Evil Sun Rising

by Guy Haley

  A fresh cacophony of mechanical noises started up: engines, creaking, rattling chains. Landing ramps slammed down into the orange dust of Alaric. Hatches popped open. Doors swung wide.

  Thick orange sunlight flooded into the hold, lighting up motes of dust like waterfalls of gold. There was a pause, wherein all the universe turned, and a silence fell. Other races might have found a beauty in this moment, a swift vision of peace before extinction. And in truth, there was a swell of emotion that passed over the boyz and the runts. All the greenskins felt it, but it was of an altogether more savage kind.

  ‘Waaagh!’ bellowed thousands upon thousands of orks. ‘Waaagh!’ bellowed a thousand speaker-grilles. ‘Waaagh!’ roared thousands of engines. Gripped by the need for violence, the greenskins poured out of the ship with a noise like the end of the world.

  The buggies and bikes were out first, a buzzing cavalcade overflown by Deffkoptas that shot down the ramp faster than fast. Hard behind, battlewagons clanked. Dreads and Kans clumped down the ramps and out of hatches after the wagons, then the boyz, so many of them the orange dust turned green. On and on the horde went, Goffs, Evil Sunz, White Spiders, Deathskulls, Snakebites, Bad Moons, flash gitz, freebooterz of every kind, Blood Axes, Kill Blades and more. Every clan, every faction, and every kind of ork you could imagine. And this was just one rust-ship; dozens had made planetfall together and dozens more were descending from orbit. Hundreds, thousands more waited to join them.

  Uggrim breathed heavily; his nostrils were full of the scent of his own blood. His throat was thick. His head hurt – not with the blow he had sustained, but with the need to kill.

  ‘Steady, lads,’ he said, more to himself than to his boyz. ‘We’re up next.’

  The Wrath of Gork emptied rapidly, leaving the Stompas alone. The pop and crackle of explosions sounded from outside as the humie big guns opened up on the boyz. The bubble fields held around the rust-ship, but the metal shook under Fat Mork’s feet as the ground beyond was pounded by high explosives. The Red Sunz waited long minutes. Nobody spoke. All the orks were tense. It was all they could do not to snatch up their weapons, throw themselves out of Fat Mork’s doors and rush headlong to join the charging mobs. The pulse rushed in Uggrim’s ears. He drooled freely, his hands gripped so tightly on Fat Mork’s steering sticks he almost bent them. Even Talker was quiet.

  Fat Mork’s squawker hissed: a message from Gork’s Fist. ‘Humie walkers coming in. We got the go. Stompas out!’

  Across the hold, Big Mouth’s head squealed around on its neck.

  ‘’Ere we go, ’ere we go, ’ere we go!’ it bellowed. Grimgutz laughed through the machine’s massive gob. ‘I’ll be first out, Evil Sun, then we’ll see who’s the best Stompa mek!’ Big Mouth’s engine roared. Black smoke poured out of his exhaust pipes.

  Uggrim narrowed his eyes at the rival Stompa. He bellowed down the ladder well. ‘Lads! Fire up the reactor. I don’t want that yellow git Grimgutz killing anything big before we do!’

  Outside the Stompas the hold erupted into activity. Runt teams emerged from holes all over the place. There were none, and then there were lots, just like that. Directed by their runtherds, gretchin clambered all over the two idols, smacking retaining pins out of their drop-harness chains. Grots whistled and shouted, flags flapped, squighounds barked. Grotbosses gave the thumbs up. Runtherds bawled commands and curses through megaphones. ‘Heave! Heave, you laggardly grots!’ Teams of sweating grots and slaves turned capstans set behind the war machines. The chains holding the Stompas slid over their armoured plates and crashed to the floor, where they slithered and rattled their way back onto drums. It was a smooth operation. Only a handful of runts were crushed to bits as the chains whipped free.

  A klaxon honked. The runts ran back to their holes.

  A series of explosions went off around the slab in front of Fat Mork, a second series starting a split second later in front of Big Mouth. The crackling detonations blew out the minimal seams holding the panels in front of the Stompas in place. The plate fell slowly outwards. Then with a gathering speed that mirrored the rushing need for violence pounding in every ork’s chest, it crashed forwards, forming a drawbridge for Fat Mork down to the parched ground. Ochre dust rushed outwards in a low billow, obscuring the view of the battle.

