The Siege of Castellax

by C. L. Werner

  Using the seal to pivot, exploiting the momentum of his own body, Gamgin swung down into the bed of the mag-engine, landing amid the pulsating power coils and shuddering piston-drives.

  Smashing his boot against the door separating the bed from the control booth, Gamgin burst in upon his objective. The horrified crew gawked at the giant, their faces drawn into almost comical masks of shock. The Iron Warrior chose the closest of the men, splattering his brains across the booth with a shot from his pistol.

  ‘Who else wants to question my orders?’ he growled at the other crewmen. With obscene haste, the slaves leapt to the controls, drawing down the magnetic pulse. At once Gamgin could feel the train reducing speed.

  ‘Survival is the reward for obedience,’ the Iron Warrior told the ashen-faced men, savouring each word of the lie.

  Shots slammed into the sides of the engine, the stutter of automatic fire, the crack of plasma bolts, the shriek of spear-launchers and grapnels. Gamgin peered through the armaplas window, watching as ork buggies swarmed around the slowing train. He saw two of the scrap metal constructs bowled over by the hurtling train, dragged along in its path by the cables their gunners had unwisely fired into the engine. Janissaries on the rear cars increased their desperate efforts to fend off the attacks, directing a withering stream of bolt-shells and las-beams into the alien horde. Each casualty only seemed to increase the orks’ determination, goading them closer to the hurtling train, urging them to step up the rate of their own fire.

  The heavier ork machines were drawing close now.

  Battlewagons and trucks kept pace with the train, casting ropes and chains onto the roofs so that alien warriors might board the carriages. The janissaries were frantic in their efforts to stop the boarding actions, but at every turn the fierce vitality of the greenskins defied their efforts. Only a concentration of fire could drop the monsters and while focusing on one attacker, others were able to scramble up the ropes and onto the roofs.

  Gamgin dismissed the doomed Flesh, staring instead at the immense bulk of the battlefortress. At its present speed, the mobile stronghold would be right where he needed it to be. The Iron Warrior smiled as he stared at the little counter displayed in the corner of his optics. Only a few more kilometres and everything would be in place.

  A violent impact against the roof of the engine brought Gamgin spinning away from the window. Snarling his annoyance, the Space Marine fired his bolt pistol into the ceiling, his shots rewarded with the pained howls of orks. From the opposite window, he could see the black mass of a battlewagon, its body swarming with roaring aliens. A tall mast equipped with a spiked gangplank told the rest of the story. Blood-hungry orks surged along the rickety walkway, shoving their own comrades off in their eagerness to do battle. Gamgin saw one ork pitch into oblivion, a second dangling precariously from a handhold on the plank’s steel side.

  The Space Marine decided he had seen enough. Bringing his bolt pistol against the face of the window, he blasted a hole in the armaplas. Wind howled through the control booth as the room lost pressure. Gamgin ignored the tempest and thumbed another grenade from his belt. Without hesitation, he dropped the explosive through the window and into the bed of the battlewagon.

  The engine shook as the grenade detonated, peppering the side of the train with shrapnel. The stricken vehicle disintegrated as its hull lost its integrity, bursting into a shower of metal scrap and mangled bodies. Warbikes veered away from the debris, some of the riders shaking leathery fists at the wreckage as they passed it.

  The crump of heavy boots on the roof was a reminder that some of the orks had managed to disembark before the explosion and survive the resulting shrapnel. A bright crimson glow began to eat through the ceiling, the burn of a meltagun. Gamgin directed another burst from his pistol overhead and the glow began to fade.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ the Space Marine hissed, glaring at the terrified slaves. His gauntlet closed about the control booth’s door, wrenching it open in a vicious tug. An ork, its body peppered with oozing wounds and slivers of metal, stood on the other side, an immense hammer gripped in its paws. Gamgin drove the muzzle of his pistol under the brute’s chin and exploded its skull.

