I am coming for you, he thought, and the machine-spirit rejoiced.
On the vox, voices screamed. There was something new in the field.
The artillery barrage stuttered.
The ork machines tightened the noose around the Iron Skulls.
4. Vollbrecht
Two waves of metal surged around the vast line of the Titans. Spotters called them in. Vollbrecht climbed out of the hatch of the Leman Russ Reach of Morpheus. He raised his magnoculars to his eyes. The Irons Skulls’ formation was thousands of metres wide, but the expanse of the Death Barrens gave the ork tide all the space it needed to manoeuvre. The Titans had drawn the force of the foe inward. Now a command had been given, and the orks were flanking.
With claws.
The waves crashed together. They became a great crest. The foe came in such numbers that Vollbrecht had a momentary impression of iron insects scrabbling over each other. Then the scale registered. His throat constricted.
Not a stream of insects. A flood of degraded Dreadnoughts.
He was looking at a mob of armoured monsters. The smallest were three metres tall. They were cylinders on articulated legs, waving pincers and guns on the ends of arms almost as long again. They came in swarms, clustered together like iron maggots come to devour Imperial flesh. Pushing through the swarms were squads of much larger monsters. They were much closer in size to the Dreadnoughts of the Adeptus Astartes. They were in the form of orks, recreated as bellowing metal giants. There were even larger engines, walkers more massive than tanks, taller than Sentinels. Their claws alone were the size of the smaller engines. Vollbrecht had seen those walkers only once before. He had been present when concentrated shelling had killed one and torn it open. Impossibly, the giant weapon had been operated by a single ork.
So was every monster descending on the regiments. A mass of infantry, every soldier transformed into a battle tank.
‘Taliansky!’ Vollbrecht shouted into the interior of Reach of Morpheus to the vox operator. ‘All tanks fire at the new threat. Basilisks, maintain support for the Iron Skulls.’ The ork engines were too close to be tackled with artillery.
The cannons of the Leman Russ lines lowered their aim. Shells flew at the enemy. They ripped into the clusters of small walkers, each direct hit blasting the cylinders to shrapnel. The walking cans nearby stumbled away from the destruction, arms waving in panic. The bigger engines marched through the cannon fire. Some slowed when hit. A few stopped. The giants shrugged off the hits. The shells only dented their forward armour.
The wave was close now. The orks sprayed the Steel Legion with twin-linked stubbers, flamers. They did little damage and were not quite in range. The cannons and rocket launchers were much worse. A tempest of high explosives tore into the tanks. The world erupted on all sides of Vollbrecht. He climbed back down and slammed the hatch shut behind him. Bullets clanged off metal where his head had been moments before.
Reach of Morpheus shook as the cannon fired again.
‘Tell me that’s a kill,’ Vollbrecht said.
‘Yes, colonel,’ said the gunner, Strobel.
‘Good.’ To Taliansky, he said, ‘Tight ranks, fire forward, drive forward.’ His driver, Koch, acknowledged. ‘We’ll cut their ranks in two.’ Vollbrecht gave the order as if it were possible. He had to believe it was. ‘Get me Colonel Kanturek,’ he said after Taliansky had relayed his commands. The tank shook again, battered from outside. Vollbrecht felt like a stone in a can. The blow almost knocked him out of his seat.
‘She’s waiting to speak to you, colonel,’ Taliansky said and passed the unit over.
Kanturek had issued the command to close the spaces in the formation. She was riding in General Walpurga, a hundred metres back from Reach of Morpheus. ‘Vollbrecht,’ she said, ‘it won’t work.’
‘It’s the only move we have.’
‘We’ll be throwing the regiments away. We have to pull back. I can’t see the other side of that force.’
‘The Iron Skulls–’
‘Will be on their own if we are utterly destroyed too. We have to salvage something.’
