by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
If he fell, the orks would know the dismay that Molkis had felt to see Penumbral Spike invaded. They would feel more, for a Space Marine could cage such dire emotion and turn it into anger with which to crush his enemies. The orks would break.
Flamegut’s elites formed up around him and battered back the Obsidian Glaives’ attack. Bayelor vanished somewhere beneath the swarm of greenskin bodies. The Standard of Obstiria almost fell, but was snatched up by the other Obsidian Glaives. One, young and bold, broke free of the ork line and ran right at Warlord Flamegut.
Fulminos roared and redoubled his efforts in the heart of the battle. The battleline heaved back and forth as the orks surged and were pushed away. Molkis reaped a tally with his fist where he could not bring his gun to bear and, where there was room to fire, every shot blasted an ork apart as if his humble bolter were infused with his rage. Where an Obsidian Glaive fell, his battle-brothers avenged him tenfold.
The Glaive battling with Flamegut ducked a slice from the ork and kicked out at the warlord’s leg. Flamegut slumped to one knee and the furnace in his belly flared. A second later the ork vomited a belch of flame at the Glaive, who rolled to the side and sliced out with his power sword.
When Flamegut drew his arm back to land a kill-stroke, he stared dumbly at the stump of his wrist. His severed hand twitched on the rocks beneath it, still holding its cutlass.
The Obsidian Glaive followed up with a thrust to the throat. His power sword punched through muscle and spine, burning away the tough scarred flesh of the ork. The Glaive twisted the blade and the head flopped to one side, held onto the charred ruin of its neck by a strand of skin. The Glaive kicked the ork onto its back and finished the kill with a downward stab through the chest that shredded the ork’s organs with the flash of the discharging power field.
A terrible cry of anguish rose up from the orks. Molkis saw the anger drain from them replaced with horror.
‘Press on!’ yelled Molkis. ‘Drive them off this mountain!’
The Obsidian Glaives surged on, led by their returned heroes. The orks broke and fled but there was nowhere to go. They sought shelter in the smoking wreck of their landing ship as Fulminos led the charge right through their crumbling formation, butchering the greenskins in their hundreds. Molkis followed and crunched them underfoot as they scrambled to escape from him, as if they were smashed beneath the treads of a tank. Molkis’s hearts swelled at the rising stink of orkish blood and the sight of corpses tumbling down the mountain past him.
The Obsidian Glaives advanced up the slope, firing as they went, dispatching the wounded orks with combat blade and chainsword. Fulminos paused by the Glaive who had killed Flamegut, and who was still kneeling exhausted beside the warlord’s corpse.
‘Good kill, young brother,’ said Fulminos. ‘What is your name?’
‘Midnias,’ came the reply.
Over the peak of the Penumbral Spike a new sun rose, a glare of white light that edged the mountain’s hard rocks in silver. Through its light Molkis could make out a distant field, an endless plain with an infinite army arrayed for battle. They were armoured in gold and carried the standards of a thousand Space Marine Chapters. At their head stood the titanic gilded form of the Emperor, his face obscured by the intensity of the light, ready to lead the charge that would win the final battle.
‘Who will follow me?’ called out Fulminos. The other returned heroes had joined him on the upper slope, on the threshold of the light. ‘Brother Molkis! You have earned your place. Come, brother. He promises us a war that will never end. Will you answer his call?’
‘Can I refuse,’ replied Molkis with a smile, ‘when there is a tally to be taken and brothers to humble?’
Molkis walked towards the eternal battlefield. Behind him, barely audible over the trumpets and war cries of the Emperor’s host a single voice struggled to be heard.
‘Remember!’ it shouted. ‘Remember!’
But it was just the last moment of doubt, the final test. Molkis walked off the Penumbral Spike and onto the battlefield at the end of time, to fight the battle that would end all battles.
Scout Desaan picked his way across the carnage of the battlefield. Orks lay dead in heaps, piled up against the battlements and gun housings where they had tumbled in the slaughter. With Flamegut’s death they had broken and run, and the Obsidian Glaives had killed them with the efficiency and swiftness of Space Marines.
