Iasus looked up. Dust trickled down from the ceiling of packed, broken stone. 'Theoretical,' he said. 'If all life is extinguished above, the collapse has likely been total. We are buried beneath millions of tonnes of stone. Practical - we find a way to go even further down. When we find intact portions of the network, we head south.'
'We are with you, Chapter Master,' Burrus said. He rapped his fist against his chestplate. So did the others. Burrus was from Terra, Iasus recalled. He had performed his duty well and followed orders without question, but his resentment of Iasus had been clear from the start. He was not a legionary who had aspirations of command, that much Iasus could tell. But he was one who had strong opinions about the fitness of his leaders. In Iasus' few interactions with him, he had been almost completely silent. Never outright insubordinate, yet not hiding his unhappiness about the outsider Chapter Master.
There was no resentment now. The question had been an honest one, and Burrus was satisfied with the answer.
Iasus turned around on the slab. In every direction was a mass of heavy shadows and jumbled gloom. Every direction was equally unpromising. There was no obvious descent.
Theoretical, he thought. Given how extensive the network is, and our position in the ruins of multiple junctions and chambers, to head off in any one direction will inevitably result in the arrival at a shaft or more intact tunnel.
Practical: choose a path and advance constantly.
He made his choice. 'This way,' he said, pointing east. Down that way lay their brothers, no matter how far they had to go.
He was right. Ten minutes later, after climbing over and around rubble, they reached a shaft. It was a small one, barely wide enough
for a legionary wearing armour to negotiate. Iasus led the way, climbing down.
There were snarls below.
They were growing louder.
Look upon every enemy action as a revelation. Every attack and manoeuvre discloses motive, means and intent. Should the foe's strike be successful, unless it results in your defeat, it is now the most detailed knowledge in your possession of the enemy's tactics, weapons and strength. Remember that the enemy is also learning from you. It is the consciousness of this accumulation of knowledge that becomes the critical point. The commander whose understanding is swiftest, and most finely developed, will turn the enemy's strength into a weakness, and march to victory.
- Guilliman, For a Hermeneutics of Strategy, 96.34.iii
Seven
SALVATION • DEPLOYMENT • SURVIVAL
The gunships flew over the battlefield once before landing their troops. They pounded the slope with Thunderhawk cannons and cluster bomb payloads. Guilliman watched from the side hatch. A huge cloud of flame and dust rose up, expanding fireballs sending out a storm of debris. For hundreds of yards, the approach to the pyramid became a new hell of destruction. To the west, the artillery bombardment continued. The movement of the orks was disrupted. Guilliman saw them scatter in confusion, change direction, collide. The flow of the green tide became turbulent. Thousands of bodies littered the broken landscape. It was a good start.
It was only a start. The orks covered the slope. They were still closing with the pyramid. From this side, the true extent of the damage was visible. Most of the west side of the structure had fallen, leaving a huge mound of rubble leading up to a gap hundreds of feet wide. Orks were leaping from boulder to boulder as they climbed the rubble before leaping into the pyramid. Even with the interdicting fire of the Thunderhawks, the orks were flooding inside.
'The pilots want to bombard the entrance,' Gage voxed.
'Permission denied,' Guilliman said, 'Banzor and Empion are lucky the pyramid is standing at all. We will do nothing to bring it down on their heads.'
'Understood.'
'One more strafing pass,' Guilliman ordered the gunship pilots. Then prepare to land us. Ultramarines, make ready to jump. We strike on the downslope run.'
Aboard Masali Spear was an armoury reserved for Guilliman's use. From the ornate, gleaming brass chest he took the Hand of Dominion. He donned the power gauntlet. He flexed his fingers. The fist of crimson and blue crackled. Energy coruscated around its form as if hungry to be unleashed. The choice of weapon was a reasoned one. It was the right weapon for the type of landscape and the type of war he was about to wage. But it was an emotional choice too, a fact he had forced himself to confront and reflect upon before he gave himself license to indulge in it. He had had enough of the orks. Most of all, he had had enough of how their savage, unthinking way of fighting was reversing his gains, and doing so by engaging in a way of war that was a mocking mirror image of his strategies. The orks would not win. They would be crushed. He would crush them with his own hands.
