by David Guymer
‘Firepower,’ he grunted, his harness winding down, gun barrels spinning off heat. ‘It is always the solution.’
Kjarvik afforded his brother-in-black an elaborate bow. The sounds of chain weaponry and bloodcurdling shrieks delivered in an angel’s voice filtered in from the outside, and vox-chatter from his open channel scratched out of his gorget bead. Landers reported the safe arrival and deployment of ground troops. Deathwatch sergeants requested Sister or armour support, called in air strikes, and reported neutralised objectives with coupled requests for redeployment.
‘We are being made to look slow,’ Kjarvik hissed as Bohr hefted his staff and clumped heavily towards the base of the weapon’s generatorum housing. The Iron Father placed the charges: melta bombs, just like before.
Kjarvik was backing up, voxing in a demand for extraction.
Bohr nodded as he strode towards him. ‘On to the next.’
The brute-shield over Gorkogrod had failed.
Maximus Thane thudded down the landing ramp of his heavy transport, leading out seventy-three Fists Exemplar of the Sixth, Seventh, and his own Second. Company structures had largely disintegrated, and yet the last seventy-three clung to that final emblem of their identity as though it were more precious than the gene-seed of Dorn that each warrior carried inside. From the ramp’s clanging metal to solid tarmac, the Fists Exemplar poured out into the orks’ guns, merging with similar debarkments of Excoriators and Black Templars.
Valkyrie and Vendetta sorties had cleared a landing zone from a previously identified sector of relatively high topological stability. The orks had used it as an airbase, comprising several score parallel runways from which they had quickly been able to establish aerial supremacy over the battle for the nearby palace supercomplex. Not this time. This time, the orks’ fighter and bomber wings were charred wrecks on the runway or smouldering still in their hangars. Thick coils of ugly black smoke choked the sky. It was a churn of black over black, pulsed with thumping volleys from the landers’ flare cannons.
In anticipation of the Deathwatch’s success, the Adeptus Astartes drop-ships had wasted no time in setting down. The bulk Astra Militarum landers were still up there however, crisscrossing trails of flak and duelling aircraft lighting up the next wave of transports.
In howls of descent thrusters the heavy landers crunched down on top of stricken aircraft. Locking clamps blew, ramps slammed into the ground, and from container after container, mortal troops emerged with a collective roar that stirred mankind’s spirit to war.
In such moments, Thane could see why some of his brothers saw the guiding hand of divinity behind His great crusade.
Scores of regiments from worlds Thane would never know, united only by the common misfortune of having served in the last Ullanor campaign, moved up behind the Space Marine vanguard. They were slower, but numerous. Thane’s suit auspex could only provide an estimate, but it was a big one – close to a hundred thousand men, give or take. Sentinel walkers strode ahead, combing the bordering structures with multi-laser fire, accompanied by Imperial Knights. The Astra Militarum regiments were joined by skitarii cohorts, servitor mobile weapons platforms and Legio Cybernetica support, emerging from their gothic transorbitals without the cry of their base human counterparts but with a group precision that was, in its ordered refutation of the chaos of the battlefield, just as affirming. A fleet of supertransports brought down heavier Martian engines.
Baneblades pushed through the aircraft wreckage. Shadowswords powered their infamously slow-charging main guns. The last survivors of Legio Ultima, the mighty Warlord Decimus Ordinatus and her escort – a battered Warhound called Helfyre, bathed in purple static emitted by its intermittent void bank – made the ground shake as they advanced into Gorkogrod.
Before the Great Waaagh of the Beast had begun, Thane would have called this army the greatest he had ever seen, a force fit for the command of a warmaster, or perhaps, in extremis, the lord of a great Chapter such as Odaenathus or Sachael. A lot could change in one year. It was astonishing to think that it was only that long ago that he had been pushing traitor remnants deeper into the Rubicante Flux, no more to his flag than a handful of ships and a hundred warriors.
A lot had changed, and this world had changed it. Thane had been in Vulkan’s vanguard ahead of a force not in the ten of thousands but closer to the millions. A transhuman could not hear his own voice for the thunder of tanks, and the march of whole Legios of Titans had made the horizon itself seem to move.
