Drakken turned towards one of the three large work-pits sunk into the floor of the bridge and strode towards it. Werner followed. The pits were filled with a mix of servitors and human officers, all connected by cables and head-mounted apparatus to the banks of glowing consoles in front of them. In a station close to Drakken’s feet, a scrawny tech-priest sat in the thick cotton robes of the Adeptus Mechanicus’s Divisio Linguistica. His sallow features were lit by the flickering green screen over which he hunched. A morass of thin metal tendrils trailed from his socket-pocked skull to the data transfer ports set into the sides of his console.
‘Adept Orrimen,’ boomed Drakken. ‘Have those cogitator-banks finished the translation yet?’
The tech-priest spoke without turning or moving his jaw, his eerie voice emanating from speakers set into the sides of his head. ‘The translation is coming through now, my lord,’ he rasped. ‘Do you wish me to relay it verbatim, or would you prefer a summary?’
‘Just give me something we can use.’
‘Summary, then,’ said the tech-priest. ‘The broadcast is a message spoken in a dialect of the orkish tongue known to be used among several of the largest clans in the Charadon Sector. Clans using this form of the language include those labelled under Ordo Xenos classification systems as Goffs, Blood Axes, Deathskulls, Evil Suns and thirty-three lesser clans so far recorded. The speaker identifies itself as the warlord Urzog Mag Kull, a known lieutenant of Snagrod, the self-proclaimed Arch Arsonist of Charadon. The message is intended for all ork parties currently active in the spinward sectors of the Segmentum Tempestus and the trailward sectors of the Ultima Segmentum. It instructs all ork ships in these sectors to rally under the banner of the Arch Arsonist. It also declares that Snagrod’s Waaagh has begun, that it cannot be stopped, and that it is the divine will of the ork gods, Gork and Mork.’
With that, Orrimen finished his report, but when the silence became drawn out, he added, ‘Does the captain wish to query?’
Drakken didn’t answer. He turned back to face Werner, gesturing with a raised eyebrow for the sergeant’s comment. Werner looked darkly dismayed.
‘Sounds like Commissar Baldur had it right. But how many other worlds have they taken in the time it took us to get here? How many other worlds might they be broadcasting from?’
‘Not from this one for much longer,’ said Drakken. ‘That signal is being boosted by the ships, but it’s definitely coming from Krugerport. We will cut it off at the source. I want their ground-based long-range communications knocked out for good. Get our brothers ready, Leo. We have our target. We deploy within the hour.’
Werner locked eyes with his captain and said, ‘It’s clear we’ll be facing tall odds down there, lord. Losses are likely. If I may, I’d like to request the honour of leading the operation personally.’
Drakken frowned, keenly aware that Werner was attempting to protect him.
‘No, Leo. I’ll be leading this one myself. Master Kantor gave me this honour. He expects a detailed report on my return. I will see Krugerport for myself. Of course, if you can think of another way to hurt them, another worthy target…’
Werner thought in silence for a moment, then said, ‘Badlanding is practically a dead world. Most of the water there is lethally toxic, and orks need potable water just as much as the human settlers did. Krugerport has a single large purification facility.’
Drakken nodded. ‘Just inside the curtain wall of the south-eastern precinct. Yes, I saw it on the maps.’
‘I think it’s fair to assume that the orks are stocking their ships from it in preparation for the next phase of their incursion. Hitting the comms array will help to delay the Waaagh, but, if we strike the purification plant, too, we can force them to supply their ships from elsewhere. That will delay them even further. It may even force them to split their forces.’
Drakken thought about it for only a moment. It made solid sense. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Any delay we can create will give the Chapter Master more time to alert Segmentum Command. Congratulations, Leo. It looks like you will be commanding a detachment after all.’