The gunships finished their uphill run. Smoke and billowing dust rose in their wake. They turned, Masali Spear in the lead, and roared back down, flying within a few yards of the ground. Their sponson-mounted heavy bolters hammered the ground ahead, clearing the path of the orks that had survived the bombs and the cannons. The horde continued to arrive from the north, but there was a gap now.
Masali Spear slowed midway through the dark, choking cloud. Dust whirled in violent eddies as the gunship blasted its hull nozzles down and forwards, approaching a hover. Guilliman leapt from the side door. His sons followed. In a few seconds, thirty
Ultramarines deployed onto the rubble. Masali Spear's engines surged and it flew up, angling towards the north. Behind it, other gunships were already disembarking their warriors. In less than a minute, the full complement of the First Chapter's infantry was on the ground. The gunships resumed their bombardment, moving north and east, beyond the artillery barrage, to hit the orks as they emerged from the exposed hive of tunnels.
The wind of Thoas blew away the smoke. The orks appeared, the tide frothing over the rubble to the north. The leading brutes howled a challenge at the sight of the wall of Ultramarines. The greenskins behind picked up the roar. It spread. In an instant, the shattered slope resonated with savagery's call to war. It was louder than the bombardment. It was a long, throat-tearing ululation, the voice of a species that lived for the joy of war and would revel in that joy until its last warrior died.
And that, Guilliman thought, is why we will exterminate all of these brutes.
He raised the Hand of Dominion, and he answered the orks with a roar of his own. He wanted them to understand what they were dealing with. His sons joined him. The roar of the Ultramarines was a deep, powerful bellow. It was the sound of nobility enraged. It was the sound of savagery's doom.
Guilliman charged, the Invictarii at his side. On his right, further up the slope, Gage led another forward wedge of Terminators. The rest of the legionaries followed a moment behind. The Ultramarines came for the orks not as a wave, but as a wall, a human siege blade with battering rams to the fore. The perception of the orks as a single, solid mass dissolved as Guilliman drew closer. The terrain prevented anything like the density of fighting in the plain and in the tunnels. The slope was steep. The footing was treacherous. Smashed, jagged rocks varied in size from loose, rolling scree to slabs the size of gunships. Guilliman barrelled straight at a loose cluster of huge brutes. They had
drawn together as they saw him, each monster wanting to claim his head as their prize. He opened fire with the Arbitrator, spreading his fire between the five giants. Armour shattered. One ork fell when a shell slammed though its eye and its brain exploded out of the back of its skull. The others were wounded to a blind rage. Streaming blood, they hurled themselves at Guilliman, vaulting over boulders. They were beyond reckless. Guilliman met them with controlled, strategic wrath. The first ork reached Guilliman a second before the others. It was twice his height, a being of uncontrolled, uncontrollable fury. Guilliman hit the warlord with the Hand of Dominion. The gauntlet slammed into the ork's ribcage with a flash of azure energy. It punched through the greenskin's body with the force of a meteor. It incinerated flesh and muscle. It pulverised bone. Guil
liman angled his strike downwards, and his blow went straight through the ork. His arm disappeared into the beast's disintegrating torso. His fist came out the other end, through the ork's spine, and struck the boulder behind. The light was dazzling in the sombre dusk of the mountains. The shock wave blew up the boulder and the ork. It knocked the nearest greenskin flat. The other staggered, blood fountaining from its nose and ears. Its howl was now one of pain. It clutched its head. Guilliman took it down with a quick burst of the Arbitrator.