Desaan passed Brother Karulak’s sarcophagus. It lay surrounded by crushed ork bodies, its armour plating covered in blood. The lifesign readings read critical – Desaan did not know enough about reading them to tell at a glance if the ancient Space Marine inside was alive or dead.
Twelve Dreadnoughts lay among the ork dead. Fulminos had made it almost to the peak ascent, before toppling at the furthest extent of the Obsidian Glaives’ charge. The other Dreadnoughts had stood as living bastions in the battle until they too had fallen, each having reaped a massive tally of ork dead.
Desaan reached a knot of ork bodies where Chapter Master Midnias stood beside the fallen sarcophagus of Brother Molkis.
‘I am sorry, my lord,’ said Desaan. ’I tried to bring him back, but he did not listen. He did not remember.’
‘None of them did,’ said Midnias. ‘Fulminos spoke to me as if I were a new recruit. Out here, without even the walls of the Spike to protect them, the degradation was faster than we expected.’
‘Does Molkis live?’ asked Desaan.
‘Barely,’ said Midnias. ‘Techmarine Javan can tell us whether he will ever fight again. We must take him back inside. Gather a detail of brothers to move him to the vault. Accompany him.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ said Desaan.
As the Obsidian Glaives began the process of salvaging the fallen Dreadnoughts, Captains Keshuma and Elhalil approached. Their companies had borne the brunt of the fighting on the battlements.
‘Lord Midnias,’ said Elhalil. ‘Your orders?’
Midnias looked across the black mountains towards the horizon.
‘This was a testing of our defences,’ said Midnias. ‘Flamegut was a lesser lord of these greenskins. Their true commander sacrificed him to learn how we fight. They will attack in their full force next. Your orders are to prepare for more.’
The captains followed Midnias’s gaze. There they saw a greater darkness gathering among the shadowed valleys. It fell from the sky and spread across the surface of Obstiria like a disease.
There would always be more orks. There would always be another battle.
The scars made it difficult every time. Chapter Master Midnias had donned his armour on the eves of hundreds of battles, but each time the pain reminded him of everything that had gone before. His back was a lattice of ribboned skin separated by ridges of gnarled scar tissue, and they cried out as if they were newly-made as he buckled the breastplate of his power armour. His shoulder pads chafed the raw flesh on his shoulders, and he felt a shiver of new, cold pain as the armour’s interfaces slithered into the ports in the carapace under his skin.
He opened and closed his hands. It felt like his gauntlets were lined with spikes, for of all the punishments Midnias had endured, the worst had been to his hands.
This punishment, he told himself, we shall also endure.
‘My lord,’ said Scout-Captain Terundel. ‘My outriders bring word of the greenskins on the move. They are heading right for our position.’
Midnias fastened the demi-cloak around his shoulder. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Their warlord could not hold them back forever. The most potent weapon against the ork is the nature of the ork himself.’
‘The first count is seventy thousand,’ continued Terundel. ‘More are landing on the Belishar Flats. Two hundred thousand in number, marching as reinforcements.’
‘Then we will have to see our warlord dead before they arrive,’ said Midnias. ‘Draw in the ou
triders and have them take their places in the line. We will need every gun here.’
‘It will be done,’ said Terundel. ‘This we shall endure.’
‘This we shall endure.’ Midnias placed the Crown of Obstiria on his brow before he put on his helmet. The crown was a simple spiked band that symbolised how Midnias was both the Chapter Master of the Obsidian Glaives and the Planetary Governor of Obstiria. Not that he ruled anything beyond his Chapter – the planet had seen off every attempt to settle it except for the Glaives themselves.
Midnias had chosen the shadow beneath an overhang of rock to spend the time before dawn, praying to the spirits of Guilliman, the Emperor and the ancestors of the Obsidian Glaives. It was not quite grand enough to be considered a cave and had afforded just enough shelter to hide him from the eyes of any orkish fighter craft that might pass overhead. He emerged from the overhang into the bleached irradiated light of Obstiria’s sun.
