The ork was dead, it just hadn’t accepted it yet; not while it could still drag its killer down into the inferno behind it.
Superheated exhaust smoke billowed up the inside of the gun tower.
Sicarius saw the ork’s flesh stripped from its bones. Its face was little more than a leering skull when he lost sight of it; still, its eyes glared up at him, full of hatred, as intractable as its death grip on his foot. Alarms began to screech and wail and blink inside his helmet, detecting intolerable temperatures without.
He pulled for all he was worth, and finally tore himself free of the clinging fingers. He felt as if his every nerve was afire, but he couldn’t allow himself to succumb to the pain. He scrambled for handholds above him, straining every muscle and fibre bundle in his arms to lift himself out of the deadly cloud. He was grateful now for Renius, who had widened the way ahead of him.
He might have blacked out briefly, the conscious part of his mind at least. Like the orks, however, Sicarius didn’t know when to die; while, unlike them, he had selfless allies to make sure that he didn’t.
He felt Brother Lumic’s hands tightening around his wrists, felt himself being lifted when he didn’t have the strength to lift himself. He sprawled onto his stomach inside a large, octagonal chamber. Cracks ran through its walls, and its ceiling bulged in the centre and groaned ominously. He felt dizzy. He didn’t know if he could stand, but he stood anyway and refused to let his battle-brothers help him.
The alarms in his helmet were quieting one by one, while scrolling displays told him how many painkilling and invigorating drugs had been pumped into him: enough to keep him active and alert, which was all that mattered to him.
His power armour required repairs, when he had the chance to see to it. Its protective layer of ceramite had begun to bubble and crack with the intense heat – though it had maintained its integrity and thus preserved his life. The floor was trembling violently, no doubt because of the engine beneath it – and how many others, Sicarius wondered, attached to other parts of the star fort’s hull?
For the first time, he noticed a pattern on one of the chamber’s walls, picked out in coloured tiles. It was the icon of the Cult Mechanicus: a half-human, half-machine skull bounded by a cogwheel, representing the perfect fusion of Man with the Machine God.
The Machine God was a minor aspect of the Emperor, in Sicarius’s view. Still, it angered him to see that the mosaic had been defaced. Many of the steel-grey and ivory-white tiles that formed the composite skull had been pried loose, while others had been cracked or shattered in the attempt. Someone had spray-painted an ork face, inexpertly, over the image. The insult focused the captain’s attention on his mission.
He rounded on his Techmarine. ‘No more secrets,’ he growled, the throbbing of the engine – the engines – underfoot lending his voice a threatening undercurrent. ‘Tell me what the Adeptus Mechanicus were doing aboard the Indestructible.’
‘I’m sorry, captain,’ said Renius, setting his jaw stubbornly.
‘I need that information, Techmarine!’ Sicarius flared. ‘I’m standing in the bowels of the Emperor-damned thing, aren’t I?’
The rest of the Ultramarines closed in around Renius, in silent support of their leader. He looked at each of them in turn, then conceded defeat with a nod. ‘There was a project,’ he confessed. ‘The tech-priests were attempting to make a star fort mobile – independently mobile, I mean.’
‘By fitting it with engines,’ said Sicarius. He wasn’t surprised.
‘Many engines,’ confirmed Renius. ‘Thruster engines and warp engines. Think about it. The Ramilies’ greatest asset is its ability to traverse the immaterium. It can generate a warp bubble around itself, which allows it to withstand–’
‘I already know this,’ Sicarius said impatiently.
‘But imagine if, instead, the Ramilies could provide its own propulsion. Imagine if it could shift from one star system to another, without having to wait for a fleet of ships to tow it and with negligible risk: a mobile command base with weapons fully charged and fully-stocked repair and resupply facilities.’
He sounded almost evangelical about the prospect.
‘Imagine,’ Sicarius growled, ‘if the orks had that capability.’
