A moment later, Rizon said, 'I have them.'
'Where?' Tarchus demanded. How? he thought. The squad was still hundreds of yards from the reported position. Unless the orks weren't coming straight up. He blinked his visor lenses to prey sight, but there was still nothing.
'Everywhere,' Rizon said. The Scout spoke with grim resolution. He knew and accepted what was about to happen.
The echoes were deafening. The walls themselves were howling, as if the tunnels had become bestial maws. On the vox, the reports from the other squads were a fragmented cascade. Auspex contacts turned into running battles within moments. There was no way to gauge the size or direction of the horde.
Rizon was right, Tarchus realised. They are everywhere.
The orks attacked when the Scouts reached the next junction. They poured out of the side tunnels. They surged from every minor break in the main passageway walls. As if a dam had burst, the green tide filled the tunnels.
Everywhere.
Tarchus and his Scouts opened fire, shooting ahead and behind. They still headed for the pyramid, because those were their orders, and there was no action that made sense any longer except the fulfilment of duty to the end. They ran down a tunnel wide and high enough for a flight of Thunderhawks. From one side to the other, it was filled with orks. Tarchus ran towards the wave. A single squad charged thousands of greenskins. Behind, Tarchus heard the thunder of many iron-soled boots. He fired, and he saw orks fall. He fired, and he was trying to kill an ocean.
Solid shells from ork guns thudded against his armour. They chipped the ceramite. A lucky shot took out his right lens. A cross-fire hail between the two hordes cut down dozens of orks. It was so thick the impacts felt like power fists slamming into Tarchus' front and back. The Scouts didn't have the armour to withstand so concentrated a barrage. They went down, their bodies punched through with dozens of impacts. Rizon was last. He staggered on at Tarchus' side, his left arm broken, armour and carapace shattered, the holes in his torso too large for the scabbing agency of the Laraman's Organ. He was bleeding out as he fought.
'Purpose...' Rizon gasped.
'Fulfilled,' Tarchus told him, hammering shells into the onrushing orks. He dropped more.
We have served, he told himself. The orks have come for us first. We have bought the Chapter time to prepare. He shouted warnings into the vox. He gave his position.
Rizon was silent, staggering on, still shooting.
'Beware the walls!' Tarchus voxed. 'The orks know of other shafts. They have the run-'
A gigantic ork put on a burst of speed and stormed ahead of the rest of the horde. It was a monster, twice Tarchus' height, its face a snarling mass of scar tissue surrounding savage tusks. It swung a huge axe as it closed with Tarchus. Bullets hit him from behind. He staggered forwards, running into the edge of the blade. It smashed through his gorget and severed his throat. He could not speak. He could not breathe. Blood filled his lungs. He raised his bolter, holding down the trigger, stitching the ork through torso and head.
The orks at the rear stopped firing. They caught up. A cleaver came down through Rizon's skull. Tarchus turned to avenge the Scout. A beast with a metal fist punched him in the chest. His armour held, but the blow pushed him back. He stumbled into the weapons of the other orks. The greenskins hacked at him with cleavers and axes as heavy as they were crude. The orks hit him with blows that would have cut a mortal in half. He sank beneath them. He was still firing, and he heard the cries of wounded monsters.
There were other shouts too. They were tinny, small, and in his ear. They came from Sirras, shouting the names of the 223rd's Scout sergeants. None were responding.
Tarchus tried, but he was choking on his blood. His arms were tired, moving far too slowly, while the orks attacked him with the speed and power of uncontained, explosive life.
He was still struggling to speak as the darkness came down over his eyes. He hoped his captain had the time he needed to prepare.
Silence fell before the dark. The orks' jaws were wide, but no sound came from them.
The blades cut through the gaps in his armour. The weapons rose and fell. He looked at them with detachment. It was as if they were no longer striking his body.
Is this enough? he wondered, but could not ask.
He sank to the ground, drowning in the green tide.
