by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
‘No,’ Ismail said, turning back. ‘But I can try.’
‘That is all I ask, my friend.’
Ismail made a noise; it was something like a cross between a leopard’s growl and a bolter going off. Mazarin realised that the warrior had laughed. Before he could comment, a great cry went up and orks surged across the broken ground below, charging towards the emplacement. ‘Best you get down below, inquisitor,’ Ismail said.
‘Yes, quite,’ Mazarin said. An ork crested the emplacement, and Ismail twisted around, punching its head off of its shoulders. ‘Come, Mamluc-9. Let us see to the next line of defence, shall we?’
Mazarin made his way back down, followed by Mamluc-9. As he walked, he said, ‘Olympia informs me that we have pinpointed her location. You know what to do?’
Mamluc-9 nodded, and patted his shotgun affectionately. Mazarin stopped and turned. He reached out and clasped the other man on the shoulder. ‘As soon as the battle commences, go. We will meet you at the lift platform, when you have signalled that you have her. Do not fail me, my friend. Much counts on your success.’
Mamluc-9 said nothing, and Mazarin hadn’t expected him to do so. He never did. Mazarin turned as he heard Ismail’s autogun roar. The orks were on top of the emplacement, propelled by eagerness more than strategy. One appeared at the top of the steps. Mamluc-9 spun and the shotgun belched. The ork pitched backwards. Mazarin continued down. ‘Olympia, Harks, we will soon be having guests,’ he said, extending his arms. ‘Ready yourselves for war, my soldiers.’
‘We’re always ready,’ Harks spat. ‘My mind is a machine, and it’s always in overdrive,’ he continued, tapping the spot between his eyes. ‘A finely tuned meat-engine of mass destruction, devised by chance and guided by the grace of the Emperor. I can burn armies and ignite a planet’s atmosphere. I am built for war. We all are,’ he continued, more softly. ‘You – your kind – saw to that. We are your weapons, just like these poor fools.’ He gestured about him, to the soldiers of Hive Jensen, who were falling back around them to the second line of defences as the orks washed over the emplacement. Mazarin joined his retinue as the emplacement became a scene of carnage. There were orks everywhere now. Ismail hadn’t been able to hold back the tide so much as he had forced it to go around him.
‘Your point?’ Mazarin said. He watched as Ismail led the surviving defenders in a fighting withdrawal. The Tallarn was an old hand at fighting orks, and he did so with economy, never allowing himself to be drawn into close-quarters combat. He kept the orks at bay with precise bursts of autogun fire as he backed down the steps.
‘No point,’ Harks said, baring his black teeth. He pointed at the servo-skulls. ‘Your eyes and voice are outside of your body, maybe your conscience is too, eh?’
‘If I had one, it wouldn’t be you,’ Mazarin rasped. The eagle mask tilted, and the optic-skull moved closer to Harks, who flinched back from it. ‘Now hush. Olympia is about to sing.’ He motioned with his cane in a grandiose fashion, and Olympia gave a courtly bow before she turned and strode through the crowd of retreating soldiers. She began to pick up speed as the first orks spilled past Ismail’s bulk and reached the courtyard.
As she ran, Olympia swept back her coat, revealing the second set of arms folded tight against her belly. The secondary arms unfolded, and the gleaming metal hands sought the hilts of the swords sheathed on her hips, even as the pale fingers of her real hands drew the pair of laspistols holstered under her coat. Then, with a strange, piercing shriek, Olympia bounded forward, moving with inhuman speed.
She had been born for this, in a way. Or rather, reborn. She had risen through the ranks of the skitarii, shedding flesh and weakness to become something other, something deadly. The blades in her lesser hands hummed with force as they cleaved through green flesh and bone, and her laspistols hissed as she danced through the orks, singing her killing song. Her weird caterwaul caused orks to stumble and fall, retching. The effects of the sonic pulse transmitter built into her larynx were different for different species, and Mazarin noted the reactions of the orks with interest.
‘Beautiful,’ he rasped, to no one in particular. An ork charged towards him, perhaps thinking him easy prey. He sighed and stepped aside, drawing the hidden blade from his cane as he did so. The brute stumbled and whirled, impaling itself on Mazarin’s sword cane. ‘You, on the other hand…’ he said. The ork’s eyes bugged out, and it yowled. Mazarin thumbed the switch on the blade’s hilt, activating the weapon’s power cell. Energy ripped through the creature, burning it from inside out. What was left of it sloughed off of the blade and Mazarin sniffed in distaste.
