Alvez never heard the rest. The far wall of the arcade exploded inwards in a great cloud of stone, steel and glass. Deadly debris flew in all directions, and those closest to the south wall were crushed to death. Something huge and dark rumbled in the great cloud of dust that shrouded half the arcade now.
Grimm, still standing at the stone baluster, bellowed down to the floor beneath him. ‘Get everyone out of here!’
Even though his helmet’s vox-amp was set to full volume, no one heard him over the roar and splutter of whatever had just demolished half the building.
As the cloud of dust thinned a little, the shadow within took on clearer form.
‘Move!’ barked Captain Alvez, and he shoved Grimm violently aside just in time.
There was the sound of a cannon firing, and the baluster where Grimm had been standing only a second ago exploded in fire and shrapnel.
Alvez raised his storm bolter and fired at the black behemoth now emerging from the dust, but his bolts rattled off its armour. Engines spluttered and rumbled, and the thing lurched out of the cloud, its great treads crushing wounded men and women who were unable to roll clear.
It was a massive ork battlewagon, a mishmash of looted tanks and armoured personnel carriers welded together on a vast track-mounted chassis. Twisted black spikes covered its armour, and a fat cannon swivelled from a cluster of armoured mantlets.
Those guns swung towards Alvez now and, with a stutter of thunder, launched a volley of explosive shells his way.
Had Alvez not been wearing Terminator armour, the proximity of the detonating shells would have blasted him apart, but it would take nothing less than a direct hit to fell him.
Under the cover of the smoke and debris that the exploding rounds had kicked up, Alvez retreated, ordering Grimm, who had narrowly missed being blasted apart himself, out of the arcade in front of him.
Outside, all but one of the trucks had left at speed, carrying the Rynnites who had made it out alive. No one else would emerge from the building now. In the driver’s cabin of the last truck, a terrified man in Rynnsguard fatigues waved frantically at them.
‘My lord,’ he yelled over the sound of the arcade’s destruction. ‘Please, hurry. Get in the back.’
The truck was military issue, a big, tough six-wheel drive affair capable of handling three tonnes of cargo. The back was unshielded. Alvez looked at it dubiously. Grimm jumped up into the rear, and the suspension compressed with a groan. Alvez followed quickly, and the driver put the truck in gear. It struggled to accelerate at first, but soon they were roaring away from the arcade, abandoned shops and hab-blocks whipping by them.
Alvez and Grimm watched from the back as the Menzilon arcade finally collapsed in a great mushrooming cloud of dust and smoke.
‘Do you think, perhaps…?’ Grimm asked.
‘No,’ said Alvez. ‘It’ll take more than that to stop it.’
A new sound was intruding on his thoughts, just audible above the rumble of the truck. It was a distant angry buzzing noise, and it came from the south-east. Actually, it was several noises merging together.
‘Damn it,’ cursed the captain. ‘We’ve got ork copters coming in!’
He was right. The copters swung out of the sky, guns blazing, the insane greenskin pilots laughing with delight. Stubber-fire stitched the back of the truck and rattled off the armour of the two Space Marines. Alvez targeted the lead copter and fired a quick burst from his storm bolter. The machine dipped for a moment, but stayed in the air. A second later, when the pilot’s torso blew outwards, the shells inside him detonating, the buzzing one-man craft went into a wild spin and exploded on contact with the corner of a tall hab.
There were still two copters. Grimm fired his bolter and blew out the gas tank of the second, turning the whole machine into a blinding yellow fireball that crashed onto the road behind them.
‘Keep moving,’ Alvez roared at the driver. Turning to look ahead, he could see the Verano wall looming into view. The other trucks from the arcade were already well beyond its great gates.
‘Almost there,’ said the Rynnsguard driver.
He spoke too soon, of course. The last of the ork copters dived towards them and, before either Grimm or Alvez could open fire, launched a volley of rockets right at them.
Most of the rockets went wide, but one screamed straight in under the vehicle and struck the ground. The explosion tossed the truck into the air, its back end spinning over its cabin. Grimm and Alvez were thrown out and hit the ground hard, but, saved from grievous injury by the armour, they were soon up and moving towards the Verano Gate.
