Straken

by Toby Frost

  Morrell watched from the entrance to a solid-looking workshop, his eyes narrowed against the glow. The local militia had supercharged the drilling machine, despite it having been only recently recovered from the orks, and had not been able to run the system auguries that would normally have been carried out. Morrell knew that he could duck into the workshop if the drill malfunctioned, but also knew that there would be little point in doing so if the plasma engines blew up.

  ‘Quite a piece of kit, isn’t it?’

  He looked round. Tarricus stood beside him, grinning. As guildmaster, he had come out to oversee the deployment of the drilling gear, and looked as proud as a new father.

  ‘It’s a phase field generator,’ Tarricus explained. ‘Very old tech, that. It dates back almost to the founding of Dulma’lin. The field pushes the driller through the rock, while the drills and melta nodes do the rest of the work. It’s very effective. You can see why the orks wanted them as fingers on their gargant. That would cut through any armour like a knife through butter.’

  Morrell had never much cared for civilian company – they lacked the discipline of Guardsmen, although civilians at least blasphemed less often. ‘Is the machine reliable?’

  ‘I think so. We’ve had to cannibalise some parts from the other drills, but the orks seem to have left most of the workings alone. It’s seen some honourable work, that driller, but this must be the most honourable yet.’

  ‘Let us hope its machine-spirit is favourable.’

  The drill dipped, and where it met the ground, the stone disappeared into the blue glow. Morrell tensed, hearing not just the crack of breaking rock, but the hiss of melta-fire. The nose of the driller slipped into the ground: slowly, but smoothly, as if it were retracting into the body of the machine.

  ‘How fast does it go?’ Morrell demanded.

  ‘Well, that’s the thing. We’ve got a lot of power going into that one machine. It’s almost at full power now, and we need to be moving even faster… Too bad none of your tech-priests were up to sticking around when the draft came.’

  ‘They had their reasons to go,’ the commissar replied. ‘I’d advise you against questioning the judgment of the High Command.’

  They fell silent, watching the drill sink into the ground. Morrell realised that he hadn’t thought about General Greiss’s army for a long while. He had been so concerned with keeping order down here, and watching his back around the Catachans, that the idea of leaving Dulma’lin suddenly seemed alien and strange. He wouldn’t miss this misbegotten bunch of caves, but somehow, as little as he liked the idea, he felt that his place was here.

  Idiocy, he thought. Sentimental nonsense, and he tried to crush the notion out of his mind.

  Tarricus smiled and lifted a mug of Barabo tea to his lips. ‘Now I’d like to see the orks anticipate that,’ he said, and he took a deep swig. Impressed but wary, Morrell turned away and set off towards the rear of the caverns, to check on the tanks.

  Two days later, Lavant reported his success to Straken’s ad hoc forward command. The upper end of the vault was a heavily mined chokepoint, a corridor of fire waiting to be unleashed. The colonel sent him back with the sappers to help the guild militia with their drilling efforts, leaving a few men to operate the gatehouse controls.

  Straken gave orders to his men to tear up the long-disused water pipes around the edge of the park. The long tubes made good conduits for spare promethium, and were laid out in the undergrowth, ready to ignite. Then he forced himself to wait.

  There were nearly two thousand men in position around the gates now, a third of them Catachan, the rest local, dug in but ready to move. Further back, heavy weapons and sniper points were installed in the main buildings facing the entrance. The tanks were out of sight of the main gate, ready to move up into position.

  Straken looked over his men with satisfaction. The trap was set.

  Gunnar Lao was three hours into the watch. Watching the storm outside was as hard on his eyes – and, he suspected, as much use – as staring at a detuned vid-screen. It wasn’t like stalking an enemy soldier, or even an animal; instead, he kept his eyes as locked on the horizon as much he could manage, glancing down at the monitoring sensoria every so often.

  ‘Kid,’ he said, ‘this is driving me crazy. Talk to me about something before this storm drives me mad.’

  In the seat beside him, Cordell Sark shrugged. ‘Sure. What about?’

  ‘Anything. Except nothing about mining.’