  Fat Mork’s bridge was down first, but Big Mouth didn’t wait for his plate to topple all the way out. He bashed it down with his rounded belly plates and waddled out of the ship. Rockets flashed from the rack at his summit before he had got outside, and then he was out of sight and into the battle.

  Uggrim howled his annoyance and slammed his drive levers forwards. ‘Let’s go! That git’s stealin’ a march on us. Get a move on!’ he shouted.

  The captive sun in the Stompa’s gut flared at Bozgat’s coaxing. Gears ground. Fat Mork’s stumpy feet were set into motion. Uggrim whooped as the Stompa emerged into the orange sunlight of Alaric, blasting and roaring, and not too far behind Big Mouth. Seeing the two embodiments of Mork and Gork march down the ramps onto the field, the orks sent up a huge cheer. ‘Waaagh!’ shouted Fat Mork in reply. ‘Waaagh!’ shouted Big Mouth, far more loudly.

  The sweep of the battle was revealed to Uggrim in full, and it was exhilarating. Ork boyz poured across the plain, thousands of them heading in a great stream towards the human fortifications. Hundreds of kans and trukks and trakks, and all the orky might of war went ahead of them. Other rust-ships dotted the plains in the distance, bubble fields flaring under fire, each disgorging its own green flood, although none were so big as the Wrath of Gork. Explosions were going up everywhere. A big kerfuffle to the south-east marked the point where some of the boyz had already broken through the defence line. The humans kept up a spirited rate of fire, cutting down hundreds of orks, and falling back where they were threatened with hand to hand combat.

  These humies didn’t worry Uggrim. They were as weak as their weapons, unable to penetrate Fat Mork’s bubble field. Most of their guns were out of range in any case, which was, now Uggrim thought about it, as much a curse as a blessing.

  Luckily for them all, the fight was coming to them. As promised, humie Stompas, Knights, were loping towards the horde – twenty of them at least, decked with flapping banners, all in different colours but variations on a single theme. They were hunched over like orks, their high carapaces rising over cockpits shaped like giant helmets. Each one had a massive gun for one arm and a big chainsword for the other. Polyphonic warhorns boomed as they ran; they were quick and closing fast. Uggrim caught some squeaky humie talk over his squawker. It sounded angry.

  The Knights tore into the ork army, cannons spitting shells at an impressive rate of fire. They stamped a bloody channel through the horde, heading directly for Grukk’s drop-ship. A big group of Deff Dreads formed up in their way, and were promptly smashed down. Orks were hurrying to get clear, in a manner that, to Uggrim, looked suspiciously like running away.

  Uggrim pressed his eye to his periscope. Looking through its magnifying lenses past the enclosing bubble field of the ship, things weren’t going too well. Orks were being blasted to pieces by the hundreds, caught by long-range artillery and the up-close repeater cannons of the humie Stompas. Burst cones of ork body parts and parched soil shot upwards. Battlewagons came apart in showers of scrap, buggies were lofted high into the air, but the orks ran onwards heedlessly. It was glorious. The Red Sunz laughed and cheered with excitement. Even the grots stopped snivelling. Fat Mork jolted as Talker opened fire with the gigashoota, sending a highly inaccurate fusillade at the Knights.

  ‘Oi, madboy – stop that!’ Uggrim shouted down the talky-tube. ‘We’re out of range.’

  ‘Well do something about it!’ Snikgob replied grumpily. ‘What we doing standing around here for?’

  Snikgob had a point. Uggrim slammed the left lever forwards. Fat Mork waddled around, heading towards the encroaching phalanx of Knights. Most were approaching the ship’s mid-section, but a couple of them had scoped the two
Stompas and altered their own course to intercept.

  ‘Hur hur,’ said Uggrim. ‘This’ll be a good fight!’

  At that moment, Grukk chose to make his entrance. Four massive explosions tore through the side of the rust-ship a way down from the Red Sunz. A good chunk of the ship’s flank, where it was at its very fattest, fell outwards. Uggrim and his lads laughed to see the humie Stompas come to a halt and then go frantically running backwards as the metal bore down on them. A stripy orange one didn’t make it, and was flattened by the falling debris, its reactor making a pathetic phutting noise as it blew.

  Dust washed outwards, covering a large part of the fight. A loud metallic ‘Waaagh!’ rolled out from the rust-ship, and Fist of Gork strode onto the battlefield. Nearly twice the size of Fat Mork, huge as an entire orktown, it bristled with cannons. Its iron hide was mostly the dark red of old blood, for that was the substance Grukk favoured as paint. Where it was not crusty red it was goff-black, covered in bulls’ heads and the neat, checked patterning of the discerning skarboy.