  Shoving the shuddering corpse aside, the Iron Warrior threw himself at the half-dozen greenskins trying to tear apart the mag-drives. As he ruptured organs with bolt-shells and split bone with his combat knife, Gamgin was struck by the immense weight of an ork warrior dropping down from the roof of the engine. The Space Marine flattened beneath the murderous ambusher, smashed against the metal floor of the platform.

  The massive ork, one of the hulking brutes that served as bosses among their kind, brought the talons of a crude power claw shearing through the fingers of Gamgin’s right hand, slashing through the ceramite plates and the reinforced bones of the legionary’s fingers. A fist the size of a human head slammed into the side of the Iron Warrior’s helmet, the ork’s tremendous strength further magnified by bulky piston-motors fitted to its scrap-work armour. Gamgin’s right side optic display burst into a crackle of static.

  The fungal stink of the ork’s breath washed over Gamgin as the alien leaned over him. Through his still functional optic, the Space Marine could see the brute’s shadow falling across the platform. Judging the ork’s position, exploiting the power of his vat-grown muscles and the servo-motors in his armour, Gamgin arched his body and brought the back of his helmet smashing into the ork’s face.

  The brute reared back, blood raining from its pulverised nose, a cracked tusk hanging from the corner of its mouth. Gamgin rolled out from under the monster, taking advantage of its momentary confusion. The Iron Warrior’s knife came slashing down, tearing through the cables looped about the ork’s hip.

  Roaring, the ork was swinging around to avenge itself on the Iron Warrior when he made his attack. Sparks exploded from the broken cables, oil spurted from severed hoses. The alien’s leg froze in place as the mechanics of its scrap-work armour seized. The resulting loss of leverage spilled the huge ork to the floor of the platform.

  Gamgin tore a fat-mouthed plasma pistol from one of the orks he had killed. Coldly he pointed the weapon at the crippled alien. It glared back at him, its beady eyes filled with frustrated rage.

  Slowly, Gamgin lowered the pistol.

  ‘You were almost early to your own funeral,’ he told the ork.

  From the Air Cohort gunship that extracted them from the ruins of Aboro, Rhodaan and his squad had a perfect view when a ten kilometre-wide section of desert suddenly vanished. One instant they could see Gamgin’s troop train speeding down the tracks, flanked on all sides by a numberless swarm of ork buggies and battlewagons, the gigantic bulk of the battlefortress lumbering several kilometres behind. The next instant, that vista was obliterated in a burst of fiery annihilation. It seemed as though a talon of fire had reached up from the flaming core of Castellax to visit a vengeful judgement upon the puny creatures who capered about its surface. For hundreds of kilometres, the desert became a mass of dust and debris, smashed flat by the holocaust’s murderous might.

  The shock wave of that blast sent earthquakes coursing through the continent, gouging new faults in the substrata of Castellax. Air currents shifted wildly, sending storms raging across the planet as its desiccated atmosphere tried to adjust to the sudden vacuum from the hole that had burned clear to its stratosphere. A wall of dust and sand three kilometres high spilled across the desert, smothering entire outposts lying in their path.

  The gunship pitched and rolled, its crew fighting wildly to maintain control. Rhodaan forced his way into the cockpit, brushing the men aside. The Space Marine forced the gunship higher, trying to rise above the cataclysm.

  Even for Iron Warriors, there was a feeling of awe at the incredible power that they had witnessed. Captain Gamgin had sought to redeem the legacy of his service, to make his name a thing of honour in the sagas of the Legion. Rhodaan didn’t know if Gamgin would be remembered by the Legion, but as he gazed down at the
glass-lined scar gouged into the desert, he was certain of one thing.

  Castellax would forever bear the mark of Gamgin’s passing.

  One surface-to-orbit missile had caused such carnage. Unable to employ the weapons against the ork ships circling Castellax due to the debris field, Sergeant Ipos had proposed a different use for the ordnance. Detaching the mammoth warheads from the missiles, thousands of slaves had buried them across the desert in a ring of annihilation that no force could defy. Seeking to redeem himself for failing to hold the Witch Wall, Captain Gamgin had offered to goad an entire ork army within range of the trap, turning a defensive position into a weapon of offence.