The Rynnsguard driver was not so lucky. His broken body lay still, soaked in blood, half in, half out of the crumpled cabin.
Grimm was at Alvez’s side now, pacing him, slowing his own steps to match those of the far heavier Terminator suit.
‘Damn them,’ spat Alvez, looking to his left and right.
From the streets on either side, a tide of orks was boiling towards them, weapons firing, blades raised, a wall of green flesh and sharpened metal. The two Crimson Fists immediately opened fire, cutting down dozens in the front ranks.
‘Get moving,’ growled Alvez. ‘Get to the gate, Huron. You have to close it before they get through. I won’t lose another district today.’
‘And I won’t leave your side,’ Grimm argued, voice shaking with the recoil from his bolter as he fired burst after burst at the horde. His left hand flashed to his belt and pulled a krak grenade free. He primed it with his thumb and tossed it at the closest knot of greenskins.
There was a deep boom, and the luckless orks at the front exploded in a shower of red flesh and bright bone. Grimm tossed another, killed a dozen more of the savages, and that was it. His grenades were spent.
The roar of the ork horde was joined by the sound of engines now. Buggies and bikes revved noisily, eager to get through, but there was no room for them, the streets were so thick with greenskin infantry.
‘Don’t you disobey me, sergeant,’ Alvez barked between shots. ‘Don’t you start that now. I need those gates closed before the orks push through. You can get there a lot faster than I can. Start the mechanism. I will slip through just before they shut. We’re operating under the Ceres Protocol, remember. I’m not about to die at the hands of this filth.’
He strafed the orks to his left with storm bolter fire and cut several apart, but there were so many of them, and they kept coming, stampeding over their dead.
Grimm had his orders. He didn’t have to like them, but they were orders just the same. Firing a last burst from his bolter, he turned and sprinted for the Verano Gate. As he ran, he told his captain over the link, ‘I’m not letting them close until you’re through.’
Alvez ignored that. He was busy picking his targets, walking backwards, his storm bolter keeping the orks at bay. In his left hand was a glowing power sword, a relic blade called Riad. Its blade, forged with technology long-forgotten, could cut through tank armour with ease. If, no, when the orks got within range, Alvez would cut through them like they weren’t even there.
He did not feel even the slightest fear as the horde closed on him. Glancing back, he saw that Huron Grimm was through the gate now, and he had only fifty metres to go. But the damned gate was still wide open.
‘Grimm?’ he bellowed over the link. ‘What in Dorn’s name is going on?’
‘The mechanism, my lord,’ Grimm answered. ‘It’s jammed. We’ll have to close the gates manually.’
‘Then do it,’ Alvez snapped. The orks were almost on him now. He hefted Riad in his hand, ready to swing. ‘And hurry up!’
Grimm could hardly believe this. He wanted someone to blame, someone to rip apart with his bare hands. The Rynnsguard troopers manning the walls were firing down into the ork horde that was closing around his captain, but their lasguns were pathetically inadequate. Only their heavy weapons – the autocannon, lascannon and heavy bolters they employed – had anything but a negligible effect on
the xenos mob, and there weren’t nearly enough of those to turn the orks back.
Grimm’s squadmates were on the walls, too, and had been firing in support of him, but the moment he discovered the gate mechanism was malfunctioning, he had called them down from the walls to help him. Closing the gate manually meant pushing each of the two gate sections together. Thick metal bars stuck out from the rear of each section to make this possible, but it would have taken the Rynnsguard many men and far too much time even to budge the gate a centimetre. Instead, Grimm’s squad went to work, even while, on the other side of the gate, their brave captain cut a path of gory destruction through his enemies.
Grimm heard him on the link, breathing hard despite the capabilities of his gene-boosted body.
‘Progress report, sergeant!’
Grimm answered through gritted teeth as he pushed with all his strength against the handle in front of him, desperate to get the gate moving. ‘Doing our best, captain.’ He managed, but that was all.
