Somewhere beyond Kohner’s fading sight, a voice barked an order. The voice was gigantic. It had to come from a chest as big as a mountain. It silenced all the orks.
The warboss turned around. It looked back. It looked up. It growled an acknowledgement, and when it did, Kohner understood he had heard something new in human experience: an ork expressing awe. Kohner knew he was dying. He was moving beyond pain. And still he was terrified.
There was an ork out there much larger than the monster that had killed him. An ork whose existence made him weep. He wasn’t crying for himself, or even for Armageddon. He wept for the Imperium. He prayed for mercy. He prayed the darkness would take him before this terrible being came into sight.
His prayers went unanswered.
1. Yarrick
I stood up from my seat in the forward area of the heavy lifter’s troop compartment and joined Setheno at a small viewing block in the port side of the fuselage. Most of the Steel Legionnaires travelling with us were seated. The few who moved around the compartment gave the canoness a wide berth. We could speak without being overheard.
Below us, the terrain of Armageddon Prime rolled past. The Equatorial Jungle was far behind us. Our air armada of lifters was less than an hour from Hive Tempestora.
Setheno nodded at the lifters visible off the port wing. They were fat-bodied beasts, their hulls disproportionately large, making their wings seem stubby despite their hundred-metre wingspans. Each lifter carried a full company, the ones that weren’t transporting our heavy armour. ‘Half a regiment,’ she said. ‘We fill the sky.’
‘Are you suggesting the response will be sufficient?’
‘Hardly. I was making an observation of scale. We fill the sky, and that is not enough.’
‘You think we are flying to our doom?’
It is not possible to shrug in power armour, but the slight tilt of her head suggested the gesture. ‘It is our duty to ensure that we are not.’
‘I agree. I will not let Armageddon fall while I draw breath. But Overlord von Strab appears to be doing everything in his power to engineer our defeat.’ I shook my head. ‘A single regiment as a response.’
‘Are his actions treasonous?’ Setheno asked.
Her question was not an idle one. I thought carefully before I answered. ‘I don’t believe so. They are ill-judged. I think he’s motivated by a combination of over-confidence and excessive political calculation. He still doesn’t believe the orks are the threat we know them to be.’ Before our departure from Infernus, Brenken had played for me the few vox transmissions we had received from the Tempestora Hive Militia. We hadn’t been able to glean many details about the disaster. We had a rough idea of where the Claw of Desolation had landed. We didn’t have anything that even approached an estimation of the size of the greenskin army. What we had were recordings of panicked screams and pleas to von Strab and to the Emperor. And we knew the timeline. We knew how long it had taken the orks to obliterate the entire Hive Militia.
Not long.
Not long at all.
In response to the massacre, von Strab had ordered the 252nd Regiment to deploy. The orks were most likely making for Tempestora, but Volcanus was also within reach. Brenken was leading half the companies there. Dividing our already inadequate strength troubled her, but we could not leave either of Armageddon Prime’s principle hives undefended.
‘The overlord’s sense of the situation is either naive or delusional,’ Setheno said. ‘In the council, he remarked that no matter what happens in Armageddon Prime, the Equatorial Jungle will prove an impassable barrier for the orks, especially since we are on the eve of the Season of Shadows.’
I snorted. ‘I wonder if even he is that stupid. He might have been speaking for the benefit of the hive governors.’
‘I’m sure he was. The defensive measures he has ordered suggest his confidence in the jungle is not absolute. Even so, he is determined to remain in Infernus.’
If the orks reached Armageddon Secundus, Hive Infernus would be the first major centre in their eastward march. ‘If he leaves now, he shows weakness,’ I said. ‘And keeping the other regiments stationed in the hives will keep the governors in line.’
‘Herman von Strab is a skilled politician,’ Setheno said. She spoke as if she were proclaiming his death sentence. ‘He should have been dealt with before now.’
‘True,’ I said. I thought again of that moment when I had considered putting a round through von Strab’s head. I grimaced at the possibility that the missed opportunity had led to the present pass. Though I have come to terms with my decision, and believe that it was, in the end, the correct one, I had no way of taking the long view in that moment. In the short term, von Strab’s survival was one of the greatest tragedies of Armageddon’s history. As we flew to Tempestora, I sensed the curtain rising on that tragedy, and I knew I had to accept the role my decision had played in bringing it about. ‘The overlord is beyond our reach now,’ I said. ‘He is running the campaign. It falls to us to make it a successful one.’
‘You speak without irony.’
‘Because what I say is true.’
She bowed her head once in acknowledgement. She glanced back at the ranks of steel benches where the company sat. ‘You have seen Captain Stahl in combat,’ she said. ‘I have not. Your evaluation?’
‘A skilled officer.’ Brenken had given Stahl the overall command of the companies bound for Tempestora.
‘Not the most senior, though.’
‘No. But the right choice, I think. He doesn’t avoid hard decisions, and he can think well on his feet.’
‘I saw resentment in the faces of some of his fellow captains. The older ones.’
‘We might need to reinforce his authority.’
‘If he proves worthy.’
‘If he proves worthy,’ I agreed.
