by Various
It took the Dreadnought’s symbiotic machine-spirit mere nanoseconds to divine the ancient’s position relative to the speeding ork vehicles and select a succession of suitable targets. The Dreadnought opened up with its assault cannon and storm bolter again, a hail of hard shells reaping their own whirlwind of death and destruction.
‘Death to the invaders!’ Brother Jarold of the Black Templars Solemnus Crusade bellowed, his augmented voice booming from vox-casters built into his Dreadnought body-shell. What little of him that was still flesh and blood spasmed in fury, thrashing and sloshing within the amniotic fluids of his sarcophagus-tank. ‘Cleanse this place of the xenos taint, in the name of the primarch and the Emperor. Death to the defilers of Armageddon!’
The squadron of warbikes leading the Kult of Speed in its attack was the first to taste his wrath. Burning rubber shredded under the attention of the Dreadnought’s assault cannon, sending several bikes and their riders cart-wheeling over the ice, as sheared axles and wheel-less spokes stabbed into the ice, flipping the screaming machines through the air to land in broken piles upon the iron-hard glacier.
Those orks unfortunate enough to land at Jarold’s feet had limbs and skulls crushed beneath his relentless, pounding footfalls.
A burst of storm bolter fire found a promethium barrel lashed to the side of wartrakk. The fuel inside touched off, blowing the vehicle apart, spreading pieces of wartrakk up to twenty-five metres away across the ice field.
With a series of hollow pops, the rocket launchers arrayed across the Dreadnought’s broad shoulders sent a fusillade of mortar shells arcing into the pack of vehicles behind the disintegrating line of warbikes.
Unable to stop in time, some of the ork bikes skidded past the Dreadnought, and having already missed one target chose instead to rev their engines and plough on towards the advancing line of Astartes armour.
Three bikes crashed and burned as Brother Jarold’s weapons-fire took them down, and just as many again collided with the wrecked vehicles.
Many of the ork drivers were horrified to discover that the Dreadnought still stood after their concerted bombardment of it, and swerved at the last moment to avoid the immovable hulk. But one wasn’t quick enough and cleared the choking exhaust trail of another bike to find itself directly on top of the Dreadnought.
The warbike hit Brother Jarold with the force of an ork rokkit. Even as the bike hit him, Jarold grabbed hold of it with his huge power fist, the vehicle swinging up into the air in his grasp as its momentum spun them both around. The ork rider was still clinging to the wide handlebars when a direct hit from Brother Jarold’s storm bolter ignited the contents of the bike’s fuel tank, as he released the vehicle at the height of its rising arc. The bike spun through the air above him and became a fiery comet, annihilating another ork rider that was rounding on the Dreadnought as the bike crashed back down to earth.
The Dreadnought’s deep strike insertion and deadly combination of cannon and bolter fire had decimated the front line of the ork Speed Freeks. And all the while, unheard over the roar of bike and trukk, assault cannon and bolter, as well as the concussive booms of fuel-tank explosions, Brother Jarold called down the wrath of the Emperor and His primarchs on the heads of the xenos filth.
The promethium roar of crude ork engines was joined by the well-tuned growl of the superior Astartes armour as the bikes of the Black Templars’ rapid deployment force and its supporting Land Speeder squadron closed on the drop-pod’s homing beacon.
If the orks had been surprised by the fury of the Dreadnought’s initial attack, it proved to be only a foretaste of what was to come as Ansgar’s Avengers – the strike force mustered in memory of the fallen Emperor’s Champion – engaged the enemy.
Clouds of bittersweet incense swirled and ascended into the vault of the battle-chapel, filling the cathedral space with a sparkling aromatic mist. Shapes swam in and out of the constantly shifting vapours, giving glimpses of fluted columns a hundred metres tall, skull and cross adorned buttresses and statues commemorating the fallen of the Chapter.
The skull-set glow-globes had been dimmed and the forests of candles were in the process of being snuffed out by a trundling cenobyte servitor while its partner, following on behind, proceeded to trim their wicks and clear away the crusted wax that coated the black iron candelabra, like a series of frozen cataracts.