‘It isn’t often you bestir yourself, old man,’ Harks said. Energy crackled about him, crawling from his pores and curling around his limbs. He flicked a finger, and an ork became a howling torch. ‘The hour must truly be desperate.’
‘Hush, Harks. We all play our part. Speaking of which… where is he?’
‘Already gone, the sneak,’ Harks said. ‘Following orders like a good tool.’
‘Soldier, Harks. He is a soldier. We are all soldiers.’
‘Whether we want to be or not. I wonder which it was, in his case.’ Harks grinned mirthlessly, and lightning crawled across the black surface of his teeth. ‘I–’
Whatever he’d been about to say was lost in the rumbling destruction that consumed a section of the bastion. Chunks of rockcrete and twisted lengths of smoking metal hurtled across the battlefield. Harks gestured hurriedly, and the storm of debris struck the coruscating shield of protective warp energy which had enveloped him and Mazarin. ‘What in the name of the Emperor was that?’ Harks snarled, as he strained to protect them.
‘Offhand, I’d say it’s what the rest of the orks were waiting for,’ Mazarin said.
The emplacement had been ruptured, not by artillery fire or explosives, but by something far more deadly. Harks’s eyes widened as the brute shape capered through the smoky gap, muscles swelling with deadly power and a sickly green energy bleeding from its pores. It was bigger than any of the orks that flooded through the breach around it, as if it were drawing strength and mass from its surroundings. The ork’s eyes were fiery orbs, and a murky froth spilled from the sides of its mouth as it stamped and gibbered. It lurched forward and vomited a searing burst of green fire, which incinerated a number of unlucky soldiers, reducing them to greasy char in moments.
Mazarin looked at Harks. ‘Well? Are you waiting for an engraved invitation, perhaps?’
‘You can’t be serious,’ Harks protested.
‘I didn’t bring you for your scintillating wit, Harks. Now, go thought-murder that alien freak for me like a good little sanctioned abomination.’ Mazarin lifted his blade, and let the tip drift casually towards the psyker’s throat.
Harks spat at his feet, but turned to face the approaching ork psyker. ‘I hate you, old man,’ he said, as he started forward.
‘The feeling is mutual, I assure you,’ Mazarin called after him.
The air between the two psykers began to vibrate as they approached one another. Lightning reached out and crackled between them. The ork bellowed and nearby fires seemed to swell and grow in strength. Harks cursed and the fires crackled. An ork raised a weapon, and the ork psyker reached out with a flabby paw and crushed the over-eager warrior’s head.
Then, with a sound like thunder, the ork psyker turned and unleashed a howling wave of green energy, which burned the air and turned the rockcrete to slag where it passed. Harks thrust out his hands and caught hold of the energy as if it were a serpent. It crawled up his arms and lashed out at his skinny form, opening a wound in his side which vented superheated blood as a red mist. Harks screamed and the energy he held exploded back towards the ork, tearing great gouges in its rubbery flesh. It staggered and threw itself forward, trailed by lighting. Harks did not go to meet it, instead raising his hands, palms up. As if at some unspoken command, the
shattered chunks of rubble strewn all around rose into the air.
The ork stomped a warty foot, and the ground cracked and split. Harks stumbled, and then threw out his arms, unleashing a barrage of debris. The ork roared as chunks of rock and metal pierced its already wounded flesh, ripping and burrowing into it. Blood splattered the ground as it forced itself forward, lightning gathering in its hands. Harks gritted his teeth, and redoubled his efforts. The ork’s body swelled, and across the battlefield, the heads of its fellow xenos began to pop as whatever power it was channelling overcame them. Mazarin had seen similar occurrences before, and he knew that Harks wouldn’t survive what was coming.
‘Master Ismail, if you would,’ he murmured, trusting the vox-signal to carry his words to the warrior’s ear. Ismail’s autogun cracked once, and a crater opened in the side of the ork’s skull. Green smoke boiled out of the rupture, and the ork was spun about by the force of the shot. A second round took it between the eyes, and, with a sigh like a deflating bladder of air, it toppled backwards, the power it had been drawing into itself spilling out and away harmlessly. The Tallarn stepped up beside Mazarin. ‘Thank you,’ Mazarin said.
