by Paul Kearney
‘Captain Ixion here, my lord.’
Calgar knelt there as though praying. The sun was coming up over the hills beyond Zalathras, the dark night finally ending. The light cast a long shadow behind him.
‘Captain Ixion, the ork host is fracturing. You may commence the landings. Send down my brethren, and let us cleanse this place once and for all.
‘Calgar out.’
Epilogue
Men’s memories are fickle things. They take the events of the past and make of them a story, and oftentimes they change that story to fit their own preconceptions of how things should be. In the gap between what has happened and what men make of it lies the truth, and often it is lost, or changed almost beyond recognition.
That is what happened with the story of Zalathras.
Years have gone by. There are fresh faces in the Chapter now. Ultramar is stable and protected, and in this part of the Imperium the Ultramarines watch over mankind as they always have. The wars of the past are commemorated in the side-chapels of the Fortress of Hera, and the names of the dead are carved upon the walls, while great Guilliman himself sits in state amid them.
In time every one of us, the lowliest and the mightiest of our brethren, becomes a mere name carved into that wall.
But our deeds live on in the heart of men. We become figures of story and legend, and the things we did in life are perpetuated in memory, and those memories blur over the years.
They say that I saved Zalidar. That is true. They say that I stood alone for a day and a night in the shadow of the Vanaheim Gate, and held back the ork hordes single-handed. They say that I slew the ork warlord in combat, face to face, before Seventh Company landed to purge the planet of the xenos and save the world for the Imperium. They say that Lord Fennick, the governor, was a coward and a traitor who sealed himself up in the safest place he could find while heroes like Boros and Lascelle and Glenck fought and died on the wall.
None of those things are true. I know that, but it no longer matters, because it is what men believe.
I know that an old man saved Zalathras, by giving up his life for the world he loved. His name is forgotten by nearly everyone now, but not by me.
I know that I did stand in the shadow of the gate for a day and a night, and I held the orks back and preserved Zalathras until that old man could redeem it with his sacrifice.
But I did not stand alone.
I was never alone; my brothers were always there with me.
About the Author
Paul Kearney’s Warhammer 40,000 work comprises the short story ‘The Last Detail’ from Legends of the Space Marines and the Space Marine Battles novel Calgar’s Siege. He studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, and has been widely published, as well as being longlisted for the British Fantasy Award. He lives and works in Port Glenone, Northern Ireland.
An extract from Ultramarines.
As usual, Captain Sicarius was the first to emerge from the Thunderhawk.
He stepped off the forward ramp onto earth that was cold and unyielding, even to his considerable armoured weight. He glanced up at strange patterns of stars, freckling the black sky. The captain wondered – as he had during every mission in the scant years since his rise to that rank – how many battle-brothers he would lose here.
They poured out of the transport ship behind him: thirty of the Emperor’s finest, resplendent in blue power armour with gold and white trappings, the U-symbol of their Chapter emblazoned upon their left shoulders. They had donned their helmets, forewarned that the air was poisonous, so the only way to tell them apart was by their battle honours.
More gunships – Thunderhawks and Stormravens –were in the process of landing beside them, easing themselves down onto cushions of noxious exhaust gases. They disgorged the remainder of the Ultramarines strikeforce onto this, their latest battlefield. At the same time, more Thunderhawks – modified to carry vehicles in place of passengers – swooped in to deposit their cargos of Predator Destructor and Vindicator tanks.
The operation was executed with the utmost efficiency. Where, a few minutes earlier, this low plateau had been devoid of any life – or of anything that life may have created – now it teemed with proud blue juggernauts, and not a moment too soon, as the captain quickly apprehended.
His auto-senses picked up the dull cracks of shell fire, even over the aircraft engines, before he could get his bearings. He stepped to the plateau’s edge and looked over a virtual labyrinth of trenches and foxholes. He could make out figures scurrying through those trenches: the soldiers of the Astra Militarum – a Death Korps of Krieg regiment, he recalled – whose reports had brought him to this tiny, unnamed moon.
His gaze, however, strayed beyond them – to the object of the Ultramarines’ mission here. The horizon was closer than Sicarius was accustomed to, no more than three kilometres ahead of him to the east. Squatting there upon it, like some ancient, mythical monster, was the Indestructible.
