by David Guymer
The orks’ return fire, great hosing sprays of it, sparked off the thick armour of the Leman Russ tanks, a sound like a megabolter choking on a hopper stuffed with nails. The torrential abuse chewed out the rearmost Rhino’s rear plating, passenger doors and track housing, all of it giving out in a death cry explosion that volleyed the tank up into the air. It flipped, bleeding off chaff, stitched by the tracers of droning aircraft, then dropped like a hammer through Solanum’s roof.
The Land Raider swerved, fat sparks spraying out from its buckled underside, skidded half about and slammed into the side of a civilian transport. The gutted vehicle crumpled under the heavy tank and the lead Rhino shunted what was left of the drivers’ cabin out of the way on its ‘dozer blade. The rest of the column veered around the piled up vehicles, forced into a growl as they down-geared to break through the detritus that blocked the east road to Urdri.
Pacing the fleeing column from the air, Shadow Captain Stenn felt his jump pack sputter smokily as its thruster timed out. Through sagging power lines and lumen cables that had miraculously survived the haphazard orbital and aeronautical assaults thus far, he fell. Cracks split the rockcrete as he hit, but shock converters in his power armour’s joints redirected enough of the impact force into forward movement, servos burning white in the smoggy dark as he ran. Other Assault Marines fell out of the sky around him. Rhinos roared past in clatters of metal. Sprays of bullets withered the air. And he ran. As fast he had ever run in his life.
Just a few kilometres ahead were the goliath bronze-plated battlements of the fortress factory. Gate 743 was open, its void shields down, and though there was no sign of a sally sent forth to relieve the Raven Guard, a smattering of extreme-range energy blasts from wall-mounted anti-siege weaponry speared the pursuing mob. A score of ramshackle buggies fell apart, carved open by lascannon beams or demolished in the helium fireball of a plasma culverin. Drops in the ocean. The two rearmost Leman Russ tanks simultaneously went up in rocketing flames, and Stenn risked a backwards glance to see the flame-shadow of something even heavier rumbling noisily in behind the mess of screening vehicles, spraying crude but devastating energy beams from a toweringly high turret.
‘Cursed Iron Hands,’ he huffed, breathless, both hearts kicking into his rib plate at a rate not dissimilar to the smog-muted scream of the punisher cannon. ‘Stubborn.’ A breath. ‘Inflexible.’ Gasp. ‘Arrogant.’
A ready rune winked across his visor display to indicate that his jump pack had vented and refuelled for another jump. The lead Rhinos were already breaking through the cordon and into the killzone that had been cleared from around the fortress walls, and screeching towards Gate 743. He looked up, still pounding the road, running the complex string of mental calculations to launch himself into the air and land precisely on the narrow strip of wall-walk behind the battlements. It took him a second.
His pack fired, heels lifting off the ground, and he looked over his left booster to the southern highway, where the Imperial remnants attached to what was left of the Legio Ferrax beat their own retreat.
Just at that moment, the sky above the ork horde flared neon green, flashing through the skeletal skyline of Urdri Conurb South and printing its post-apocalyptic death-shadow onto the backs of Stenn’s eyes before his visor tint could adjust to the glare. A sound rumbled out a few seconds later, bestial, throaty, the silhouettes of the abandoned cranes and industrial habs appearing to writhe as the green light vanished as quickly as it had appeared and stole them back with it to darkness.
He blinked an urgent override for his jump pack to release emergency thrust.
And then the Titans began to die.
>>>
He had a bitter, illogical loathing for the descendants of Corax that he could not explain. Having just experienced a small part of Orvid Stenn’s existence, he felt that he should feel greater empathy for his brother Space Marine, but he did not. What he felt was greater ambivalence, as though along with his body he had been dissociated from everything of his own experience that could have made him care. He was not Orvid Stenn, and the dissonant notion arose that he might equally not be Kardan Stronos. He was nobody, and anybody had the potential to be him.
He was simulus – the collective.
Stronos canted.
Snow enfolded Ares’ coded presence, and for what felt to the world of the binharic like an age, Stronos’ mind faced the data storm alone.
>>>
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> URDRI FORTRESS FACTORY, COLUMNUS
>>> ORIGIN >>> ENGRAMIC RECONSTRUCTION OF ORVID STENN, SHADOW CAPTAIN, METACHIRURGEON TALOS EPSILI SUPERVISING
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 999100.M41
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
The Raven Guard were spread along the length of the thigh-height rockcrete wall that demarcated the bombed-out lot of haulage depot 764 from the adjoining premises. It wasn’t much, but it was something. With the exception of some minor damage, it had weathered the destruction of the outer defences relatively intact, a credit to the Administratum clerk that had overseen its construction, and ran roughly parallel to where the curtain wall had been until ten minutes before.
