Calgar's Siege

by Paul Kearney

  Lieutenant Lascelle and his men had helped stem the irruption, firing the stubbers into friend and foe alike, knowing that the Space Marine armour was more likely to shrug off the heavy slugs than the mainly unarmoured orks.

  Slowly, the enemy had been killed and pushed back, and Calgar had strewn the gateway with yet more corpses using long rippling volleys from his storm bolters. The situation had stabilised.

  That had been an age ago, it seemed. They felt the loss of their brethren, the surviving Ultramarines. The support of stubbers and lasguns was no substitute for Adeptus Astartes-aimed bolter fire.

  The day darkened, and for a brief interval the attacks grew less intense. There was a lot of cheering and shouting out on the plain, and the orks were coursing in a river of bodies that seemed almost like some kind of triumphal parade, even while they still sent in attacks on the wall.

  Calgar and his brothers stood in the gateway, the dead piled knee- and waist-high around them. Calgar was as weary as he had ever been in his life. He stood dripping ork blood while Brother Orhan replenished the storm bolter ammunition in his dorsal magazines. He flexed his fingers in his power fists, and checked his power levels. Even the magnificent ancient armour he wore had its limitations. Its power-pack was seriously drained by the continuous use of the fists and the Iron Halo. He had only a few hours left before he would have to recharge.

  A few hours may just be enough – for all of us, Calgar thought grimly.

  ‘What is going on out there?’ he asked Brother Valerian. ‘It sounds almost as though the xenos are celebrating.’

  The Librarian advanced stiffly until a volley of autogun and bolter fire made him pull back into the cover of the corpse-piled gateway. His hood glowed.

  ‘Their leader is here,’ he said simply. ‘The ork warlord has come up from the river and is now in the battleline. I can feel his mind, my lord. For an ork, it is surprisingly subtle. He is no fool.’

  ‘I never thought he was,’ Calgar said.

  ‘Your dorsal magazine is refilled, my lord,’ Orhan said.

  ‘Thank you, brother. That should keep me standing a while longer.’

  A rune was blinking in Calgar’s helm display, a vox channel. He closed down all other frequencies and blinked it open.

  ‘My lord, how do you fare?’ a voice said.

  ‘We are holding, Ixion, but barely. It is good to hear your voice, brother. How far out are you?’

  ‘We are approaching the ork fleet from the far side of the planet, high orbit. We will be ready to engage in six hours. The landings will commence as soon as we have gained orbital superiority.’

  ‘Excellent. Ixion, you will hold off on landings until you have direct word from me.’

  ‘My lord, surely–’

  ‘This Waaagh! must be broken here, before it has a chance to metastasise. The key to doing that is to kill the leader. He thinks he is close to final victory here – I must end him, one way or another. If you begin landings it will be a long, hard struggle to defeat the Waaagh! But if I can kill the leader before you even arrive, then all Seventh has to do is mop up a mass of leaderless tribes.’

  ‘I see, my lord. It is a high-risk strategy.’

  ‘All the good ones are.’

  ‘If I may say so, lord, the risk to you personally is enormous.’

  ‘Perhaps. But it will save the lives of our brethren in the long run. Even Seventh Company would have a hard time destroying this Waaagh! as it stands. This is one cancer which must be cut out with a scalpel, Ixion. Once that is done, we will move in with the hammer.’

  ‘Yes, my lord. Throne watch over you.’ A pause. ‘The Fidelis survived. It is at Calth now, undergoing repairs.’

  ‘I rejoice to hear it. Pass on my compliments to Shipmaster Tyson.’

  ‘Tyson died, my lord. The ship suffered heavy damage.’

  Calgar sighed. Tyson had been a good man.

  ‘One other thing, Ixion. If I am incapacitated, then Brother Valerian will be your point of communication with this world, and Brother Mathias will be in command here until your own arrival. Clear?’

  ‘Quite clear, my lord.’

  ‘A lot can happen in six hours, Ixion. If disaster strikes, and you find Zalathras completely overrun by the time you are ready to start the landings, then you know what to do.’

