by Toby Frost
Boots scraped on concrete. Morrell snapped the book shut and glanced round. A tall man stood in the doorway; light glinted on metal. Straken walked in, a can in each hand.
He put one on the table. ‘Courtesy of the Dulma’lin Mining Guild. They brew it themselves.’
Morrell closed his notebook and looked at the tin. There was a little aquila stamped on the top; it displeased him to see the holy sign associated with alcohol. ‘You’re drinking before battle?’
‘The miners figured we all might want to drink to our success.’
‘I see.’
Straken didn’t go away. ‘Ready to move out, commissar?’
‘Yes, once I’ve made my peace with the Emperor, I’ll be all set. I take it there isn’t a priest around?’
‘Sorry, no. Right now, the Light of the Emperor is coming out the barrel of a lasgun.’
Morrell leaned back. The little chamber, with its battered furniture, reminded him of interrogation rooms he’d used in the Commissariat. ‘Your men don’t seem the most pious people I’ve ever met,’ he observed.
Straken shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t say that. “Set thy hand to the sword, for the Emperor loves not words without deeds”. Isn’t that how it goes?’
Morrell made the corner of his mouth smile. ‘I didn’t realise you were so well acquainted with holy writ, colonel.’
‘I’m full of surprises.’ Straken stepped towards the door. ‘I’ll see you in two hours,’ he said, and he raised his own can. ‘To victory, commissar,’ he added, and without waiting for Morrell to return the toast, Straken left the room.
Eighty kilometres above Dulma’lin, General Greiss sat in the officers’ cabin of the huge assault craft that would ferry his army to Excelsis City. His hard fingers drummed on his knee. Behind his chair, Nork Deddog waited, a silent, bad-smelling lump of muscle waiting for trouble to start.
Everyone says the waiting is the worst part of battle, Greiss thought. Until the shooting starts, that is. It was the sense of helplessness that bothered him, the feeling that, now the order to deploy had been given, he had to trust the tech-adepts to deliver his men to the battleground.
The assault craft began to shake. ‘All soldiers to their stations!’ the comm-link barked. ‘All vehicle crew to embark immediately!’
General Greiss rose and strode down the steel corridor, the great bulk of Nork Deddog behind him. By Greiss’s side a tech-priest swept along, its face a glinting mass of lenses under its hood.
The ship rocked as if swatted by a giant hand. Greiss almost lost his footing but stayed upright, waving aside the ogryn’s offers of help.
‘This way, general,’ the tech-priest rasped. ‘No need to tarry.’
The airlock doors hissed and rumbled apart. Greiss followed the tech-priest into the docking bay.
They stood at the edge of a colossal chamber, filled with row upon row of armoured vehicles. Great Leman Russ battle tanks formed the vanguard, closest to the huge doors that would drop like a drawbridge on planetfall. Several carried punisher gatling cannons, designed to chop through the masses of ork infantry that would inevitably come running for them. A few were Catachan vehicles, Greiss noted with pride, but the majority came from the Selvian Dragoons. They were bone-coloured and scrupulously clean. Pennants drooped from their comms antennae. Each tank wore its commander’s heraldry on a shield attached to the turret. They looked like forts.
Then there were the vast Baneblades, their cannon barrels big enough for a man to crawl down, the top predators of the pack of tanks. Around them stood rows of Chimera armoured transports, packed in five deep, their soldiers already embarked. Once the armour had broken open the ork defences, the troopers would pour in and finish the job, rooting the greenskins out of their lairs with lasguns and bayonets.
And this is just one of our ships, Greiss thought. We will crash through these xenos like a hammer through glass.
The assault craft rocked. Greiss put a hand on the nearest Chimera’s flank to steady himself. The tanks did not move. A good omen, the general thought, patting the Chimera as if it were a loyal beast. We stand firm.
The tech-priest emitted a chittering burst of binaric, and its vox-comm gabbled back. ‘Your command vehicle is this way,’ it said. ‘You should strap yourself in, lest you fall and sustain injury. Your structural integrity is, after all, comparatively weak.’
Impertinent, Greiss thought. Typical Mechanicus.