‘Reinforcements to the south wall. Repeat–’
Even Stenn didn’t hear the rest of what he yelled into his vox, the sound-deadening crump of a missile shrieking from its launch tube mere metres from where he knelt. The fine structures of his inner ear self-protectively dampened his hearing, the solid bangs of his brothers’ bolter-fire suddenly muffled as though they defended an oceanic trench. Several hundred lasrifles of the Imperial Guard made a tremendous show of light and noise, the hard stitching of their more serious firepower growing incrementally louder as his hearing returned.
‘–too close!’
Stenn couldn’t pick out the source of the shout from the general confusion, but could see a maniple of vanguard skitarii laying down fire as they withdrew to secondary positions, dropping like electro-stunned marionettes as the orks opened up with their own pistol sluggers. The Guardsmen in that section simply broke. Stenn saw a sentinel scout walker in the navy blue and grey camouflage markings of the Conurbis XI attempt to follow them, only to tangle legs in its pilot’s haste and fall in an inelegant heap of helpless metal.
‘Tanks forward!’ Stenn roared in
to the bedlam, voice hoarse from smoke and shouting, as bare-chested greenskins as big as power-armoured Space Marines piled over the abandoned stretch of wall. He raised his plasma pistol and fired.
A tendril of blue-white transitionary matter linked his sidearm to an enormous brute plastered in war paint for the merest fraction of a second before the ork exploded in a muddy green mushroom cloud of vaporised xenos flesh. Bullets thunked his armour as the orks spilled over the wall and into the defenders’ lines. If there were a breach here where the Raven Guard held the centre then the rest of the line was as good as finished. Stenn liquefied another with a snarl, this one with a face covered in arcane sigils and glowing with rapturous frenzy. His pistol hissed off heat as three more bulled through the mess.
The Rhino hit at speed.
The rockcrete wall that the orks had been climbing over exploded along fracture planes into shards, those not immediately crushed under the tank hollering and coughing as the withering pall crashed over them. The Rhino’s storm bolter spat into the blinded horde, and Stenn saw the skitarii immediately switch protocols and advance again, exploiting the armoured transport as a firebase as they had the wall before it. The Conurbis XI, however, were thoroughly broken. Stenn could still see them, disappearing into Urdri’s industrial sprawl. He paid them no further mind. They would show up eventually, if the city survived that long. He checked the power to his lightning claw, then thumbed his plasma pistol to open vent as he turned back to the orks.
Having harried these orks for every metre they took towards Urdri, Stenn knew that this was no ordinary invasion.
He had heard in dispatches of the psychic energies that flowed through their Gargants – weapon grids, shields and piercing uncanny augurs – and that brought their lumpen drop ships to ground still. He had heard too of the court of warpheads with which the self-styled warpboss, Zagdakka, surrounded himself, and had lost two squads of his most experienced Scouts in a failed attempt at thinning their numbers. He saw now with his own eyes the weird energy that flowed through these greenskins in their battle-madness like some manner of psychic connective tissue, the brawn and sinew of some gestalt ork that drove them unto death with a single, overriding will. The fire discipline of the Raven Guard and their mortal allies slaughtered greenskins every minute by the hundred, but they didn’t seem to care, hurling themselves recklessly against the Imperial guns as though possessed.
Not that the blasted Iron Hands would allow for the slightest deviation from their precious calculus. Stenn sneered, his pistol emitting a final hiss as coolant jets sprayed from the weapon’s muzzle and the vents locked. He thumbed off the safety and selected rapid fire.
He could teach the Iron Hands a thing or two about logic.
‘Kristos, you honourless shell, I’m talking to you.’ He raged into the vox as he seared the heaving mass of orks with plasma. Too soon, heat warnings blinked red on the pistol’s side and he was forced to flick back to vent. ‘I need reinforcements and I need them now. Now, Kristos! I want a creeping artillery barrage walking outwards from the outer wall over the southern highway and I want aeronautica backup. Kristos!’
‘Captain,’ shouted Yavid. His company standard-bearer was on one knee behind the low wall and blazing into the horde with tight semi-automatic bursts of his pistol. He jerked his beaked helm towards the wrecked loading yard to the northeast of haulage depot 764. Stenn looked to where his brother pointed.