Conflicting tactical needs must be resolved through the rigorous application of the theoretical. The theoretical is the method by which the relative value of the competing priorities can be determined. This determination is critical. To choose the wrong tactical need is to hand weapons to the enemy. The error can easily compound to the point that this single choice can lead to defeat regardless of the foe's tactics. Indeed, the opponent may not have any strategy at all. War is a force unto itself and though it is shaped by the decisions, correct or disastrous, of the combatants, it is not controlled by either faction. At best its force can be directed, and the power to do so is useless if it is not applied correctly. Thus, not only is the theoretical the necessary precondition to victory, so is its absolute rigour. The decision made in the conscious absence of the theoretical is the guarantor of self-inflicted doom.
- Guilliman, On the Practical Necessity of Theoretical, 22.5.1v
Five
INFESTATION • PRESERVATION • APOSTASY
The mural made Guilliman pause. This was before the word came from the 22nd. This was in the final seconds during which the war on Thoas followed the narrative he had established. In the pain of the years ahead, he did not often think back to this moment. It would be superseded by far worse memories, and far worse agony, far worse narratives. But even in that period of cursed innocence between Thoas and Calth, when so much of what he believed was burning and he did not know it, he did not like to think of this moment. He willed his mind to slide over the memory when he considered Thoas. There was much he would choose to put aside about the world. He would tell himself the memories and the thoughts they engendered were unprofitable. That they were irrelevant or worse. Their suppression was an active good. These were the things he would tell himself. And later, when the galaxy burned, and he was confronted by his blindness, there would be the fresh pain to come from this campaign. He would be reminded of all that he had not seen, and of all that he had chosen not to see. He would see the patterns and the repetitions in his blindness, and the terrible alloy of grief and rage would be forged anew.
Guilliman and the companies he had selected to accompany him were deep into the ruins. They were making their way northwards. The route was circuitous, angling through multiple blocked intersections. They were taking the largest tunnels, wide enough for the full deployment of heavy armour. The passages could have been grand avenues. Stretches hundreds of yards long were open to the sky where the high roofs had fallen in. There, as in the pyramid, Guilliman saw murals faded to vague blurs of colour.
Here, though, now, in the last moments of the narrative he had decreed, he and his sons were in an untouched section of the tunnels. The passage led across a colossal domed chamber. A mustering zone, Guilliman surmised. The orks had pillaged it of metal too, though there were more traces of the higher platforms. Their size suggested they had been landing pads. The floor was thick with debris, and the stench was eye-watering. Orks had made a home of this chamber. A century of defacement covered the lower walls. Higher up, the original murals were intact. They were dark from the decades of smoke from dirty fires, but the wind did not reach this far in. The artwork had weathered time better than in any of the other regions the Ultramarines had crossed. The lights of the vehicles shone on the mural. Guilliman paused at the sight, Gage at his side. The companies waited for him. The vehicle engines idled, their guttural rumbles filling the dimness of the dome with echoes. Guilliman looked up, studying the mural. It was martial in theme. That was no surprise. Commanders a hundred feet tall struck heroic poses. Their forces were faded hints behind them.
'Those shapes look famili
ar,' Gage said, pointing to rough silhouettes.
'Land Raiders,' Guilliman said. 'Then they had Standard Template Constructs.' His gaze returned to the commanders. They held his attention. They made him uneasy. Why? he wondered. Analyse the details. Piece by piece, there was nothing he could point to and state was objectively wrong. The cut of the uniforms, the shape of the caps, the stem visages - each detail spoke to the authority of these men and women and celebrated their prowess. Perhaps the answer was in the obscured portions of the mural, in the murky colours that had lost all form, but still gestured towards meaning.
'These soldiers are lacking,' Gage said.
'Agreed,' said Guilliman, and he came closer to finding what displeased him. 'I have no sense that they are fighting in the name of anything.'
'They do seem to be against the name of something.'
'Yes. And only that.'
The moment of contemplation was a long one, though it lasted mere seconds. And when Guilliman's dislike of the murals crystallised, the vox burst into life.
The ork counter-attack had begun. They were everywhere along the length of the ruins, and the 22nd Chapter was taking the worst blows.
The wave of greenskins appeared at the edge of the tanks' illumination. They rounded the curve of the tunnel and charged towards the ground-floor access to the pyramid. They howled with, victorious rage. At the huge doorway, Iasus stood between Land Raiders. He waited a few seconds more, for the orks to be scores deep. They filled the width of the tunnel completely. If any of the smaller greenskins wound up on the sides, they were crushed against the tunnel walls by the bulk and momentum of their larger cousins.