  The gambit had been a vicious success. Drawing the orks after him, a transmitter inside his own armour sending the detonation signal to the bomb, Gamgin had claimed over a million aliens in his final moment. Even the xenos had been taken aback by such devastation. For three weeks, they were silent, keeping to their scattered strongholds, regathering their strength.

  When the orks did start to move again, however, it became clear that their objective was now Vorago itself. The annihilation of an entire army group had done something to the aliens, given them a focus and drive that had been absent before. No longer did they range pell-mell across the wastes, assaulting every outpost and settlement in their way. It was as though some fiendish hand had reached out and brought the beasts to heel. In the councils of the Warsmith, discussion began to turn to the supreme warboss, the focus of the Waaagh! itself.

  Biglug. It was a name that had become increasingly prominent in the ork vox signals blanketing the planet, a name that had been echoed in the feral war cries of the invader. Oriax interpreted it as evidence that the warlord was taking a more direct hand in the campaign.

  The ork advance on Vorago, for instance, displayed a care and caution no one had expected from the aliens. Their solution to the threat of more buried warheads had been at once brilliant and simple. Rather than scour the desert trying to detect the hidden traps, the orks focused their attention on the one spot where they could be certain the ground was clear. A vast alien horde descended on the gaping pit where Gamgin had sprung his trap. With amazing industry, the orks began to construct a bridge across the crater, concentrating such an immense number of flakwagons and crude fighter planes at the site that Morax’s Air Cohort was incapable of attacking the construction.

  Once the orks were across the pit, they would be within the ring of warheads Ipos had buried. By deploying the traps in a manner that would maximise their breadth, the Iron Warriors had thought to construct a wall of death far beyond the environs of their stronghold. It was a tactic that would have stalled Imperial ground forces for months. They had expected the orks to be similarly delayed. The very simplicity of the alien mindset was again proving a foil to their plans.

  As it stood, they could expect the orks to reach the outer defences of Vorago within one month.

  Already pushed to their limits, the millions of slaves toiling beneath the lashes of the Iron Warriors would have to increase their productivity.

  There was no choice if Castellax were to withstand the siege.

  A green haze drifted through the skies of Vorago, crawling around the smoke stacks and spoil heaps as though possessed of some loathsome life of its own. There had been many strange colours and clouds in the skies since the detonation of the orbital warhead. The explosion had thrown clouds of dust and debris into the atmosphere, elements ripped from deep within the planet’s strata. Some of the displays had been amazingly beautiful, illuminating the sky with hues of surpassing wonder and vibrancy. Others had been dark smudges, aerial blots that made the normal shades of smog and pollution seem clean and cheerful.

  As he stared up at the green haze, Yuxiang was struck by its ghastly gyrations. He could almost feel the thing dripping its poison into the streets, corroding the metal siding of hab-pens and the brickwork of storehouses. What it was doing to mere flesh, that was something he tried very hard not to think about.

  ‘Next.’ The word was pronounced like a death sentence, which in a very real way it was. Yuxiang turned his gaze from the ghastly sky to the even more hideous vista of Vorago proper, or at least that section of the city he could see from his place atop the firebreak.

  Firebreak. A typically deceptive turn of phrase. Yuxiang doubted if the megalithic ferrocrete wall had ever been intended to confine industrial fires to a single section of the city. No, from the very start the Iron Warriors had engineered their cities with an eye towards battle. Each street was a nest of hidden pillboxes and bunkers, fortified blockhouses and flak towers loomed above each district. The firebreaks were arranged in strategic patterns, positioned to support the other fortifications. Staggered along their faces were gun emplacements and missile batteries.

  As final proof of their purpose, the surface of each firebreak was scored with two-metre-deep holes. One wall in each of these pits looked out over the city, a narrow slit cut into the ferrocrete. There was just enough room in the pit for a man to be posted with some measure of accommodation and comfort.

  Naturally, the Iron Warriors expected two men to a pit.