The ship shuddered. ‘Commencing final descent,’ the comm announced. ‘Ordnance firing. All vehicles to readiness station secundus. All–’
The whole craft shook. A scout car broke free from its stowage and slid across the bay. Straps trailed from it, and docking-bolts scraped along the floor. The car banged into the wall. Greiss looked for his personal Chimera.
And thus the battle begins, he thought, and even after a hundred wars for the Guard, he felt nervous.
In half an hour it would be time to leave. Morrell walked out of the power station to join the regiment. Lieutenant Zandro gave him a grudging nod. The commissar turned to Colonel Straken. ‘Emperor protect, colonel.’
‘You too,’ Straken said, and Morrell trudged off to join Zandro’s men.
Straken checked the strings holding the skull of the Miral land shark to his belt. He flexed his mechanical arm, whirled it to test the servos, and, satisfied, zoomed his bionic eye in and out.
A little way off, Tanner’s team of saboteurs were studying a map, running through their objectives one last time. Equipped with a wide variety of knives and short swords, their faces and arms striped with dirt, they looked wild and deadly even for Catachans. Tanner nodded to Straken, smiling briefly, and for a moment he looked almost friendly. Then he turned back to his men. They looked like killers.
Lavant strode over. ‘Colonel, my team is ready.’
The demolitions men had a smart, organised look. Where some of the Catachans could have passed for mercenaries, Lavant’s men looked like members of an elite military team. They carried satchel charges and a few anti-tank mines; two soldiers had a stripped-down heavy bolter. They looked precise rather than furious, a scalpel instead of a battleaxe. Strange, Straken thought, how a unit could take after its officer.
‘You’re not taking any long-range support?’
‘We won’t need it,’ Lavant said. ‘We’ll go in close and set charges. The orks won’t know what hit them – literally.’
‘If you say so. I could get one of the missile launchers, maybe a sniper–’
‘No,’ Lavant said, and the firmness of his voice surprised Straken. ‘No, no snipers.’
‘Whatever you say. Just keep it quick and deadly. Give the orks something to look at.’
Straken turned back to the tough, competent men of his command squad. They were all set. ‘Mayne, put the order through the vox.’ Straken raised his voice as loud as he could. ‘Catachan Second – move out!’
7.
The regiment marched out of the station with Straken at their head. Halda, the colour sergeant, walked beside him, his standard still rolled up on its pole. They moved by squad, splitting when the terrain required it, flowing round obstacles to regroup. Men covered each other. Scouts watched the edges of the regiment, sending messages back to the centre through hand signals. Nobody spoke.
The muffled, heavy tread of the Sentinels rang through the pale trees. Two would accompany Straken’s group, to assault the gatehouse. Four were with Zandro and Morrell, fitted with krak missiles to make wreckage out of any heavy armour the orks might bring up. One of the machines strode along just behind Straken’s command group. He glanced back, and the pilot threw him a quick salute. Straken nodded to the man and motioned him to fall back a little. The walkers might be rigged for stealth, but they were hardly subtle.
They reached the little chapel, the hanging priest now cut down, and moved straight past. Scouts ran ahead to check the road.
It was Dulma’lin’s artificial equivalent of night. Straken boosted his vision
to sixty per cent optimum, but did not give the order for torches. They had all hunted in near darkness back on Catachan.
They passed through farmland: crops modified thousands of years ago to produce high yields in near darkness. The jungle fighters slipped through close-packed fields of altered wheat, spindly fungal plants the shape of palms and pallid vines on massive wire racks.
The cave walls closed in from the side, like the frame of a gigantic doorway. For forty-five metres the cavern narrowed into a sort of connecting passage. They moved quickly down the road, aware that there was not enough cover here. The forward teams, Straken among them, watched for enemy bikers. On Straken’s orders, two Sentinels moved up on either side of the road. They met nobody.
The cavern opened before them, and they stood at the south end of the Mommothian Vault. Straken stopped to give himself a moment to take it all in, and become adjusted to the sheer size of the place; even the great holds of the Radix Malorum were nothing compared to this.
