by David Guymer
‘We need to go!’ Khrysaar crabbed towards him, staying low.
‘Were you expecting me to suggest we stay and fight?’
‘You have been behaving oddly, brother.’
Rauth brandished his bolt pistol, masking the twinge that even that much movement pulled in his face. ‘Just don’t slow me down.’
‘That’s the Arven Rauth I used to hate.’
Turning neatly away, Khrysaar drilled the skull of the ork that had been trying to clamber over the splash barrier behind them and blasted it open. It toppled into the companionway, but the explosion brought others running. A hulking warboss with a thick chain wrapped around its fists started pounding on the barrier. Cracks began to spread through the armourglass.
Rauth was already running.
Instinct took him up the street, using the Chimera for cover. The Guardsmen were too preoccupied to notice him go. Either that or they assumed the Space Marines would fight this war their own way. Not too far from the truth. He veered sharply out of the way as the Leman Russ lurched into reverse.
A raucous mob of greenskin fighters charged for the opening. There wasn’t one amongst them smaller than Rauth. Khrysaar grabbed his arm and dragged him behind the Leman Russ. A gout of flame from the battle tank’s sponson rendered the orks to dripping fat, half a dozen unstable legs still trying to get at the two Iron Hands before sluggish nervous systems were apprised of their death.
The two Scouts sprinted up the street, away from the fighting.
Khrysaar took point as Rauth turned, hand pressed to his gut and wincing, and drove bolt-rounds methodically into tusked green faces as they piled out from their tank to give chase. His accuracy was superhuman.
A rocket looped out of the ork-held side of the street and punched through the glacis plate of Iron Blood. As if a Titan had just stepped onto the Chimera’s sloped front, the vehicle rose off its tracks, teetered over the point of no return, then crashed over onto its roof. The Mordians backed away in good order, shedding numbers to ork gunfire, before the rocket finally went off.
The lower front plate blew out, the shrapnel burst throwing the Guardsmen to ground.
This was the sort of war that the Emperor had made the Adeptus Astartes to fight on their behalf. Because they are too weak to fight it for themselves.
‘How far to the forge sacrarium?’ Khrysaar yelled over his shoulder.
‘Did you see me inload a cartolith before we boarded the Chimera?’
‘You had the seat beside the viewing slit.’
An ork bommer bobbed and wobbled across the sky, boosters screaming, before crashing into the hab a few hundred metres down the highway and turning the block into a fireball. More greenskin warriors fought their way out of the building. Most of them sported a burning limb or two, but it didn’t seem to dampen their ferocity.
Rauth pulled up sharply, a splintering pain shooting up his shins.
‘Why are you stopping?’ said Khrysaar.
Rauth made a face that could have been the result of any one of a million personal slights. ‘The road is too wide. We’ll be swamped if we go this way.’ Both arms outstretched, he leapt onto the splash barrier opposite the orks’ side of the road. The barrier curved back, so that vehicle splash would spill onto the highway rather than over passing pedestrians, but its weather-proofed layering had not presented a smooth surface in thousands of years, and Rauth was able to wriggle over the S-curve and fall onto the companionway.
Khrysaar followed him over.
Muffled bullets crunched into the hardened glass.
‘Into the building,’ said Rauth. ‘Keep off the highways, work our way through the habs.’
‘We’ll do this, brother.’ Khrysaar clasped his arm at the bicep. ‘An Iron Hand started this. Two Iron Hands will end it.’
Rauth scowled. ‘Into the damned building.’
The door was locked and barred, but it had never been designed to stand up to an enraged transhuman.
It exploded before Khrysaar’s boot and the two Iron Hands charged inside.
The windows were loosely shuttered. Gunfire and the burning aircraft across the way caused shadows to jump across the floor. Tables were scattered unevenly around the room, chairs stacked against one wall, a counter at the back. An eatery of some kind? It didn’t matter now. He looked back at the broken door. Even an ork won’t need to strain too hard to figure out where we’ve gone. A sudden blast wave rattled the table legs on the floor.
The two Scouts quickly swapped a look.
‘Grey Hammer?’ said Khrysaar.
‘Grey Hammer.’ Rauth pointed to the back of the shop. ‘Move.’