Ahead of him now was a heavy articulated truck, with giant exhaust stacks and spiked wheels in the orkish preference. It was bent inwards at the coupler to form a ‘v’ shape, and incoming fire was spanking off the metal sides. Thane waved his command squad into cover. Brothers Kahagnis and Abbas moved to bull bar and rear fender respectively and laid down fire for the Black Templars and Excoriators that continued to pound past. Thesius pulled himself up onto the driver’s cabin, turned as Thamarius threw up his battle-brother’s autocannon, then got down to one knee and blazed over the charging Space Marines.
‘To the palace. Fast and hard!’
Thane thumped into the side of the truck’s trailer section without slowing down, so hard it lifted half an inch off its nearside wheels. He turned his back against it, auto-senses taking in the mass of Astra Militarum and mechanised support pushing up to secure the Space Marines’ gains. He switched to long-range vox.
‘Issachar, this is Thane. Estimate ninety per cent of forces landed. Advancing towards the palace on primary schedule.’ Static hissed across the channel. A Valkyrie gunship jetted overhead. ‘Issachar!’
The Valkyrie’s tail-wing seemed to pop. Promethium smoke spewed out of it as it dropped, corkscrewing over and over before disintegrating on impact with the ground without even so much as an explosion. A rust-coloured ork jet blasted through the smoke cloud, wings wobbling as it banked and strafed across the Black Templars advance with twin hails of high-powered shot.
‘Issachar!’
He gave up. He looked at the sky. The fleet must still be too far out, hence the lack of drop pod reinforcement. Fitting one boot between the solid rubber tyre and the hellishly scratched mud guard, he climbed up onto the vehicle’s slug-holed rear container. Keeping low, he looked across the field of wreckage and blast craters, auto-senses crowding his helm display with threat markers and tactical screed.
Gun emplacements in the control towers. Orks in heavy battlegear mustering behind pre-prepared chokepoints. Fast attack vehicles closing in. The ground between the outermost runway and the access roads was a killing field, and the Space Marines were breaking down into combat squads to maximise their use of cover. The palace was fifteen kilometres due north, a gauntlet of bunkers, tank traps and enfilading fire zones.
Dorn himself could not have done better.
‘A frontal assault is still foolhardy and predictable,’ Thane had argued. Watch Commander Warfist, he recalled, had nodded sagely, prompting several others around the conference table to do likewise. ‘It was tried once and it failed.’
‘Foolhardy and predictable is what the orks have come to expect from the Imperium,’ Koorland had answered, with that strained but confident smile that he wore now most days. He had grown into his crown. Sometimes, he seemed to forget that he wore it at all. ‘Let them see again what they expect to see.’
‘To the palace!’
Thane stood and waved the massed army forward, just as a massive explosion blew out the back wall of a structure that butted onto the airbase.
A spiked grinder wheel appeared through the dust, followed in a rattling of tracks and loose bolts by a super-heavy ork battlefortress. Battlecannons mounted on rotable turrets belched smoke while orks manning pintle-mounted machine guns on its rampart-like upper sections exchanged fire with what must have been the Deathwatch kill-teams deployed ahead to secure the flanks. Their fire discipline took out a
few machine-gunners and was successfully holding up the vehicle’s infantry support, but it would take more than a smattering of lascannons and multi-meltas to put a terminal stop to a monstrosity on that scale.
‘For the Emperor!’ Thane bellowed as the first Chimeras rumbled into range. Koorland called the men Ullanor Veterans. They proudly called themselves the Ullanor First. Thane called them Ullanor survivors. They looked afraid.
They did not look afraid enough.
‘I need you to lead the assault, brother,’ Koorland had said to him, after Asger and the others had left and they were just brothers, alone, at his table. ‘Our success rests on my survival, and my survival rests on yours.’ He had put his hand on Thane’s shoulder and squeezed. Not hard. Enough to bid a brother farewell. ‘I would rely on none but a true son of Dorn to survive long enough.’