The city was magnificent rather than beautiful, the great buildings covered in a rash of statues and bas-reliefs, depicting saints, soldiers and symbols of power. Buttresses protruded from high stone walls like insects’ limbs. Great bridges arced over the streets, carved in the shape of the Imperial aquila, or the crossed swords of duelling heroes.
But even more impressive than the buildings were the immense columns supporting the cavern roof. Over half a kilometre high, their upper regions swathed in mist, they stretched over the tallest buildings. The columns themselves were carved; several were riddled with windows. The miners must have honeycombed them, Straken realised.
The greatest pair of columns were entirely carved, trimmed and shaped into enormous figures, like giants wading through the streets. On the left stood Lord Solar Macharius, who had brought Dulma’lin into the Imperium during his crusade to unite the worlds of man, and on the right, Saint Helena the Illuminator, the patron of miners, lantern in one hand, pick in the other.
They advanced, and buildings appeared around them. The Catachans split into squads and crept forwards, around large houses and Administratum office blocks. They were entering the commercial part of Excelsis City, where the labour of the miners was turned into bullion and jewellery to be shipped off-world.
Suddenly, gunfire crackled out to the west. Men ducked and pulled up their lasguns. The Sentinels turned, hydraulics whining. The Catachans waited.
A scream came from behind the buildings that lined the road, no more than ninety metres away. It rose up like the cry of an exotic bird, then died away into a choked gurgle. There was no more gunfire. Straken glanced from window to window. It could have been a human, or one of the gretchin, the small race that served the orks. Perhaps it was even an ork, tortured by its comrades. He gave the signal to carry on.
They began to see the first evidence of the invasion. Few buildings were ruined: most of them would have been stripped of workers by the Guard call-up long before Killzkar’s horde arrived. But there were las-burns and bullet holes on stone walls, windows smashed on food shops and weapon stores. At one point, they passed rows of vehicles, pulled up before a crude roadblock, their doors still open. There were gaps in the queue, where larger vehicles had been taken away.
A slew of corpses lay near the vehicles, spread roughly to the east as if a great hand had scattered them. Those nearest the roadblock had been cut down with blades; further out, gunfire had killed them. The bodies were almost skeletal. Several seemed to have been disintegrated, hit by some alien beam weapon. Others had simply been blown apart.
‘Wonder where they were going,’ Tanner said.
Halda shrugged. ‘Anywhere away from the orks.’ He spat on the ground. ‘Xenos,’ he added, in a tone that made it sound like a curse.
‘Quiet,’ Straken replied.
Lavant voxed in: his team were moving out. Straken wished them luck. He signed off and continued. As he passed a groundcar riddled with bullet holes, the door wrenched off by something stronger than a man, he checked the back seats out of habit. There was no need to be careless. Iron Hand Straken might be hungry for battle, but he wasn’t a fool.
The avenue was six lanes wide, flanked by a large public garden, now overgrown. It ran all the way to the gate, the grand entrance to Excelsis City and the probable headquarters of the orks. The xenos would be concentrated up there, where the buildings were grandest and the loot easy to acquire, squabbling and carousing. No doubt planning some new atrocity, Straken thought. Orks never stopped fighting: the best you could hope for was that they turned on one another.
He checked the map, then called Mayne over. ‘Zandro, this is where your team stays. Get the road fortified – the Sentinels can push some vehicles into a barricade. Put snipers and rockets on the roofs, flanking the approach. Morrell, you’re with him. Emperor protect.’
He left half his force gearing up. This is it, then, he thought, as his team began to advance on the gatehouse. The road branched and began to rise, onto the vast ramp that led to the surface.
He could see the Great Gate: twenty metres of tarnished brass, covered in a mural showing the introduction of Dulma’lin to the Imperium. Heroes six times Straken’s height bowed before the Golden Throne, the folds of their robes blue with verdigris.
‘Where’re all the orks?’ Tanner said. He whispered, but his voice seemed to fill the air. ‘Awful quiet, isn’t it?’
Straken looked at him. ‘You want me to say that it’s too quiet?’
‘You don’t need to,’ Tanner replied.