Renius inclined his head. ‘Khargask is attempting to bring the project to fruition, and has clearly come closer than we hoped. I suspect it was a test flight that brought him to the Agides System. Something went wrong. The Indestructible came down here, but its engines slowed its descent, at least. The damage to the propulsion systems and plasma generators may have been minimal.’
‘And what about the energy flares that the Krieg men saw?’
‘Attempts to re-establish the warp bubble,’ Renius surmised, ‘and to reconfigure it to maintain the Ramilies’s integrity, to hold it together against the incredible stresses of take-off.’
The floor and the bulkheads around them were still trembling, but less violently now. The engine below them had ceased its angry protests and settled into a comfortable rhythm, almost a hum. Sicarius asked himself why it was still running at all, now that the five Ultramarines were safely out of the reach of its backwash. He didn’t like the answer he came up with. He turned back to the Techmarine.
‘Is there a control room?’ he asked. ‘There must be a control room.’
‘The basilica,’ said Renius. Of course. ‘Beneath the Grand Chamber.’
Sicarius pinpointed the location on his schematics. He had already calculated his own position, towards the inner edge of the star fort’s south-west-facing quadrant, and he quickly mapped a route from one to the other.
There were narrow, winding, upward-leading staircases in each of the chamber’s eight corners. Most of them had partially collapsed, but the one he needed looked to be just about passable. Sicarius hurried towards it, his footsteps crunching on broken mosaic tiles, and his battle-brothers didn’t need to be told to follow him. If what he suspected, what he feared, was true, then his mission was more urgent now than ever.
He had to get to that engine control room while there was still time.
CHAPTER XI
The Korpsmen were wheeling siege towers across no-man’s-land: tall, teetering wire-frame and canvas constructs, six of them in all. The Indestructible’s energy weapon stabbed out at one of them and reduced it to smouldering ashes.
The towers didn’t look as if they provided much protection. Most of the Death Korpsmen didn’t wait for them to arrive, anyway. The order had come for them to scale the star fort’s ramparts, so scale them they did.
Mouldings and gun emplacements provided plentiful handholds, and some Korpsmen were equipped with crampons and grappling hooks, so the climb itself was easy – but for the green-skinned creatures waiting at the end of it. Kenjari could see their brutish faces, peering through crenels above him; then the faces were replaced by guns and rocket launchers, firing downward.
He could almost have admired the men of Krieg, the way they never flinched nor wavered, just swarmed up those walls as many around them were riddled with bolts and bullets and sent hurtling back to the ground. He could almost have admired them – had he not been expected to follow them.
Kenjari shrugged his rucksack from his shoulders, sifting through it for climbing tools with shaking hands. He found a small hand axe, which would do. As he straightened up, he realised that his sergeant had seen him vacillating and was elbowing his way towards him – through a scrum of waiting Death Korpsmen – with his bayonet poised to deliver his customary encouragement.
Then, a series of warning cries rang out: ‘Look out below!’
Two orks had tipped a vat of something over the side. Some of the Korpsmen managed to leap for cover, but those higher on the walls were drenched in a viscous, silver tidal wave that sizzled through their flak armour. Several of them, these normally taciturn warriors, screamed. Kenjari gasped as a maimed body smacked into the ground at his feet, writhing in agony. His sergeant judged that the
casualty couldn’t be saved and put him out of his misery with a gunshot.
He heard the voice of an officer over his comm-bead: ‘Keep climbing. Climb! Climb! The Emperor expects.’
He realised that the guns of both sides had fallen silent; it could only just have happened, because his ears were still ringing from their barks. Blue-armoured figures marched out of the battlefield smoke, and Kenjari was filled with awe at the very sight of them. The Angels of Death didn’t mount the ramparts themselves, but they aimed their bolt and flamer weapons up at the defenders and several brutish faces quickly disappeared from sight.