Ullanor – orbital
Koorland backed ponderously into the teleportation slot. It probably did not matter which way he faced once the teleport cycle was under way, but he wanted to be in a position to monitor his squad and in Terminator armour he was too bulky to turn around once inside.
Fidus Bellator was a relic of antiquity, the first of the Indomitus suits fashioned in the closing years of the Heresy War, a gift from the Black Templars to the last of the Imperial Fists. His field of view was narrower than he was accustomed to from wearing power armour, mobility around the neck sacrified in favour of massive protection over that area and the shoulders. What he could see, however, was virtually enhanced by the armour’s adaptive auspex, augmented with outlines and false contrast, every movement of his eyes tracked by icons, brackets and informative screed.
Power was at maximum. Armour integrity was at maximum. The ammunition count to his integrated storm bolter was at maximum.
In their own two alcoves, back-lit by the slow-powering blue hum of the slot’s dematerialisers, Bohemond and Asger were similarly, though less magnificently, clad in Tactical Dreadnought plate.
Asger’s was draped in a snowy white pelt, ritually scratched with kill tallies and symbols of luck and warding. His armour was fitted with a back banner pole from which the Wolf Lord would have flown his personal heraldry, but from which the Watch Commander had hung a swatch of plain black cloth. He wore a pair of lightning claws. Bohemond’s black plate was immaculately picked out in silver, hung with prayer strips and lengths of pure white fabric bearing the Sigismund cross. Hailing from a martial tradition with a common root to Koorland’s own, he was similarly armed with storm bolter and power sword, the peerless Sword of Sigismund already free of its scabbard.
Those two needed little reassurance from him.
The two ogryns, Olug and Brokk, however, had filled the confines of the teleportation chamber with their panicked odour. For all their fearsome, greater-than-human appearance, the pair had been close to a full-blown panic attack until Commissar Heliad Goss, formerly of the Minglor XVII ogryn auxilia, had been found from amongst the Ullanor Veterans billeted aboard Alcazar Remembered and at the last minute reassigned to Koorland’s force. He was in the slot between them, reciting children’s prayers from memory, interspersed with simple words of encouragement. They were still sweating, but were not about to rip through the conduits for a way out which was a marked improvement.
In the remaining six slots, Krule and the Space Marines of Kill-Team Stalker prepared themselves for teleport in whatever manner brought them comfort.
Alcazar Remembered had two teleportation decks. The chamber itself might have been cramped, wall space bulked with slots for twelve Terminators, the floor a trip hazard of power cabling and hoses, but the technology was astonishly power-hungry and demanded the sacrifice of an entire deck to its generators. Kavalanera’s squad was in the other chamber. They were the ones that could not be risked. And due to the inevitable shipwide systems drain that followed a teleportation cycle, Koorland and his squad would be on their own for several minutes at least.
Krule looked up from his prayers. ‘Answer me honestly, Space Marine. Are you afraid?’
‘You do not refer to the orks, do you?’ said Asger.
The Assassin was quiet a moment. ‘No.’
‘Fear was purged from our hearts with the making of the blessed primarch,’ said Bohemond.
‘Indeed,’ said Koorland as the energy brackets running through the alcoves built to lumen-strip brightness, the hum becoming equivalent in volume to what one might experience by passing the bulkhead onto main drive. There was a tremor in the walls. ‘And yet, I am terrified every time.’
For some reason, the Assassin seemed comforted by his admission.
‘Coordinates locked. Systems charged.’ Shipmaster Kale’s voice echoed through the chamber’s augmitters, like a stone dropping deep, deep down a bottomless well. ‘We will be powerless for up to half an hour, but Issachar has the orbital defences well engaged, and surface scans indicate that the Deathwatch have been successful in eliminating the ground-based weaponry targeting our orbit. Bulwark and Faceless Warrior will escort us in. We are ready up here, lord.’
Koorland closed his eyes and muttered an invocation to the Emperor’s protection.
But he did not hesitate.
He could already picture in his mind the throne room of the Great Beast that Krule had described to him.
‘Commence.’