Harks looked down at the dead alien, and placed a hand to the wound in his side. He looked at Mazarin. ‘Can we go now?’ he asked wearily.
Hab-Ring Deucalion, Hive Jensen
Mamluc-9 moved swiftly across the swaying gantry towards the hab-unit, shotgun at shoulder height. As the first ork burst out of the gloom of the corridor beyond, he fired. The ork was knocked back, but not down. Mamluc-9 fired again, and the ork fell, missing most of its skull. He paused at the edge of the entry-hatch, considering. Then he unclipped a grenade, activated it, and sent it bouncing into the compartment beyond. He huddled away from the blast, and the gantry shivered as the grenade went off.
He pushed himself away from the wall and swung into the compartment, the sensors built into his helmet compensating for the smoke that now filled the area. An ork, its flesh torn by shrapnel and its crude combat vest aflame, rushed towards him blindly, ruined jaws working soundlessly. He avoided the rush and pivoted, driving the reinforced stock of his shotgun into the back of the brute’s head. Alien bone, softened by the heat, crumpled, and the ork pitched forward. Mamluc-9 whirled around, narrowly escaping a blow that would have done the same to him, and fired, taking the second ork in the gut.
It stumbled back, eyes wild with shock, and then lurched forward, roaring. It swung its crude blade down and Mamluc-9 caught its blow on the length of his shotgun. The tableau held for a moment, man and ork straining against one another, until the former snatched his knife from its sheath and drove it point-first up through the ork’s jaw and into its brain. Even then, it took several moments for the brute to realise that it was dead.
Mamluc-9 did not remember who he was or what he had been, before he had put on the mask. But he knew how to kill. He had killed xenos of every type and species. He had killed them with explosives, guns, knives, sharp sticks and, in one case, a decorative paperweight shaped like the Imperial seal.
The owner of the hab-unit had not been so skilled, however. The man was dead, torn apart by the bite of savage blades, his blood decorating the floor and walls. An autopistol lay near a lopped-off hand, unfired.
There were orks everywhere in the hab-ring now, looting and killing. The area would be abandoned entirely soon. His helmet’s HUD showed the positions of his companions as the emplacement was slowly overwhelmed. His skin prickled as he felt the aetheric chill of Harks’s powers being unleashed. There was a rumble that came from no explosion, and he shook his head. He didn’t have much time. He checked the tracking device hooked to his belt, and looked around. He heard a soft sound, like an animal’s whimper.
Ah, there she was.
The one they had braved the horrors of a planetary funeral pyre to find. The whys and wherefores of the mission escaped him, as so much did the longer he wore the mask. He didn’t care; the mask saw to that as well. All that mattered was the mission.
He moved quickly towards the sound. When he tore open the closet, the woman screamed, and moved to shield her child. It wouldn’t have taken long for the orks to find them as they ransacked the house. The girl was young, barely more than a toddler. She stared at him over her mother’s shoulder, displaying no fear, only curiosity.
Mamluc-9 considered her for a long moment. Then he held out his hand.
Shyly, the girl took it.
Hab-Ring Deucalion, Exitus Node, Hive Jensen
Ismail saw them first.
‘He has succeeded,’ the Tallarn said.
‘Ah, and not a moment too soon,’ Mazarin said as he clapped his hands together. Through the eyes of his servo-skull, he saw the broad shape of Mamluc-9 hurrying across the bridge, a woman beside him, a child clutched in her arms.
‘It’s them,’ Harks wheezed, clutching the wound that was his souvenir from his battle with the ork psyker. ‘The woman, I mean. I can hear it in her head.’ Mazarin glanced at him. He had dealt with the creature efficiently enough, but he looked as if he was on his last legs. Mazarin hoped he would survive. It was difficult to find a battlefield-capable primaris psyker not already attached to a military command.
Harks stiffened. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘There’s something…’
‘The rail,’ Ismail said, lifting his gun. Mazarin saw the first ork a moment later. Where they’d come from he couldn’t say, but he recognised what they were easily enough. There were thousands of them loose in the lower levels of the hive. Wrapped in ash-stained rags and wearing crude fatigues, the ork commandos hauled themselves onto the sky-path with howls of excitement.