Five
Krugerport, Badlanding
Service in the Tenth Company, the Chapter’s Scout company, was about proving oneself. It was about the mastery of war and of the body. As a Scout, one learned to employ his implanted organs, to trust them, to become one with them. One learned to perfect the art of the kill. Years of service would prove a Scout’s readiness, and then the call would come. He would be ordered to return to Arx Tyrannus to attend the Steeping. It was an ancient rite dating back to the time when the primarch had walked among them. Dorn had once welcomed battle-brothers into his ranks by cutting his palm and sharing his blood directly with them. Now his blood was a holy relic, sharing only its presence. Time had wrought its changes on the Chapter’s rites. Nowadays, a Scout being elevated to full battle-brother status would dip his left hand in the blood of a foe he had slain himself. The ritual had changed, but the meaning and significance of it had not. The fist literally became crimson. It was the final step in becoming a full battle-brother, the final step before being assigned to one of the other nine companies.
Unlike some, Scout-Sergeant Ezra Mishina was in no great rush to be elevated. His duties had often called for him to act as a sniper. Long days waiting for a perfect kill shot had taught him patience. His years as a sergeant, guiding younger and far less experienced men, had reinforced the lesson. The call for him to attend the Steeping would come when the time was right. For the moment, all he cared about was doing his best, doing his duty as he was supposed to. Right now, that meant serving as forward eyes and ears for Captain Drakken’s Third Company.
Mishina had been specially selected by Captain Icario to accompany the Third on this mission to Badlanding, and, if he were being honest, there was nowhere else he would rather have been. This was where he belonged, in the thick black shadows of a hostile town, stalking alien sentries with his silenced bolt-rifle slung over his back, combat knife in hand, eyesight augmented by the sensitive optical lenses of his night-vision goggles. Already, he had silenced the grunting breaths of half a dozen filthy greenskin scum. His boots and fatigues were flecked with their blood.
Five hours ago, with the local star, Freiya, still bright in the afternoon sky, the Third Company’s Thunderhawk gunships had landed in a deep wadi some thirty kilometres to the south-west. They had flown in low with the sun at their backs, using its blinding glare to mask the telltale glow of hot plasma from their thrusters.
Mishina and the three Scouts under his command had then pushed out towards the town, scouring the land for threats well ahead of the Tactical squads that followed behind them.
They had reached the town’s shell-pocked, fire-blackened curtain wall just as the sun slid below the horizon. Perfect timing. The orks here were complacent. It looked like they had slaughtered the Imperial Guard forces to a man. As far as they were concerned, the fighting was over for now. That was perfect, too. They had neither patched nor barricaded any of the gaping breaches that their artillery assaults had blasted in the high sandstone walls. Mishina and his Scouts waited for the very last of the twilight to bleed away, for night to cloak them in its veils. When it had, they slid into the town in silence, killing the orks they caught unawares by thrusting their long combat knives neatly between the third and fourth vertebrae as they had trained so relentlessly to do.
With their nerve bundles neatly severed, the orks went down quick and quiet, the trademark kill of a true Adeptus Astartes Scout.
Mishina had taken many lives in this way. It was as instinctive a process to him now as breathing silently and moving from cover to cover, all of which he did without need for conscious thought. He was pleased with the performance of the other Scouts, too, though it was far too early to start handing out compliments. Captain Icario had assigned him some promising men. Two of them had only ever experienced the slaughter of a greenskin through the sensorium-link downloads availab
le in the Chapter’s Librarium, but they had bloodied themselves for real this night, and there was more killing to come.
Careful to make as little noise as possible, Mishina placed a booted foot on the edge of an old wooden crate and boosted himself up to the flat roof of an abandoned single-storey hab. From there, he surveyed the layout of the town. The planet’s solitary moon, in the shadow of which The Crusader still held station undetected, had not risen yet, but the Scout-Sergeant’s goggles showed him all he needed to see with the clarity of a dull, slightly muddy afternoon.
Aside from the town’s curtain wall and a smattering of prominent two-storey structures, Krugerport was built low to the ground, the vast majority of its buildings topping out at about five or six metres in height. Most of the streets were narrow, giving the habs the aspect of short, blocky figures huddled close together against the wind-blown dust. It was an ugly place, and not just because so much of it had been blasted to rubble. There was little sign of artistry here. A kind of scrappy functionality ruled, as if everything had been put together as quickly as possible and maintained on the very edge of working condition. There were no parks or museums.