  There was a pause in the vox, a hissing silence.

  ‘There is no Chaos taint on this world, my lord.’

  ‘The ork infestation is intense. Zalathras is the last point of resistance on the planet. If it has gone, then the world is not worth trying to retake. You will destroy it from orbit. Is that clear?’

  ‘Perfectly clear, my lord.’

  ‘Calgar out.’

  He closed off the channel, reopened that of his immediate brethren. Six hours was indeed a long time. He felt the weariness in his frame. The constant, intense hand-to-hand fighting was draining beyond any other form of warfare. He had not felt so physically used up since the Behemoth campaign, half a century before.

  The armour he wore analysed his blood as he stood there and administered yet more stimulants, though its internal chemical supply was near exhausted.

  Six hours. He was glad he had put in place a fall-back plan.

  ‘Here they come again,’ Brother Valerian said. And then, puzzled, he added. ‘This is something different.’

  The orks before the gate advanced in what were, for them, ordered ranks. While all across the wide battlefield before the walls their kin raged and assaulted in blind ferocity, these orks came on in a line, marching through the bloody muck with a great tattered scarlet banner hanging over them.

  And in their midst, a great litter was carried upon which stood one of the largest orks Calgar had seen, fully armoured and carrying a great curved power sword in one hand while the telltale penumbra of a power field flickered on his other fist. A chant went up from the advancing line. They were repeating a name – not Calgar’s this time. A barbarous ork word.

  ‘Brug, Brug, Brug!’

  ‘It appears my opposite number has decided to get a closer look at the fray,’ Calgar said, and he felt a glow of relief. The stand in the gate had not been for nothing. They had drawn out the ork warlord at last.

  ‘They think we’re done,’ Brother Mathias said, joining him, his white skull helm glinting through its grime, catching the last light of the sun. ‘He is here to gloat, to watch us go down.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Calgar agreed. ‘Note the orks around him – well-armoured, large killer-types. They must be his bodyguard. They will come at us next, while he watches. Brothers, be ready. The next attack will be the worst. They will fight like fiends while his eye is upon them.’

  ‘We fight with your eye on us, lord,’ Valerian said. ‘Let them come. We will show them what killing is.’

  The surviving Ultramarines gathered around Calgar as he stood there. There were seven of them left alive.

  The ork warlord held up his power sword. It shone and glittered in the light of the setting sun. Night was almost upon them.

  Then he thrust the blade forward with a high, gargling shout in his own barbarous tongue.

  The line of orks around him charged forward, roaring.

  And it began again.

  Night passed over Zalathras – for untold thousands, the last night they would ever know. The ork hosts swarmed around the walls like a mass of maggots intent on consuming an injured animal.

  They reared up the siege ladders upon mounds of their own dead, coming ever closer to the lip of the battlements. In places, some of the more agile of their kind were able to leap up from the topmost rung and land on the catwalks above, to spread mayhem there until they were brought down.

  The defence of the city had been stretched to breaking point. In the north, the firefighters were all but destroyed by a surprise assault tha
t came close to scaling the walls. Lieutenant Janus died there in the thick of it, a long way from his home on Macragge, and into the dark with him went thousands more of the militia, dying where they stood, knowing that there was nowhere to run to if the walls were breached.

  And all of them, every man, knew that Marneus Calgar was still fighting in the Vanaheim Gate. That knowledge inspired in them a desperate valour. They fought as stubbornly as the most seasoned veterans of the Astra Militarum, like men who have only one hope left. Deliverance might yet appear with the rising of the sun.

  Brother Orhan was killed close to midnight, the big orks nudging him away from his fellows with a cascade of blows and then swamping him as he staggered in their midst swinging his axe and cleaving half a dozen to pieces before he went down. Brother Parsifal tried to retrieve his body, helped by Valerian and Calgar himself, but the press of the enemy was too great. The Ultramarines were shunted back into the barbican, retreating step by step while Brother Kadare fired bursts of heavy bolter rounds to cover their retreat and Brother Antigonus moved up to flood the enemy line with blast after blast of flamer fire, the promethium rising up in a blazing wall that lit up the interior of the gateway.