Fourteen
Ullanor – Gorkogrod, inner palace
Teleportation was an experience that Koorland counted, his own near death on Ardamantua and subsequent bloody resurrection very much included, as one of rare horror.
Every atom in his body felt as if it had been electrified, charge repulsion baring his basic substance to the warp, then the quarks and gluons that constituted those creaking atoms, separating, separating, until he was a physical thing only in the abstract. He was atomic spaces, constrained only by the memory of nuclear cohesion. He was a nebula cloud, spread across the infinite, haunted by the unbearable thought of one day collapsing to form a star.
Then movement. But without body. It felt like his soul was forced through an electrostatic mesh. Like gruel being strained through muslin, but the substance was what was caught in the membrane, and he was the discoloured diluent that trickled through. From that weak suffusion of molecular memory and psychic tangling, there came a reformation.
And it was a, not the. Everything was contingent.
What emerged, and how, was in the lap of the gods.
The blinding light of teleportation faded, the disembodied sense of half-remembered dread following slowly, like blood trickling through a drain. Koorland’s primary heart was pounding, as though he had been engaged in some extraordinary struggle that he could not now recall. The teleportation chamber was gone. In its place, displayed by his suit’s auto-senses in augmented definition, was a dank, flame-lit room.
The ruddy heat of open stoves was reflected in the beaten metal fronts of cabinets, from the brutally large blunted implements that hung on pegs from the walls. Half-heartedly mopped-up bloodstains smeared the floor and the surfaces. Pots bubbled, ill-fitting lids chattering. A hunk of meat, what looked like a sawed-through stretch of vertebral column dipping from the end, dripped fat onto a sizzling element and rotated on a jerky mechanical spit. Koorland’s armour recorded the intense heat while insulating him from it, and the effects of the uncertain light were evenly filtered and restored.
The smell, however, was all too readily imagined.
Asger Warfist lowered his lightning claws. A wary sniff crackled through the unit vox, instinctual in spite of the total environment seal of Tactical Dreadnought armour.
‘This is no throne room.’
Ullanor – Gorkogrod
Inquisitor Wienand tapped her foot impatiently as a gang of servitors broke open a crate and spilled wirefoam cladding across the floor. It contained a portable vox-caster. Another was being installed directly opposite,
part of two banks of units being wired up in series. Inquisitorial technical staff opened diagnostic channels and made expert reconfigurations inside open panels stuffed with what looked, to Wienand, like tangles of cabling. A magos supervised, hunched under his – or her, difficult to tell – acid-stained red robes. The occasional flicker of a servo-appendage switched across to furiously undo and redo someone’s work.
‘Castellan Clermont’s strike force coming under heavy fire in sector Twelve-B,’ said one of the vox-operators.
‘Twelve-B?’ said Wienand. ‘Do they plan to take the palace on their own? Redeploy Kill-Teams Godwyn and Phobos to clear the adjoining blocks, and raise the castellan if you can.’
‘Yes, Representative.’
The vox-breaking interference between surface forces and fleet was something that Imperial forces had been forced to contend with during the previous invasion. At Wienand’s insistence, and Asger’s approval, something had been done about it.
The chamber that her small command detail had occupied as a surface monitoring post was a level between levels in one of the hundreds of gretchin hab-towers that prickled the cityscape in the palace’s immediate vicinity. To supply their ork overlords with workers, Wienand assumed. Terra was organised with similar considerations in mind.
This particular floor was unoccupied, empty but for thick shock-absorbent clamps and structura-mimetic columns that enabled this structure and others like it to remain upright through the awesome stresses of tectonic rearrangement or subspace translation. The tower was the tallest in the battlezone that wasn’t part of the palace itself, and had been selected for that reason. Servitors and techno-magi trailed clumps of cabling and complex adaptor tablets behind them to exposed wall panels. From there, they cross-connected Wienand’s equipment through the tower’s own messy electrical system to the dishes, antennae and non-geometric pylons that flourished over the spiretop like fungoid weeds.
Veritus would have found the cross-wiring of technologies a borderline act of heresy. But that was why the ancient inquisitor had remained on Terra, and let her operatives do the work that he could not.