Mishina had seen towns like this before. They were hastily built to exploit local resources and, when those resources were finally gone, when the mines or promethium fields ran dry and the wealth dried up with them, the population gradually died too, shrinking to nothing in a remarkably short space of time.
The walls all around him were plain sandstone. They might once have borne bright posters calling for faith in the Emperor and diligence in one’s job, but now they were marked only by the telltale signs of heavy street-fighting, of las and plasma burns, and countless black holes cut by the impacts of so many solid metal rounds. From his new vantage point, Mishina spotted a number of small market squares and plazas where it looked like a few token statues had once stood. These were little more than rubble now. Most of them would probably have been carved in the image of the Emperor and His saints, but it was impossible to tell the standard of quality to which they had been finished. The orks had smashed all of them to rubble, not with the hate-fuelled malice of traitors and Chaos-tainted scum but, more likely, in a mindless expression of their raw love for destruction in all its forms.
They were simple beasts, the greenskins. In Mishina’s eyes, there was little more to them than muscle and aggression, and that was just as well.
From his perch atop the modest hab, he contacted the other Scouts and queried their positions. As each reported in, Mishina found himself nodding. None had been spotted by the enemy. No one had given himself away. Each had positioned himself in the location to which Mishina had sent him, and had done so in good time.
So far, so good.
Mishina ordered them to hold position and await further orders.
To the north, almost eight kilometres away according to the laser rangefinder incorporated into his goggles, he saw the tall, rooftop-mounted, wrought-iron latticework that identified one particular building as the Krugerport communications bunker. Atop the latticework’s eighty-metre height, he saw a cluster of dishes mounting powerful broadcasting antennae. Near the base of the pylon, the orks had decorated the iron girders with some kind of rusty metal sigil. Painted red, it was made of iron plates arranged in the rough likeness of a leering alien face.
Increasing magnification, Mishina noted the fortified rooftops surrounding the communications bunker. Their corners were piled high with sandbags, and they bristled with heavy weapons, many of which looked like Guard-issue lascannons and heavy bolters.
That’s going to mean trouble if they get the drop on us, Mishina thought.
Hulking forms moved to and fro by the light of cooking fires. The orks had spitted meat over these. It hung roasting, licked by orange flames, and Mishina noted with revulsion and anger that some of those spits carried hunks of meat that bore the unmistakable silhouette of human limbs.
The smell corroborated his worst suspicions. The scent was close to that of roasted grox, but sharper in the nostrils. He had smelled it before, a funeral pyre stink.
Turning away from the sight, and zooming out to normal magnification again, he tracked right and found what he was looking for. To the east, nine-point-six kilometres away, he easily identified the water purification plant by its bulky rectangular profile and by the vast metal tanks that stood arrayed along its southern flank.
Mishina raised a gloved hand to the comms rig on his left ear, keyed the Third Company’s command channel, and said, ‘Brother-captain, this is Shadow One.’
Drakken’s gravelly voice answered, ‘Go ahead, Shadow One.’
‘Shadow Team in place, my lord. Visual perimeter established. We’ve marked a path for you. Clear to follow us in whenever you’re ready.’
‘Understood, Shadow One. Moving up now. Keep me apprised of movement.’
Drakken is solid, thought Mishina. His is a name with more than a few legends attached. He’s not prone to careless mistakes, I know that much. But even so, I have the damnedest feeling, like a mental itch. There’s something I don’t like about this. Perhaps it just seems too easy.
Or perhaps it’s something else.
Trying to move silently in Mark VII power armour, Drakken knew, was like trying to reload a bolter with just your teeth – damned near impossible and usually not worth the bother. Sooner or later, the orks would wake up to Third Company’s presence here, and when they did, the real work, the righteous work he lived for, would begin proper.