  He got too close, and received a fusillade of autogun bullets that smashed him backwards. Calgar beat the enemy back from his body, and Antigonus crawled out of the barbican, firing his bolt pistol as he went.

  The big orks they fought now were well armoured and in strength were more than a match for even the augmented strength of the Adeptus Astartes. They snatched Parsifal off his feet and piled onto him with suicidal abandon. When Calgar cleared them off the Apothecary with gouts of storm-bolter fire, Parsifal was lying with his limbs rent from his body. His head had disappeared.

  Antigonus died soon after, still firing his bolt pistol and cursing the enemy aloud over the vox. He had bled to death inside his punctured armour, the wounds he carried too much even for the self-healing systems of his kind.

  And so the night went on.

  Ghent Morcault sat in the pilot’s chair of the Mayfly, staring out at nothing. Calgar had given him the vox frequency of the Ultramarines and he sat there clutching his pitchthorn stick and listening as the Adeptus Astartes died one after another. Tears streamed down the old man’s face – grief for the Ultramarines, for his city, for the world he loved and the crew he had abandoned.

  He flipped the ignition switches, warming up the atmospheric engines. The main drives were inoperable, and the ship was a holed hulk, but Fennick’s engineers had worked with Jon Gortyn to make her airworthy, for a short while at least.

  A short while was all that was needed.

  Over the vox came the voice of Marneus Calgar himself. The Lord of Macragge was breathing heavily, and there was a catch to his voice that spoke of some damage to his lungs. It shocked Morcault to hear the bone weariness in Calgar’s voice. The Chapter Master of the Ultramarines was more than a man; it did not seem possible that he should sound so like a harried, exhausted human being.

  ‘Morcault, the time is close. We are nearly at our end here. I am patching through the coordinates. Just outside the Vanaheim. He stands on a litter amid a group of great orks.’ A panting grunt, as though the Lord of Macragge had been struck a blow.

  ‘Do not fail me. You know the consequences.’

  ‘I do,’ Morcault said.

  If he or Calgar failed in their aim, then the likelihood was that Zalidar would be destroyed from orbit by the Andronicus battlefleet of the Ultramarines.

  Morcault could not bear that thought. His beautiful world, whose mountains and jungles he had explored for almost forty years, reduced to a dead cinder in space. It could not be allowed.

  ‘Wait for my word,’ Calgar said. ‘I must be sure of his position. This last gambit cannot fail.’

  The vox cut off. Morcault sat tapping his stick on the deck plates of the bridge, while around him the Mayfly hummed with power, the retros warming up in preparation for take-off. The old man flexed his right hand, staring at the swollen knuckles, the blue veins that ran across it.

  I am not the pilot I once was, but I am still good enough. I will not let you down.

  Twenty-Five

  It was not long before the dawn, now, and in that black hour the unrelenting violence seemed to ease a little, as though to take a breath before the final act.

  All along the walls of Zalathras, the ork armies brought up fresh formations from their inexhaustible reserves to fill the gaps in the line and prepare for more assaults, while on the walls themselves the militiamen gulped warm water from their canteens, reloaded their weapons, changed power-packs, and closed their eyes for a moment of rest or prayer.

  And in the deep shadow under the Vanaheim fortress, Marneus Calgar stood alone.

  Brother Mathias was lying, gravely wounded, at the rear of the barbican, watched over by Roman Lascelle and the remnants of his militia company. The Ultramarine Chaplain had lost an arm to an ork power sword, and half his helm had been cleaved from his head a moment later. His right fist held onto his crozius in a grip that only death would loosen.

  Brother Kadare was dead amid a gleaming pile of spent casings, shot through and through, face to the enemy, still kneeling upright as though he might at any moment rise to his feet and continue fighting. But his soul was gone to the Emperor’s Peace.