This is not a choke point, Iasus thought. The tunnel is far too wide. We might as well be fighting in the plain again.
'Fire at will,' he said.
Las-beams seared the enemy column. They incinerated multiple orks at a stroke. Heads and torsos became ash. Heavy bolters chewed up the forward ranks. The leading mass of orks vanished in an explosion of blood and tom flesh. A few blasts punched all the way to the far wall. Rock vibrated. The tunnel hummed, then shook. In the lights of the tanks, the air turned grey with a snowfall of dust and rock chips. Cracks ran down its length. The tremors increased with every second of artillery fire.
'All companies!' Iasus voxed. 'Cease heavy fire. Infantry only! The structural integrity of the ruins is compromised!' The pyramid's solidity was an illusion, he realised. Whatever had damaged the other structures and punched craters through the tunnel roofs had punished this portion of the ruins too. It was a monument waiting to collapse.
The Land Raiders of the 221st fell silent. The orks raged forwards over the annihilated bodies of their kin. The tremors continued. Iasus could feel the pounding rhythm of ongoing shelling from one of the upper levels. It resonated through ceilings and walls, even into the rock under his boots.
'Cease fire, cease fire!' he shouted into the vox.
The rhythm ceased. The tremors eased. But the dust still fell, in the tunnel and in the pyramid's chamber. The orks were two-thirds of the way down the tunnel. Large-bore but crude bullets shrieked into the Ultramarines line. Thousands of brutal axes and sword blades were raised, the bloodlust a tangible musk.
'Brothers of the 221st!' Iasus shouted. He raised his power sword. The dust created a bright nimbus around its blue light. 'Forwards with me! Courage and honour!'
They were his brothers. Many of them might not think so. Perhaps none of them did. But he was their Chapter Master, and when he called, they answered. A battering ram of blue and gold ceramite charged out of the pyramid to meet the orks. The barrage of bolter shells was orders of magnitude beyond the power of the swarm of ork bullets. They inflicted almost as much damage as the Land Raider guns. Scores of greenskins died. For a moment, the ork wave seemed to stop where it was, the brutes dying as quickly as they ran forwards. The illusion was short-lived. The wave was too huge, too ferocious. It closed with the Ultramarines, its thousands of voices united in a single, shattering roar.
In the final seconds before impact, the leading edge of the Ultramarines phalanx narrowed to a point. On either side, the ranks further back poured on the bolter fire. The spear point drove into the orks with power sword and chainblade. The momentum of the two forces was such that Iasus had a sense of accelerating as he cut and shot his way into the green tide. Orks thundered past him, ignoring him in favour of the legionaries ahead of them. He butchered the orks before him, his movements an efficient, murderous refrain. In these initial seconds, they came at him, and he at them, too fast for them to defend against his blows. He swung his power sword through a neck, decapitating the greenskin with a single swipe. The head flew off to the left. The stump geysered blood. Iasus fired his bolt pistol through the crimson, drilling massive holes through the skull of the next ork before the body of the first had fallen. He brought his sword back the other way and into the neck of a third ork as the other bodies crumpled. Three enemies dead in two steps.
He ran on, a lightning scythe, slashing and shooting, slashing and shooting, moving deeper and deeper into the enemy lines. Behind him, the legionaries of the 221st took down the greenskins, each brother striking with his preferred weapons and techniques, the individual approaches forming a unified killing machine.
For as long as half a minute, the Ultramarines advance stopped the wave cold, a wedge driving deep into its core. Half a minute when the attack to defend the pyramid seemed on the verge of becoming a true advance. That illusion lasted much longer than the first one. Then it died too. The orks kept coming. The river of brute strength was unending. Giants waded through their smaller kin. One reached for Iasus. He pumped three shells into its chest. He destroyed its armour fashioned from scavenged metal plates. Fist-sized wounds opened in its torso. The ork snarled in agony but didn't slow. The impact of the shells was enough to spoil the aim of its own blow, and it hit Iasus with the side of its axe blade, hard enough to snap the weapon in half.
