The greenskins responded in kind. Random fire came from their long range weapons but to no effect, save chipping rockcrete or kicking up clods of ash. Orks were not built for shooting, their efforts were half-hearted at best. They did it more to hear the guns go off, the thud-bang and the stink of expelled smoke, than to actually kill anything. Orks preferred to fight close up, where they could smell the blood and fear.
The beasts will find little of the first and none of the second from us, Tsu’gan thought.
The orks were close now and the brother-sergeant knew the order to unleash a firestorm was close too. Crackling static in his ear over the comm-feed gave way to Captain N’keln’s voice, and Tsu’gan realised that order was at hand.
Salamanders were pragmatic, not as given to lofty speeches and rousing rhetoric as some of their distant cousins, such as the Ultramarines. The fact made N’keln’s speech comparatively epic.
“Sons of Vulkan, Fire-born all, this is our last redoubt. There is no line beyond this wall, no further gate to defend or keep to garrison. This is it. I have but one edict: None shall pass.” He punctuated each and every word. “Into the fires of battle!” cried N’keln, as his voice became many. “Unto the anvil of war!” the Salamanders chorused.
“Let them close,” uttered Tsu’gan to his squad. Across the battlements, sergeants were priming their troops in the wake of the captain’s speech.
Sighting down his bolter’s targeter, Tsu’gan felt a presence behind him and turned to see Elysius appearing on their section of the wall.
“You have missed the start of the battle, brother,” Tsu’gan offered wryly.
The Chaplain snorted with derision.
“I have missed the parlay, you mean, brother-sergeant.” By his tone, it was difficult to tell whether or not Elysius was serious. Tsu’gan would find out later if his idle remark had been taken in jest.
“The xenos are a stain upon the galaxy,” the Chaplain intoned, zealotry affecting his timbre as he lowered his voice. “Let them burn in the fires of retribution!
Eyes flashing with hate, Elysius ignited his crozius and pointed it in the direction of the onrushing horde.
Tsu’gan sighted down the targeter again. “Unleash hell!”
It was as if all the sergeants were somehow synchronised or linked by empathy as weapons fire erupted across the wall in unison. Muzzle flashes ripped down the battlements of the iron fortress in a fiery wave, the resultant din like thunder. Greenskins were torn apart in the brutal bolter salvo, the explosive shells wreaking terrible havoc even amongst creatures as tough as orks. Exhorted by threats and the bellows of their captains, the beasts weathered it, trudging over the chewed-up remains of their kin implacably and without remorse. Some fled — those whose nerve had broken, or who’d lost their captains to enemy fire or infighting — they were met mercilessly with a cleaver or axe upon reaching the line of green still poised at the apex of the ridge. For this was just a first wave.
“Bolter fodder,” growled Tiberon, over the comm-feed. It was difficult to be heard above the roar of gunfire, though Chaplain Elysius managed it with his scathing diatribes and xenophobic tirades. Pistols and flamers were still out of range, as the orks had yet to close, so he directed each caustic utterance like a bullet aimed to kill.
The side of Tsu’gan’s battle helm lit up as Brother M’lek fired his multi-melta. The hungry beam burned a hole through an advancing ork truck, cooking its engine and turning it into a white fireball that engulfed several foot sloggers rushing alongside it.
The brother-sergeant paused to commend M’lek’s fine shooting, before addressing Tiberon.
“That is why we must break them, brother, and maintain our strength for the real fight to come.”
Tsu’gan gunned down a chieftain’s armoured bodyguard, turning its skull into bone fragments and red vapour as the bolter round entered its eye and exploded outwards. He saw only one ork battle leader in the midst of the fighting, and judging from the clan markings of the greenskins barrelling towards them, this was its tribe. Perhaps the claw-armed warboss on the ridge was letting his subordinates take turns at trying to crack open the iron fortress.
“Let them come,” Tsu’gan hissed belligerently. He took aim again and executed the chieftain itself, who had strayed too close to the fight. “They’ll die by my hand,” he concluded grimly.