  Sark frowned. ‘Well, I remember that there was this big storm, about three years ago. If you think it’s bad out there, you ought to–’

  Lao looked away, disgusted. ‘And no storms, either. Hey…’ He pointed to a screen on the dashboard. Slowly, a shadow was creeping over the edges of the picture, as if smoke were seeping into the workings. ‘What the hell is that?’ he said, and he looked back out the window.

  The army broke from the horizon as though forming out of it. Suddenly, there was a row of dark shapes in the distance, like the ruins of a massive wall, a mirage. The specks grew, becoming larger and more solid as they approached. Towers and spires rose from the horde, and below them were vehicles so closely packed that their armoured hulls looked like the roofs of a mobile town.

  Lao felt fear swell within him. He suddenly wanted to be anywhere other than in this armoured can – except outside, in the storm. He looked from left to right, from one side of the army to the other, and tried to work out how wide apart they were. Two kilometres, three? It was like a tide coming in.

  ‘Call it in,’ he said. ‘They’re coming.’

  Sark opened the vox. ‘This is Watch-point One,’ he said, ‘Come in.’

  ‘Reading you, Watch.’

  Lao leaned close to the comm-link. ‘We have orks sighted on the horizon. We’re looking at a big force here. It’s a whole army coming our way. I’m seeing a lot of armour. I think...’ He checked the sensoria, hardly daring to take his eyes off the approaching army. ‘They’ll reach the city in just over an hour.’

  ‘I hear you. Can you give any further details? How many do you estimate?’

  ‘I don’t know – the whole lot! Listen, this is it, I’m telling you. For the Emperor’s sake–’

  ‘I believe you. Get back, Watch-point One. I’ll pass it on.’

  Sark had fished out the magnoculars. ‘Emperor protect us.’ He passed them over. ‘Look!’

  The army was closing, but not quickly. They could not be doing much more than thirty kilometres per hour, Lao realised, and as he turned up the image enhancement, he saw why. The front row of the army was packed with tanks and battlewagons, painted a range of garish colours and trailing banners and flags. But they were dwarfed by the enormous creature that lumbered between them. It was easily twenty-five metres to the shoulder, coated with sheet metal bolted to scales that were already iron hard, an enormous green beast larger than a super-heavy tank. It loped along, head low to the ground, its great jaws open, the teeth reinforced with metal. The mouth was like the entrance ramp to a drop-ship.

  Lao lowered the magnoculars. Even Catachan couldn’t provide a beast that big. A monster like that could crush a battle tank under its foot and hardly notice it.

  Outside, the wind was low. ‘Back this wagon up,’ Lao said. ‘We’re getting out of here.’

  Straken listened to the vox. ‘All right,’ he said after a while. ‘Seal up the back entrance. Leave a skeleton crew there and send them down here to reinforce the line. We need every man we can get.’

  He hung up. Halda stood before him, holding the rolled standard of the Catachan Second. The sergeant looked at Straken for a moment, waiting for orders. Against the overgrown foliage of the Triumphal Gardens, his thick beard and banner pole made him look like a savage from a feral world, holding a spear and ready to hunt.

  Straken thought, So this is it. They’re coming, just like I thought. He felt something that was either anticipation or fear. And they’ll get here before the fleet. Typical. />
  ‘Sir?’ Halda said.

  ‘The orks are coming,’ Straken replied. ‘Scouts say that there are thousands of them – tanks, troop carriers, the lot. They’re bringing some huge animal with them. It sounds like a squiggoth.’ He stood up. ‘Listen! People, we have one hour, maybe less. Halda, you unfurl that banner when I say, and not before. Understand?’

  ‘Loud and clear.’

  ‘Vox-team, call up the gatehouse and get those doors open. I want Killzkar to walk right in. Relay the information to the other teams. Keep the tanks back out of sight. Fire only on my orders.’

  He watched as his orders spread. The news ran through the men around him, was shouted by their sergeants and lieutenants, spread by vox to the other units of the army. Straken fought down the urge to check his weapons again.

  The Great Gates rolled apart. For the first time in almost a year, the soldiers looked out at natural light. It flooded the streets of Excelsis City the way the Emperor’s presence was said to, washing over the buildings, trees and vehicles and the men who hid around them.