The knot of rocky ridges and crevasses at the head of Black Gulch was treacherous terrain for anyone but a Space Marine. It was broken and trackless, enough to whittle away an army of normal men who marched across it. But four hundred Obsidian Glaives had set up their battle lines there, with bolters and heavy weapons covering the long dark throat of the gulch.
Black Gulch was a deep furrow in the surface of Obstiria, a long canyon carved by a glacier in ages past before the planet had drifted closer to its sun. An army marching across Obstiria, from the landing grounds on the high plains to the fortress of Penumbral Spike, would inevitably follow the path of the gulch. Its soldiers would drain into the gulch like water trickling down off the mountainsides around it, and when they came to the broken ground at the western end they would find themselves bottled in, the front ranks struggling across the terrain as the rear ranks bunched forwards into a formless scrum.
That was the plan.
Midnias answered the salutes of the Obsidian Glaives on the way to the front line. With the losses at Penumbral Spike, including Captain Seharra, the structure of the Chapter had been compromised and battle-brothers from various companies were set up in fire teams together. Devastator-Captain Keshuma was positioned ahead, lying on his front as he scanned the landscape of the gulch.
‘I can smell them from here,’ said Keshuma.
‘Can you see it?’ asked Midnias.
‘It’s in the heart of them,’ replied Keshuma. ‘It’s got plenty of xenos flesh in front of it. But to these eyes it’s hard to miss.’
Midnias clambered onto the rock beside Keshuma. The captain hadn’t been exaggerating. The radioactive breeze carried on it the stench of alien sweat and blood. It carried the sound of the xenos too, rhythmic chanting and the churning of throaty engines.
Black Gulch was full of orks. The mass of green-skinned bodies stretched from one side of the valley to the other, a kilometre and a half of seething, furious xenos killers. For as far as the gulch ran, winding across the jagged mountain ranges back to the flats, it flowed like a green river. Obstiria’s radiation didn’t seem to affect the orks at all. They were difficult to kill.
Difficult, but definitely not impossible.
Midnias could pick out the foremost bull-orks. The largest and most brutal of their kind, they had shouldered their way to the front to reach the battle first. They wore the colours and symbols of many tribes – a gouged eye, a clenched fist, a rack of horns, several variations on a skull. Once they had probably been at war with one another on whatever world spawned them. Now they were united and fought as one, most on foot, some from the crudely looted and adapted Imperial tanks that ground along in the middle of the horde.
They were firing off their guns in celebration of the battle to come. Most orks sought to kill up close but they loved the noise and devastation of gunfire too, and the more powerful of them sported enormous multi-barrelled cannons that competed in the shows of fire and noise they made.
It was a horde with no discipline or plan, funnelled inevitably down Black Gulch towards the Obsidian Glaives position. It could no more turn back the way it had come than take flight to soar over the mountains.
‘It’s working, so far,’ said Keshuma. ‘We’ll only fight a thousand of them at once instead of a hundred thousand.’
‘Even so,’ said Midnias, ‘this is not a storm we can weather. It must die. That is the only way.’
‘There,’ said Keshuma, pointing.
Midnias saw it. It towered over the horde, wearing armour that looked like it had been nailed onto its frame: an ork of immense size, its face a mass of scars and its bare bloody fists wrapped with spiked chains. Its brutal skull was crowned with horns, but Midnias could not tell if they were a natural growth or if they, too, had been bolted onto the ork’s skeleton. Its armour was festooned with captured prizes. Whole corpses of Imperial Navy crewmen hung from wooden gibbets fixed to its shoulders. Dozens of skulls rattled on its chest. It was a walking monument to the hatefulness and fury of the ork.
Grukk. The greenskins called it Grukk. It was the lord of an army that had come to the Sanctus Reach to despoil everything in its way, an army that had to go through the Obsidian Glaives first.
But it was also the horde’s greatest weakness. Grukk’s underling, Flamegut, had fallen to Midnias at Penumbral Spike, and the orks besieging the fortress had broken. With Grukk’s death this horde, too, would fall apart. If Obstiria was to stand, Grukk had to die, and again it would be Midnias who killed it.