The sound of the pitted oak doors opening – the doors so old now the wood was black – resounded throughout the battle-chapel like the boom of distant gunfire. Chaplain Wolfram opened his eyes, finishing the prayer that was on his lips. He rose to standing from where he had been kneeling before the Solemnus Shrine, his eyes falling once again upon the empty indentations where the Black Sword, the Champion’s laurel-wreathed helm and the lovingly ornamented Armour of Faith should have lain.
Wolfram turned, one armoured hand – every knuckle of the gauntlet embossed with the Templars’ black cross and white skull insignia, a permanent memento mori to the one charged with watching over the souls of the crusaders – closing around the haft of his crozius arcanum. The ancient artefact was both a Chaplain’s badge of office and a potent weapon in its own right. A disruptor generator was concealed within the wooden shaft of the relic, that one simple addition turning the flared blades of the Templar cross that surmounted it into a lethal power axe.
The sound of echoing footfalls on the stone-flagged floor of the cathedral space carried to the Chaplain through the muffling clouds rising from the glowing nuggets of flame-flecked incense smouldering within their braziers. Chaplain Wolfram relaxed his grip on his crozius.
The booming footsteps came closer, the incense smoke parting as a colossal shape, that was neither man nor machine but something of both, something greater than either, stepped into the light of the candles that guttered in the breeze of its advance.
Wolfram noted the battle-damaged banner pole and the deeply etched gothic lettering upon the Dreadnought’s hull and bowed.
‘In the name of Him Enthroned on Holy Terra, well met, Brother Jarold,’ he said. ‘And what brings you to this place of sanctuary, still an hour from matins?’
‘May the Emperor’s blessings be upon you, Brother-Chaplain,’ the machine-tempered voice of the ancient responded.
‘You are not slumbering with your brother Dreadnoughts aboard Forgeship Goliath?’
‘Now is not the time for rest.’
‘But our recent endeavours on Armageddon have cost us dear,’ the Chaplain warned. ‘Rest is what is needed now.’
‘I cannot sleep, brother, not when there is still so much of His holy work left undone. And besides, I have slept for long enough already.’
‘Then what can I do for you, brother?’ the Chaplain asked.
‘I would seek your counsel,’ the Dreadnought said in a voice like the slamming of sepulchre doors.
‘From me, brother?’ Wolfram asked, caught off guard for a moment by Brother Jarold’s honesty. Ancients were usually the ones who shared their hard-won wisdom with the rest of the Chapter; they were not the ones who came seeking it from others. ‘You are troubled?’
‘Yes, I am troubled, Brother-Chaplain.’ The Dreadnought broke off.
‘Speak, brother. You have nothing to feel ashamed of.’
‘But I do.’
‘I see. You speak of the loss of Brother Ansgar.’
‘I do, brother. When the Emperor’s chosen one needed me most, I was found wanting.’
‘You have prayed about this?’
‘I have sat in penitent vigil ever since my return to the fleet. I have thought on Brother Ansgar’s fate and nothing else.’
‘I too have spent time in prayer and contemplation on the same matter,’ Wolfram admitted.
‘You have, brother?’
‘I have. You cannot blame yourself for what happened. Blame the beast, the heretic xenos that blight the world b
elow still. Purge yourself of your guilt in the crucible of war. Smite the xenos with bolter and fist and cannon, all in the name of vengeance. Use the rage that the Emperor has placed within your soul to bring down His wrath upon the greenskin. Show no remorse. Show the alien no pity and you will have nothing to fear.’
Silence descended between Chaplain and Dreadnought as the latter considered the former’s words.
‘So you believe that this is all part of some greater plan? His divine plan for Armageddon? For our crusade? For me?’
‘I do not know, Brother Jarold,’ Wolfram admitted with a shake of his head, ‘but what I do know is that no one has come forward since to take on the mantle of champion, having received His divine inspiration, and there are plenty who would be ready for such a role.’
‘So you believe Brother Ansgar is still alive.’ The Dreadnought’s augmented voice suddenly sounded strangely like that of a young petitioner, yet to be admitted to the brotherhood, desperate for reassurance.