  They waited. Someone passed a flask of water around. Straken refused it. He wondered how Tanner was, and then how much of an effect Lavant’s traps would have on the incoming horde. He checked the teams off in his mind, unit by unit. Come on, he thought. The door’s open – what more do you want?

  Then he wondered whether he had been wrong. What if Killzkar didn’t decide to march in? What if the warboss tried to starve them out, or just hurled bombs through the gates instead of descending into Excelsis City in person? He shoved the thoughts down. Iron Hand Straken didn’t think like that.

  Distantly, he heard the rumble of engines.

  Men around him heard as well. They looked at the gates and the light streaming through, and then at the cavern roof. Killzkar’s army was above them.

  In the light streaming through the gates, a huge shadow appeared.

  The squiggoth was first to approach the gates. If the ramp had not been solid rock, it would have fallen apart under the weight of the beast: each of its feet was the size of a bunker, and every footstep boomed through the cavern. Two ork Dreadnoughts walked beside it, children next to a warhorse. The squiggoth carried an iron fortress strapped to its back, from which jutted dozens of gun barrels. On the monster’s head was an enormous steel crown, its spines forming walls in their own right, and in the centre of it sat a colossal ork.

  The squiggoth stopped, lowered its head and dropped to its knees with a ground-shaking boom. A drawbridge flopped down from the fortress on its head, lying along the monster’s snout like the nosepiece of an ancient helmet. The hulking figure on the throne stood up.

  Only an ork, Straken thought, could be that crazy – or that arrogant.

  Even if he hadn’t been able to see its face, he would have known that it was Killzkar. The warlord wore a suit of bright yellow armour, some of it striped with black warning marks, and a blue banner as a loincloth that still displayed the omega symbol of Ultramar. Straken boosted his vision and saw the ork’s face, exactly as the briefing had described it long ago: crossed by two huge, livid scars as if it were stitched together from four separate pieces, the lines gleaming with metal sutures.

  Vehicles swarmed behind Killzkar’s squiggoth, crawling respectfully after their master. There were too many to make out clearly, packed together axle to axle. Straken saw high-sided tanks, armoured wagons crammed with ork soldiers, small castles on tracks, even great rolling machines looted from industrial worlds.

  Warboss Killzkar looked around at his city. He smiled, not knowing that several dozen crosshairs were centred on his patchwork face.

  ‘Kill him,’ Straken said.

  20.

  Gunfire roared out of the Catachan positions. Lascannons, heavy bolters and missile launchers threw up a strobing wall of light. Tanks rolled into place in the avenues, covers and camouflage were thrown aside, and mortars hurled their bombs over the heads of the enemy to land in their packed ranks.

  Blue light flickered around the squiggoth, as if the shots fired at it were hitting a glass dome. A few shots slipped through the field to burst on the creature’s armour or hide. The beast lurched upright, turned aside and lumbered into – and through – Excelsis City’s concert hall. It lowered its head, trying to shake the concussion away, while the guns on its flanks began to return fire.

  Killzkar kicked one of the panels on the squiggoth’s head aside and jumped. As he dropped, his troops rushed forward to join him. Several shots had not been deflected by the field, and Killzkar’s armour was ripped and dented from the salvo. Blood ran from a hole in his scalp that would have killed a human being. The warboss paused, chuckled and ran ahead, bellowing. Behind him, the ork lines came alive. Aliens swarmed out of trucks, scrambled out of the squiggoth’s howdah like pirates boarding an enemy ship and rushed towards the Imperial line.

  The orks advanced in a screaming wave of fangs, green muscle, filthy clothes and greased metal. Killzkar lumbered along at their head, but in a second the mob around him had outpaced him.

  A great wall of gunfire hissed and rattled from the park. The Catachans opened fire and cut down the front rank of the enemy in a heartbeat. Straken gritted his teeth as the orks came into range. When they were twenty-five metres away, he fired.

  Tanks fired down the long, straight avenues. Straken saw shells burst in the packed mass of aliens, throwing flesh and ork blood high into the air. Chaos broke out in the ork ranks as vehicles and waves of foot troops surged forward, and each rolled over the other. A creaking battlewagon ploughed into the back of the ork line even as its occupants jumped out, the driver too crazed or too injured to turn aside. A moment later it exploded, and spinning lumps of armour added to the carnage. The roar of gunfire almost drowned out the bellows from Killzkar’s soldiers.