  The orks answered the gargant’s cry with their own mighty ‘Waaagh!’. They lunged forwards again, swamping the first line of the humie defences across a broad front.

  Uggrim salivated at the prospect of the fight. Knights encircled Fist of Gork, firing madly at it. Thinking it would be highly politic to get involved in this biggest of scraps, as well as loads of fun, Uggrim lined Fat Mork up with the foe and depressed his acceleration pedals.

  The Stompa took one step, lifted his foot to take another, and came to a juddering halt. There was a noise like a farting squiggoth and a faint smell of burning, before Fat Mork tipped uncomfortably forwards to balance precariously on the toe of his upraised foot. The lights went out.

  Uggrim looked around with disbelief. He toggled a couple of switches. He snarled, slammed his fists into his skull. He cast about, settling on a grot as a target for his anger.

  ‘No, boss, no… Oooof!’

  The grot flew down the ladder well, dead.

  ‘What the zog’s going on? What the zog is going on!’ bellowed Uggrim.

  ‘We’ve stopped!’ shouted Snikgob. ‘Lost all power!’

  ‘I knows that! I know! I can see that, can’t I?’ Uggrim watched in dismay as Big Mouth ploughed on towards the human lines, racking up a very impressive kill count while Fat Mork stood there like a madboy picking flowers. ‘What the zog is going on?’

  To make matters worse, a Knight was zeroing in on them.

  ‘Boss, boss! Humie Stompa coming in fast!’ shouted the lookout grot from the tower above.

  ‘I know, I know! I can see that as well!’ bawled Uggrim back up the talky-tube, too angry to be impressed the grot hadn’t run off. He rammed the drive levers back and forth. They had no effect, so he started slamming his gnarled fists into the dashboard over and over again. The Knight fired. Uggrim winced.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE BIG SCRAP

  ‘What’s going on? Why aren’t we moving?’ shouted Talker, only now grasping the situation. Then, ‘I think I needs the drops. My tummy isn’t well.’

  Fat Mork shuddered as a shell burst on his crackling shields.

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ wailed Bozgat, down on the engine deck. He ran to and fro, clutching his head in his hands.

  ‘Well I’d zogging well find out, you useless squig turd!’ shouted Uggrim, his voice all hollow and tinny down the talky-tube. ‘Because that humie Stompa don’t look like he’s coming round for a cup of fungus beer and a nice chat.’

  ‘Ooooh! The emblems, the heraldry! The badges are nice!’ hooted Talker. ‘Pretty! Male line left, distaff right. Clever pinkies!’

  Another of the enemy Stompa’s shells exploded harmlessly, absorbed by Fat Mork’s energy shield.

  ‘Oh, that’s pretty, that’s nice. At least that still works then,’ jabbered Talker. ‘A predictable outcome of a polarised muon deflection matrix.’ He belched loudly. ‘Well orky.’

  ‘Boss, boss!’ shouted Bozgat. ‘Reactor’s still on. I don’t understand!’

  Uggrim’s mind was highly compartmentalised. On the one hand he was an ork, possessed of and possessed by all the unthinking rage that suggests. But the other part of his brain brimmed over with inherited knowledge, some of which was so complex it would have kept the assembled priesthood of a forge world occupied for a generation or two. As his subkind had been made to react in such situations so many aeons before, this part kicked in and took over, pushing his roaring orky aggression aside. He wanted to kill, but before he could kill, he had to fix. The red mist receded from his vision. Diagrams and charts and rotating schematics spilled dizzyingly into his mind’s eye, and his innate technical know-how spilled in its turn out from his fanged mouth.

  ‘Check the fuses, check the shunts! Initiate testing on the couplings. That’s got to be it!’

  Bozgat pulled himself together, for a while. He swung under the criss-crossing pipes and bracing spars that webbed the periphery of the engine room like a great green ape, frantically grabbing at everything that conveyed power anywhere. His concentration didn’t last. Unable to find what was wrong in a time commensurate with his limited span of patience, he lost his temper, grabbed his biggest axe-spanner and started randomly hitting things very, very hard. Sparks and arcs of electricity shot out of the abused machinery, flashing on Bozgat’s teeth as they earthed through the Stompa’s metal deck. The little mek’s ears smoked, but he went on battering everything in sight. ‘I can’t do it! I can’t do it!’ he wailed.

