He bent his knees. He lifted another shell off the pile and onto his shoulder. He straightened up and turned, and his blood turned to ice-cold water.
His crewmates were climbing down from the Earthshaker platform. His sergeant yelled at him and jabbed him in the side with a bayonet. He almost dropped the shell, trying to place it down. His hands were trembling.
He did what he had to do. He followed his sergeant, although it was the last thing his leaden feet wanted. As they hurried through the trenches, they were joined by tens, scores, hundreds of other Krieg soldiers. They could have been as scared as he was, thought Kenjari, but he doubted it; anyway, if they were, it wouldn’t show.
He kept an eye on his sergeant’s stripes, knowing that if he lost him he would struggle to locate him again. Conversely, he was sure that if he tried to hide himself, the sergeant – worse still, Commissar Dast – would find him.
His four-man Earthshaker crew were joined by six more to form a squad. The other Korpsmen were forming into groups of ten too, and spreading out along a wide, straight trench. They were at the eastern edge of the trench network, Kenjari realised, as close as they could get to the enemy. Emperor, this was really happening!
A blue-armoured giant was wading through the throng, his shoulders squared, his gauntlets clasped behind his back. His face was masked, like the faces of the Korpsmen, with metal rather than cloth but equally impenetrable. Kenjari had never been this close to a Space Marine before, and was daunted by his palpable presence.
He recalled his brief hope of salvation when the blue ships had arrived; it seemed even more absurd to him now than it had then. When first he had set eyes upon a Krieg Korpsman, he had feared him to be an angel of death. The Adeptus Astartes, however, were often given that nickname too.
Kenjari stood in the trench among the others, their bodies pressing in on him, his nostrils filled with the stench of his own terror. He had drawn his lasgun, following his sergeant’s lead, but his hands were so sweaty that he thought it might slip out of them. He had tried his best to keep the weapon maintained and to understand its functions; he prayed it would work for him when he needed it. For what it might be worth.
He strained to hear his sergeant’s voice over the crashing of manmade thunder. His eyes were distracted by flashes of man-made lightning. His orders were the same as those of the rest of his squad, the rest of his regiment. The Death Korpsmen of Krieg were to rise up out of their trenches into that raging storm. They were to march on the star fort, the fallen castle, and wrest it back from its usurpers.
It didn’t sound like much of a plan to Kenjari.
Not that he had a say in it. It seemed like an eternity before a whistle blew, somewhere, and the sound was taken up and amplified by Krieg officers closer to hand; an eternity, and yet the time passed in a heartbeat.
The men of Krieg surged forwards, almost trampling him in their rush to mount the trench wall. If Kenjari thought he could hang back, though, he was mistaken. His sergeant grabbed the scruff of his neck and dragged him bodily up after him. His gloved hands scrabbled to find purchase on the uneven surface and he almost dropped his gun again. He managed to dig a boot into the side of the wall and lever himself upwards, flopping onto his stomach with his legs dangling behind him. The sounds of shelling seemed suddenly much louder and he didn’t want to raise his head, but his sergeant was there again, hauling him to his feet, propelling him onwards.
Kenjari found himself running. He couldn’t see where he was going. He was following the soldiers ahead of him through the smoke, spurred on by the soldiers – the identical soldiers – at his heels. He spotted a rank insignia on an epaulet and realised that the captain had sent his officers out here to be slaughtered too. He had seen no sign of Dast in the trench, however.
He trampled over coils of razor wire, already demolished, flattened into the hard earth by the tracks of the Space Marines tanks. A monstrous shape emerged from the haze in front of him, then resolved itself into two smaller, angular shapes: a pair of tanks. One of them was dead, a gutted metal corpse, which the other was using for cover. Its main gun belched out fire and more smoke, and blazed a trail towards the Korpsmen’s objective like a route marker.
A moment later, fire blossomed among the soldiers to Kenjari’s left and only a little way behind him, close enough that his neck was seared by the blast heat; he could smell their burning flesh. They didn’t scream; or if they did, he couldn’t hear them over the guns. Were the men of Krieg really so stoic, he wondered dimly, or was it just that they hadn’t had time to suffer?