Emerald lightning lashed upward. It sheared off the starboard wing of the lifter closest to us. The aircraft went into a spinning dive and veered our way. Setheno and I remained motionless at the viewing block as the collision loomed. Thousands of tonnes of high-velocity metal rushed together. Our engines screamed as the pilot, Rhubeck, pulled us up. The stricken craft dropped beneath us and spiralled towards the ground.
More lightning reached upwards for the fleet. Two lifters took direct hits to their fuel tanks and exploded. I was thrown against the fuselage wall as Rhubeck tried to manoeuvre defensively. The effort was pointless. The lifter turned slowly, and the energy beams came in such profusion and in such wild arcs that there could be no anticipating them. I staggered back to my seat and strapped myself in. Setheno followed. The weight of her armour gave her greater stability as the lifter rocked back and forth.
‘We are under fire,’ I called out. ‘Prepare yourselves! We will be hit, but the Emperor protects!’
We had need of his protection. Our turn to be hit came a minute later. There was a green flash to port that shone through the viewing block with the intensity of a sun. Metal shrieked. A blast close at hand, and then we were going down.
The drop was fast. My feet rose from the deck and I was weightless for several seconds. We tilted sharply to starboard as the dive steepened. It neared the vertical, and I felt the sickening momentum of a spin building. The engines screamed, and they rushed us still faster towards the ground. I bit back a snarl of rage that the end should come in so pointless a fashion. I kept my face impassive. Beside me, Setheno stared straight ahead, her eyes cold as the fate before us. I prayed to the Emperor that I would yet be allowed to fight in his name. This death would be wrong. Plucked from the sky, trapped in the giant, tumbling sarcophagus, this end was tantamount to dereliction of duty.
The Emperor protects. There was a great shuddering, and the lifter’s dive began to level off. We came out of the spin. The engines whined even higher, and there was a second explosion, this time on the port si
de. The aircraft jolted, but its nose continued to even out. Over the din of the howling lifter, from behind the door to the cockpit, I heard a scream, as if Rhubeck were dragging us out of the plunge through will alone.
He did well. We were almost horizontal when we hit the ground.
The impact shattered my perceptions. Time broke into a jumble of splinters. Blows hammered me from all sides. Reality was a tumbling, rolling blur of thunder and metal and pain. The lifter slammed belly-first into the ground and ploughed a furrow through earth and rock. I heard the cracking of rock, the disintegration of steel, the cries of the dying, the blank roar of fire. I don’t know if I lost consciousness. The line between awareness and oblivion vanished. There was only the crash, the great rending of the world, the smashing and hurling of my body. My restraints tore and I flew.
I knew nothing, but I still knew pain.
And then it stopped. The stillness was so sudden, it was its own form of trauma. I lay on my back, blinking through a haze of confusion and agony. Everything was motionless. Everything was silence.
But no, that was a lie. I grunted. I tried to sit. I succeeded. No bones were broken. The ringing in my ears and the fog before my eyes faded. The violence of the world returned. The silence gave way to the hiss of leaking promethium, the crackle of flame, and the earth-shaking pounding of more and more aircraft hitting the ground.
I managed to stand. My left leg tried to give out beneath my weight. I allowed myself to stagger a single step, no more than that. The Emperor had heard my plea, and my duty to him called with a voice louder than the white noise of our catastrophe.
I had been thrown free of the lifter in the last moments of the crash. The wreckage was strewn across a thousand metres of ground: smashed engines sat in pools of burning fuel, the wings had broken off on impact and the fuselage had broken into three large pieces. They had more or less held their shape, though there were huge rents in their sides. The one I had been in was twenty metres long. The nose was crushed. No one in it could have survived, but Rhubeck had saved many of us. As I gathered my scattered thoughts and took stock of the situation, Setheno emerged from the fuselage, followed by Steel Legionnaires. Her forehead was bleeding, but she moved easily. The troopers who stumbled out behind her were in much rougher shape, but they were mobile. That meant they could fight.
To the east, the orks’ green lightning still streaked to the sky, felling the armada. There was such a concentration of fire, across such a wide area, that it was impossible to avoid. We had flown into a wall of devastating energy. I had encountered this form of ork artillery before. It was volatile, inaccurate, but devastating. I had never seen it deployed in this kind of strength. The greenskins had the means for a massive invasion, and the cunning to use them well. The ground shook, and shook again as more lifters crashed. Some managed to land without disappearing into balls of flame. Others disintegrated, leaving nothing behind but tracts of blackened metal and unrecognisable flesh.
Setheno joined me, along with Captain Stahl. His face was turning purple and black from a mass of contusions. One eye was swollen shut, and he was favouring his left arm. He gazed eastward in horror.
‘A powerful enemy,’ Setheno said. ‘Von Strab is not alone in underestimating them.’
‘We are guilty too,’ I agreed. As we would be again. And again. No matter how desperately we struggled against making that mistake.
His voice cracking with awe and despair, Stahl said, ‘They’ve finished us before we even started.’
‘What do you mean?’ I snapped.
He looked at me in surprise, puzzled that I couldn’t see the scale of our defeat. ‘They countered our response,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken us out before we could even reach Tempestora.’