‘Not good enough,’ Alvez answered. ‘Work faster!’
Grimm grunted and put everything he had into pushing the gates closed. Beside him, two of his brothers also pushed. The other two worked the opposite section. The sound of gunfire was loud and constant from atop the wall.
‘We can’t keep them off him!’ shouted a Rynnsguard officer. ‘There’s too damned many!’
Grimm howled with rage. He wanted to be out there beside his captain. What in the blasted warp was he doing here, about to lock Drigo Alvez out there with the enemy?
Orders, said a voice in his head. You can never disobey your orders.
‘Captain,’ Grimm grunted. ‘How close to the gate are you? It’s almost shut. We’ve only three metres to go!’
It was true. The Rynnsguard would later tell of the Space Marines’ incredible strength that day. It shouldn’t have been possible. The gate’s sections weighed several tonnes each and were only ever meant to be manually closed with the aid of powerful trucks that could shunt them together.
‘Close the gates,’ ordered Alvez.
Grimm stopped pushing immediately, his squad brothers following suit.
‘My lord–’
‘I said close the damned gates, sergeant. Are you deaf? They’re all around me now. There’s far too many of them and if they get through, Dorn help me, you’ll have disobeyed a direct order. You’ll no longer be Adeptus Astartes, I promise you. I am commanding you to save that district, and you will do it. How many hundreds of thousands of people are sheltering behind those walls? Do it, Huron!’
The conscious part of Grimm’s mind railed against it, but his psycho-conditioning was incredibly deep and, through a strange numbness, he felt his body once more put all its strength into the effort of sealing the gate.
Again, his squad brothers took their cue from his example.
Before he knew it, the task was done, and he stood gasping, helmet pressed to thick metal surface.
He ordered his squad brothers back onto the ramparts to lend their Rynnsguard their firepower, but he knew it was too late. He felt the loss inside him already.
A moment later, Brother Kifa hailed him on the link, and his tone was enough to tell Grimm everything. Even Terminator armour had its limits. Against such overwhelming numbers, the captain could not have fought longer than he did.
He was gone.
Grimm allowed himself to fall to his knees. He had never felt like this in all his life. He hoped he never would again.
His left hand sought something on his belt and he tugged it free with a snap, raised his hand in front of his visor and looked at it.
It was a tiny wooden aquila, the charm that the old Rynnite woman had tried to give Captain Alvez as they marched through her street.
Grimm stared at it, the relentless noise of battle all around him dimming to mere background static. This pathetic little trinket was supposed to protect people. It was supposed to have some power, yes? The woman, filled with reverence for the Crimson Fists, had wanted the charm to protect Drigo Alvez. But it was he, Huron Grimm, that had carried it with him. And it was he who lived.
What did that mean, he wondered?
Nothing, answered a voice in Grimm’s mind.
It sounded so much like the captain’s.
It means nothing at all, Huron, the voice repeated. It is just a piece of wood. Destroy it!
Numbly, automatically, Grimm closed his armoured fist over the tiny icon, and crushed it to splinters.
Now get up, said the voice. Get back in the fight. Honour me. Honour the Chapter as you were taught to do.
Grimm got up as the voice commanded, slammed a fresh magazine in his bolter, climbed to the top of the ramparts, and went back to war.
Thirteen
The Azcalan Rainforest, Rynnland Province
Cortez’s pistol clicked empty, and there wasn’t time to change the magazine. Rearing up in front of him was a huge ork with skin the colour of coal. In each clawed hand, the slavering beast held a cleaver over a metre long, each blade viciously serrated like the jaws of a Medean killfish. There was a blur of motion. Cortez’s reflexes shifted him a step to the left before his conscious mind even had time to register the angle of the blow, his response time the product of centuries of diligent training.