Would he suffer, he wondered, when the fire consumed him too?
He didn’t know how far he had to go. He couldn’t see the star fort through the smoke, and he had lost all sense of time and distance. He felt as if he might have been running forever and might yet be. The thundering of the shells to every side of him – the Imperial tanks were still firing, despite the risk of striking their allies – had merged into a continuous roar; except that sometimes, his ears picked out a louder, closer explosion than the others and he knew that another ten or twenty or thirty masked soldiers had just been wiped out.
This wasn’t at all how he had pictured it in his nightmares. He had thought he would see his death coming.
He had lost sight of his sergeant, after all. The soldiers around him may have been his squad-mates or not, Kenjari couldn’t tell. It crossed his mind that he could pretend to stumble or to have been hit by shrapnel, just fall to his stomach and let the others pass over him; but he was afraid they might trample him to death or he might be shot by an officer who saw through his deception, so he kept on running.
Then, to his surprise, he saw it: the star fort, or at least its towers looming over him in menacing silhouette. The sight of it lent strength to his weakening legs and bolstered his straining lungs as, for the first time, he thought he might be one of the fortunate few, the ones that actually made it there.
He focused his thoughts on that goal and followed the Korpsmen’s stout example. He willed his feet to fall one after another, his chest to rise and fall as he sucked in iron-tasting filtered air in an almost mechanistic rhythm. He lost heart as the towers seemed to grow no larger in his sights. He had misjudged their distance, he realised, deceived by the sheer scale of the construct and the intervening smoke.
He was all too close to the star fort’s guns, however.
The next explosion dazzled him and may have burst an eardrum. Its heat wave knocked Kenjari off his feet, and for an instant he thought it could well have been the one. He was caught, unexpectedly, by the Krieg Korpsmen behind him. They saved him from falling; had they not, he wasn’t sure he could have picked himself back up.
He was still dazed, disoriented, when they thrust him forwards again.
No soldiers remained ahead of him to follow, none that Kenjari could see, just the space where they had been – until he felt the soft wetness of their dismembered bodies underfoot and, looking down, saw their blood spattering his fatigues.
A voice, his sergeant’s voice, burst over his comm-bead at that moment, with a bluster of hollow encouragement. ‘Almost there,’ he insisted, ‘less than half a kilometre to go.’ A moment later, it was four hundred metres, then three hundred…
He could no longer see the star fort’s towers, he was too close to it. Instead, he was beginning to make out more intricate details: arched walkways and battlements and decorative mouldings – and a cannon barrel pointed squarely at him. The blank glare of the barrel transfixed him; he knew he was at its mercy. He could only pray for the greater mercy of the Emperor, if only he had had the breath.
He must have been heard, anyway, because the cannon didn’t fire. The Imperial tanks must have knocked it out already. Kenjari had survived. He had made it across the killing field. He was footsore, exhausted and only wanted to collapse into a quivering heap, and yet somehow he had made it.
He had made it – all the way to the place of his nightmares.
At least he would be safe from the castle’s remaining guns here, too close to their hidey-holes in the walls for them to get an angle on him. He was still in danger from friendly fire, however, as he realised when a shell burst too close over his head, peppering him with hot shrapnel. For the first time, he began to worry about the other perils ahead of him, the ones he hadn’t expected to have to face.
New shapes were forming ahead of him through the smoke, hulking figures with stooped postures and arms hanging down to their knees. Kenjari caught a glimpse of wild eyes beneath a heavy brow and tusks jutting out of a drooling mouth. The orks, he thought. The orks were coming out of their castle, pouring over its ramparts to greet the would-be invaders, impatient to engage them in physical combat.
He remembered how he had seen them tearing soldiers apart.
He stumbled to a halt and almost fled, momentarily forgetting how afraid he was of the Korpsmen and their leaders behind him; remembering, before he took his first step, how afraid he had been of the star fort’s guns, finding himself paralysed between a choice of violent deaths.