It was the size of a small city, but had the look of a cathedral with its gothic spires and towers and covered walkways. It was a multi-layered, stepped structure, symmetrical, with four arms extending from the diamond-shaped basilica at its centre. It had once, evidently, been a burnished gold in colour, but its walls were soot-blackened, flaking and beginning to crumble.
It was a Ramilies-class star fort: a giant mobile base of operations assembled in the Imperium’s own forges. It shouldn’t have been here. It should have been out in space somewhere, proudly standing sentry over one of the Emperor’s worlds; not crippled and stranded like this, held captive by the inexorable force of gravity.
The Ramilies was its own arsenal. Its towers bristled with gun emplacements, while torpedo tubes glowered warningly through its outer walls. Its cavernous launch bays could each easily contain a cruiser or multiple flights of smaller ships.
Four aircraft were rising from one of those launch bays now, from the Ramilies’s far quadrant. Like the fort itself, they had seen better days – though possibly not much better. They were crudely constructed, with heavy guns grafted haphazardly onto their patched-together hulls. They looked too ungainly to fly, yet fly they did, as if keeping themselves in the air by sheer obduracy alone.
Ork technology; there was no mistaking it.
The shells that Sicarius had heard had been fired by the Guardsmen in the trenches, shot from Earthshaker cannons. The Earthshakers were siege guns, slow to reload and cumbersome to aim; they were built for breaking through walls, not for bringing down aerial combatants. So far, they had failed to score a direct hit on any of their four targets, only buffeting them with explosive blast waves.
One of the ork craft was thrown into a clumsy barrel roll, careening away from the rest of its flight. As Sicarius watched, however – against all odds, against all sense – its pilot managed to wrestle it back under control. All four ships were sweeping over the trenches, he realised, without deigning to return their occupants’ fire. They were bearing down on the plateau on which he stood.
He bellowed an order to the Space Marines behind him: ‘Scatter!’
The first ork craft roared over Sicarius’s head, its bomb bay doors yawning open. Three rocket-shaped casings dropped out of its belly, one by one. Forewarned, the majority of Sicarius’s brothers leapt out of harm’s way; their vehicles, however, were virtual sitting ducks.
The first bomb smacked into the prow of a Predator Destructor, its gunner barely managing to duck back into his turret before it struck. The ensuing explosion lifted the vehicle off its tracks and set its engine ablaze, forcing its crew to evacuate.
The remaining two bombs took longer to choose their targets, and Sicarius realised that they had some form of guiding intelligence. One of them swooped low over the roof of the disabled Predator, and then began to climb again. It streaked towards a bright blue Thunderhawk which had been coming in to land; two Vindicator tanks were attac
hed to the ship’s underside, dangling helplessly.
Fortunately for their crews – not to mention the Thunderhawk’s pilot – the bomb’s controller had overreached itself. Its limited propulsion unit sputtered out and it faltered a good way short of its objective. It spiralled back to earth, some half a kilometre away, where it burst harmlessly.
‘Let them come,’ a familiar voice bellowed, defiantly. ‘I will not cower from any stinking greenskins. Let them try to shift me from this spot.’
Brother Ultracius had not sought cover like the others. He had been an Ultramarines sergeant once – but now, he was a walking tank himself, what little remained of his physical form interred inside a Dreadnought casing.
Standing at almost twice the height of his brothers, he had made himself an irresistible target. As the third and final bomb came around and dived towards him, Ultracius let rip at it with his massive twin-linked heavy bolter: a prodigious weapon that jutted from his right elbow in place of a forearm.
The bomb flew unerringly through a hail of bolt-rounds towards him, close enough to Sicarius now for him to see that machine-spirits didn’t drive it as he had expected. It had a pilot: a gretchin, a member of a stunted orkoid subspecies. It was shorter – much shorter – and punier than a typical ork; still, it couldn’t have fit easily into the bomb’s casing, not unless its legs had been amputated.
Its squat body was hunched over a tiny control stick, its pointed ears trembling with malevolent laughter.