Shattering explosions outside. Vollbrecht cursed his blindness. The gun boomed. ‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘We can’t–’
‘Throne!’ Kanturek shouted in alarm. ‘Vollbrecht! Break right! Break right! Break–’
Koch had swerved at the same moment as Kanturek’s warning. There was a huge crunch and Reach of Morpheus tilted onto its side. Armour plating tore. The walls caved in. Taliansky screamed, caught in the compacting interior. Vollbrecht lunged for the hatch. The tank tilted higher. A monstrous claw broke through the armour. Vollbrecht got the hatch open and started to crawl out.
One of the giant walkers had seized the tank. It was crushing the hull with its claw. It shook the Leman Russ like a Grox tearing into prey. The movement hurled Vollbrecht from the tank. He hit the blasted ground hard, snapping his left arm. He staggered up and away from the destruction. The ork flipped the tank over and pounded on the hull, caving it even as the explosions within jetted flames through the splits in the armour.
Flames and explosions everywhere. Disoriented, in shock, Vollbrecht stumbled on. His breath was a harsh echo in his rebreather. The ork Dreadnoughts were smashing the formation to bits. Kanturek had been right. But it was too late for anything. The small walkers clustered around crippled tanks, carrion-feeders. They ripped rents wider. They turned their flamers on the interiors or reached in to bludgeon the crews to pulp. One of the ork-shaped engines seized a cannon with two claws and squeezed at the very moment the gun fired. The front of the tank blew up. The walker waved its claws in joy, brandishing the severed gun like a club.
The ork engines were a mob, and it had stormed the Steel Legion. It overwhelmed with numbers and power. Vollbrecht’s disorientation ceased to matter. There was nowhere to turn. There was nothing to do. Monsters of iron rioted through the regiments. The tanks still fought. The air shook with the concussion of human and greenskin weapons. Ork walkers blew up. The smallest were crushed beneath Leman Russes. And none of the struggles mattered. There were always more walkers. The mob was without end.
Vollbrecht moved through a landscape of flame and embodied violence. Ork and human wreckage surrounded him. Tanks charged their opponents. Monstrous walkers welcomed them with stubbers two metres wide, shrieking energy weapons, and always the giant claws.
Beneath the cacophony of the battle, the rhythm of the Basilisks had continued. Now the rhythm slowed. Gaps opened up. Then it stopped completely. The mobile artillery had no defence against walkers.
Vollbrecht discovered he had drawn his laspistol. He squinted at it. He didn’t know why he held it.
Something huge roared behind him.
He turned, raising the pistol because he must still fight. He fired at a crimson leviathan. It didn’t notice his shots. It didn’t notice him. It marched on, a wall of metal, its head unleashing howls of triumph. The wall loomed over Vollbrecht. It cast him into the night.
5. Mannheim
After the screams, the silence. All communication with the 167th and 203rd Regiments ceased. So did all supporting fire. It took only a few minutes. The Iron Skulls were alone on the field against the orks.
For a short period, the difference was minimal. The ork infantry and armour in the near vicinity of the struggle between gargants and Titans was caught in the crossfire. Anything on the ground was obliterated.
Even so, Mannheim foresaw the end.
‘Yarrick,’ he said. ‘Are you still there?’
‘I am.’
‘The Steel Legion regiments are gone.’
‘I understand.’
‘I will do what honour requires.’
‘I know you will.’
As he spoke, the end drew nearer. The Warhounds reported attacks by massed ranks of smaller walkers. The mobs de
stroyed the Skitarii Rhinos. They joined with the stompas and the gargants, and there were too many foes for the Warhounds. They began to go down.
The wedge formation became untenable. The Legio Metalica’s advance stopped. The gargants came at the Imperials from all sides.
We came this far, Mannheim thought. He turned Steel Hammer in a ponderous circle. Valth and Drammann fired the Hellstorm and the plasma annihilator as fast as they could. The draw on the reactor was fierce. Mannheim gave the annihilator no time to cool. The risk of catastrophic overheating was real. He and the moderati knew there could be no sparing of the weaponry. Perhaps they also knew, as he did, that soon there would be no more risks to consider.
