There came no answer.
His finger flicked to his ear, silencing his comm-bead. Now, Dast could hear frightened breathing; it was coming from behind the burned-out corpse of a Predator Destructor. He took a step towards it and issued his challenge again, in a sterner tone this time. A wretched-looking figure emerged from behind the ruined tank. He was wearing a Death Korps uniform, facemask and rebreather unit; immediately, however, Dast knew that this was no man of Krieg.
‘Identify yourself, trooper,’ he demanded. When the figure’s response caught in his throat, Dast prompted him, ‘You were issued with a number. What is it?’
The trooper had to check his own dog tags before he could answer.
Dast nodded. The number was a recently issued one. He didn’t need to tap it into his data-slate to confirm his suspicion: that this was one of the Agides miners who had been found here and pressed into service. He couldn’t remember his name, but that was unimportant. He kept his pistol levelled at the trooper’s head: he might just have been stupid and desperate enough to think about using his own weapon.
‘Why are you hiding, trooper?’ barked Dast, knowing the answer.
‘I…’ the trooper stammered.
‘Who ordered you to leave the front lines?’ He knew the answer to that too.
The trooper lurched towards him; for an instant, Dast thought he was going to attack. Instead, he fell to his knees in front of the commissar and his lasgun slipped from between his fingers, disregarded. ‘I… I’m a worker, not a soldier,’ he pleaded. ‘I was never trained to fight. I was never prepared for… for this.’
‘You jumped from the star fort,’ Dast guessed, presenting the question as a statement of fact. ‘You didn’t fall. You chose to jump.’
The trooper’s guilty silence was the only answer he needed. The commissar’s duty was clear.
This man had disobeyed orders. He didn’t need to be told the consequences of that. Dast told him to remove his helmet, which he did, with trembling hands. Dast put his gun to the trooper’s temple. He gave him a moment to make his final peace with the Emperor, then he squeezed the trigger.
He beckoned one of the other survivors to him. He had him strip the flak armour, the lasgun, the rucksack and the rebreather mask from the cowardly trooper’s body. He averted his eyes from the dead man’s face as it was revealed. He never looked at their faces, not the ones who had faltered in their duty. Their lives hadn’t mattered and were not worthy of remembrance.
The man’s equipment would be passed on to the Death Korps of Krieg’s next recruit. Dast hoped that, with the Emperor’s grace, this time it might be issued to someone more worthy of it.
CHAPTER XIV
Khargask cannoned into Captain Sicarius, with enough force to bowl him over had he not seen it coming in time to brace himself.
He had stooped to take the impact of the charge on his shoulder, which gave him leverage to thrust his attacker away from him. He swung his Tempest Blade at the massive ork, but a rusty servo-arm blocked it, showering both combatants with furious sparks. Another mechanical limb, with a snapping claw attachment, slithered over Khargask’s shoulder and struck for Sicarius’s throat. He was forced to surrender a step to wrench himself free from it, before it could tighten its hold on him.
In the meantime, Renius had downed a greenskin mechanic with his power axe, and a bank of rune panels was his now. His voice came over a vox-channel, calm and clear: ‘There’s a blockage in the hyper-plasmatic energy conduction system and a synchronous vibration in the tertiary warp engine manifold.’
Sicarius had found the orks’ guttural language easier to understand. There was no mistaking the Techmarine’s next words, however: ‘It won’t make it.’
In his flesh-and-blood arms, Khargask clutched an oversized shooter. Something flashed inside it and it bucked violently in his grip as it fired with a series of deafening pops. Its bullets sprayed the engine control room almost indiscriminately, but three of them tore through Sicarius’s armour. The damage to the unique Mantle of Suzerain would pain the artificers on Macragge.
One of the bullets lodged itself in the muscle of his left leg.
The pain only lasted for an instant before a cocktail of chemicals suppressed it. However, he could feel the bullet shifting, tearing through more tissue, as he twisted to avoid another metal-armed swipe from his opponent. It’s like fighting a giant octopus, he thought ruefully, I’m being attacked from every direction at once.