The gatehouse stood by the side of the gate itself. It was a broad, four-storey building, fronted by columns, the windows large and elegantly curved. Formerly, it had been a hotel and a staging-point for visiting dignitaries before they ventured overground. But the lower floors were boarded up, the higher ones smashed and now bulked out with sandbags. The dirty barrels of ork stubbers stuck out like broken drainpipes.
Worse, it stood behind thirty metres of lawn. Without cover, it would make an admirable killing-ground.
Straken flicked his hand for the men to stop. He gestured to the sides of the street, and the troops began to split, taking up positions by the houses. Two marksmen levered a door open and slipped inside, to find a vantage point. It was almost dawn.
He turned to Tanner. ‘Go around the side. Take out any vehicles they’ve got.’
The captain nodded. ‘Once I hear you going in, I’ll converge.’
‘Good. But quietly, all right?’
They would not get much closer without alerting the orks. Straken stopped beside a billboard as Tanner and his men crept away, waiting for Lavant’s distraction. Make it quick, he thought, and he clenched his metal fingers into a fist.
The orks hadn’t bothered posting sentries around their vehicle pool; they had just strung up a few corpses and expected that to keep anyone else away. It would have worked on the survivors, but Captain Tanner had seen a fair share of dead bodies – and had made quite a few as well.
He crept forwards, ducking from doorway to doorway. Each few metres in the open were like crossing an empty plain, and it was a relief to slip back into cover. Behind him, Tanner heard the soft, scurrying tread of his men moving up with him.
The vehicles were parked inside a fenced enclosure, once reserved for enforcer use. The orks had bolstered the fence with barricades of sheet metal and heaped stone, but several enforcer wagons were still visible within: all scratched and dented, one lying on its side. Tanner could hear the whine of an electric saw inside, and the sudden grating sound as it cut metal. A pole rose out of the enclosure, sprouting conical sirens like some weird flower.
He drew his long knife. Tanner licked his lips: tension had made him thirsty. For a second his mind wandered, and he imagined himself back in the Radix Malorum with Zandro and the lads, washing another mission away in beer.
Something moved in the compound. An ork strolled into view, holding a tin can. It raised the can and pushed its clawed finger inside, rooti
ng about for something. Satisfied, the alien licked its fingertip and tossed the can onto the ground, then turned away.
As Tanner started to advance, a skinny green hand shot out and grabbed the can. He dropped back into the shadow, knife raised.
A scrawny humanoid crept out, a pallid greenish thing just over a metre tall, the limbs long in proportion to the body. The face was bestial, but crafty instead of brutish. The nose was so large as to form a sort of snout, the eyes tiny and red. It opened a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth and chattered.
Gretchin. A sub-species of orkoid, both slaves and parasites of their larger kin. Vicious little animals and, Tanner recalled, surprisingly good shots. It looked away, following its comrade, picking at something inside the tin.
The aliens moved out of view, lost behind the compound wall. Tanner rushed across the road, keeping low, and dropped down beside the entrance to the enclosure. The scraping sound was loud now. The orks must be hacking up metal in there.
Slowly, Tanner leaned around the entrance. All sorts of vehicles were parked inside: half-tracks and armoured trucks, mainly, but also rickety buggies and a single, high-sided tank painted a weirdly jolly shade of red. Several buggies had rocket launchers rigged to their backs. They looked as if they would either overturn or tear themselves apart when they fired, but Tanner had seen such things in action before. He scurried into the maze of vehicles, slipping between the bolted iron flanks, steering towards the siren.
An enforcer wagon was on his left, a half-wrecked bus on the other. Tanner advanced down the corridor they made. He could see the siren clearly, bolted to the wall of the building. He looked right, trying to peek through the bus windows – and looked straight at a corpse. It sat on a rear seat, head lolling back, turned as if to stare right at him.
Tanner caught his breath. Behind the bus there was an open yard. Half a dozen orks stood around one of their buggies, welding sheets of metal to its side. To Tanner’s surprise, one was smoking a roll of lho-sticks, tied together to make a crude cigar. Another, carrying a stripped-down welding torch, flicked its visor up and admired its handiwork. The air reeked of hot metal and spilt oil.