The Hellstorm beam overloaded one gargant’s power field and disintegrated its top half. Two more leaned in to take its place. The tracked monster was close now. It flew banners and savage icons, a barbaric mirror to the glorious pageantry on the peaks of Steel Hammer. The multiple missile platforms echoed the towers of the cathedral. Nemesis, Mannheim thought. I will see you destroyed.
The giant gargant’s missiles flew for the Imperator. A few exploded against other ork machines. Others lit up Steel Hammer’s void shields. Another gargant struck with a limb that had been fashioned into a chainsword twenty metres long. The void shields could do nothing against that weapon. It cut into the armour. Mannheim brought the Imperator around and slammed the mass of its own limbs against the gargant. The blow shattered the blade and hurled the gargant back.
More rockets hit the back of Steel Hammer. So did shells. So did energy beams. The shields collapsed. The damage stabbed deeper and deeper. Mannheim registered the damage reports as background. The Titan’s movements became sluggish. The crew was dying. Flames shot through the corridors. The cathedral had taken so many hits it was a grand ruin, fire and smoke billowing from its broken walls.
The machine-spirit wailed its fury and its agony. It strained against the reins of Mannheim’s control. He held fast. He directed its rage. He made its retaliation count.
Soon there would be an end to all doubt. In the small corner of his mind that observed the struggle with dispassion, Mannheim granted himself the luxury of final questions. He did not ask for peace or absolution. He would be satisfied with the conviction he had been true to his oaths, to the Imperium, and to the Emperor.
Should he have done more to stop von Strab’s madness?
He could have. He could have turned the Legio Metalica against the overlord.
And in so doing, he would have broken his oaths. The oaths had sustained him and shown him his purpose his entire life. There were those who could bring judgement to von Strab within the laws of the Imperium. He would not harm that which he had devoted his existence to preserving.
Yet the doubts remained. So be it. Let them be his punishment. And let the Emperor judge his deeds.
The Father of Mankind would not have long to wait.
Mannheim brought Steel Hammer around to face the supreme gargant once more. It fired a huge energy weapon in the centre of its torso. The beam was a lightning helix of crimson and emerald. It struck the core of the Imperator before the void shields could recharge.
The chatter of tech-priests updating damage ceased. There was a ferocious power surge and Mannheim jerked in the command throne. Blood filled his mouth. It ran from his eyes and ears. The machine-spirit howled. There was a crack, a breach, a loss most vital.
Tocsins sounded. Breathing heavily, Mannheim shut them off.
‘Princeps,’ Valth said. ‘The plasma annihilator…’
‘I know,’ Mannheim rasped. The primary weapons had both shut down, protecting their own systems from the building catastrophe. The reactor had received a mortal blow. It was going into meltdown. The radiation levels throughout the Titan were soaring. He felt his skin begin to burn.
The machine-spirit had gone mad. All coherence was breaking down. Mannheim’s sense of the great body turned into a collection of fragments. There were legs. There were arms. There was a head. They had no relation to one another. He stared through armourglass at his killer. It was a mountain. Its armour was red, the red of blood, of the burning sky, of the pain that wracked his frame. The jaws of his huge skull were open in an eternal idiot grin.
‘Nemesis,’ Mannheim hissed. ‘You die with us.’
His fraying awareness found Steel Hammer’s right leg. He lifted it. He jerked it forward. Sheet lightning tried to split his skull in half. The Imperator took a step. It rocked towards the gargant.
Rocket and energy blasts hit on all sides. More wounds, more fire. They didn’t matter now. Mannheim sought the other leg.
He moved it.
Another step.
Almost there.
Time falling away, his skin reddening, his body failing, all strength turning to ash, flowing away to the Barrens.
He voxed whoever was still alive to hear him. ‘Iron Skulls, these are my final orders. I command you to withdraw, if you can. Live to avenge the Legio Metalica. Live to preserve the Legio Metalica.’
He sounded the battle horn one last time as Steel Hammer toppled against the gargant.