‘Trooper 3117-Delta,’ his sergeant’s voice bellowed. ‘You have a weapon. Use it!’
At least, against the orks, he could try to defend himself. His fingers had slipped from his lasgun’s trigger guard and he fumbled to find it again.
Many of the Korpsmen around him and behind him had dropped to one knee, bracing the butts of their weapons against their shoulders; so, clumsily, he followed their lead. He located his sights and squinted through them with his right eye, but couldn’t keep them steady. He saw a mass of green brutes thundering towards him, bearing down on him, swinging axes and crude chainswords.
One of them wielded a cobbled-together automatic weapon, and was spraying out bullets ahead of itself, indiscriminately. The Death Korpsmen had begun to return fire, and Kenjari’s sergeant’s voice was screaming in his good ear, urging him to do the same.
He screwed his eyes shut and squeezed his trigger.
CHAPTER VIII
The orks were massing ahead of them.
Sicarius could hear their guttural voices, grunting half-formed words in their own crude language. He understood enough to know that they were gathering for battle. They spoke of intruders in the mine tunnels.
The missing gretchin had found its masters, after all; with that, his hopes of reaching the star fort undetected were finally dashed.
‘We have a fight on our hands,’ he told his combat squad over their shared vox-channel. He saw no point in keeping radio silence now.
The tunnel they were following was narrow, and they had to proceed in single file. Sicarius took the lead, making no attempt to quiet his ringing footsteps. He could hear orks ahead, waiting out of sight, and could smell their xenos stink.
He detected Khargask’s hand in their actions again. It wasn’t the way of these brutes to wait patiently in ambush, and he guessed that some of them would be chafing at their orders, as he would have been himself. He decided to test his theory.
He stopped short of the tunnel’s end, activated the Talassarian Tempest Blade’s energy field and bellowed one of his Chapter’s war cries: ‘Courage and honour!’
Two greenskins took the bait.
They tumbled out of hiding, jostling with each other to be the first through the tunnel entrance. The winner stampeded towards Sicarius, with bloodlust in its eyes and a blood-caked axe raised over its head. He had time to snap off a single plasma pistol shot before it reached him. The bolt of superheated energy struck the ork in its shoulder, burning through flesh, and it howled in pain but didn’t flinch from him.
As it brought its axe head down, Sicarius ducked under it and parried it with his energy-wreathed blade. The blow was strong, but not as strong as he had expected, perhaps weakened by its wielder’s injury. He thrust the axe away from him and plunged his blade sideways into the ork’s chest. It coughed up blood and the axe fell from its numbed fingers; still, it managed to shift its falling weight onto him. It yanked at his helmet as if trying to dislodge it or snap his neck, and he couldn’t break its grip.
Instead, he lowered his head and thrust himself forwards. Surprised, the ork was lifted off its feet and carried along with him. He slammed it into its comrade, coming up the tunnel behind it, and felt its bones being crushed between them.
The ork let out a half-grunt, half-groan and let go of the Ultramarine’s head. It was still on its feet, albeit with support from the second brute behind it, so he tore its torso open with a double-handed, downward stroke.
He stepped back and loosed off a series of plasma bolts at the second ork. It tried to use its dead comrade as a shield, with limited success. It let the body drop to the ground instead, trampling and tripping over it to get to its tormentor. By the time it stumbled within striking range of Sicarius, the second ork was half-dead itself, and his Tempest Blade finished the job.
Two down, and neither of them had landed a blow on him. These narrow confines gave him a distinct advantage, forcing the orks to engage him one by one despite their greater numbers. Sicarius amplified his voice and yelled along the tunnel again: ‘Is that the best you can do? Send me your real fighters. I need a challenge!’
He heard a choked splutter from ahead of him. This time, however, no orks responded to his taunt; they had learned the folly of that. Had he had more time, Sicarius might have tried again. As it was, he had no choice. His enemy wouldn’t come to him, so he had to go to them – even if it meant marching into a trap.