Iasus heard cracks on the left side of his armour as he flew against the rampaging orks on his right. He crashed to the ground. He was trampled. Bodies fell on him, holding him in place. He roared and fired upwards, pulling the trigger so quickly that the explosions of the shells blew apart the corpses and hurled his attackers back, bleeding and dying. He rose just as the giant ork reached him again. The warlord shouted in its barbaric tongue and grabbed his shoulders with both hands. It lifted him high, squeezing as if it would crush him to pulp. As it raised him, he plunged his power blade forwards. The ork gutted itself. It stopped for a second, staring at him in disbelief and anger, holding him with its arms outstretched. Then it let go, and he plunged back into the cauldron. There were more huge greenskins arriving, slower than the others but much more dangerous. Harder to kill, too. And still the orks kept coming. Their fury and energy grew with every second of violence. The Ultramarines advance slowed, then stopped. Now the orks were coming faster than they could be killed. They blunted the wedge of the 221st.
'Make a wall,' Iasus voxed the company. 'Let none pass!'
The wedge grew wider, stretching from wall to wall. The lines of the Ultramarines were deep. The orks had nearly a thousand legionaries to fight through if they wished to reclaim the pyramid.
They mean to, Iasus thought.
On the heels of that thought came another, even less welcome. The orks were not fighting to take back the ruins. The greenskins engaged in war for its own sake. They would attack until they or the Ultramarines were no more. And wasn't that why the Legion had come to Thoas? To exterminate the orks? The ruins had changed that. Guilliman had ordered they be saved and held. So now Iasus fought to preserve as well as to destroy. Envy of the orks flashed through his hearts. They fought without restriction, and by instinct alone. They had a wild freedom in their way of war. He dismissed the envy in the same moment. He ran his sword through the eye of another brute, and in doing so he hurled the unworthy emotion away. There was no value in the ork way of being. There was no purp
ose. There was no meaning. But there was power and relentless strength in their hunger and the greenskin multitude. The 22nd truly was fighting a tide. With every kill, Iasus was trying to swim against a savage current, and no matter how many orks he shot and slashed, his blade and pistol could no more stop the relentless flow than they could kill the sea. The orks roared and charged and fought and died and fought and charged, endlessly. The 22nd could not stop the greenskins from reaching the pyramid. The strongpoint would fall.
We don't need to stop them.
The thought was a revelation and it was liberation. He almost laughed as he sidestepped the axe swings of two orks, took a step back and drilled them with bolt-shells. Theoretical: preservation of the ruins is contingent on the completion of the initial goal of extermination. Practical: do not fight to hold ground. Fight to destroy.
What he had envied was the Ultramarines' to take. There was no need for a strongpoint. The ruins would be theirs when the last ork lay dead.
'Our fight is not defensive,' he voxed the Chapter. 'Seek the opportunities of the moment. Annihilation is our watchword! Let them come and fall on your blades. Brothers, there are no reserves. We are all on the front lines!' The shift in tactics was a nuance, but its importance was more than psychological. The only thing to defend would be a brother's flank and back. The Ultramarines formed into tighter, smaller, more mobile formations, unbreakable stones in the midst of the ork torrent. The battle roar that greeted his orders gave him new energy and hope. He hurled himself at the xenos, slashing and shooting. In the heaving tide of the horde, it was difficult to gauge direction. No matter. Every direction was forwards. The ground he covered was irrelevant. A step back was not a retreat. What mattered was each ork that fell. Every kill was the true way forwards.
A few yards to his right he saw two legionaries go down. The muzzles of their bolters glowed red from the rate of fire. The orks came at them so fast that their disintegrating corpses hit them with the heavy weight of dead meat. There were multiple blows, and for a moment the bodies were shields for the greenskins behind. Orks slammed into the legionaries and overwhelmed them with numbers. Iasus tried to cut through the foe to reach them. It was too late. The bolters kept shooting for a few moments more, but cleavers and axes struck arms and legs and heads and torsos at once. Shrieking chainblades ground through the seams of armour. Iasus was only two steps away from the mob that had obscured the legionaries when the floor was awash with a new flow of blood. It was not the stinking, obscene blood of orks. It was heroic blood.
Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar Page 9
