Hammer and Bolter: Issue Twenty-Six

by Christian Dunn

  ‘Fire control has been hit! Can’t raise fire control!’

  ‘Last macro-cannon has gone silent!’

  ‘Delta battery reports two plasma batteries have overheated!’

  Bodras turned the jug upside down, draining the last few drops from the bottom. He tossed the empty vessel aside, watching as the inertia dampener caught it and smashed it against the bulkhead.

  ‘Report to Castellax,’ the captain said, his voice cold as he watched the rok rotate into position. ‘Tell them we’ve occupied the orks as long as we can.’

  Bodras watched as a brilliant glow gathered in the mouth of the rok’s oversized cannon.

  ‘Tell our dread masters they can expect some company real soon,’ Bodras spat. He glanced down at his elegant jacket. It was such a shame that so fine a garment was going to be ruined.

  Mummified husks of humanity, bound in sinews of steel and garbed in mantles of iron, mouths stretched wide in frozen screams, the Eternal Choir loomed from the vaulted heights, incense dripping from their desiccated chests, madness crawling in their shrivelled eyes. Each servitor was bolted fast to the face of a curved pillar, their broken arms wrapped about the obverse side. A low chant hissed from the throats of the automatons, a sibilance that somehow melded the harmony of song to the howling of beasts.

  The monstrous chant swept across the grim chamber below. Promethium lamps cast an infernal glow, sending weird shadows slithering about the pillars and dancing along the heavily adorned walls. Bas relief battles raged anew as the play of crimson light and black shadow swept across them, once more igniting the ancient campaigns of Sebastus IV and Olympia. Power-armoured giants contested bloodied battlegrounds, their gilded bolters and chainswords glistening with reflected light. Stone Titans rained destruction upon screaming masses of humanity, thorny towers bristling with armaments wrought carnage upon Space Marines of the Imperial Fists Legion while gloating killers adorned in the heraldry of the Iron Warriors visited doom upon those striving to escape the trap.

  Everywhere in the frescoes, one terrifying visage was repeated. The glowering countenance of an Iron Warrior encased in baroque Terminator armour, wielding a storm bolter and a power claw encrusted with shining rubies. Half the Space Marine’s face was flesh, the rest was nought save a snarling skull of metal. Wherever the hulking warrior appeared, there the enemy lay heaped and torn about his feet. Always there was a sense of malignance and power in his piercing stare.

  Seated in a throne of pure diamond, clear as ice and strong as adamantium, its legs shaped into clawed feet and its back carved into folded wings, the half-faced monster from the wall cast a steely gaze across the gloom. The flesh of his face was puckered and raw, scarred with hideous burns and the corrosive caress of things beyond human imagining. The metal of his exposed skull bristled with cables and power feeds, a nest of synthetic serpents that coiled about the Iron Warrior’s neck before sinking into sockets scattered across the bulky armour he wore. Even in rest, safe within the halls of the Iron Bastion, mightiest fortress-keep on Castellax, Warsmith Andraaz kept himself locked inside his ancient suit of Terminator armour. It was whispered that his body hadn’t stirred from the plasteel and ceramite shell in five millennia.

  To either side of the throne towered the hulk of another Space Marine encased in Terminator armour, a member of the elite Rending Guard. Bodyguard to the Warsmith, the Terminators were veterans of countless campaigns, their armour studded with battle honours and draped in trophies torn from the bodies of their conquests. When the Terminators committed themselves to combat, it was only on the express command of Andraaz. They recognised no other authority short of Perturabo himself.

  The Warsmith stretched out his hand, closing the armoured gauntlet into a fist and smashed it down against the immense table of obsidian which dominated the centre of the chamber. The crazed network of glowing wires and relays streaming through the semi-transparent rock blinked as the impact sent a tremor through the table.

  ‘Enough,’ Andraaz growled, his voice like a metallic scratch. The word echoed through a suddenly silent room, even the chanting of the servitors retreating before the monster’s anger.

  Seated about the obsidian table, a half-dozen armoured giants shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. Masters of life and death, gods of destruction and doom to the millions of slaves entombed upon Castellax, the Iron Warriors felt their hearts quicken as Andraaz focused his ire upon them.