  The long line of slaves gradually dwindled as men were detached and lowered into the pits. Overseers from bombed out factories and janissaries from disbanded regiments supervised the positioning of men and the distribution of equipment. The slaves who had been pressed into the Vorago militia were similarly dispossessed, men from conquered outposts, destroyed settlements or, like Yuxiang, from decimated districts within the city itself.

  ‘Next,’ the tired growl came. The man ahead of Yuxiang shuffled forwards, raising his arms as a uniformed janissary inspected him, checking for any sharp objects that might allow the slave to cause mischief. When he was satisfied, the soldier nodded to the officer in charge. He was a dark-skinned colonel, his hair beginning to turn grey, his eyes lifeless and doll-like, utterly devoid of compassion or empathy.

  At a gesture from the colonel, the slave was directed into the pit. When the man didn’t move fast enough, a burly overseer stepped forwards and jabbed the glowing end of a shock baton into his ribs. With a yelp of pain, the slave dropped down into the hole.

  ‘Next,’ the colonel snarled. Yuxiang stepped forwards again, submitting himself to the humiliating inspection. Then it was his turn to march to the pit. Tired as he was, he forced himself to move quickly and deny the thug with the shock baton his sadistic pleasure.

  Dropping down into the pit was made harder for Yuxiang by his efforts to avoid the slave already down there. Somehow, he managed to prevent himself hitting anything more important than a toe. The other man was too exhausted even to curse at him.

  ‘Chains,’ the colonel’s growl echoed down from the mouth of the pit. Yuxiang and his companion glanced at the wall, finding the thick loops of chain bolted into the ferrocrete. Reluctantly, they brought the iron links into contact with the manacle locked around their left wrist. As the chain made contact, an automated clasp clicked open and closed about the striated edge of the manacle. The slaves raised their arms, tugging at the chain to show the colonel that the manacles had been secured.

  ‘Weapon,’ the colonel called out, turning away from the pit. A janissary appeared at the opening and lowered a weathered lasgun down to the slaves. One weapon to a pit, that was also the Iron Warriors’ decree. The expectation was that when the armed man died, the unarmed man would take up his weapon. With barely enough room in the pit to aim one gun, anything more would be excessive.

  Yuxiang took the lasgun, noting how light it felt in his hands. The slaves who had been dragooned into the militia had received an entire twenty minutes of training. In that time, Yuxiang had been allowed to handle a lasgun twice. It took him only a moment to appreciate the reason the weapon was so light. There was no power pack. The slight detail of ammunition was something the Iron Warriors would delay until the last possible moment.

  When the orks were within firing range of the wall, then would be t
he time to distribute ammunition.

  Any sooner and the slaves might take it in their minds to shoot at someone else.

  Rounding his crystalline throne, Warsmith Andraaz gestured with the talons of his power claw, using the razored fingers to emphasise his statements.

  ‘The loss of Captain Gamgin has not bought us the time we had anticipated,’ Andraaz said, accusation in his tone. Several eyes turned towards Sergeant Ipos, one of the Rending Guard even shifted his position slightly to face him, but the Iron Bastion’s seneschal seemed oblivious to the unspoken recriminations.

  The massive table at the centre of the war room came alive with a three-dimensional image of Vorago and its environs. While the assembled Iron Warriors watched, the glowing lines representing railways and roads began to darken and wink out. ‘According to Fabricator Oriax’s predictions, we can expect all ground transport to be cut off within two months,’ Andraaz stated. His gaze shifted to Skylord Morax. ‘Less if the xenos gain air supremacy.’

  Morax was quick to reassure the Warsmith. ‘The Air Cohort will be able to resupply Vorago as long as we can assemble resources at the northern outposts. If the humans cannot maintain those positions, then I make no guarantees.’

  ‘It sounds like you are already excusing failure,’ Admiral Nostraz hissed. ‘I think the Air Cohort would benefit from new leadership.’

  Morax fixed his rival with a menacing glare. ‘You would do better? The man who allowed the orks to make planetfall? I think Gamgin lacked perspective. There are some who have done far more to disgrace the Third Grand Company.’