To Renius, he voxed: ‘I don’t want to hear that. I want those engines shut off. That’s why I included you in this mission, so do your duty!’
Khargask had only one eye, his left, red and rheumy. The other had been replaced by something that looked like a sniper scope, jammed into the socket; it wasn’t helping with Khargask’s aim. Sicarius suspected that it might serve as a primitive auspex. It looked painful; he hoped it was.
He ducked between the big mek’s whirling arms and hacked energetically at the armour that protected its chest. He felt he had dislodged something, but he failed to draw ork blood. He did raise Khargask’s ire: he was seething and spitting, hurling insults at the Ultramarines captain.
More than anything else, Khargask seemed affronted. He was more than aware, Sicarius guessed, of his own notoriety. Indeed, he had pulled off quite a coup, stealing the Indestructible from under the noses of the massed Imperial Navy. ‘Khargask!’ The ork kept bellowing out his own name as if it ought to mean something.
One of Khargask’s claw arms fastened onto Sicarius’s blade. The machine-spirits in both fought a savage duel of their own, rending and biting at each other’s metal flesh, oily black blood spraying from their arteries.
The Tempest Blade, ancient and mighty, emerged as the victor. Sicarius let it rest while he emptied his plasma pistol’s charge into Khargask’s face. Most of the sun-hot rounds melted intervening servo-arms, but one of them scorched the big mek’s eyepiece.
I’ll deal with the greenskins, he had assured Renius. He chided himself for his overconfidence. It was almost more than he could do to stand up to a single ork, this ork. Smart and strong and savage, he recalled. He had underestimated Khargask, despite warning others against that very mistake.
‘Another one coming your way,’ the Techmarine warned him.
A greenskin had left its station at the edge of the room and was lurching towards him through the smoke. It was another mek, bristling with bionics but not engulfed by them as Khargask was. Sicarius feinted, luring Khargask into his ally’s path as it fired a burst of flame from a welding torch. He howled at the mekboy, sent it scurrying back to its rune panels. The big mek wanted Sicarius for himself: his first mistake.
The other orks were wrestling with levers, fighting fires, too busy to pay much attention to the battle raging behind them. Khargask employed his full complement of mechanical limbs to keep his opponent at bay, and bellowed orders at them that urged them to work faster.
A second ork mek saw what Renius was doing and sprang at him from behind. He didn’t turn, but his auto-senses must have seen the ork coming, because his servo-arm met it with a punishing blow. The ork’s knees buckled, but it pushed itself back to its feet with a roar of defiance.
It lunged at Renius again, just as a rune panel blew out in front of him and sprayed the pair with white-hot plasma. Renius got the worst of it, but the ork had no armour to protect it. For a second time, it staggered, clutching its hands to its eyes. It was blind and helpless, just awaiting the mercy of a killing blow.
Sicarius returned his focus to his own fight. He blocked the big mek’s next swing at him with his Tempest Blade, but shifted too much weight onto his left foot in the process. The bullet in his leg squirmed again, and he all but fell into a mighty, power-assisted punch to his jaw. He rolled with the blow, because it gave him the space he badly needed to reemploy his plasma pistol.
Khargask was panting eagerly, sensing his enemy’s weakness. He held himself in check long enough to finger a
rune panel on his arm. A pair of pylons strapped to his back burst into ozone-stinking life and projected a luminous, close-fitting aura around him. The way the aura popped and crackled, it surely couldn’t endure for long – it had to be a drain on whatever power source he was using – but while it did, the big mek was well-protected.
He bore down on Sicarius, straight through a hail of plasma, which his force field comfortably deflected. He mauled and clawed and even bit at his armoured foe again. He succeeded in breaking the seals on Sicarius’s helmet, so the smoke that wreathed the control room seeped into his nose and throat.
Renius’s voice broke through the fog: ‘–can’t power down the engines. The only thing I can do is try to starve them of air, make them stall before they–’
A claw arm jabbed through Khargask’s force field, and Sicarius caught it. With a laboured grunt of effort, he ripped the arm from its harness and set about the big mek with the sparking end. He hoped that some of the strength of his blows might make it through the field, or that he might be able to overload it.