With the death of their tribal leader, the orks faltered. A bloody killing field had materialised in the no-man’s-land before the wall; the greenskins in the first wave, despite their efforts, having been unable to get close enough to launch a meaningful assault upon it.
Seeing this, up on the ridge, the warboss bellowed his anger. Sweeps of his brawny arm sent the other tribes forwards, one after the other. Orks in their thousands charged at the Salamanders. Their tribal chieftains hooted and roared, eager for their clans to be the first to reach the enemy. The swell of the greenskins’ brutish voices rose into a clamour.
Tsu’gan felt the dull nagging at the back of his head again, the sensation of being in the tunnel below the iron hall. The feeling of cold metal against his forehead where he’d pressed the bolter’s mouth returned. Nascent psychic energy from the orks was building. Perhaps it was somehow fuelling whatever lurked in the darkness beneath the fortress.
Elysius’ voice responded to it, became the anchor once more to keep the Salamanders grounded. In their multitudes, the orks had got beyond the killing field and were readying for a first assault against the wall. The Chaplain used the bark of his bolt pistol to punctuate his spite-filled sermons, whilst all across the battlements flamers spewed with promethium fury.
“Cleanse and burn!” roared Honorious, as his faceplate was lit by his weapon’s fiery glow.
Despite the Space Marines’ strategic acquisition of targets, and their spoiling tactics, the sheer mass of greenskins meant a close-up battle was inevitable. That suited the Salamanders well.
“Here is where your mettle shall be tested,” cried N’keln, his voice clear as a silver spear thrown in sunlight, resonating through the comm-feed. “Be the anvil, become the hammer!” The effect was galvanising.
“Judged in the fires of battle…” remarked Lazarus with genuine admiration.
Iagon stayed silent, focused on slaying the approaching orks with angry bursts of his bolter.
“Hold them here,” snarled Tsu’gan, steeling his squad as he knew his brother-sergeants would be too. “We knew this was coming,” he added, as the first of the ork grapnels clanged and found purchase against the battlements. He blasted apart the thick chain dangling off it, waiting for the line to become taut before he fired. Muffled screams from the unseen greenskins once climbing up the severed chain, now falling to their deaths, made Tsu’gan smile beneath his battle-helm.
Three more grapnels followed it. Brother S’tang took out one, before another five rattled onto the battlements, biting deep.
Brother Catus mistakenly hacked at a chain with his combat blade before leaning over to strafe the orks below with his bolter. He lurched back with a cleaver lodged between his neck and clavicle, spurting blood. S’tang dragged him aside, putting a bolt through the cranium of the ork that dared be the first to poke its head up over the rockcrete lip of the wall.
Ugly greenskin faces emerged en masse after that. They were attached to brutish bodies carrying cleavers and saw-toothed blades.
Chaplain Elysius brained one of the orks with his crozius, electricity still coursing through its shattered frame as it fell back in the morass of warriors below, before jamming his bolt pistol into the maw of a second and reducing its head to shredded meat. A red haze spattered his skull-faced visage, anointing him in blood. Yet as deadly as he was, Elysius could not kill them all.
“Honorious!” yelled Tsu’gan.
The battle-brother swept his flamer around from pouring gouts of promethium down the wall and sent a searing blaze over the greenskins trying to outflank the Chaplain.
“Burn in the fires
of perdition, xenos!” spat Elysius, as the orks were consumed and plunged, flailing, into the mobs amassing at the foot of the wall.
Tsu’gan wiped a swathe of blood from his visor and took a moment to look around the battle site. Sporadic skirmishes had erupted all across the wall. The Tactical squads bore the brunt of the attacks, allowing the Devastators in the higher, less accessible towers to continue wreaking carnage amongst the greater horde that swelled beyond in the ash basin like a green slough.
Many sergeants had broken their warriors up into combat squads; those that fought hand-to-hand or to disengage the grapnels, and those that maintained a ranged fusillade.
In the brief seconds of assessment he allowed himself, Tsu’gan also noticed ork vehicles prosecuting suicide runs against the walls. He saw a bulky wagon, festooned with plates and brimming with orks, rammed headlong in the wall. Shot apart by heavy bolters and multi-meltas, the wagon was a wreck, but now the greenskins were climbing up its tower-like pulpit and using the debris to gain the battlements. Missiles choomed overhead, super-heated beams cross-hatched the night obliterating the ork suicide runners before they could close, but couldn’t stop them all.