The greenskin berserker’s blades bit deep into the soil where Cortez had been standing. In the half-second that the creature took to reverse its momentum and wrench its weapons up again, Cortez’s power fist flashed forward in an arcing blur. It was a body shot, a thunderous strike to the monster’s exposed side, and the crack of lethal energies ionised the air, giving it a sharp metallic smell. The ork howled and crumpled to its knees, a great spherical section of its torso utterly destroyed. Gore poured forth, and it sank forward, but Cortez wasn’t finished. One did not leave a wounded ork breathing on the battlefield. These were hardy creatures, far hardier than any living thing had a right to be. Wounds that would have killed even a Space Marine might only cripple an ork until its incredibly resilient algae-infused system could put it back together. He had seen it happen before.
The moment the creature’s head struck the dirt, Cortez raised his booted foot and hammered it down on the beast’s ugly head. Once, twice, three times. At first, the skull resisted the massive impact of the blows, but, by the third stomp, it gave way, the bone shattering at last, the brain turning to a jelly-like smear.
There was no time to glory in the victory. All around Cortez, his battle-brothers were engaged at close quarters. It was here the orks were most dangerous. It was here they excelled. Their raw animal power and savagery were incomparable among all the alien races, save perhaps the disgusting tyranids. Individual combat would favour the Adeptus Astartes, of course. No living being trained as relentlessly, nor mastered war to the same degree. But the orks were not fighting as individuals. Their strength was in their numbers. Hundreds poured forth, as if the forest was vomiting them out, like something poisonous eaten by mistake and rejected. ‘Stand fast!’ Cortez bellowed, drawing his combat knife. Its blade was long and keen, sharpened to the monomolecular level, treated with a coating of synthetic diamond, as were the knives of all the Crimson Fists. They cut through the flesh of the orks, carving great hunks of bleeding meat from the densely muscled bodies.
Days had passed since the rescue of Dasat and his pilgrims from the slaver camp, and this was the third time since then that the contingent from Arx Tyrannus had run into wandering ork mobs. The two previous times, whichever squad was on point had quickly eliminated the problem. Those mobs had been relatively small. This one was far larger, and there had been no going around it. A pitched battle had been inevitable.
Cortez heard Kantor on the link ordering Squad Viejo to break north with the refugees, to get them away from the edge skirmish as quickly as possible. Then the Chapter Master was in among the orks, a whirlwind of violence, felling all that tried to swarm on him.
Cortez would have enjoyed watching his friend’s martia
l prowess in action, but two snarling orks, marginally smaller and lighter-skinned than the monster Cortez had just slain, lunged at him from both sides. Cortez slid backwards a single step, and the aliens’ crude blades cut empty air. He did not give them time to recover. Every blow they missed was an opening he was conditioned to exploit. Lunging to the right, he rammed his combat blade deep into the belly of one, so deep he felt its point catch on the inner surface of the beast’s vertebrae. Instantly, he yanked back on the knife’s grip. The serrations on the back of the blade caught on the creature’s innards, and ripped them out through the gaping hole in its skin. For an instant, the creature stood looking down at its own looped intestines, a look of dumb curiosity on its idiot face. Cortez had already turned to the other, kicking at its leading knee, hard enough to smash the kneecap to pieces. The ork went down on its other knee with a roar of anger and pain. Again, Cortez’s power fist flashed out. There was a sharp electrical crack, and the creature’s head vanished in a red mist.
The lifeless, headless body fell forward on its chest, twitching and gushing hot blood.
Cortez spun and caught the other ork, the one his knife had just gutted, on the side of its head with a backhand blow. It, too, collapsed headless to the soil, falling to rest atop its own slick viscera.
Over the comm-link, Cortez heard himself addressed. ‘Alessio, try to draw them west. Crush them between your squad and Segala’s.’
Easier said than done, thought Cortez as his power fist felled another green wretch.
From the corner of his eye, he saw the Chapter Master fighting only a dozen metres from his side. Fenestra and Benizar were beside him, giving their all. Cortez threw himself into the fight even harder, and became a blur of blue motion, slaughtering the brutish foe as quickly as they could emerge from the dark green shadows.
Cortez relayed the Chapter Master’s orders to his squad between blows and, together, they began moving west even as they fought. Kantor moved with them, growling over the link, ‘That’s it. Keep them coming. North a little. Draw them on.’
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 89