  And Brother Valerian was slumped at Calgar’s feet, still conscious, but with his psychic hood ripped clear off his armour and his helm gone. His eyes were clear, but an ork had carved out his bowels. They rested in his lap, a steaming mass he cradled in his fists.

  As he stood there, Calgar stooped and set one powered-off gauntlet on the Librarian’s head, as gently as a father might caress his son.

  ‘You have done good service, brother. You must hang onto life for me. I have lost too many friends, these last days.’

  The Librarian smiled faintly. ‘I shall do my utmost, my lord.’ His face grew grave. ‘Do not die here. We cannot lose you too. The price has been too high.’

  ‘We pay it, whatever it may be,’ Calgar said, straightening.

  The Lord of Macragge’s superlative artificer armour was broken and holed in a dozen places. One of his power gauntlets was as dead as a lump of scrap metal; the power field on the other flickered like the last light from a candle burnt down to the wick. His helm display was full of flashing red runes.

  It was almost done.

  Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.

  He blinked on Morcault’s sigil.

  ‘Now. Go now, and may the Emperor guide you.’

  The old man replied at once. ‘It shall be done, my lord. I shall be there in a few minutes.’

  Calgar sagged. The orks were moving in on him, as wary as wolves of old Terra circling a wounded lion. And a hundred yards beyond them, the ork warlord Brug stood on his shoulder-borne litter, watching.

  Calgar had hoped to draw him in face to face, to break apart that snarling skull in his hands, and feel the ork’s life give out within his grasp. It was not to be. The warlord was too intelligent to risk all, now that he was on the brink of seizing all. It was up to Morcault now.

  His bodyguard moved in, weapons raised. Marneus Calgar strode forward to meet them.

  And out of the north, the Mayfly came careering through the sky with a hoarse roar.

  All across the city, men and orks looked up at that sound, which carried even over the endless gunfire and the artillery. Ork anti-aircraft guns, caught out by the appearance of the little freighter, were slow to aim and fire. A trail of clouds exploded in the Mayfly’s wake as they frantically tried to draw a bead on the craft, but they were just a little too slow.

  The Mayfly came arcing over the southern walls of Zalathras. High up in the Alphon Spire, Lord Fennick watched it streak across the dawn light in the sky, afterburners flaring.

  ‘You old bastar
d,’ he whispered.

  From halfway up the Kalgatt Spire, Hester saw it, too. She and Jodi Arnhal and Jon Gortyn watched, while little Scurrios wept like a child behind them. Gortyn set a hand upon her shoulder, and she grasped it in her own.

  On the walls below, in the midst of the unending carnage, Colonel Boros looked up gasping, frowning, wondering what it signified.

  Roman Lascelle could not see it, because the blood from the head wound that he had taken had sealed shut his eyes. He was lying beside Brother Valerian. The Librarian was smiling.

  And Marneus Calgar smashed the orks back from him with new energy, beating them down, firing with the one storm bolter he had left that worked. He was still fighting in the gate when the Mayfly dived down from the near vertical towards the ground beyond.

  He caught a glimpse of the ork warlord looking up, jaws agape in shock, and he saw the bright white bloom of the explosion as the ship hit the ground, a massive explosion that blasted Brug and his bodyguard to atoms and sent them flying, tore apart hundreds of the foremost orks, and sent up a massive wall of mud and earth and hurtled corpses and wreckage.

  Calgar was blown backwards by the blast, tumbled end over end as though he were a leaf caught in a gale. His armour died, went dark, struggled to come back online. He ripped off his broken helm and keyed the vox, croaking with effort.

  Morcault had fulfilled his trust in him.

  ‘Andronicus, this is Calgar. Do you read?’

  He struggled to his knees. A curtain of fire burned out beyond the Vanaheim Gate, and the ork host there had been smashed asunder. He was no psyker, but even he could feel in the air the mass dismay of the xenos armies. They had lost their leader, the focus that had brought them here and welded them together. The Waaagh! was collapsing.

  ‘Andronicus – Ixion, can you hear me?’

  His ears rang. There was blood streaming down his face.