‘That is what I know. Somewhere, and perhaps only barely, but the Emperor would not leave us without a source of inspiration to lead us at a time such as this, with the conflict to decide the fate of this world still raging around us. And Brother Ansgar does not have to fight alongside us to inspire we of the Solemnus Crusade to great deeds.’
Incense-smoke coiled about the motionless form of the monolithic Dreadnought. When Brother Jarold spoke again, the vibrations of his vox-casters sent ripples through the curling smoke, creating new eddying patterns within it.
‘Then my course is plain,’ he said.
Chaplain Wolfram looked up at the scrollwork decorations of Jarold’s Dreadnought-locked sarcophagus.
‘This day I vow that I shall not rest until Brother Ansgar has been found and we bear him back in triumph, or that we might lay his body to rest and reclaim the relics of our Chapter – the sanctified weapons that are the most potent symbols of his office.
‘I shall petition Marshal Brant to muster an army that we might avenge Brother Ansgar and our Chapter against the orks of the Blood Scar Tribe,’ the Dreadnought said. ‘And then we shall return to Armageddon.’
Brother Jarold surveyed the wreckage that was all that remained of the Speed Freeks expeditionary force. The kult’s predilection for speed had proved their undoing. Stronger armour and better armament would have perhaps given them a better fighting chance against the inviolable armour of the Black Templars battleforce.
Sensors that saw in wavelengths ranging from infra-red to ultraviolet scanned the devastation searching for life-signs. If any greenskin had survived the Black Templars’ rout they would not remain alive for long.
The once pristine white wilderness was now befouled with the gouged ruts of tyre tracks, blackened mounds of snow and ice thrown up by the artillery shells of both sides, promethium spills and fossil-fuel slicks turning the ice desert black. Some puddles still burned, the oily smoke rising from them adding their own acrid pollution to the devastated wilderness. Impact craters pockmarked the glacier where some heavy shells had missed their targets; where others had hit, debris from large ork vehicles lay strewn across the snow.
The kult’s battlewagon had met its end when the machine-spirit of Techmarine Isendur’s personal Razorback transport targeted the battlewagon’s primary weapon power cell. A single, directed pulse from the Razorback’s twin-linked lascannon and the resulting detonation had not only taken out the gun-bristling battlewagon itself, but also a guntrukk, a warbuggy and three assorted warbikes.
This had also been the turning point in the battle, a devastating blow from which the orks never recovered. All that was left of them now were piles of burning debris, blackened craters in the ice and piles of crushed and eviscerated carcasses.
Brother Jarold stood at the centre of the devastation, amidst the splintered axle-shafts, buckled wheel-housings and twisted chassis of the orks’ ramshackle vehicles.
Behind the imposing presence of the watchful Dreadnought massed the Black Templars of the Solemnus Crusade. That same crusade had set out twelve years before to avenge the atrocity perpetrated against the Templars’ Chapter Keep on the world of Solemnus by the greenskins that fought under the banner of the Scarred Ork.
There were injuries among the crusaders, the most severe being the loss of a limb sustained by Brother Baldulf under the wheels of an ork warbike, although it wouldn’t stop him from marching to battle alongside his brethren, his chainsword held high. But there were no brothers to mourn that day, to be marked on the roll of the fallen, maintained within the battle-chapel at the heart of the Solemnus fleet’s flagship battle barge, the Divine Fury.
The Emperor was truly smiling upon their endeavours that day; for sixty-three verified enemy kills not one Black Templar had fallen to the Kult of Speed. It was all the proof Brother Jarold needed to feel vindicated that their search for their lost champion was the will of Him Enthroned on Holy Terra.
Brother Jarold gave thanks to the Emperor, the Primarch Dorn and Lord Sigismund, their Chapter-founder, that their sanctified boltguns had functioned fully during their battle with the greenskins and that not one of their war machines had been damaged beyond repair during the conflict.
The Black Templars land speeder squadron had decimated the ork bikes and trukks, the Rhinos and Razorbacks finishing off what Typhoon and Tornado had started, while the Space Marines bike squadron and two-manned attack bikes had harried those orks that attempted to flee the battlefield.