The remaining siege towers crashed into the side of the star fort, and the nearest Korpsmen poured into them at ground level, to emerge a minute later onto platforms at their tops. Kenjari tried to make it to a tower – it seemed like the safest option for him, relatively speaking – but too many others were in his way. He found himself pushed up against the Indestructible’s ramparts and, though he had thankfully been separated from his sergeant, he could feel a hundred other blank eyes upon him and he knew what he had to do. He had to climb.
It was like the trek across no-man’s-land again, just in a different plain. He was following pairs of booted feet above him, spurred on by the blank-faced men at his own heels when his every muscle only longed to surrender, fearing that he ought to pray for a speedy death because it might be the kindest fate on offer. Time after time, shots rang out above him – despite the efforts of the Space Marines below – and a nearby Korpsman lost his grip on his hand- and footholds and tumbled past him, no longer a human being but merely a sack of flesh and bones and blood.
A body glanced off him and almost took Kenjari down with it. His right hand lost its grip on the wall and that side of his body swung away from it. He hadn’t climbed as high as he had imagined; he could have survived a fall, but he would likely have been injured and his sergeant might have euthanised him too. To his relief, the Korpsman at his ankles caught his slipping right foot and boosted him back into position with a growl: ‘The Emperor expects.’
He felt light-headed, sweaty and sick, and just wanted to cling to something solid for a moment, but the masked man beneath him was still pushing and he had to climb again. He saw a gun emplacement within reach – no threat because the barrel of its cannon had been shattered – and gratefully utilised the broad, firm ledge it offered. As he pushed off from it, with a little more confidence, a green hand was thrust through the gap above the cannon and grabbed him by the knee.
Kenjari squealed in terror. It was the first time he had ever touched a xenos, and a tiny, irrational part of his brain insisted that he was contaminated now.
When the orks had attacked at the star fort’s base, the men of Krieg had saved him, though that hadn’t been their objective. They had saved him by getting between Kenjari and the xenos and by fighting them relentlessly, many of them to the death. Three squads of experienced Guardsmen – grenadiers – had charged the orks with bayonets and, though they hadn’t been able to match their strength, they had kept them busy while their comrades had sniped at them from the sidelines.
Kenjari had loosed off several shots himself, firing blindly in panic, and he knew that his efforts had amounted to precisely nothing.
No one else could save him this time. His lasgun was slung across his back again, but his hand axe was clamped between his teeth in case of need. He clung to the wall with his left hand, snatched the weapon with his right and struck down with it. He wasn’t thinking clearly enough to aim, and his blows made criss-cross patterns of cuts across the ork’s flesh instead of slicing through its muscles.
The Emperor was with him, however, and it proved to be enough. The ork’s fingers spasmed and let him go; his axe head must have struck a nerve. He dragged himself away from there as quickly as he could, his weariness forgotten.
To his right and above him, a siege tower had extruded a gangplank over the star fort’s battlements. Death Korpsmen were teeming across it, though it was only wide enough to accommodate two of them abreast.
He couldn’t see, but could imagine, the reception with which they were greeted. He could see the results of it too, as more bodies came hurtling over the parapet. Death Korpsmen were backed all the way along the gangplank, jostling to get forwards. Perhaps Kenjari was better off where he was, after all. Rather here, he thought, than queuing up the steps of one of those fragile towers, waiting for his turn to confront the monsters above…
He was nearing the top of the ramparts. Other Korpsmen had made it ahead of him; most had detached their bayonets and were wielding them like knives, knowing that the orks would quickly close upon them. Perhaps, Kenjari thought, by the time he was able to join them, the combatants on both sides would be occupied and he wouldn’t be noticed. Perhaps he could slip past them and find a nook somewhere inside the star fort to hide until the fighting was over.
The structure was shaking.
Kenjari hadn’t noticed it at first, with all the sound and motion around him. The vibrations, however, were growing fiercer, and suddenly the air was charged with electrical energy and he could see sparks of it, purple and green, flaring around him. The sparks seemed to be building inside the walls themselves, until they were too powerful to be contained. For a moment, the energy wreathed him, making his nerves tingle and his hair stand on end beneath his helmet, but fortunately doing no worse.