Mamluc-9 noticed them a half-second after Harks, but by then, it was too late. The orks were on them in an instant, hurling themselves over the sides of the bridge, ragged cloaks flapping. Mamluc-9 spun, shoving the woman aside. A blade sank into his chest, ripping through his armour as if it were paper. His shotgun roared and an ork was flung back.
Mamluc-9 stumbled, and Mazarin almost cried out, before he remembered himself. ‘Go,’ he croaked. Even as the word echoed out of the vox-caster, Ismail and Olympia were in motion. The Tallarn drew his blade as he ran and removed the head from one of the orks as he slid past. Olympia bisected another, carving the alien into bloody chunks with her blades. The last two beasts flung themselves at their enemies with gleeful howls, and were summarily dispatched for their efforts.
The woman was screaming, clutching the child, her cries spiralling into the smoky air to join the cacophony rising from below. ‘Silence her,’ Mazarin hissed. Olympia jabbed the woman and the girl with syringes held in her artificial hands. The solution inside would put them to sleep, and had been prepared for just such an occasion.
Mazarin knelt and, with steady hands, unhooked his servant’s mask. The man was already dead, and had been from the moment the ork blade severed his spine. Mazarin stared down at the pale, wrinkled ruin of the face, trying to recall who the man had been before he’d become Mamluc-9. At last, Mazarin gave up and allowed Harks to help him to his feet. He cradled the mask to his chest as gently as Ismail held the child. ‘Satisfied, old man?’ Harks said, softly.
‘Not yet. Not until we’ve left this place far behind. Come, the shuttle awaits,’ Mazarin said, stalking towards the lift, the mask held tight. Ismail bent so that Olympia could lay the woman over his shoulder, and then they followed him towards the pneumatic lift which would carry them back to the uppermost levels of the hive. There was only one still working on this level – the others had been shattered by the heat, or had been caught in explosions, or had simply stopped working. Those, he saw, were caught between the hab-rings, and most were full of soldiers trying to head down to the fighting or civilians seeking escape. They would remain where they were, until the fire reached them or the orks did.
The pneumatic lift climbed the spine of the hive, towards the skyport. Below, th
e lower rings of the hive were being consumed in fire and war. Smoke and ash drifted upwards, caught by the still-functioning oxygen recyclers mounted in the upper reaches of the outer shell. There was a crashing roar as a section of one of the lower rings gave way and collapsed in a cloud of dust and a plume of fire. He could make out the crumbling shapes of buildings giving way to gravity and becoming a flood of bent metal and rockcrete that swept over everything in its path.
The air was thick with noise – screams, roars, gunfire, explosions, splintering metal, tearing stone, all of it rising up, combining into a singular noise that defied description. If he had been a man for poetry, Mazarin thought he might have compared it to the death-scream of some great leviathan, or the funeral dirge of an entire race, but because he was who he was, it was merely noise.
The child whined, and Mazarin glanced at it. Ismail shifted slightly, as if to protect the child from Mazarin’s sightless gaze. ‘It should be sleeping,’ Mazarin said. The mother was, where she hung unceremoniously over the Tallarn’s shoulder. But the child squirmed and wailed.
‘She’s frightened,’ Harks said, clutching his wound. He looked paler than normal, and Mazarin wondered if his confrontation with the xenos psyker had broken something inside him. ‘She’s a child, Mazarin. Her parents are dead. Her world is dying.’
‘Worlds die, but the dance goes on, eternal and pristine,’ Olympia trilled.
‘Emperor’s bones, shut up,’ Harks hissed. He hunched forward, one hand pressed to his skull. ‘I can hear the death of every living thing in this misbegotten place. I don’t need some berserk wind-up doll yammering in my ear as well.’
Olympia whistled and the glass face of the elevator trembled. Harks clutched his ears and made a strangled sound. Mazarin thumped the floor with his cane. ‘Stop it. I’ll have none of your childishness, Olympia, and none of your whining, Harks. Rejoice, my soldiers. Our war is almost won.’ He glanced down at the blood-spattered mask he held, and felt a flicker of annoyance. ‘Yes, almost.’