by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
It didn’t get a chance to stand. Even before the smoke had cleared, cultists thronged through the wrecked doors, emptying their guns into its black armour. From his perch, high in the gallery, Hurta saw a flash of white amidst the chaos. The freak’s skull mask.
He hated waiting. Always had. Even now, his trigger finger twitched, desperate to fire, but Big Bruvva had told them to wait for the signal. The moment had to be right.
The assassin struggled to rear up, chips of its armour flying in all directions. One of the cultists got near – too near – and was rewarded by talons digging deep into his leg. The Gork worshipper screamed as he was dragged in front of the assassin, his own brothers’ ammo slicing through him.
It was the opportunity skull-face had been waiting for. It was on its feet again, returning fire, kicking and swiping with those damned claws. Surely it couldn’t remain standing for long. It was surrounded. It was dead.
A brother Hurta had never seen before grabbed the assassin’s gun arm, yanking it back, attempting to rip every ligament in the freak’s shoulder. Old skull-face just swung around, driving its talons deep into the tall man’s neck, perforating muscle and bone. Another brother lost. Another dead.
But that was the freak’s first mistake. As the brother dropped, the assassin pulled its claws free, turning its back towards Hurta. The moment Hurta had been waiting for.
Big Bruvva’s voice hissed in Hurta’s ear-piece: ‘Now!’
Hurta squeezed his trigger, the harpoon bucking in his arms. The barbed spear shot forward, burying itself in the freak’s back with a satisfying crunch. So much for that armour.
The assassin arched its back, pulling against the thick cord that stretched back up to Hurta’s harpoon. Hurta grabbed at the gargoyle that was crouched beside him, anchoring himself as the refined acoustics of the cathedral sang to the sounds of harpoons being fired from all around the gallery.
Spears plunged into the assassin’s flesh, barbed spears impossible to pull out without doing more damage than they had caused going in. Spears dipped in poison. Big Bruvva had promised the freak a lesson. This was it.
Within seconds, the assassin was caught in a web of cords, each reeling back into the harpoons, holding the freak tight. At first it thrashed, a couple of Hurta’s brothers losing their footing and crashing down from their hiding place.
Not Hurta. Hurta hung onto the gargoyle, even as the freak stopped struggling, its head finally lolling drunkenly forward. A stream of red drool flowed from its slash of a mouth, the slabs hissing and steaming where it pooled.
A cheer went out from the faithful, a roar of victory, but silence descended as a green-skinned giant swaggered into the cathedral.
Big Bruvva reached out and, almost gently, tipped the back of the freak’s head. The cult leader smiled and then planted a pile-driving punch on the assassin’s cheek. Its head snapped around so fast that Hurta was sure its neck must have broken instantly.
When the head fell limply back, the side of the death mask was smashed, opened by the spikes implanted in Big Bruvva’s knuckles, dark blood oozing from the cracks.
‘Bring it to the Pit,’ Big Bruvva sneered.
It was like coming home. The roar of the crowd. The rubble beneath his feet. The stench of stale blood and fear.
The Pit.
It had been here that Big Bruvva had pulled a bone from beneath a collapsed wall and used it to stave in the head of his first opponent. Here where his first vision had seared its path across his mind. Here where he had first heard Gork’s name, screamed across eternity.
They were coming now. Big Bruvva could feel them. Ready to descend. Ready to crush and stomp and kill. It wouldn’t be long.
Bombs falling. Guns firing. Bones ground into the dirt.
The Day of Reckoning.
Big Bruvva swayed on his feet, but no one would see. He was standing in the shadows, all eyes on the freak, hanging from chains in the centre of the Pit. Limp. Broken.
Big Bruvva would break him some more.
He could feel the drugs burning through his veins, his muscles hardening second by second, pressing against the restraints of the exo-suit. It hurt. Gork knew it hurt, but pain was good. Pain kept you alive and when you were alive you could make others dead.
Stomp ’em. Crush ’em. Kill ’em.
Big Bruvva lurched forward, ignoring the pain squirming at the back of his mind.
They are coming. They are coming. They are coming.
The suit’s pistons hissed with every step – out into the arena, out into the light.