  ‘It does not matter how the filthy xenos infiltrated the system,’ Andraaz hissed, turning the red lens of his synthetic eye upon the man seated to his right.

  Broad of build, massive of frame, Captain Morax, Skylord of Castellax, glared spitefully at his opposite across the table. Morax ran a jewelled glove through the stubble of hair covering his scalp, wiping away the beads of perspiration gathering there. ‘Honoured Warsmith,’ Morax said, sucking at the moist fingers of his glove, ‘I was merely observing that if control of the fleet had been shared with my administration, then these intruders would have been dealt with much sooner.’ A trace of a smile curled the Skylord’s flaccid cheeks as he watched his rival across the table react to his taunt.

  ‘That is a dangerous insinuation, Sky-rat,’ the other Iron Warrior spat. Admiral Nostraz was a towering man whose face was, if anything, even more scarred than that of Andraaz, though he hadn’t augmented any of his mutilations with cybernetic implants. ‘The raider fleets stand as ready for action as they ever have.’ His eyes darkened and his voice dripped with menace. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer we send half our ships out every time we hear a noise or one of our tankers is overdue?’

  ‘It is a sad thing to see timidity masquerading as strategy,’ Morax said, grinning. Nostraz’s eyes narrowed into murderous slits and he lurched up from his chair.

  ‘The Warsmith said there was to be an end to this squabbling!’ roared the Iron Warrior seated to the left of Andraaz. Captain Gamgin was a vicious specimen of savagery, one arm a mass of gears and cables bound in plasteel plate and armaplas fibres, one leg given over to a grumbling bundle of machinery, his lower jaw a set of piston-driven steel fangs. The Ruinous Powers had been quite attentive to Gamgin over the millennia, corrupting his body with fierce mutations. Each time the warp corruption settled into his flesh, a bit more of Gamgin had been cut away and replaced by metal. The millions of conscript soldiers Gamgin maintained on Castellax held that the first part of him that had been changed to steel was his heart. Only one purpose beat there now: complete and merciless loyalty to Andraaz.

  Both Nostraz and Morax shifted their hateful gaze from one another to Gamgin. As much as the two rivals might hate each other, their mutual contempt for Gamgin and envy at his favour with the Warsmith gave them common cause. At the slightest nod from Morax, Nostraz pointed at the shifting pattern of lights displayed above the surface of the obsidian table. It was a three-dimensional star-map of the Castellax system, not a true hologram but rather a projection of the table’s weird elements. As Nostraz pointed, the table reacted, shifting and magnifying one portion of the starfield while allowing the rest of the map to recede.

  ‘The orks struck from the fringe of the system, in the vicinity of Impex V. The high proportion of asteroids in that sector has always been a detriment to our sensors.’ The admiral gestured and brought the image of an old Imperial frigate into view. ‘Our initial response, a single system patrol sentry, was overwhelmed by the intruders. They have since penetrated the static defences surrounding the ice-moon and its neighbours. Mostly through the crude callousness of their assaults. They think nothing of driving their smaller ships straight into the waiting guns of a satellite and obliterating the position with the debris of their own comrades.’ At the snap of his fingers a dozen more ships appeared on the map, each image slowly collapsing into a menagerie of lights gradually streaming towards Impex V. ‘The second wave consists of five Infidel-class raiders and seven system-defence destroyers. They will engage the orks. After whetting the aliens’ appetite for ba
ttle, the raiders will withdraw, using their greater speed to outdistance the destroyers. They will maintain a presence just beyond the enemy guns while the orks are occupied with the destroyers. With the greenskins busy, the raiders will use their macro-cannon to pick them off from afar.’

  ‘And if the xenos have weaponry able to match the range of the macro-cannons? Or if the orks have infiltrated in numbers capable of focusing on both elements of your fleet?’ The questions came from a scowling man, his richly adorned armour studded with battle honours and the leathery trophies of past conquests. Over-Captain Vallax, his face split by the jagged scar of a World Eater’s chainaxe, his long hair shifting in hue as his emotions darkened, leaned over the obsidian table. The Over-Captain’s gauntlet touched a line of ships further towards the core of the system.

  ‘I see these possibilities have already occurred to you,’ Vallax mused. As he touched the lights, each was revealed as another vessel in the Castellax fleet. In all, there were fifty-nine ships in the second line Nostraz had established.