He led his Adeptus Astartes through the breach in the curtain wall that Mishina and his Scouts had marked out for them. Orks wouldn’t see those marks. The Scouts left little splashes of a liquid that was only visible in infrared. The helmet visors of the Crimson Fists picked up those splashes as if they were blazing neon lights, and the Space Marines followed them into the town of Krugerport, knowing that the path they followed had been cleared for them.
Once Drakken and his men were beyond the outer walls, the captain opened a channel to Sergeant Werner, who was about twenty metres to the rear, preparing to lead his own group in through the breach. Drakken had assigned him command of three ten-man squads. ‘This is where we part, Leo. Follow the Scouts’ markings, and may the Emperor watch over you.’
‘As He watches over you, my lord,’ replied Werner, then he and his men split off from the main group, disappearing into the inky shadows of a narrow avenue to the right.
Drakken watched the last of Werner’s Adeptus Astartes disappear, then gave the signal to his own squads to move out in single file.
The streets of Krugerport were, in the main, too tight for heavy vehicles to negotiate. In some settlements, this would have been a strategy to prevent enemy armour making headway during an assault. In Krugerport, however, Drakken had the feeling it merely represented the human tendency to seek closeness with others when in hostile places. This planet was a merciless rock, its winds choking everything with corrosive dust, its chemical seas capable of eating the flesh from a man’s bones in moments.
So why had men settled here at all? It was no great mystery. There were two things in Badlanding’s favour. First, the atmosphere was breathable, which made it a relatively rare and valuable find among the millions of worlds man had discovered since the first days of his expansion into space. Despite the vast size of the Imperium, the ratio of naturally habitable worlds to non-habitable was far below one per cent. The second reason Badlanding had been colonised was just as simple: the Scratch Mountains, towards which Commissar Baldur had claimed he would lead his survivors, were rich in seams of adamantium and proteocite, the latter a compound used in the production of rare ceramite, the material from which much of the Adeptus Astartes battleplate was made.
Thinking of the Scratch Mountains made Drakken scowl. He had brought eighty-three Space Marines with him on this operation, not to mention numerous serfs, pilots, technicians, communications specialists and the like, all of which were absolutely essential to the smoot
h operation of the Crimson Fists fleet. Of the eighty-four Adeptus Astartes, he personally led a detachment of thirty, Werner led another thirty. Four Crimson Fists from Tenth Company were acting as advance scouts. Eight more battle-brothers had been assigned landing-zone patrol duties on the perimeter of the broad wadi in which the Thunderhawks rested well out of sight, and another ten had been sent in an arcing path well out from the town, skimming over the dust dunes in Land Speeders, racing to the last known location of the Imperial Guard forces.
What that latter force had already reported made for grim news. The cave complex to which Baldur had retreated was now nothing but a mass grave. Desiccated corpses, most with their heads taken for trophies, lay in heaps at the back of the tunnels. There were a number of ork dead, too, but not enough by half. It was clear that Baldur and the remnants of his forces had been backed into a corner and slaughtered to a man. They had been completely overwhelmed. How the orks must have revelled in all that killing!
Only the fact that he wore his helmet stopped Drakken from spitting on the ground in disgust. He hated the greenskins with a lethal passion. Throughout much of his life as a battle-brother, he had fought to purge Imperial outposts and trade routes of their savage kind, but year after year they would come back, making fresh incursions from frontier worlds on the periphery of the Loki Sector. It seemed an endless task. No matter how many one killed, no real headway was ever truly made. Success was measured in distance, in how far the alien hordes were kept from civilised space.
In two millennia, Rynn’s World itself had known the footsteps of aliens only once, and not at all since the Crimson Fists had taken up residence there. In the subsequent years, a number of potentially devastating Waaaghs had been averted, defused by surgical strikes which had been masterfully conceived by Pedro Kantor. Drakken had earned great honours for his part in these, but the real glory belonged to the Chapter Master.
No wonder they call him the second coming of Pollux, Drakken thought as he scanned the shadows up ahead for traces of ork.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 70