Stomp ’em. Crush ’em. Kill ’em!
The crowd went wild as soon as they saw their champion striding purposely towards the freak, his name chanted over and over again. It mixed with the cry inside his head, the otherworldly bellow that threatened to split his skull in two.
‘Bruv-va! Bruv-va! Bruv-va! Bruv-va!’
He was running now, arms raised, teeth bared, ready to rip this deformity limb from limb.
Big Bruvva roared, a single wordless howl that echoed around the arena, his followers instinctively joining the chorus, drowning out the harsh grind of the chainblades mounted on each of Big Bruvva’s arms.
And still the freak didn’t move.
Maybe it was unconscious. Maybe it was dead. It didn’t matter. Big Bruvva would cut it in–
The chains attached to the post broke free, the freak ducking as the chainblade buried itself into the stone. The teeth caught, just for a second, but long enough for the assassin to brake his curved claws against Big Bruvva’s exposed chest.
The pain didn’t even register as he brought his free arm around, cracking hard into the side of the freak’s nightmarish face. The assassin stumbled back as Big Bruvva pulled the embedded chainblade out, the momentum causing him to take a step back – far enough to avoid the boot that swung out to take his legs away from beneath him. Blood sprayed from the freak’s cracked mask, hissing as it splashed against the rubbish beneath their feet.
Big Bruvva brought his right chainblade down, but the freak rolled out of the way, sweeping up with those claws, cutting through cables and wires to find the welcoming flesh of Big Bruvva’s left forearm. The blades did their work, cutting deep to the bone.
Big Bruvva’s vision flared white, the pain silencing everything else, the roar of the crowd, the buzz of his blades. Even the thunder in his head.
He had suffered worse injuries in the past, but he bawled with the agony, and Bruvva barely noticed the freak springing up to plant a boot in the middle of his blistered chest.
The force of the blow threw him back, the hand of his ravaged arm cramping into an involuntary claw of its own.
This couldn’t be happening. The skull-faced freak had inflicted a few scratches, nothing more, but as Big Bruvva lost his footing, it was as if his body was going into shock.
Realisation dawned as he hit the floor. Those claws. They were poisoned, just as the spears in the cathedral ambush had been. His body felt like it was burning up from the inside – matching the flames that raged through his mind.
Stomp ’em. Crush ’em. Kill ’em
He couldn’t even tell if his followers were still cheering or had been shocked into silence. All he could hear was the sound of a battlefield. A single, monotonous war cry drowning out every else. He forced his head around in time to see the freak swinging a weapon down towards him. No, not a weapon. Those damned claws.
Big Bruvva twisted, the exo-suit’s joints whining in protest, and batted the claws away with his near useless-arm. He brought it down hard, crushing the hand beneath the exo-suit’s armour plating and rolled on top of his opponent. He knew what he was going to do, even as he planted an armoured knee into the assassin’s chest, a pleasing spurt of blood spraying through those skull-like lips.
With more effort than it should have taken, he drew his near-dead arm ba
ck sharply, twisting it so the chainblade met the freak’s own mangled arm. The teeth sliced through armour and flesh, before it reached bone. The assassin bayed, the first nose Bruvva had heard it make, scarlet eyes widening behind the mask.
When the freak pulled its arm back to its chest, the severed hand stayed where it was, claws still twitching. It grabbed its bloody stump in shock, long enough for Big Bruvva to grab the assassin’s throat with his good hand. He pressed hard, feeling the freak’s windpipe buckle beneath his grip, heard a choked gasp behind the mask. Not such a monster now. Strip away the skull and the weapons and the armour and the freak was just another stinking human ripe for sacrifice, one more tribute to Gork.
Stomp it. Crush it. Kill it.
The freak clawed helplessly at Big Bruvva’s arm, the cult leader lifting his prize into the air. No poison could stop him. No wound would bring him to his knees. He was the Chosen One. He was Gork’s herald. He was triumphant.
Big Bruvva held the freak aloft, ignoring the pain. This was his moment. He threw back his head and joined in his followers’ cry.