And then, in the midst of the ork triumph, he became the heart of a sun.
1. Yarrick
Lanner and I went alone to the underhive. Helm was right – we might not come out again. The risk was worthwhile. My mission was delicate. It required a light touch, a nuanced sense of the emotional and political currents, and the split-second decision to kill. Each person who accompanied me multiplied the possibility of error. I wanted Lanner, who knew the territory, and he carried a portable vox unit. That was all.
I was searching. I didn’t know who I was looking for, nor where I could find them. I trusted they would find me.
We went deep, to the regions from which hope had long since been banished. There was no true name for the spaces we found. They were far below the foundations of any structure. Biological and industrial effluent formed their rivers. There were tunnels that might have seen maglev trains in the early years of Hades, or they might have been constructed for that purpose but never used. There were the remains of mining pits, the last of their ore extracted many centuries past. The larger caverns had walls and roofs that were mixtures of natural stone and rockcrete. I was in the land of detritus of all kinds. Especially the human form.
‘Been a long time,’ Lanner said.
‘Since you were in the underhive or since you were the comms trooper?’
‘Both.’
‘Nostalgic?’ I asked him.
He growled.
There were eyes on us during my entire journey. A commissar stood out in any civilian environment. The further down we went, the more of notice I became.
Good.
The awareness needed to keep from being ambushed held thoughts of Mannheim’s loss at bay. I understood what had happened. I understood its import. I denied myself the hope that the cataclysm of Titan reactor meltdowns had diminished the orks’ force. Hope was forbidden until Armageddon was liberated. So was despair. Until the triumph, there could only be determination.
We reached a zone of eternal night lit by wavering, scavenged glowstrips and burning torches. We pushed through crowds of the most desperate of Hades’ denizens. In the narrower passages, they pressed together like maggots. They had the pallor of maggots too, where the colour of their flesh showed through the grime and the ritual scarification. We walked until the space opened up. A patchwork metal bridge stretched over a chasm into which sewage fell in a cataract. In the centre of the bridge I brought us to a halt. I rested my hands on my holster and the pommel of my sword. I waited.
It took less than five minutes for the first gang to approach. The bridge traffic thinned to nothing, then, from each end, a group of five men and women walked towards us. They wore crude armour fashioned from scrap metal. They carried axes and cleavers just as
crude, but clearly effective. Their faces looked as if they had been caught in frag grenade explosions, the shrapnel still embedded in their cheeks and forehead after leaving long scars. It was a good illusion. I was sure it impressed many of their enemies and all of their prey. It made me optimistic that I was not wasting my time.
‘Say and do nothing,’ I warned Lanner.
The largest thug had embedded large metal fragments in his chest. He grinned, showing drill bits instead of canines. ‘Trespassing, old man.’ The hardware in his mouth gave him a lisp.
‘I don’t think I am. The Emperor reigns here as he does above, and I go where my duty takes me.’ Before he could follow up with another taunt, I said, ‘We don’t have time for posturing. The orks are coming, and I have business with the gangs. All of them. So you need to prove to me that you’re worth speaking to, or you fetch someone who is.’
The thug snarled and took a step forward.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. I pulled out my bolt pistol, whirled and put a shell through the head of the man who had been creeping up behind me. Then, to make myself clear, I turned back and shot a second thug, one standing just to the right of the leader and looking on with anticipation. The reports of the shots bounced off the walls of the cavern.
In these depths, pushed to the worst excesses merely to survive, humans began to resemble orks. And I understood orks.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘I will repeat myself just this once. Prove you’re worth my while.’
The leader’s eyes had widened, and he had lowered his axe. ‘Name’s Beil. I speak for the Heirs of Grevenberg.’
Grevenberg. The family had been nobility once, or so the legend went. The truth behind its fall was buried as deeply as the criminal who laid claim to the name. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘There is war coming, and you have a role to play.’
He snorted. ‘You think we care what happens above?’
Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon Page 24