‘Lord Midnias! Darkest Hour here.’ Midnias recognised the voice of Captain Draegan of the Second Company, and the vox-echoes that told him the message was coming from the void far above. ‘We are in position in low orbit. Ready to deploy at your mark.’
Midnias glanced upwards. Against the blue-white sky he could make out a dark splinter. ‘Then stand by,’ said Midnias. He switched vox-nets. ‘Chosen brethren! To me! The battle is too long awaited.’
The Obsidian Glaives that Midnias had chosen joined him at the front. One of them buckled a jump pack onto Midnias’s back. They included members of Squads Benilar, Voken and Gaerdigan, assault units whose sergeants had been lost in the fighting at Penumbral Spike. It was a tradition among many Chapters for battle-brothers who had lost their leaders to form the forlorn hope, the first assault through the breach. Midnias was their squad leader now.
‘Ready?’ asked Midnias.
The assembled Obsidian Glaives saluted. There were eighteen of them in the markings of three different companies. None of them said anything. There was no need to.
‘Your objective is the alien known as Grukk,’ said Midnias. ‘With its death, the greenskins fall. Have faith that your brethren will be at your side, but fight as if you fight alone. Keshuma, cover us! Elhalil, ready the charge! Chosen brethren, with me!’
Midnias stepped forwards. Below, the greenskins let up a cry to see the first Obsidian Glaive standing in their way. They were close enough for Midnias to see the blood-flecked anger in their eyes.
Midnias leapt off the edge. He activated the jets of his jump pack and his fall was arrested, the momentum switched forward. He hurtled down Black Gulch over the heads of the foremost greenskins. Eighteen Obsidian Glaives were right behind him, the sound of their jump packs like the air itself being torn apart.
The jump pack would take him far, but not all the way to Grukk. Midnias and his brethren would come down in the middle of the horde. Before Grukk was to fall, there were a great many greenskins to kill.
It could be strange, the thoughts that came to a mind in the most extreme of circumstances. Even with the sleep-taught discipline of a Space Marine, even with the experience of a Chapter Master, Midnias still had a part of him that was very much human.
The heat of the jump pack jets behind him was like a slab of hot metal against his back, very much like that of a cramped, stifling cell in the belly of a spacecraft. The brig was next to one of the reactor housings to keep
it swelteringly hot. The prisoners kept there would sweat out all their defiance, so when it came to interrogation and sentencing they would admit to any evil in exchange for a glass of water.
It was Midnias’s first memory. Some Space Marines retained nothing at all of their lives before their recruitment, as sleep-doctrination tended to force out previous memories to be replaced with battle-lore and tracts of the Codex Astartes. Midnias remembered the cell where he had been imprisoned, the prayers of admonition and penance inscribed on the steel walls and the hourly sermons from the brig chaplain. He remembered the manacles on his wrists, ankles and throat.
His name had not been Midnias then. It did not matter what it was.
A dark shape had stood in front of the cell door. Midnias was amazed at its size. It seemed too big to fit into the cell block corridor. It wore massive glossy black armour trimmed with white, the image of crossed swords on one shoulder pad. Its helmet had a faceplate in the shape of a skull. The sockets were set with green lenses and the teeth were picked out in silver. It wore a black half-cloak and around its waist were buckled the implements of a priest – books, an hourglass, prayer beads and ritual silver knives.
‘You are punished,’ said the armoured giant. It had a low, metallic grind of a voice.
Midnias looked up at the apparition, but there was no expression to read from the skull. Perhaps this was some strange shipboard tradition. Perhaps this was his executioner, dressed up like a horror from a child’s cautionary tale. Whatever it was, answering it could hardly put him in any worse a spot.
‘Executed,’ Midnias said. His throat was raw and hoarse.
‘Are you punished enough?’
Midnias smiled. Cracked lips pulled back over broken teeth. ‘For what I have done?’ he said. ‘No.’
‘What if you could be punished?’ said the giant. ‘Not killed here, but to live an entire life of punishment. Not pain, for pain can be adapted to and ignored, but a punishment of service that will never end. Even at your death it will not be finished. A true punishment as befits your crime against the Imperium of Man. What would your answer be?’