‘Waaaaaag–’
He didn’t even see the freak move. There was no warning. One minute it was hanging from his fist, like a slab of meat, and the next it was thrusting the stump of its arm through the protective cage that surrounded Big Bruvva’s head. He had no time to react. The bloody end mashed into his face, stripping the skin away in an instant. The flicker of a memory replayed through his mind. The pool of gore steaming on the cathedral floor, eating through the stone slabs like acid.
Big Bruvva had no idea if he screamed. He saw Gork’s bloodshot eyes, painted large across a blazing cosmos, even as his own were reduced to a viscous jelly that dribbled out of melting sockets. Gork was laughing, throwing back his mighty head and roaring with mirth.
Big Bruvva never felt his hand loosen around the freak’s throat. Never felt it press its stump deeper, burning through his skull and into his brain. Never even felt his knees buckle, his engorged body crashing forward, the exo-skeleton smashing into the jagged debris on the floor.
As he died, the only thing Big Bruvva could hear was Gork’s mocking laughter, taunting the man who would have been an ork.
His Chosen One.
His fool.
The stars were falling across Ghul Jensen. That’s what it looked like for Governor Vinter at least. New suns blossomed in the sky before fading, fire streaking through the heavens.
This was what Big Bruvva had wanted the governor to see, why he’d kept him alive. The Day of Reckoning. The Coming of Gork.
The idiot would have claimed that the explosions in the upper atmosphere were a sign, a portent even, if his vocabulary hadn’t been that of a child.
He was right about one thing. It was a sign – that bombs would soon start falling. That ships would be descending through those leaden clouds, crushing all opposition.
Not that Big Bruvva would see it himself. The cult leader had left the smashed screen operating in the office, so that Vinter could witness him slaughter the Assassin first hand. The governor wished he’d still had the strength to cheer as the brute had fallen in front of his followers, his face an unrecognisable mess – but he could hardly breathe. It wouldn’t be long now. A blessed relief.
He didn’t know what had happened to the Assassin. As soon as the cult leader crashed to the floor, his disciples swarmed into the arena, desperate to take down the creature that had killed their so-called herald. The screen became a confused mess of bodies, gunfire crackling over the speakers, as the Gork worshippers turned on each other. Big Bruvva’s lieutenants were desperate to take control, filling the gap left by their leader’s demise, even before his body grew cold.
The governor wondered how long the Assassin had lasted in the melee; which of the mindless drones had delivered the killing blow. It didn’t matter anymore. Soon they’d all be dead. The weakest of laughs gurgled in Vinter’s throat as he imaged the cultists welcoming real orks with open arms. He could just imagine the response, the leer on the orks’ faces as they cut the pretenders down where they stood.
‘Stupid humies!’
There was movement in the corridor outside. He’d heard muffled explosions and gunfire earlier, the feuding cultists making for the spires to claim their throne. Let them have it, for all the good it would do.
The door opened. Vinter couldn’t look up. His head was like a lead weight.
He followed the noise across the room, booted footsteps on the carpet. It wasn’t like the heretics to be so quiet. Where were the jeers and yells, the cries of victory? Maybe they were there and just couldn’t hear them. For all he knew, his senses had finally deserted him. A blessed release.
A shadow passed in front of him, blocking out the light of the panoramic window. Something pressed up against his chin, pushing his head back. Something that burned. The governor looked up, expecting to find himself staring at the idiotic features of a cultist, all tattoos, studs and pointed teeth. Instead, the face in front of him was bone white, albeit streaked with dried blood. Red eyes regarded him coldly, the death mask frozen in an eternal smile.
Vinter wheezed a weak approximation of a laugh. ‘So, you weren’t sent for Big Bruvva at all. Of course not. What would the Imperium care about a heretic and his motley band of followers, eh? Not when you could have me.’
The Assassin didn’t answer. That wasn’t a surprise. Nor was the fact that the Imperium had known all along. About the illegal arms. About the army.
About the plans to attack the other hives.
He could have ruled Ghul Jensen – no longer the poor relation among the founding families. Vinter, a name they had always ridiculed. A name they would have learnt to fear.
Until that dolt had dragged himself from the Pit – and the moment Obstiria fell. It had only been a matter of time.
Not that such a triviality would stop the Assassinorum. Why leave things to chance when you could send an Eversor to tie up any loose ends? To finish the job.