A new sound, far louder than the others, rose from the bowels of the earth: a groaning of tortured machine-spirits.
Kenjari had seen this happening before, but from a distance, standing up on his toes to sneak a glance out of a Krieg trench where no officers could see him. He had heard it suggested that the orks were building and testing a powerful weapon inside the Indestructible. Were they about to test their weapon on him?
The Space Marines were finally climbing the walls beneath him. They were climbing faster than any Korpsman could; in some cases climbing right over them. The Korpsmen’s handholds weren’t strong enough to support them, so they were punching new ones through the star fort’s adamantium skin into the metal beneath.
One of them – a blue tank with two legs and a single arm – had been lifted by a gunship right onto the top of the battlements, landing with a thud, squashing countless ork defenders. He managed to swing out of the juggernaut’s way, into a space left on the wall beside him by a Korpsman who had taken a stray bullet to the head.
‘Follow the Space Marines,’ the ever-present voice in Kenjari’s ear buzzed. ‘They are the Emperor’s angels, and it is they who will bring justice to His enemies.’
The star fort was shaking more violently than ever and, suddenly, glancing down as he clung to its mouldings for dear life, Kenjari saw the reason why. The star fort – the castle from the sky – was straining to lift itself off the ground, to return to the heavens from which it had so unceremoniously fallen.
It wasn’t going to make it. It wasn’t just the gravity of the Agides moon that was holding onto it. The star fort’s lower levels were entangled – inextricably so? – with the moon’s mine workings and its subterranean tunnels. It had failed to pull itself free of them before, he suddenly realised.
This time, however, was different. This time, the machine-spirits weren’t about to give up their struggle. Their groans had steadily increased in pitch and volume until they became full-blooded howls of defiance. The emissions from the star fort’s walls were combining to form a bubble around its massive structure, a flickering, flaring energy shield; there were still a few gaps in it, but they were closing up fast.
The Indestructible seemed to scream as it wrenched itself free from the grip of the hard, black earth and began to ascend.
It was, for Kenjari, just the latest in a succession of overwhelming terrors; one more than he could bear. He saw some Korpsmen shaken from the ramparts, plummeting towards the ground, and he felt a powerful stab of envy towards them. It occurred to him that he could plausibly fall too. He might break a few bone
s, or he might find a soft landing on the bodies that were piling up underneath him.
Either way, the xenos would fly their castle away from him, and take the Death Korps of Krieg and the bright blue Space Marines with them. They could carry on their bloody war without him, among the stars. Kenjari would live.
There was no time to think about it, to second-guess himself. The surface of the moon was already beginning to recede beneath his feet, and in a second it would be too late, he would be trapped. He had one chance to save himself, and that chance was now.
Kenjari jumped for his life.
CHAPTER XII
The Indestructible was in motion.
Sicarius was hurrying along a curving passageway, fighting to stay upright as the floor bucked like a panicked mount. The walls were getting the worst of it, his pauldrons leaving indentations in the stone and shattering lumoglobes.
Back above ground, he had been able to vox Sergeant Lucien. His second-in-command had been proud to report his progress. He had led their Chapter over the star fort’s ramparts and they were fighting its occupiers hand-to-hand. It was more than Sicarius had expected.
So far, as his command squad had journeyed to the star fort’s heart, they had met little resistance. A few gretchin had crossed their paths – inadvertently, he suspected – but not for long. Now he knew what was keeping most of the orks busy. Lucien had not seen the big mek himself, however.
Sicarius knew where Khargask would be; and he knew that, no matter the situation outside, he would not be alone.
‘These xenos are not so tough,’ a welcome voice boomed over an open vox-channel, ‘when they have no cannons to hide behind.’ Evidently, Brother Ultracius had made it to the Ramilies too.
Knight of Talassar - Steve Lyons Page 7