He fingered a frag grenade on his belt as he stepped forwards. He thought about rolling it ahead of him: it would scatter the waiting orks, at least, and likely injure a few of them. An explosion, however, could have brought down the roof and cost him more time than he could afford to lose. He couldn’t risk it.
Nor, however, would he approach his enemy timorously. Sicarius picked up speed along the tunnel, his pistol levelled, his Tempest Blade ready, knowing that the rest of his combat squad would follow him, intending to burst upon the cowering orks like the Emperor’s wrath personified.
He was six steps from the tunnel’s end when a gretchin popped up in front of him. With a wide-mouthed cackle, it lobbed a small object his way. His Space Marine reflexes kicked in and he shot the creature before it could duck back out of sight. The thrown object, in the meantime, skipped across the tunnel floor between Sicarius’s feet, and he shouted a warning to his battle-brothers behind him: ‘Grenade!’
It was a stick bomb, like the ones they had seen before.
There wasn’t enough space for the Ultramarines to scatter away from it; chances were, their armour would be proof against it, anyway. The danger, once again, was that it might collapse the tunnel and slow them down, even divide their forces.
There was no time for Sicarius to issue an order. Brother Filion acted on his own initiative. He dropped to his hands and knees on top of the bomb, which bounced into his plastron and burst. He hadn’t quite smothered the blast, but he did absorb the brunt of it. The tunnel trembled – as did Filion, though his arms remained locked into position – and sweated dirt, but maintained its integrity.
Sicarius never broke his stride.
He erupted from the tunnel mouth like an oncoming tank, swinging his blade and firing his plasma pistol blindly, a war cry in his throat. As he had expected, he was immediately attacked from both sides. At least six orks piled onto him, battering him with clubs and meaty fists. They weren’t prepared for the momentum he had built up, however, and he carried them several steps before they wrestled him to a halt.
The short stretch of ground thus gained by him proved crucial, allowing his brothers space to emerge from the tunnel behind him.
Lumic and Gallo fired up their chainswords and laid into the captain’s attackers. He felt them beginning to fall away from him and dislodged another himself, with a hefty punch to its stomach, but was borne to the ground all the same. An axe head slammed into his helmet, making it ring, and his blade was kn
ocked out of his hand.
He jabbed his elbow into an ork’s throat, and suddenly only one remained.
He managed to turn the tables on the brute, pinning it beneath one knee. He jammed his pistol into its slavering mouth. Its comrade, the one with the fractured larynx, leapt onto his shoulders, gasping and spluttering incoherently, but couldn’t stop him from pulling the trigger.
The ork on his back was trying to throttle him. Sicarius reached over his head and seized it by its brawny forearms. It was strong, but its strength was waning quickly. He managed to lever himself to his feet and propel his opponent backwards, slamming it against a rock wall. He felt its fingers losing their hold on him, and threw the ork over his shoulder. It landed on its back and, thanks to its throat injury, couldn’t regain its breath. Sicarius saw his Tempest Blade on the ground and snatched it up. He sliced through the ork’s neck, so it wouldn’t have to worry about breathing again.
For the first time unencumbered, he took a good look at his surroundings.
He was in another cavern, man-made and smaller than the last one, little more in fact than a confluence of several tunnels. It was heaving with green-skinned orks, many more than had initially leapt on him – but his strategy of punching a hole through their ambush had proven effective. His blue-armoured battle-brothers – and one in red – had ploughed right into their midst and were cutting a bloody swathe through them.
Sicarius could see the Indestructible: a part of it, at least. The star fort, he recalled, had extra landing pads and gun towers on its underside, the better to defend itself in its natural environment of space where up and down had no meaning. One of those towers had crashed through the roof of one of the tunnels. In the process, it had been reduced to scrap. Beneath its burnished armour plating, the tower was fashioned from something that looked like stone – a super-dense stone, he had learned from the schematics, mined on one particular world – but this too had been shattered.
Knight of Talassar - Steve Lyons Page 5