Khargask shrugged off his efforts and responded with another shooter burst. Sicarius tried to twist out of the way of the bullets, but his injured leg betrayed him – as he had known it eventually would – and he found himself falling. He caught himself, just, on his hands and rolled onto his back, his pistol flaring wildly and in vain. Khargask took a moment to stand astride his downed opponent, with his ugly face twisted into an even uglier sneer, savouring the taste of victory.
Sicarius snarled up at him. ‘Enjoy it while you can, you brainless brute, because your schemes have come to nothing. Your engines don’t work and we’re all about to be blown to bloody–’
Khargask’s sneer froze. His eyepiece, even broken, must have warned him of imminent danger. He dived for cover as a fusillade of explosive bolt-rounds churned up the floor where he had been standing. A mass of solid blue armour came plummeting through the vent hole in the ceiling, landing with an impact that threatened to knock everyone else off their feet.
It was Ultracius, of course; and behind him appeared Brother Filion, his power armour scratched, dented and burned but his chainsword dripping dark ork blood from its teeth and howling for yet more. ‘Orders, captain?’ he requested.
The remaining ork meks were abandoning their rune panels, realising perhaps that there was nothing more they could do, seeing their enemies among them, and seeing a precious chance for a good fight. ‘Brother Filion, deal with them,’ Sicarius ordered as he pushed himself to his feet. ‘Ultracius, you too. Ensure that Renius’s work is not interrupted.’ The Dreadnought and the big mek had been squaring up to each other, as the former ignited his power fist. Sicarius was grateful for the respite that Ultracius had given him, but Khargask was his and his alone.
He readied the Tempest Blade.
He hurled himself at his enemy’s back and thrust his blade through a gap between the flickering bands of the ork’s failing force field. The sword’s energy field spluttered and screamed as Sicarius jammed the weapon into a vent in Khargask’s makeshift servo-harness. Machine-spirits danced and buzzed around his gauntlets in impotent fury, as the big mek’s mechanical arms went limp and the force field sputtered and died.
Khargask pitched forwards and took Sicarius’s blade with him. He was staggering under the dead weight of his useless servo-arms. He made one final attempt to bring his shooter to bear, but Sicarius was waiting for him and fired when he saw the angry red of the ork’s remaining eye.
This time, his plasma rounds thudded into green ork flesh and mined wells of viscous ork blood. Still weighed down by his broken accoutrements, Khargask stumbled backwards and flailed into an instrument bank. For the second time, he was wreathed in dancing energy; but this time it was hurting him, scorching his skin. His single eye rolled back into his head, a mixture of blood and snot dribbled from his snout and he crumpled and slid to the floor.
Ultracius was making short work of the remaining meks, with the able but almost unnecessary assistance of Filion. It felt as if the star fort was shaking itself apart, and the greenskins were struggling to stay upright, let alone fight.
Sicarius was fighting to stay on his feet too, and to cross the room to Renius. He was finding it difficult to breathe. His armour was pumping air to his nostrils, but too much of it was escaping through the cracks in his artificer plate. Throwing out his hands, he fell heavily into a rune panel beside his red-armoured brother.
‘I’m no Techmarine,’ he growled, ‘but it seems to me we’re out of time. Can you stop those engines or can’t you?’ If the answer was negative, then he and his brothers – his entire company – were about to die… and the Indestructible would be lost too. Sicarius would have failed in his mission.
Renius hesitated for a moment, then made a decision. He plunged his claw arm through one of the rune panels in front of him. He shattered dials and switches and yanked out bundle after bundle of tangled wires, wrenching them from their roots. Sicarius opened his mouth to yell something at him over the roars of the engines, then realised that, abruptly, the sounds of the engines had ceased. The star fort had stopped trembling too.
Everything seemed preternaturally still, for a moment.
Then the floor dropped out from underneath him.
CHAPTER XV
Sicarius woke to a barrage of vox-chatter in his ear.