Fort Callivant had withstood the impact of the rok about as well as Rauth had imagined it would and half the highways were blocked or simply destroyed outright, rubble now, demolishing other roads in a cascade going deep into the underhive. The orks that had survived the descent – and some would have – would be hours away at least, but plenty more were landing all the time on primitive drop pods and planetary assault rams. The random nature of their deployment meant their forces were fragmented and small, but everywhere. They would have presented no difficulty to an Iron Hands demi clave, or even a decently prepared Guard outfit, but for two Scouts even a small, fragmented force was a serious obstacle.
They charged from block to block, avoiding ork mobs where they could, feeling no shame in running where they could not.
On a feeder highway, they ran into a gang of gretchin gleefully setting up booby traps, tripwires attached to clusters of stikk bombs, civilians strung up like scarecrows to lure in the unobservant. They gunned the runtish xenos down, revelling in an enemy they could safely slaughter, ignoring the civilians, and drove through the clapboard shutters to the next building in chain. An ork bulldozed through an interior wall and grappled Khrysaar to the floor. Rauth didn’t wait. He’d do no less for me. He burst through the maze of worker dorms, finding himself teetering on the umpteenth floor over a criss-crossing abyss of sagging cables and creaking guttering. An identikit hive block faced him, about six metres away. He took the leap from a standing start. A single shot boomed out in the confined space. A sniper. The auto-round slammed into his bicep just as he landed and rolled into the opposite block. He met up with Khrysaar again as he stumbled through the door. With their combined strength they forced the heavier outer hab doors and staggered out.
The courtyard was a partially domed plaza. Rubble littered the wet flagstones, the crushed wreckage of water fountains and plug-in shrines between freestanding columns. Pilgrims would have congregated here to wait, to pray and to suffer the requisite privation to earn admittance to the forge sacrarium proper. Corpses of the same littered the processionals now. As the principal pedestrian access it had been built to manage large and restive crowds. The fortified narthex on the opposite side was an imposing structure, built thick and high, and home ordinarily to a garrison of several hundred skitarii legionaries.
A pair of Iron Hands in Clan Garrsak insignia held it.
The warriors methodically fired semi-automatic bursts into the orks milling amongst the ruins on that side of the plaza, complementing one another’s angles with the perfection of an algorithm. A few hundred Callivantine families had made it to the narthex’s walls and were hammering on the gate, but the Iron Hands were deaf to their wails. Indeed, it was only when their cries lured the greenskins out of cover that the Iron Hands appeared to mark their presence at all. A storm of bolter fire silenced their screams. Their butchered remains mingled with those of the orks.
The Iron Hands were the masters of urban warfare. Barring none. They did not care about lives or property. Collateral damage did not concern them. If a structure could be bombed to create a choke point or to cut off an avenue of attack, then it would be bombed. They would use civilian shields, shoot into allied forces and exploit Imperial assets to draw enemy
forces in before retaliating with overwhelming firepower. The Hammer and the Storm, it had once been called. The use of viral, chemical or rad-weaponry to neutralise whole quarters of a ‘friendly’ city was far from beneath their consciences.
We could teach the Imperial Fists a lesson or two. If they would listen.
‘I see it.’ Khrysaar pointed to a copper-faced spire, just visible through the swirling rain and the layered energy haze that blanketed the forge sacrarium. ‘On the other side of the narthex.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Rauth.
A couple of ramshackle ork Dreadnoughts and a superheavy wagon laden with jeering troops rattled towards the narthex. The two Iron Hands on the battlements were suddenly conspicuous by their absence.
Throne!
The string of demo charges knocked down the narthex’s high walls one at a time, burying the greenskin assault in a tsunami of red dust and leaving a cliff of shattered bricks where the fortress had been.
Rauth’s jaw muscles bunched in frustration.
‘We’ll need another way through.’
A gunshot blew out the lintel of the door they were standing under, and both warriors turned to see a pack of orks pouring into the vestibule behind them. Rauth blew out his cheeks.
‘We’ll cross that bridge later.’
They left the orks blasting impotently into the air as they sprinted for the narthex. Exertion was starting to blur Rauth’s vision as a mob of bikers roared onto the plaza on a diagonal, trailing tin cans on lengths of string, with scraps of flag bearing lightning bolts and crude rocket glyphs whipping out behind them.