  But the orks did not stop. The slaughter seemed to intoxicate them, like fumes. They trampled their wounded and scrambled over the remains of their vehicles. The squiggoth, dazed by the gunfire, dipped its head and scooped up a dozen ork soldiers in its enormous maw.

  Mortars hurled shells over the buildings and the orks sent out their elite troops. Xenos equipped with copters and jump packs flew out of the horde. Many smashed into the cavern roof, popping in blossoms of fire above the battlefield. Others were gunned down and dropped onto their comrades. But some got through.

  Thirty metres away from Straken, an ork bounced into the air and swooped down on the Catachan line. It misjudged its landing and the jump pack it wore caught light – the explosion blew it and six Guardsmen apart. A primitive teleporter flickered on the back of the squiggoth and suddenly a pack of shrieking gretchin was loose in the woods.

  From the rows of trapped vehicles and bellowing foot soldiers, massive figures waddled forth, waving pincer-arms. The ork tanks might be stuck, but their Dreadnoughts were comparatively nimble. They climbed onto broken vehicles or simply tossed them aside. ‘Walkers!’ Straken bellowed. ‘Vox, get the tanks on them. Bring them down!’

  It was impossible to tell how many orks had died – they had fallen in the thousands already. One of the smaller Dreadnoughts waded through its fallen comrades as if through glue. On the far left, nearest the gate, the ork line finally reached the trees, and the gunfight turned to wild close combat. A Sentinel was brought down by sheer force of numbers, its outline lost under thrashing alien bodies. An ork warlord got to work on the hull with a power claw.

  No, Straken thought, surely not. Slowly, with terrible losses, the orks were overwhelming his men. The aliens were dying at a rate of ten, maybe twenty to every Catachan, but without help, it was only a matter of time.

  ‘Give me that,’ he snarled, grabbing the comm-link.

  A Leman Russ’s battle cannon boomed two metres from Morrell’s head. He felt the shot as much as heard it, and the tank rocked and clanked as the next shell loaded. It detonated in a screaming, thrashing mob of orks as they scrambled out of their truck. A moment later the truck itself caught
light and blew apart in a shower of metal. Morrell bared his teeth at the destruction: half smile, half snarl.

  ‘Keep firing!’ he yelled into his comm-link, and his voice boomed out of the speakers on top of the command Chimera. Militia stood around the vehicles, using them as cover, blazing away with laslocks and autoguns. They were a ragged-looking crew, the commissar thought as he limped down the line, but by the Emperor they were keen. Perhaps there was truth in what he’d heard from the more daring officers of the Guard: for fierce fighting, there was no incentive like revenge.

  A Griffon mortar, formerly in the possession of the orks and now crewed by rescued Selvian Dragoons, hurled a low-velocity shell in a high arc. It burst by the squiggoth’s foot, knocking a gang of armoured alien leaders down like skittles. The squiggoth’s defensive field flickered. Dozens of cannons roared from the fort on its back, as if from the portholes of a galleon.

  Behind it, the ork armour rolled forwards. Much of it had once belonged to humans. The crew on the Griffon slammed another shell into the breech, and a second later it arced over the battleline.

  Something boomed to the left: an explosion, not a gun. A soldier tore out of an alleyway and ran over. ‘Commissar! They’ve put one of our Russes out!’

  Morrell put a hand over his ear and yelled, ‘So?’

  ‘We need to pull it back.’

  ‘Can you make repairs?’

  ‘I think so, commissar.’

  ‘You’ve got five minutes. If it’s not working by then, get the crew out and use your lasguns. Nobody leaves the line without good reason, understand?’

  ‘Sir, yes!’

  Morrell turned back to the line. The xenos were closer now – they were dying, yes, but not fast enough. Vehicles slowly rolled towards the Catachan lines, past the confused squiggoth and the mounds of dead. Each wagon had a massive metal ram at the front, like a curved snowplough, and small arms fire rang uselessly off their armour. Morrell glimpsed green bodies packed in tight behind the shielding.