His chrono told him he had been out for almost eight minutes. His auto-injectors were pumping him full of stimulants. He could feel weight pressing down on top of him. The roof of the control room and much of the Grand Chamber above it had collapsed onto his head. Either that or the floor had rushed up and smashed him into the roof; perhaps both had happened.
The weight that pinned him was shifting, lightening a little. Someone was digging their way towards him. He had fallen on his hands, so he could easily brace himself and start to lever himself upwards. He felt debris sloughing off his back. He heard a booming, mechanical voice, but not through his comm-bead. It was Ultracius, welcoming him back to the land of the living.
‘We didn’t jump?’ Sicarius checked. ‘We’re still on the Agides moon?’
‘Dropped like a stone and landed hard, Knight of Talassar,’ the Dreadnought confirmed. ‘A lot of Krieg men didn’t make it – the impact turned their bones to jelly. No shields to protect the star fort this time, either. The tech-priests won’t salvage much from it.’
At least they’d be able to salvage something, Sicarius thought. Their clandestine project had been a failure, anyway, he could certainly tell them that.
Ultracius was working slowly but methodically, with one giant hand. He wrenched a heavy plasteel beam from the wreckage and tossed it over his shoulder, almost casually. Sicarius found that he could stand now. The fires in the engine control room had been extinguished, but the smoke of them lingered. Nearby, an Apothecary in white armour was tending to a pair of casualties. Filion was already trying to sit up; Lumic must have fallen from the floor above and was ominously still.
Sicarius voxed Lucien and asked how many battle-brothers they had lost. He responded with Gallo’s name and ten others. Each one was a tragedy, but Sicarius knew the list could have been much longer. He hesitated to ask the next question: ‘And what of the Krieg regiment?’
‘Still counting their dead,’ Lucien told him, gruffly.
Sicarius picked his way across the room to where the body of the ork’s big mek lay, half-buried. Khargask’s hand twitched, but it must have been a post-mortem spasm or perhaps a shock from his still-sparking servo-harness. Sicarius’s auspex detected no breath on his lips, and confirmed that his body heat had all but dissipated.
He turned the body over with his foot and wrestled his sword out of its back. He ignited the energy field, which flared into life. Sicarius smiled. Like his tortured armour, the Tempest Blade had served its purpose well.
He raised the blade and sliced through Khargask’s thick neck. He picked up the ork boss’s head by one of its tusks.<
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Sicarius didn’t need a trophy. He had, however, heard Khargask’s name spoken too often for his liking. He was dangerously close to becoming a legend to some; and legends were difficult, almost impossible, to kill.
The Imperial Navy would want to announce the Indestructible’s recapture to the galaxy. They would want all faithful servants of the Emperor and His enemies alike to know that its hijacker, the upstart ork, had paid for his transgressions. The story of the star fort’s loss would still be told, but now it would have a new and more apposite ending. A whispered rumour of the Imperium’s folly would become a cautionary tale of its bloody and righteous vengeance.
It would behove the Lord High Admiral to have tangible, unequivocal proof of his claims; Sicarius would present him with exactly that. He tied the ork’s head to his belt, unceremoniously.
He scaled a mountain of debris, which slipped and shifted beneath him every finger- and toehold of the way. He was having to drag his injured left leg behind him, and more than once he almost suffered a fall that would have been embarrassing if not actually injurious to him. My body requires repairs, Sicarius thought ruefully, as badly as my armour does.
He clambered up through the wreckage of the Grand Chamber, out through its double doors. The atrium beyond was relatively intact, though cluttered with greenskin corpses. Brother Gallo’s body was here too, lying where it had fallen. No lumoglobes had survived the star fort’s crash – its second crash – but pale starlight leaked through narrow windows and cracks in the walls.
The slope of the floor was steeper than it had been before. Sicarius had to hold on to the walls to keep his footing. He headed downward and westward, towards the brightest light source. A fading heat trail, detected by his auspex, suggested that someone had recently come this way: the Apothecary, he hoped.
Knight of Talassar - Steve Lyons Page 9