The last tried to rise. Guilliman slammed the Hand of Dominion down again. Rock and ork were vaporised in the blow. The earth shook as the impact rippled outwards. Boulders shifted. Debris rolled down the slope. A precarious heap of granite collapsed, starting a new slide, knocking more orks off their feet, crushing their howls into silence as the rock gathered momentum down the slope. Their helmet crests waving in the eternal wind, the Invictarii incinerated greenskins with plasma pistol blasts. They ran through and dismembered any who managed to get close with power swords. The blades hummed and flashed. They were works of beauty and elegance. Guilliman appreciated art, and he understood its worth in the battlefield. It was the signifier of greatness, of the superiority of the warrior honoured to wield the object whose worth exceeded its ability to kill. But more than art, more than beauty, Guilliman valued precision. The power swords were the right weapons for the right warriors. In the hands of the Invictarii, they were the art of war crystallised into a simple, murderous form.
Orks died. With plasma bursts and power gauntlet concussion waves, their deaths were brilliant flashes in the twilight and the cracking toll of a stony bell. The flares were bait. The currents in the greenskin tide shifted. Brutes who had been rushing to the promise of battle in the pyramid now charged towards the closer, brighter fight. The bellows of their dying comrades were a summons rather than a warning.
Guilliman saw the shift, saw the growing number of enemies heading towards him, and he was satisfied. Theoretical: the orks will turn from besieging Banzor if a more immediate target presents itself Practical: hit them hard, and be as visible as possible.
Now they came. Guilliman and Gage's wedge formations hit them first. Guilliman repeated the principle of the assault on the plains, forcing the orks to come together in an effort to stop his advance, and tearing out the heart of the hordes. Behind came the long, deep line of legionaries, their steady stream of bolter shells, rockets and flamers meeting the orks that ran on. The howls of the orks became more and more outraged. The horde came for the First Chapter.
'Movement behind us,' Gage voxed. 'Some of them are pulling out of the pyramid to fight'
'Good,' said Guilliman.
'We'll be surrounded soon.'
'Chapter Master Banzor,' Guilliman voxed. 'What is your status?'
'The pressure is starting to ease.'
'Can you link up with Empion yet?'
'He will soon!' Empion said. 'We can see you, brother,' he told Banzor.
'Then we will join you on the slopes, primarch', Banzor said.
'No,' said Guilliman. 'Break out south. Reinforce Atreus at the next pyramid. What we had hoped to do for you is now your task. March south and end the war on that front.'
Habron broke in. A Thunderhawk transport had Flame of Illyrium in its hold as it circled the battlefield. The Techmarine was deploying the scanners of the Explorator from the air. 'Lord Guilliman,' he said. 'Contact from the Twenty-second.'
'On the Cavascor?'
'No. From beneath the rockslide. Word from Loxias of the 221st. Chapter Master Iasus and some elements of his force have survived.'
'Can they be reached?'
'I am working to determine that. I am not in direct contact with the Chapter Master. Loxias is acting as a relay for as long as he can.'
'Do what you can. If possible, find an extraction point.' On the command network, Guilliman voxed, 'The Twenty-second is still with us. We march to the north, Ultramarines'
He drove the Hand of Dominion through another ork. Its followers stumbled in the shock wave, then died as the Arbitrator spoke again. Behind, Guilliman sensed a shift in the rhythms of bolter fire. The legionaries were beginning to counter the attackers coming from the pyramid. Under the dark grey sky of Thoas, in the light of stars neither setting nor rising, the orks in their thousands mshed through artillery and gunship barrages. A new avalanche, one of flesh and rage, rushed to bury Guilliman.
Theoretical, Hierax thought, then stopped.
Theoretical, he began again.
His thoughts stuttered, stumbled into formlessness, and looped back. The word revolved through his mind, a refrain without purpose. He stood in the centre of the strategium, his back to the tacticarium table, gazing blankly at a pict screen. He took in nothing from the screen beyond a vague shifting of colours.
Theoretical.
Useless repetition. The dull, cold, hammering toll of grief and anger.
Sirras was gone. Old friend, old comrade, old ally. His belief in Hierax as the proper Chapter Master of the 22nd had been absolute. His judgement had been flawed.
In the final moments before vox contact with the 22nd had been lost, Hierax had heard Iasus demanding Sirras cease the heavy armour fire. Then the pyramid vanished. The vox went silent. A mountain had fallen. Hierax mourned his comrade. His anger initially coalesced around Iasus. But Iasus had been correct. Sirras had been the author of his own doom.