A squad of Iron Hands Centurions, almost as well camouflaged as the Raven Guard themselves in their huge black warsuits and perfect stillness. Their hurricane bolters were unloaded and pointed at the ground or at walls, whichever direction they had happened to be facing when the strange malaise of inaction had taken them. Stenn regarded them with fury. The few Iron Hands he had seen had been that way, ever since the unexpected psychic onslaught had levelled the south wall outright. At first he had wondered if it was a secondary effect of Zagdakka’s powers, but the Raven Guard and their mortal allies were unaffected. Yavid had a replacement eye as well as a bionic arm and he remained functional, as did the crew interfaces of their vehicles. As did the damned skitarii.
‘Kristos!’ he roared down the vox again, knowing he wasn’t going to be answered, but determined that his last words be heard just the same, even if it were only by a comatose machine. ‘And he had the nerve to tell me that the Raven Guard dragged his primarch down,’ he growled to Yavid. ‘Corvia, but I hate them. You hear that, Kristos? You think it was coincidence that found us both in the vicinity of this world? We too heard Dawnbreak’s mortis cry. The second one, the one they sent after you abandoned their world to the eldar!’ An ork ran at him. He tore its head from its shoulders with a slash of lightning claw, then incinerated two more with precise blasts from his pistol.
With the meaty clash of butcher’s work, the bangs of bolter-fire diminished as orks thundered into the thin line of Space Marines. The Rhinos’ storm bolters flashed; the thudding reports dissolved into the meat of chainblades and knives and primal screams. Assault Marines leapt into the air on bursts of thrust, flung back to earth as though on elastic cords to send orks flying. Lightning claws sizzled and cracked. He was aware of men fleeing, skitarii jerking as they were cut down, but the melee had swallowed him whole. All the feints and tricks and stratagems that had delayed the Weirdwaaagh thus far were done. Now it came down to the strength of his arm, the artifice of his armour – kill orks until there were no orks left and pray to the Throne that enough men survived to hold this line when it was done.
It was what failure looked like.
He trapped the whumping chain edge of an ork axe between the talons of his lightning claw, but the muscle behind the blow drove him back. The ork’s arm swelled as it sought to break the lock, its tusked visage sweating under the energy sheath that crackled about Stenn’s talons. With a growl, he pushed the ork back and turned it, enough to bring his pistol to the ork’s stomach. A beam of superheated plasma exploded from the ork’s back, and he let it thump to the ground with a howl as it came to terms with its vaporised intestines. He stomped on its leg, tension bleeding out of him in a chuckle as he beheld the swaying gantries of the northeast loading yard.
The Centurions moved!
There they were, silent as the blown-out repair shops through which they came, ghosts of the machine bound forever to a doomed cycle of destruction and repair. The firepower of the Centurions alone would have ripped a hole into the ork horde as wide as the gates of the Ravenspire, but six full squads of Tactical Marines also moved up through the rubble behind them. They spread out, taking fire-positions just beyond the chokepoint where Stenn’s efforts held the orks at bay. What were they waiting for? He saw a pair of hellfire Dreadnoughts lumbering into position either side of the smaller Centurions, and then heard the weary collapse of a pockmarked stretch of rockcrete as the glacis plate of a Redeemer pattern Land Raider drove through it. Its sponson flamestorm cannons traversed to track the flows of the ork horde, liquid promethium dribbling to the rubble floor.
Stenn cursed as he punched his lightning claw through a charging ork’s ribs. Never expect an Iron Hand to commit until he was good and ready.
‘What are you waiting for?’ He shot an ork in the face as it made to barrel towards Yavid, and found himself in the sights of the nearest Iron Hands squad. They had bolters locked and aimed, but for some reason held their fire. Their eye slits shone an ephemeral white, but they could have been decoy suits for all the urgency they showed. ‘Shoot, curse you!’
A horrible sense of premonition grew under his skin like a worm. Stenn looked over his shoulder and >> RESTRICTED DATA >>
>>>
The migranious sensation of access denial flared up in Stronos’ brain.
The alteration of precious data in its vault felt to Stronos
like a personal act of apostasy, no less than if someone had deliberately failed to bless his bolter prior to a deployment.
>>>
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> URDRI FORTRESS FACTORY, COLUMNUS
>>> ORIGIN >>> ENGRAMIC RECONSTRUCTION OF ORVID STENN, SHADOW CAPTAIN, METACHIRURGEON TALOS EPSILI SUPERVISING
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 999100.M41
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
‘Artillery inbound!’ Yavid cried, hoarse from yelling out warnings, and Stenn turned from the waiting Iron Hands to look up. Horror at the calculated callousness of the xenos wrote itself in streaks of reflected green into his visor.
