘Die, filth,’ Verryn said, and he pushed the barrel against the ork’s forehead.
He pulled the trigger. The gun exploded.
The plasma gun liquefied both the commissar and the warboss’s head. The ork toppled forward, collapsed limb by limb, keeling over onto its front. It crashed onto the remains of the barricade. Of Commissar Verr
yn, there was no recognisable trace.
The battle was over.
Orks lay in heaps and wreckage covered the floor. Amid the aliens, perhaps one to every seven orks, lay soldiers of the Guard. Some wore blue uniforms, others combat vests and red bandannas. Already the dust was settling on them all.
‘They’ll be back soon,’ Captain Montara said. Her face was grey with dirt.
Straken could taste blood. There was a steady ache in his side that rose and fell with each breath. As he walked it became a sharp pain, jabbing him with every step. He’d felt worse. ‘Move out,’ he said.
Montara said, ‘I’ll go and check my team,’ and she strode off into the cloud of dust.
A small group of Mordians approached with Lieutenant Krall at the front.
‘You’re the commanding officer now, colonel,’ Krall said. ‘I’ll have my people ready in ten minutes.’
‘Five,’ Straken replied. ‘We need to move.’
‘Yes, sir. I saw what happened back there. To the commissar.’ She looked straight at him, but he couldn’t read her expression.
Montara took a deep breath. ‘Best get moving, then.’
‘Yes,’ Straken said.
They picked their way through the underhive, boots sloshing through brackish, oil-slicked water, the blue light cold and soft around their faces. Protected by scouts, the Guardsmen carried their wounded, and General Beran, home.
Fresh signs had been painted on the walls, to show the way, but they saw nobody else. The Mordians did not go as quickly as Straken would have hoped, but they were tough and uncomplaining. He glanced back to make sure that no one had lagged behind, and Hollister came hurrying up to talk.
‘Damn shame about your plasma pistol, eh?’ the medic said, grinning.
‘Yeah.’
‘An honest mistake,’ Hollister replied. ‘How were you to know? Some of these plasma weapons are terribly unreliable, I’ve heard. The machine-spirits, you know.’ He peered at Straken, frowning. ‘Are you feeling all right, colonel?’
‘Fine,’ Straken said. ‘Let’s go.’
The cultists were like an oncoming wall. There must have been two hundred of them. They were armed mostly with laspistols and whatever heavy tools they had scrounged from the city’s now abandoned manufactoria. Still, through my magnoculars I could see some scavenged weapons of military grade – grenade launchers and flamers – and the ogryns too. I’ve always found them revolting, even when they were fighting on our side. These corrupted brutes were even worse. They led the attack, screaming and bellowing like possessed animals, waving axes, hammers and picks. On their heads they wore hoods made of sackcloth with evil sigils painted onto them.
We poured lasfire into them as they came, but it didn’t seem to affect them in the least. Even the shells of our heavy autocannons did little to slow them. For the thousandth time since coming to this planet, I wished that we still had at least one operational tank.
To my right, Velez, our primaris psyker, had his eyes squeezed shut and fingers planted forcefully against the side of his head. Tiny arcs of electricity danced across his brow as he surveyed all the possible futures that stemmed from this moment – he didn’t look particularly reassured by any of them. On my left, the priest, Lantz, had his arms extended before him, palms open. He chanted loudly for all to hear, crying out for divine deliverance from both the lightning and the tempest. Both of them were Cadians, like myself, and therefore upstanding and capable men in their own right.
‘Options?’ I barked.
Velez answered first. He opened his eyes and stared at the oncoming mass of corrupted flesh that had once been the good people of the city of Rycklor. ‘I recommend we fall back,’ he said in his raspy voice.
I agreed completely. Behind us was the bridge, and if we regrouped on the far side then the enemy would be channelled into a compact column which would allow us to concentrate our firepower to greater effect, or failing that, blow the structure out from under them and send the whole lot into the flowing, corrosive acid of the Solray River.
However, before I could open my mouth to order a retreat, Major Leclair appeared by my side. Like the rest of Zhenya’s natives, he was pale and blond. His moustache, an affectation worn by all the men on this planet, was so thick that it covered the entirety of his upper lip. His sword was drawn.
‘I’m certain I didn’t hear that correctly, Captain Kervis,’ he said to me. ‘We must seize the initiative by charging the enemy ourselves.’