Theoretical: Sirras was deficient in his application of reason.
Hierax's thoughts moved out of their spiral. They began to find direction again.
Practical: correct your path where it too closely resembles his.
'Captain?'
Hierax's eyes focused. He looked right. Kletos had entered the strategium.
'What is it, legionary?' Hierax said.
'What we're hearing about the war. Is it true?'
Hierax wondered how long he'd been in a fugue state if there had been time for news of the disaster to spread from the bridge.
'Yes,' Hierax said. 'Yes!' he snapped. 'The position held by the Twenty-second has been destroyed. There are no signs as yet of any survivors.'
Kletos swore. 'He should never have been our Chapter Master. We should be down there. If he hadn't-'
'The fault was not that of Chapter Master Iasus,' Hierax said. Kletos fell silent.
'Captain Sirras made an error of judgement, one that he could have avoided had he fully applied our primarch's philosophy.' He knew this to be true. Sirras had been reckless. He had disobeyed an earlier order. Hierax could imagine the situation must have been extreme to push Sirras to make that mistake, but it could not have been the result of applied reason.
'Are we all that remains?' Kletos asked after a moment.
'Perhaps.'
What are your orders?'
'I will make contact with the primarch. His orders will be mine. I...' He trailed off, his eye caught by the pict screen he had been staring at when Kletos arrived. It displayed the tracked movements and concentrations of the orks. The topography of the map had refreshed itself a few moments before to account for the new physical reality on the planet. Despite the destruction, the ork horde in that position showed very little reduction in density and numbers.
'Why there?' Hierax wondered.
'Captain?' said Kletos.
Hierax pointed at the screen. 'Why are there so many orks here?' Large hordes were attacking the Chapters at the other pyramids, but here was where they were most numerous.'
'Chance?' Kletos suggested.
The idea was not unreasonable. Orks were unpredictable partly because their actions were so often dictated by random events. The right topographical dip could change the course of an entire horde's rampage. Even so, the solution felt wrong. 'I don't think so,' Hierax said. 'There have been more orks in this region of the mountain chain from the opening moments of the campaign. There must be something attracting them to the region.'
His eyes widened. With a curse, he turne
d to a screen on the other side of the strategium. He found what he was looking for immediately.
'Look,' he said to Kletos, tapping the screen with a finger. 'The radiation blooms over that region are anomalously high.'
'You theorise a correlation.'
'I dismiss coincidence, certainly.'
'Why would the radiation levels there be so high?'
'That is the key question' There were traces along the entire mountain chain, and the reports sent back to the fleet by the Techmarines described evidence pointing to the fortress having fallen in a war. All the signs of damage, though, were many centuries old. The radiation levels around the north pyramid were so high, it was as if the war were not over in that sector.' 'Theoretical,' he said. 'There is an ongoing source of radiation somewhere in that vicinity.'
'Caused by the orks?'
'Doubtful. More likely caused by something that is attracting them.' The conjecture crystallised. It gathered weight, becoming a true theoretical. 'Vox!' he called to the bridge. 'I need to speak with Lord Guilliman.'
The shaft ended in a new warren. Iasus wondered how many sub-levels there were. Had the people of Thoas once burrowed as far as the core? These passages were narrower than the ones above, and their ceilings were lower. Many had collapsed too. Some of the damage looked ancient, but much was new. Dust still filled the tunnels. The air grated against Iasus' teeth when he inhaled. The snarls and heavy footsteps of orks echoed everywhere. There were no greenskins at the junction beneath the shaft.
Burrus was the first to join him. He looked around, listening. 'Are we surrounded?' he asked.
'We may well be,' Iasus said. They infest these passages.'
'Are they looking for us?'
'I don't think so. I don't think they know we're here. Though they will before long.'
'Why are they here?' Burrus moved to one side as more and more of the company dropped from the ladder and out of the shaft.
Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar Page 12