The bark of a storm bolter firing echoed across the ice field like the retort of a heavy artillery piece. It had a number of the Black Templars raking the mounds of debris and bodies with boltgun and flamer, seeking the source of the sound, ready to bring the fight to the enemy once again. Instead they found Brother Jarold, blue smoke coiling from the muzzles of his heavy storm bolter – a weapon so large it would not look out of place mounted on one of the fleet’s precious Predators or Vindicators. The body of a greenskin Jarold had targeted spasmed as it was blown in two by the mass-reactive rounds.
Techmarine Isendur approached Jarold. The Dreadnought dwarfed even the crimson-armoured Techmarine, whose twitching servo-arm – which seemed to move with a life all of its own – made him appear even taller than the average superhuman Space Marine. Behind him, Isendur’s servitor team were making repairs to superficial damage sustained by the Razorback in the battle, or keeping an unstinting watch over those working on the machine, depending on their designation and degree of sentient programming.
Sensing the Techmarine’s presence before he had a chance to speak Jarold asked, ‘Are our brothers ready to move on the objective again?’
‘Affirmative, brother,’ the other replied in that familiar emotionless way of his, that was so out of character when compared with the passion and zeal exhibited by the rest of the crusade’s fanatical warriors. ‘At your command.’
‘How far do you judge us to be from our target?
‘Twelve point zero-seven-six kilometres,’ the Techmarine intoned. It had been remarked upon on more than one occasion that Isendur was more akin to the machines to which he ministered than his brother Space Marines.
‘And the nature of the signal,’ Jarold said. ‘Is it still as it appeared from orbit?’
‘More so,’ Isendur said. ‘As hypothesised, the anomalous readings detected from orbit are indicative of some form of primitive teleportation technology.’
Grim satisfaction warred with Jarold’s overriding sense of guilt and barely-supressed rage. The memory of the moment Jarold witnessed the mech-enhanced greenskin warboss teleport out of the devastated mekboy’s lab blazed within his mind as hot and red as the moment when he had been cut down by a rusting cybernetic claw, that had earned him the privilege of being encased within the Dreadnought shell that had formerly been the living tomb of Ancient Brother Dedric.
The moment Emperor’s Champion Ansgar had been taken
from right in front of him replayed itself through his mind for what seemed like the thousandth time…
He saw himself closing on the alien tyrant again, a sphere of crackling emerald light surrounding the ork and his unconscious prisoner. He watched again as the green glare of the crackling shield intensified.
And then, just as his crashing steps brought him within reach of the xenos brute, with a sub-sonic boom the sphere of light imploded, plunging the ruins of the laboratory into sudden darkness. Only a retina-searing after-image remained, trapped within the sensor-linked optic nerves of Jarold’s physical body, but of Emperor’s Champion Ansgar and the alien warboss Morkrull Grimskar there was no sign…
‘Then the command is given,’ Jarold said simply.
Wherever the orks were using their wildly unpredictable teleportation technology, there was the possibility that the reconstructed Grimskar, nemesis of the Solemnus Crusade, would be there too. And if the greenskin warboss was there, there was also the possibility that they would find Ansgar too.
Isendur made an adjustment to the signum he held out before him in one crimson gauntlet. Servo-motors whined as the Dreadnought turned to observe the Techmarine with its faceless sarcophagus front. ‘Brother Isendur? Is there something else?’
‘I am picking up another signal,’ the Techmarine said.
‘Another teleport signal?’ Jarold asked.
‘No. It is weak, like a resting pulse.’
‘What is its source?’
‘Bearing zero six-seven point three.’
‘And what would you hazard is the nature of this signal?’
‘There is a fifty-two per cent probability that it is electromagnetic interference caused by isotopes buried in the bedrock beneath the glacier,’ the Techmarine explained. ‘But there is also a twenty-three per cent probability that it is interference caused by the disruption of the planet’s magnetic field by the teleportation matrix. One way or the other, probability tells us that it probably is not worth pursuing.’