  The admiral nodded his head. ‘The second wave has a two-fold purpose. The first is to engage the xenos, but more importantly they are to gauge their numbers and deployment.’

  ‘Orks don’t have any rational deployment,’ scoffed the ghoulish Skintaker Algol, Slavemaster of Castellax. The Iron Warrior’s armour was lost beneath the hideous folds of the cloak he wore, a garment fashioned from human skin flayed from slaves. The stink of blood still clung to the freshest patches of Algol’s vestment. When the aroma wore off, he would stalk back into the strip mines in search of fresher replacements.

  ‘Rational or not, we need to know where they are,’ Morax snapped back. ‘Our sensors can’t give us proper intelligence for that sector, and there is too much psychic disturbance in the area for the Navigators on our ships to provide us with anything useful.’

  Captain Rhodaan stood and faced the Skylord. ‘What about using the Speaker?’ he suggested. Morax ran his glove across his scalp again, hesitating to answer the question.

  When the question was answered, it was Warsmith Andraaz who spoke. ‘The Speaker may be needed for other duties.’

  A dull, mechanical rasp crackled from the end of the table. Alone among those gathered in the war room, the speaker wasn’t an Iron Warrior, but rather a withered shell of humanity. Pale, corpse-like flesh fused to a mechanical armature, its gaping mouth housing the meshwork of a vox-caster, the servitor was acting as the proxy for the only member of Castellax’s hierarchy absent from the chamber. When it spoke, however, all within the room knew they heard the voice of Fabricator Oriax.

  ‘To focus the Speaker’s thoughts upon such a task would require a drastic change to the chemical mixture in its bath. To safely perform such a procedure would take days. To unsafely perform such a procedure might kill it. Or, even worse, return it to awareness.’

  There was no emotion on the corpse-face of the servitor as it transmitted Oriax’s words, but a flicker of uneasiness crossed the countenance of each Iron Warrior who heard them. Veterans of thousands of wars, victorious conquerors of hundreds of worlds, they knew better than to tamper with an alpha-grade psyker, especially after what they had done to him.

  ‘Using the Speaker is out of the question,’ Andraaz declared. ‘We will proceed with Admiral Nostraz’s plan.’

  Three scarred and battered Infidel-class raiders raced across the stellar emptiness. Behind them, the ships abandoned wounded comrades and slower support vessels, consigning each to the doubtful mercies of the orks. Survival, not loyalty, was the law of the moment. Flee now, or remain forever with the dead.

  From the bridge of the Requiem, Arch-Commander Vortsk watched as the survivors drew steadily closer to the defensive line his fleet had established. The old pirate’s brow knitted with dismay, disturbing the nest of cables implanted into his forehead that hardwired his mind with the cogitators of his battleship. He could feel his vessel’s agitation pulsing through the wires, like a hound smelling blood. The Requiem was an old hand at slaughter, having perpetrated thousands of atrocities in her time, both for and against the decaying Imperium. Since defecting after the Badab War, the battleship’s lust for violence had only grown. Vortsk sometimes wondered if her time in the Eye of Terror had endowed his ship with a consciousness of her own.

  ‘Patience,’ Vortsk whispered, his fingers tapping against the command baton resting in his lap. ‘You shall glut your hunger soon enough, my sweet.’

  The Arch-Commander forced the ship’s agitation into his subconscious and focused his attention upon the pict screens scattered about his control-nest. The armoured, tomb-like pod was ringed with flickering displays, cycling through views of every deck on the battleship. Vortsk ignored these and the thousands of relays transmitting views of the Requiem’s exterior hull. What interested him were the long-range observium reports, the transmissions from the fleeing raiders and the vox-chatter of the on-coming enemy.

  Together, the data created a fearsome picture. The raiders and their destroyer escorts had encountered a far bigger mass of orks than the doomed Vulture had reported. The rok was still active, but now it served as just another warship in an armada that dwarfed the combined might of the entire Castellax fleet. If the data from the raiders was to be trusted, the aliens had infiltrated the system with three hundred vessels of destroyer-size or greater, including two monstrosities boasting a mass approaching that of an Oberon-class battleship.