One of Ultracius’s bolts had found its mark, and the guided bomb exploded barely a metre in front of the aquila symbol on the Dreadnought’s chassis. A fraction of a second later and it would have hit him squarely, cracking even his armour plating. As it was, he weathered the blast, though it forced him onto his back foot and almost made his knee joints buckle.
The gretchin pilot perished in flames.
Less than three seconds had passed since the bombs had dropped.
In that time, however, the vox-net had exploded with urgent chatter. The pilots of the grounded Thunderhawks were hauling them back into the air; while those still carrying tanks and other vital equipment were flying evasive manoeuvres, looking for a chance to set down their heavy burdens.
The second and third ork bombers, delayed by the Earthshakers’ covering fire, were intercepted before they could reach the plateau. One of them was crippled almost instantly, holed by an explosive punch from a Thunderhawk’s battle cannon; the other craft put up a better fight. Its hull may have seemed less than aerodynamic, but it was tough enough to shrug off a fusillade from four twin-linked heavy bolters.
The bomber fought back. Its pilot was a fully-grown ork, looking somewhat out of place behind a glacis, a pair of goggles perched ridiculously on its green snout. Its primary weapons were a pair of automatic ballistic guns slung underneath its wings. Like most ork ‘shootas’, they were noisier than they were accurate.
In a one-on-one dogfight, the clumsy ork craft was probably outmatched. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a threat, however.
The fourth bomber – the one the Earthshaker cannons had sent into a spin – was finally coming up on the plateau; while the first – the one that had made one bombing run already – was coming around to make another. They found that the Ultramarines had three more gunships in the air, waiting for them.
We should have set down further behind the lines, Sicarius thought. His eagerness for battle and inexperience of command had made him incautious. He blamed himself, but, stuck on the ground as he was now, there wasn’t much he could do to put things right. He could only watch as the opposing flights circled each other, spitting at each other venomously.
‘The Emperor is with you,’ he encouraged his pilots by vox, but resisted the urge to bellow instructions at them. They knew what they had to do and how to do it. They wouldn’t have been sitting in those cockpits if their instincts weren’t as finely honed as they could be.
He ordered his tanks to advance, separating as they did. They were moving targets now, grinding their way down the broad, winding trails that led to the plateau’s base; still, moving all the same. In addition, the Stormravens had closed ranks to keep their enemies at bay, and were beginning to drive them back.
Nevertheless, one of the bombers opened its bay to eject two guided casings, but their intended targets were beyond their limited range. They detonated on the ground, and claimed no casualties other than their own hapless occupants.
Another ork bomber was fatally holed and sent screaming, nose over tail, out of Sicarius’s sight. A moment later, a fiery cloud blossomed over the horizon to the north, reassuring him that the threat had been dealt with. In its turn a Stormraven gunship had also been damaged, smoke belching out of one of its engines; the pilot, however, sounded confident that he could make an emergency landing.
Sicarius stepped off the edge of the plateau. The drop was short enough for his armour to completely absorb the impact of his landing. He voxed his battle-brothers: ‘Form up on me.’ The first of the tanks was already pulling up behind him, while the situation in the sky seemed to be under control.
Then, a pilot’s voice rasped urgently through his earpiece: ‘The last ork, captain – it’s coming right at you… gambling everything on a suicide dive…’ He could hear the rattling of patched-together engines growing in volume above him.
Sicarius wasn’t worried. Three Stormravens had already dropped onto the bomber’s tail, with their lascannons flaring. It wouldn’t get close to him.
The inevitable explosion, when it came, made it seem as if a new sun was blazing in the sky, turning night into day for just a moment. The light glinted off blue ceramite and plasteel, and cast the shadows of a hundred armoured warriors and their powerful engines ahead of them. It was in that light that the Ultramarines strikeforce began their march across the small moon’s barren surface; a spectacle that would surely have caused their enemies to quail, had any of them only seen it.
The Ultramarines were marching to war.
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For my brothers, Sean and James
A Black Library Publication
First published in Great Britain in 2016
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.
Internal illustrations by Dave Gallagher, Paul Dainton,
John Michelbach, Kevin Chin.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-514-2
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