Typical Imperium efficiency, praise be to the Throne.
Behind the bleeding Assassin, far in the distance, a fireball erupted from the walls of Hive Jensen. The first casualty of the incursion.
Hive Vinter would be next. The governor wondered how long it would be until all the towers were burning.
The knife slipped easily into his parched throat. He locked eyes with the Assassin as he was released from his torment, his chambers bathed in the red glare of the battles already raging outside.
Was the Assassin’s death mask grinning a little wider as he slipped away? And what was that sound Vinter heard as he slipped away? The sound of the Eversor’s body crumpling into a heap at his feet, its wounds finally taking their toll?
The governor would never know.
Perhaps the Day of Reckoning had come for them both.
Chapter 1
The Red Waaagh!
From a dozen brawling orkish domains, the Red Waaagh! gathered: a billion orks pulled in the wake of the rust-ships of Warlord Grukk.
Grukk the Unstoppable, he liked to call himself. Grukk Face-Rippa, he was more often called. Grukk the Zogging Maniac, the boyz said.
They did this behind his back. He really was a maniac.
Grukk’s fleet of blunt-nosed kill kroozers smashed across the cosmos, pillaging half a dozen star systems. His followers multiplied with every victory, attracted not by the fact of these conquests, for many a lesser Waaagh! has accounted for more devastation, but by the sheer violent finesse with which Grukk achieved them. By the time the Red Waaagh! dived into the Karasoon Warp Rift en route to Sanctus Reach, its ships filled space as far as the eye could see; the largest Waaagh! for centuries. Members of every clan and faction imaginable had thrown in their lot with the Face-Rippa. As a representative sample of ork-kind, it was unsurpassed in recent millennia, the kind of gathering a xenobiolog
ist would have given his eye or tooth to survey. In truth, had any xenobiologist got close enough to accomplish such a study, he would have given a lot more than his tooth in payment for the privilege.
With this cloud of marauding violence travelled the Red Sunz Mob – Uggrim, Snikgob, Bozgat and their Stompa, Fat Mork. From system to system they wandered, following a path of bloodshed and teeth away from the domains of the tau in the galactic east, heading ever corewards.
‘Dunno why,’ said Uggrim, when surly Snikgob asked him why. They were in the hangar of the Evil Sun Rising. (This vessel they had acquired with a small amount of cunning and a large number of teeth from the crazed Pirate Boss Gunmouth Nazog, but that’s a tale for another day.) ‘I just feel it in me bones, ya know? I reckon Mork wants me to go.’ Uggrim jerked his thumb over his shoulder at their war god sleeping soundly.
Uggrim and Snikgob said little more on this matter than that. The meks were clever, but they were orks, and proper boyz are uninterested in philosophy.
From the battlegrounds of Hurdlian to the meteor-wracked plains of Bork’s Mistake, onwards from there through an unfortunate and near-fatal brush with the arsonists of Charadon and the tyranids locked in never-ending war against them. There was a fruitful contract with a flotilla of freebooterz lost and down on their luck, and a sadly short-lived association with the deadly Dread Dok and his Kan Katastrophe Karnival… Fat Mork fought on a hundred battlefields. Sometimes the Red Sunz lingered so long in one place Snikgob thought they’d stay forever, only for Uggrim to stick his nose in the air and sniff the wind like a squighound on the chase. Days after, they’d be gone. However long they stayed, always they headed off eventually, and when they did, always they went to the galactic west.
So it was that Uggrim and the Red Sunz Mob found themselves pulled into the orbit of Grukk’s mighty Red Waaagh!, shortly before it hit Sanctus Reach. Not that Grukk or his followers knew that was what it was called, or would have cared had they known.
It is on one of the Red Waaagh!’s larger ships, the Toof o’ Mork, that we find Boss Mek Uggrim toiling, reduced in station from the Big Mek to a big mek, one among the many hundreds working their strange genius on the behalf of Grukk. Or rather, on behalf of the Bad Moon Big Mek Mogrok, Grukk’s chief adviser and aide. This is how Mogrok styles himself, and for the time being at least, so Grukk believes him to be…