  Up top, Uggrim leaned back from Fat Mork’s periscope eye. The Imperial walker looked altogether too close through it. Fat Mork’s shield generators screamed as round after round pounded into them from the big cannon on its arm.

  ‘Bozgat! Bozgat! Bozgat! Fix it or we’re all dead!’

  ‘Waaagh!’ howled Bozgat, and not in a good way. He battered the casing of the reactor, putting shiny gouges into its paintwork. ‘I’m tryin’! I’m tryin’!’

  ‘Try harder, you bleedin’ runt! Pull yourself together. You an ork or a grot?’ bawled Snikgob. He gave up, ramming the levers on his lifta-droppa backwards and forwards in frustration, and dropped from his chair, ran across the gun deck and slid down the ladder to the engine room with his feet on the rails. ‘Gork’s arse, you want something doing, do it yourself!’

  Frikk, meanwhile, was scurrying about on his hands and knees, looking for things Bozgat might have missed. He had already soiled himself twice, and the mess of metal shavings, old screws and bones littering the place were cutting his palms and knees up something chronic. Bozgat was panicking, Snikgob was shouting, and there were a great many things outside that were trying their best to kill him. He tried to ignore the reality that he was, to all intents and purposes, inside a poorly constructed tin can with a fusion bomb in the middle. He failed.

  There are few things that can be as physically terrified as a gretchin. Fear, however, is a friend to a rare number of them. There are grots that will die on the spot under the duress of such terror, but Frikk was of the other sort. Fear motivates this unusual breed like nothing else. Frikk’s small brain was in overdrive, his mean red eyes scanning every scrap of the engine room. Instinct drew his gaze downwards, round about Bozgat’s boot level where the ork would not think to look. In a small gap, close to the floor, he spotted something awry. A thick tube of fungus rubber had been hacked through, the bundle of wires inside cut. The metal that made them up had melted together.

  He scrambled over to it, grabbing onto a scalding pipe as Fat Mork rocked back on his heels. ‘Argh!’ he wailed, sucking his fingers. ‘Bozgat! Bozgat!’

  Frikk noticed a pair of glyphs scratched into the wall. His eyes widened with shock. He hastily scrubbed them out with dirt before the mek scrambled over and shoved him out of the way.

  ‘Sabotage!’ Bozgat snarled. He yelled over his shoulder at Snikgob. ‘We’ve been done!’ Bozgat pulled the ruined cables close to his face, flipping a magnifying lens down ov
er his eye. ‘Been cut just enough to melt when stressed. Someone with the know-wots gone done this! I bet you it’s that bleedin’ glory hog Bad Moon. Frikk, Frikk! Get back here!’ Bozgat grabbed the gretchin by an ear and pulled him squealing into the hole. ‘You gotta help. We gotta join all these back up!’

  ‘But there’s loads of ’em!’ protested Frikk.

  ‘Best work fast then, lazy grot,’ said Bozgat, his own thick fingers already working with surprising dexterity, separating the melted strands and twisting the wires back together.

  ‘Lemme at it,’ shouted Snikgob, and he pulled roughly at Bozgat’s shoulder.

  ‘No room,’ said Bozgat, elbowing Snikgob hard.

  ‘Stop fighting and fix it!’ yelled Uggrim down the talky-tube. ‘Snikgob, get back on the gun deck. Don’t want Talker doing anything weird.’

  Uggrim redirected his attention back outside. Seeing its shells had no effect, the Knight had pulled back and was circling the Stompa warily. Fat Mork was taking plenty of fire from all around, but luckily Gork’s Fist was attracting most of the humie Stompas’ attention.

  Great, thought Uggrim. Means we only got the one to deal with.

  The Knights ran round and round Gork’s Fist, blasting away at its iron hide. His bubble fields were out and his armour glowed hot with the impact of fusion weapons. Runnels of molten steel dribbled down the gargant’s broad skirt, flash-cooking boyz who got too close. But the Knights could not penetrate the thick plating. One of the humie walkers was doing some right fancy prancing, ducking this way and that. It got carried away, ran forwards and carved a gash into Gork’s Fist’s belly plates.

  ‘Ooh, that was pretty stupid,’ said Uggrim to himself.

  The gargant reacted swiftly, taking the Knight off guard. Its shoulder weapons ratcheted down, sending a massive rocket straight into the humie Stompa’s chest. The explosion was huge, but the walker was only staggered. Uggrim narrowed his eyes at that.