Khrysaar opened fire on the bikes. His shots pranged their armoured frames as they jinked and pulled wheelies. Rauth spun towards the orks behind. It’s actually a relief to stop running. A tremor ran through the ground before he had his pistol in line with the first ork’s brow. A gust of warm air rolled over him, as if a fire elemental had just exhaled, and before Rauth was even aware that something had happened the ork bikes vanished under a saturation missile strike. Sizzling bits of spoke and fender pattered over the flagstones, nothing left of the squadron but a crater six metres across.
Rauth looked back to the pursuing orks.
They were drawing back to the hab, a look on their dull faces that took Rauth time to recognise simply because he had never seen it expressed by an ork before now. A brutish blend of horror and surprise. He turned to see what they were looking at. He tilted his head further back. His mouth dropped the other way.
It was Princeps Fabris.
II
In a final blast of stabilisation jets, the Three lowered onto the hurriedly cleared landing block aboard the Shield of the God-Emperor. Tonsured serfs in billowing white surplices bearing the Hospitallers cross approached, bent against the downwash from the Thunderhawk’s cycling turbofans. A thick-necked mortal armsman led them out. He wore the same devotional garb as his brothers but under a black breastplate and bracers, a ceremonial broadsword strapped across his shoulders. He was forced to jog to keep pace with the tech-priest that scuttled towards the gunship’s lowering ramp.
The magos prostrated himself on the deck just as the embarkation ramp rattled home and locked. ‘You are welcome aboard my charge.’ He looked up from his position of abasement as the first Space Marines clumped down the ramp. ‘The reputation of your Chapter as machine-whisperers and masters of artifice precedes you. Pray inform Iron Father Kristos that his munificence will be recompensed in commensurate measure.’
Jalenghaal regarded the prostrate human uncomfortably. ‘Mirkal Alfaran has left the ship, is that correct?’
‘Aboard the Inviolate Zeal, lord, yes, to take the sword to the unclean vessels of the xenos.’
‘How many Hospitallers remain aboard?’
‘Two squads, I believe.’ The magos glanced enquiringly to the armsman, who spared a nod.
‘And Venerable Galvarro, does he remain upon the bridge?’
‘Yes, lord.’ The magos sounded confused. ‘Do you wish to see him before I take you to the drive chamber?’
‘I do,’ said Jalenghaal and unlocked his bolt pistol sidearm.
The bolt overshot the gaping magos and punched through the armsman’s breastplate. It detonated, blowing the mortal warrior’s torso inside out. The armsman’s own chest shielded the other serfs from the blast, but the gory eruption stunned them long enough for Jalenghaal to shift aim and fire again. They were close-packed, unprepared; the four-shot burst exterminated them all.
‘What are you–?’
Burr shot the magos dead, a single round from the hip.
‘I could grow accustomed to this,’ he said.
Jalenghaal was uncertain whether he meant forcing entrance to an allied vessel or murdering tech-priests in cold blood, and decided not to enquire. He swung his aim ninety degrees, short-range helm auspex scanning the embarkation deck for threat pings. The Hospitallers had not left so much as a single Storm Eagle behind. Borrg made a disappointed sound as the rest of the Iron Hands tramped out of the Three.
‘An easy mission is a mission accomplished,’ Thorrn chided the neophyte.
‘It will not be easy,’ said Jalenghaal, his boots making a red mess of the Hospitallers’ welcoming party as he strode for the exit hatch. He blink-clinked a rune in his helm displays, parcelling off a section of his augmented consciousness to replay Kristos’ simulus log in the background. ‘It is a long way to the bridge.’
And Galvarro would be waiting for them when they got there.