  There were other ork vessels operating deep in the system. An alien species as wild and vicious as the orks rarely maintained focus and cohesion, and the invaders of Castellax were no different. Small splinters of the armada were attacking the remote mining outposts scattered through the planetoids at the fringe of the system, while a hulking kill kroozer had been closing upon the Impex V station when the last message was transmitted from the ice-moon.

  Vortsk scowled as he examined the data. The odds were against the human fleet, but he knew there was more to securing victory than simple numerical advantage. The human mind was organised, analytical and calculating. That of the ork was simple barbarous instinct, with no greater thought than closing with an enemy and giving immediate battle.

  The Arch-Commander studied the pict screens displaying the proximity of the ork forces. While some of the armada had lingered behind to finish off the abandoned destroyers and crippled raiders, a small number of ships were pursuing the three raiders that had escaped. Vortsk licked his lips as he saw that among the pursuers was one of the big battleship analogues. The ork armada as a whole might outnumber the human fleet, but in the present circumstance, the advantage belonged to Vortsk. There were only a half-dozen escorts with the ork battleship, none of them larger than a frigate. Even allowing for the ork propensity to pile ridiculous amounts of armament onto their ships, the human battle line had them outgunned twenty to one.

  ‘Raise the captains of the Pride and the Damnation,’ Vortsk said, hissing into the vox-sceptre which would convey his order to the bridge surrounding his command-crypt.

  ‘What about the Vindictive?’ a sub-altern’s question crackled back. Vortsk smiled as he glanced again at the positions of the approaching ships.

  ‘Maintain strict silence as regards the Vindictive,’ Vortsk said. ‘It is best that her captain doesn’t know our plans.’

  Arch-Commander Vortsk felt a shiver of excitement crackle down his steel spine as he watched the pict screens. The raiders and their pursuers had only just drawn within range of the battle line’s guns. Instead of losing momentum, the ork pursuers had picked up speed. Vortsk smiled as he imagined the desperate efforts the aliens had made to force this last burst from their ships. They were so eager to sate their appetite for battle that they were charging headlong into destruction.

  Only one thing more was needed to complete the trap and, by prearranged conspiracy, the Pride and Damnation provided what Vortsk required. As soon as the three raiders were within range of the fleet’s heavy guns, the Pride and Damnation fir
ed upon the Vindictive. The close-range barrage tore through the raider’s void shields, smashing into her engines and leaving her a cripple.

  Predictably, as her betrayers raced away and left her behind them, the Vindictive blasted away at them with the few guns she could bring to bear in such an unexpected emergency. Her fire was ineffectual as far as punishing her betrayers, but it did serve the purpose Vortsk needed it to. It reminded the pursuing orks that, though crippled, the Vindictive was still very much alive.

  Vortsk’s breathing became shallow, his mind feeling the eagerness of his ship as he watched the drama playing out upon the pict screen. The Vindictive abandoned her vengeful fusillade and turned her guns back upon the approaching orks, unleashing a desperate and futile barrage into the grotesque battleship. The crackle of energy shields intercepted most of the raider’s fire, what little penetrated did nothing more than scratch the battleship’s armoured hull.

  The frantic efforts of the Vindictive to save herself did ensure she had the orks’ full and undivided attention. The battleship and her escorts closed upon her like a pack of wolves. Vortsk grinned, lifting the vox-sceptre to his trembling mouth. ‘Arch-Commander Vortsk to all ships,’ he said. ‘The orks are engaging the Vindictive. When they close to three kilometres of her, open fire. All batteries are to concentrate upon the battleship designated as Target Omega.’

  Dim memories of his pampered childhood flashed through Vortsk’s mind as he waited for the aliens to close the distance. He remembered waiting impatiently for his father, a noble of Decima X’s ruling cadre, to bring home the traditional grox-hide cassock each St. Julian’s day. The same unbearable eagerness gripped him now. He could almost hear the Requiem growling in expectation.

  ‘Unleash hell!’ Vortsk hissed into the vox-sceptre as the orks finally came within range. From every ship in the fleet, a withering barrage of macro-cannon, lances, plasma batteries and lasers slammed into Target Omega. The ork battleship seemed to glow like a tiny sun as its shields struggled against the awesome violence. Two of its escorts, whether by accident or design, diverted into the path of the barrage and were almost instantly gutted by the concentrated fire.