An impact against the lower part of his section almost knocked Tsu’gan off his feet. The tremor rippled up through the metal and rockcrete. A blast wave of heat washed over the sergeant and his squad, as the vehicle that had collided into the wall ignited and exploded. A few seconds later, scrapes and clanks could be heard as the orks scrambled up the makeshift siege tower.
“Grenades!” ordered Tsu’gan, knowing that he was out, but that half of his squad could oblige him. Frag grenades bounded down the wrecked carcass of the vehicle, pulped and burning against the wall, and exploded in a series of dull percussions. The scraping and clanking ceased.
“Glory to Prometheus!” he yelled, exultant in this small victory.
Then he saw the force approaching the Techmarine Draedius’ gate.
A mob of heavily armoured orks advanced under fire towards the fortress’ only ingress.
Something moved amongst the larger ork bodies. Tsu’gan caught the glint of metal, a spherical object daubed in jagged iconography, akin to a mine…
“Concentrate fi—”
A concussive blast erupted from the gate below, cutting the sergeant off before he could issue the order to try and stop it. The Salamanders occupying the section of wall directly above it were thrown off their feet. Out the corner of his eye, Tsu’gan thought he saw Shen’kar pitched off the battlements. His vision was marred by coiling smoke and exploding debris, so he couldn’t be certain. Brother Malicant stumbled and the company banner fell. Only Captain N’keln kept his footing, snatching the banner in defiance of the fire crawling rapidly up the wall, lashing tongues of flame devouring everything they touched.
“Tank bombers,” said Tiberon, groggily. The squad had felt the blast wave like the full force of a hammer blow. “Must’ve cracked open the gate…”
Greenskins swarming into the dust cloud billowing from the gate confirmed Tiberon’s theory. The Salamanders still standing aimed through the murk, trying to take out the ork assault force that had seemingly appeared from nowhere. Ork commandos returned fire, and Tsu’gan saw another of his brothers fall; a lucky shot through his gorget disabling him.
The heavy-armoured brutes also returned, obscured by the grey fug of smoke and churned ash now swathing the battlefield. The throaty rumble of revving chain-blades could be heard through it, anonymous and forbidding.
The orks converged on the gate and the brother-sergeant was powerless to stop it. He cursed his position on the wall, wanting desperately to be where the fighting was fiercest. A bright plume of fire, its roar so loud it eclipsed the chugging chorus of mechanised blades, tore through the smoke and murk below, devouring the assaulting horde with voracious hunger.
Fire Anvil had unleashed its flamestorm cannons and the orks tasted the Land Raider Redeemer’s fury. Howling in rage and pain, the greenskins fell back. Enflamed bodies stumbled from the ruined gate, before sinking to their knees and collapsing in charred heaps upon the ground. No Salamander put them down; they just let them burn.
Three consecutive bursts and the conflagration ebbed, leaving scorched earth, edged by fire, in its wake.
“In Vulkan’s name and for the glory of the Chapter!”
Praetor’s stentorian timbre thundered across the comm-feed like a rallying bow wave. The Firedrakes had filled the breach.
“In Vulkan’s name!” echoed N’keln, standing tall amidst the dying flames wreathing the battlements before him. Brother Malicant was down, but the captain held aloft the company banner in his stead. The coiling drake depicted on the sacred cloth snapped and snarled in the wind as if alive within the fabric. The edges of it were burned and blackened, but that only added to its belligerent allure. N’keln became a beacon, forged as steel upon the anvil of war at last.
“None shall pass,” he roared, and the firedrake upon the banner seemed to roar with him.
Tsu’gan found a smile was curling his lip.
The orks were doomed.
In desperation, the last of the tribal chieftains had assaulted the wall up one of the wrecked wagon towers. It gained the battlements, bloodied but unbowed.