‘Are you dead?’ I asked.
‘I don’t understand, commissar.’
‘You’re still drawing breath.’ I pointed to the soldiers still emerging from the fuselage, and then at the survivors I could see gathering outside the other pieces of the lifter. ‘So are they. We are only defeated when we are dead. If even then.’
I glared at him until I saw determination take hold once more. He nodded and marched towards his troops. He began to call out orders, and the dazed crowd took steps towards becoming a military force once more.
‘You’re thinking of a run to Tempestora?’ Setheno asked.
‘Yes.’ I looked towards the ork lines. The enemy was not coming for us yet. The orks were content for the moment to shoot us out of the sky. The gauntlet had taken almost all the lifters now. The crashes covered a wide area, but many aircraft, including our own, had still travelled many kilometres as they fell. We had a lead on the orks. Perhaps enough to win the race, if we started soon.
‘We cannot save Tempestora,’ Setheno said. I would have punished any soldier who spoke those words before an engagement. Coming from the canoness, however, they were nothing more than cold-eyed clarity. And she was right.
‘I know,’ I told her. ‘But we can damage the enemy. And the longer we hold the orks there, the better Brenken can prepare Volcanus.’
‘Agreed.’
Over the course of the next hour, we worked with Stahl and the other officers still alive to re-forge the companies into something coherent and capable of fighting. We had lost almost all our vehicles in the crashes, and at least half the troops. We were still many hundreds, and as we started the march to Tempestora, we were an army, not a rabble. The Steel Legion trenchcoats bore the burns of the disaster. Many of the rebreathers were damaged or unusable. But this was a regiment that had fought well for its colonel, its home world, and the Imperium. It would not stop now, especially when the home world itself was under threat.
We gathered the companies for as long as the orks continued to fire at the sky. When the green energy bursts ceased, we were out of time. Some of the lifters had come down too far for us to reach. I saw one near the northern horizon that looked remarkably intact. There could be more survivors there. But we could not afford the delay in hooking up with them. To the west, Tempestora’s silhouette bulked towards the clouds. To the east, a dust cloud was rising. The orks were on the move.
Stahl voxed orders to all survivors to make for the hive. Some answered his call. Perhaps there were others who heard and could not answer. There was no way to tell. And there was no choice.
In the clammy heat of the Armageddon Prime day, we began the forced march to Hive Tempestora.
2. Seroff
In the reception hall of von Strab’s quarters, Dominic Seroff savoured his amasec and waited for the evening to end. The reception was a show of confidence. Under the pretext of honouring the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension despite the recent events, von Strab was reassuring the hive governors of Armageddon Secundus that the situation was well in hand. The reassurance was also reinforcement. The overlord’s authority was absolute. Even now.
The amasec was good. Too good, Seroff thought, for Armageddon. The taste had a nuance of flavours, a subtlety at odds with the industrial brutishness of the world. Von Strab must have it imported from elsewhere. The bottles, though, bore the overlord’s family crest. Vanity, pretence and power came together in that lie. Seroff shrugged and took another sip. The amasec’s provenance was irrelevant. What was true of the vintage was true of the overlord. Von Strab was powerful, effective, and his grip on Armageddon unchallenged. His corruption and venality were irrelevant.
His competence as a war commander was a question. Seroff was sceptical about von Strab’s assertion that the Equatorial Jungle would stop the orks. But if the overlord was wrong, then a strong defence of the hives was paramount. He understood why Mannheim was upset about the size of the force sent to defend Tempestora and Volcanus, but he also understood the expediency behind von Strab’s decision. He didn’t like the idea of Armageddon Prime already being as good as lost, but the possibility was a real one. It had to be faced.
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Seroff finished his amasec. He signalled a passing serf for another drink, and then found von Strab at his elbow. The overlord had been in conference with Governor von Kierska a few moments before. His movements could be stealthy for a big man.
‘I hope you’re enjoying the evening, lord commissar,’ von Strab said.
‘I appreciate its necessity and execution.’ He had no reason to play the toady. His remit extended far beyond Armageddon itself. Von Strab was a useful political ally, not his master.
Von Strab smiled, unoffended. ‘I just received some news about the 252nd. The airlift to Tempestora has been lost.’
Seroff looked at von Strab for a long moment. ‘Lost?’ he asked. ‘Completely?’
‘We’re waiting for more news. But all the lifters have fallen off the augurs.’
‘You don’t seem overly concerned.’
‘We don’t know everything yet.’ He made a show of sighing. ‘Losses are inevitable in war. Regrettable. But there we are.’
‘You aren’t worried,’ Seroff repeated.
‘I have no reason to be. If the orks had landed on the eastern side of the jungle, I would be concerned. They did not.’
‘We may yet lose Prime.’
‘We’ll reclaim it in time.’
Seroff couldn’t decide if von Strab was more naïve or more pragmatic than anyone he had ever met. The thought that he might be both was chilling. Seroff dismissed it.
‘There is something I wanted to ask you,’ von Strab continued. ‘I’ve been wondering why you raised no objection to Commissar Yarrick being part of the expedition against the greenskins. You made it very clear that you wanted him sidelined after Basquit.’
Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon Page 6