III
Princeps Fabris stood in the middle of the burning highway, ten metres tall, smoke spiralling from the discharged missile tubes in his carapace hardpoint. The Knight Crusader was armoured in an eccentric pattern of purple-and-black adamantium plates, each emblazoned in the emblems of House Callivant and heraldic allusions to a warrior ancestry stretching back eleven thousand years. Twin banners fluttered between the Knight’s legs, announcing its allegiances both to Mars and to the old Iron Tenth. A ghost flicker chased its titanic outline as the Knight’s ion shield repulsed rain and ork fire with equal vehemence. Raising arms outfitted with heavy stubber and rapid-fire battlecannon, the princeps turned the escaping orks into short-lived puffs of flesh, bringing down the entire face of the hab that Rauth and Khrysaar had just fled. His speakers emitted a war-song at cacophonous volume as he did so. And why not? The ground trembled as the god of iron strode onto the courtyard.
Fabris thudded to a halt before the two Iron Hands, then tilted his almighty torso to greet them. One honour brother welcoming another to the tourney field. Given the awesome size differential it should have come across as ridiculous, but the Knight’s throbbing aura of machine power had left Rauth numb.
‘Well met upon the fields of glory, Iron Hands,’ Fabris declared. ‘Reap the bounty while it is offered, say I, for the greenskins shall not be so accommodating once their main force arrives.’
Rauth’s voice was tiny in comparison, and it took him longer than he would have liked to find it. ‘Should you be alone?’
The princeps’ laughter boomed against the buildings that still stood. ‘Should you?’
Rauth looked down, embarrassed, as though the tenor of the god-machine’s vibrations were having some influence on his flesh. The thought gave him the germ of an idea. He had heard that those bonded to the body of a Knight were not like other men. The machine’s spirit altered them, made them care about things that Rauth knew a warrior should not. Things like honour, brotherhood, sacrifice.
He looked back, raising his voice. ‘We are on a mission of great importance. The…’ Unfamiliarity caught the word in his throat. He expelled it on a shout. ‘…honour of my Chapter depends on our return to the forge sacrarium.’
Khrysaar looked at him as though he spoke in alien tongues.
‘We can’t fight every ork in Fort Callivant,’ Rauth
hissed to him. With his eyes, he gestured to the mighty war machine. ‘But he can.’
‘Attend me then, bold heroes.’ A building crumbled as the rippling sound waves of the princeps’ speakers finally took their toll. His arm-mounts swivelled, banners rippling as his giant stride carried him directly over the two Iron Hands’ heads and away. ‘For war. For honour!’
IV
Jalenghaal fired back down the corridor. The torrent of bolt shells broke open the shields of the armsmen that boiled up from the deck below. They had lived and fought alongside Adeptus Astartes all their lives; they must have understood what they faced, and yet they came to face it regardless. Jalenghaal felt that he should be impressed by such courage, but their stupidity left him cold.
Grinning dementedly, Borrg ignited his flamer and rinsed the wall of shields.
Shields popped and clanged to the deck as the fat melted from hands. Men thrashed and rolled, screaming until the promethium they inhaled burned away their lungs.
The neophyte gave the corridor another hosing. In case there were any more armsmen on the Shield of the God-Emperor feeling brave.
The soldiers’ ammunition belts cooked off in a blitz of minor detonations that made Lurrgol start. The Iron Hand swung back and opened up on the bulkhead. Borrg cursed, shutting off his flamer hose to shield his eyes as he was pelted with ricochets. Thorrn stove the back of the old warrior’s helmet with his bolter’s stock.
‘I think I hit it,’ said Lurrgol, lowering his bolter.
‘You hit something,’ Thorrn answered darkly.
A short blast of heavy auto-fire drew everyone’s attention back up the passageway. It was followed immediately by a thump of something large and hollow hitting the deck. An ident-blip in Jalenghaal’s helm display turned red. Deimion was down. Strontius’ signifier was the closest to his position. Jalenghaal blink-selected the icon and routed the warrior’s optical inputs to his screens.
The blast doors to the main bridge were ahead of him. A hundred metres ahead. They were partially hidden from Strontius’ optics by the angle of the corridor, designed to funnel an enemy into the enfilade of its sentry guns before letting them even within sight of the doors. They were just ahead. A pair of quad-linked autocannons, activated by heat or by movement. The view shifted as Strontius dropped into the cover of his heavily armoured brother and returned fire. The shot was rushed and the lascannon blasted harmlessly against the doors. Standard plasteel-adamantite composite with an energy-proofing ceramite sheath. It would take something bigger than a lascannon to get through.