Elysius, just finished dispensing with one of its lessers at the end of his bolt pistol, rammed his crozius through the foul beast’s chest as it appeared. It snarled, only for the Chaplain to head-butt it with his battle-helm, shattering a tusk and then snapping off the other with a savage pistol-whip from his still-smoking sidearm. He tossed the weapon aside, seizing the dying chieftain in his gauntlet, the other hand gripped tightly around the haft of the crackling crozius, and lifted the ork into the air.
In a stunning feat of strength, or faith, Elysius raised the flailing ork above his head and flung it, screaming, onto the ground far below.
“I cast thee out, abomination!”
Coupled with the Fire Anvil’s fury and the wrath of Praetor’s Terminators, it proved a decisive blow.
The orks fled en masse, back across the killing field and up to the ridge.
Their warboss took their capitulation badly. Every one of the fleeing greenskins was slaughtered by the hordes that still remained.
A strange lull descended. It was punctuated by a deep throbbing in the back of Tsu’gan’s skull, like the Salamander could feel the ork warboss’ rage. So potent was the beast’s fury that it had manifested physically, a distinctive pulse in the greenskins’ natural psychic overspill.
In the absence of battle, the sense of despair from earlier returned. Tsu’gan lurched forward to grip the lip of the battlement for support.
“Sire?” hissed Iagon, leaning conspiratorially towards his sergeant.
Tsu’gan held up his hand to show he was all right. He gripped his bolter for reassurance. Guilt flooded his body pervasively like a cancer, and he longed for the brander-priest’s rod and the pain that dulled the ache inside him.
“There is evil here…” he heard himself slurring, as low as a whisper.
It was eking out of the stones. In his delirium, Tsu’gan almost imagined he could see it: a thin, trailing mist of utter black.
“Hold together, brothers,” Elysius girded him, “and we shall smite the alien.”
The baleful effects of the iron fortress ebbed. It was not yet strong enough to overcome the Chaplain’s fervour. Tsu’gan straightened again, gritting his teeth.
“Let’s finish this.”
The warboss bellowed, reasserting his dominance. The orks charged again.
Dak’ir emerged from the chasm to a different world than the one which he’d left previously. An eldritch darkness blanketed the ash dunes now. A black shape, like a moon or planetoid, smothered whatever celestial body of Scoria should have held prominence in the night sky. This then was the black rock of which Illiad had spoken; the carrier for the orks. Its orbit had brought it close enough to the ashen world for the greenskins to launch an
assault. As time passed, Dak’ir knew it would only bring them closer.
The strange milieu brought other sensations with it, too — the sounds and smells of battle. The bulk of the Vulkan’s Wrath, still high as an Imperial bastion’s defence tower even though it was partly sunken into the desert, obscured Dak’ir’s view but he could still see a warm orange glow tinting the darkling sky. There was something serene and beautiful about it, despite the distant crump of explosions and the whiff of smoke and promethium wafted on a hot breeze.
The comm-feed in his battle-helm crackled, like life breathed back into a corpse, and he heard the voice of Brother-Sergeant Agatone.
“Marshal your forces, brother,” he snapped, clearly perturbed that they’d been out of vox contact for so long. The inquest would come later. “We are about to be under attack.”
Dak’ir didn’t question it. Instead, he ran around the half-submerged prow of the Vulkan’s Wrath and climbed up to the summit of a small dune. What he saw there quickened his heart to a state of combat readiness.
“Pyriel,” said Dak’ir. The Librarian had been right behind the sergeant and followed him up the shallow dune. “When you said there were no oceans on Scoria…”
Before their eyes, still distant but closing, there boiled a belligerent green sea.
“I was wrong,” Pyriel replied simply.
The voice of Illiad intruded.
“Swine-tusks…” he uttered, hoarsely.
The rest of the combat squad had positioned themselves around him in battle formation. They’d all heard Agatone over the comm-feed.
“The swine-tusks have returned,” rasped Illiad, gaping in terrified awe at the grotesque spectacle swarming the dunes. “The slayers of your brothers are back to kill us all.” Dak’ir hadn’t heard fear in the human before… until now.
[Tome of Fire 01] - Salamander Page 29