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Leclair had assembled all of the remaining members of the Zhenyan defence force. They had affixed bayonets to the ends of their lasrifles, and their red and blue uniforms stood out in sharp contrast to the bleak emptiness of the surrounding countryside.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘We need to pull back to better ground.’ I didn’t have time to go over this argument again. On paper Leclair outranked me and oversaw the local militia, whereas I was in charge of an actual regiment of the Astra Militarum. That alone gave me seniority. It had been a contention between us since the day we first arrived on their world. Leclair had expected that we would fill the gaps in his depleted force and not usurp control of it completely.
The major, who had been trained in a comfortable local academy rather than a Whiteshield youth auxiliary program, quoted a passage from the Tactica Imperium: ‘The offensive alone can give victory, but the defensive gives only defeat and shame.’
The Zhenyans nodded, and I heard at least one ‘hurrah’ from somewhere nearby.
But I too was familiar with the Astra Militarum’s encyclopedia of sage advice: ‘If the enemy comes on in a great horde, try to direct them into a narrow defile or enclosed space, so that their numbers work against them…’
‘Yes, yes. I’m familiar with that one,’ he replied.
‘Then you agree that our priority is to defend this point.’
The corner of Leclair’s right eye twitched with disappointment. ‘Yes, sir.’
Without another word, and considering the matter closed, I turned and began running down the length of the bridge. Lantz remained almost joined to me at the elbow, and Velez fell in as fast as his left leg would allow. He had broken it during our first campaign together, and the knee joint had never been quite right afterwards. On the far side, behind sandbag barricades, my Cadian brothers and sisters were standing with their weapons at the ready.
‘Firing line,’ I shouted. ‘Form a firing line, on the double!’
The rearguard scrambled into two ranks. Lasgun safeties clicked off in unison. Only when the psyker, the priest and I were safely behind the barricades, did I realize that Leclair and the Zhenyans had failed to follow us.
At the far end of the bridge, Leclair raised his sword towards the cultists. ‘For glory and honour!’ he cried.
‘For Zhenya!’ the soldiers yelled, their spirits buoyed up immeasurably by the major’s infectious bravado.
They sprinted forwards, blades and rifles held up like spears, with Leclair in the lead, and plowed into the foe. For a moment it seemed as if their exuberance alone would carry the day. They stabbed the ogryns again and again, and pummelled them with the butts of their rifles. Sprays of blood formed a red mist in the air. Then, the hulking creatures roared and struck back. Things went very badly after that.
These ogryns were like nothing I’d ever encountered. Not only did they seem to ignore the multiple, gaping wounds inflicted upon them, but also their already formidable strength seemed to have increased. The ogryns lashed out with their weapons and the bodies of Leclair’s men crumpled and fell in an instant. Limbs went cartwheeling through the air, and cries, which moments before had been patriotic, turned bloodcurdling.
Velez gripped his long psyker staff with both hands. The cultists were surging around the ogryns now. They hit Leclair and his men on their flanks, chanting and screaming in tortured ton
es. Blood drooled from their mouths and turned their eyeballs red, covering their clothing and dripping on the ground.
‘Damned fool!’ I spat. The major had doomed not only himself but all of his men with his rashness.
I dropped to one knee and unlocked a nearby metal storage box. Inside were a selection of frag grenades, satchel charges and a remote detonator. I withdrew this last item, extended a stubby antenna and let my thumb hover over the single, red button on its side. With the smallest of motions, the explosive compounds wired into the bridge’s support structures several months previously were ready to be activated – a contingency against a situation just like this.
Eight months ago, everything in this star system had suddenly fallen apart. Blood-thirsty cults had swept through the cities, and there had been daily mass murders in the agricultural areas. It was an insurrection on a massive scale, and local forces, like Major Leclair’s, were quickly overwhelmed. As a result, we, the sons and daughters of Cadia, had been brought in to help restore order. Still, with every battle we fought, the chaos only became compounded. The system’s infrastructure had broken down to almost nothing and interplanetary communications were virtually non-existent. We hadn’t actually received orders from anyone in system command since last summer, but the commands we did receive had been quite clear. We were told to establish a containment perimeter around the Rycklor manufactorum district, to protect all bridges and roadways leading into and out of said district, to annihilate anything from within the city that attempted to stage a breakout, and to wait for further reinforcements.
Now it was early winter – the ground was hard and jagged and the wind was damp and cold. Thick banks of unnatural, rust-coloured fog roiled in the skies and obscured the city. Reinforcements had yet to appear and supplies were running dangerously low. Still, we held our position as we had been told to do, trusting that a column of Leman Russes would come trundling down the road to lead us to victory. If this bridge disappeared by the time they arrived, our heavy armour could end up stranded on the wrong side of the Solray. More than that, the eventual recapture of the city of Rycklor might be crippled by the loss of a major thoroughfare.