Further away, however, Grimruk could see a different story unfolding. Soldiers were pouring from the higher bunkers, others were racing back from the farther trenches and the fire line they had formed to deal with Gobsnot’s mob. The kommandos controlled their section, but the kaptain knew they could not do so for long.
The ork kaptain gestured with his chainaxe at the bunker and roared. He could see a few of the closest orks acknowledge his order. They stopped attacking the escaping soldiers and took off at a lope for the closest bunker. Other orks, noticing the action of their comrades, gave off their own bloodthirsty pursuit and moved to support the bunker attack. The kaptain gave a satisfied grunt. That was what set his boyz apart from most of the horde. The kommandos understood the need to get a job done even if it meant pulling out of a scrap.
Grimruk snapped his fingers and pointed at the carcass of the soldier he had killed. Wizgrot leaned over the body and tore a ragged strip of cloth from the front of its tunic. The kaptain waited until his orderly stuffed the scrap of cloth into one of the bags the grot carried. Then he lunged at the wall of the trench. The ork’s powerful arms had no trouble pulling his bulk up from the pit. Grimruk snapped a command over his shoulder to Wizgrot and hurried to join the rush on the bunker.
Wizgrot cursed and mumbled under his breath as he struggled to climb out of the trench and follow the lead of his kaptain. The short gretchin didn’t try too hard, though. The possibility that the fighting would be over by the time he reached the bunker limited the enthusiasm of his efforts.
The bunker was a big blockhouse of ferrocrete and plasteel. The humans inside were armed with at least two heavy bolters and had gutted three of Grimruk’s kommandos in the first rush. The reminder that the soldiers had weapons more formidable than the las-guns of the trench defenders had curbed some of the enthusiasm for the attack. By the time Grimruk joined his troops, the orks were sheltered behind several tank-traps, leaning out from their cover to deliver ineffectual potshots at the fortified position.
Grimruk growled at the other orks as he joined them behind their scanty cover. He could hear the ferocity of the fighting down in the trenches. The humans were bringing up reinforcements to contain the incursion into their lines. Some of his kommandos might not appreciate it, but it wouldn’t take too many humans to overwhelm them. Sure, they’d get a good scrap out of it, but the Blood Axe clan was built on the idea that there was more to winning than getting yourself killed in a big fight. If they were going to get what they needed and bring the information back to the warboss, then they had to move and move fast.
Grimruk bellowed at one of the kommandos near him. A huge-shouldered ork wearing a set of thick goggles over his eyes and lugging a giant metal barrel on his back turned and stared suspiciously at the kaptain.
The kaptain barked at the ork, a brute named Skorchslag. He motioned with his fist, ordering the commando to attack the bunker with his flame-spewing burner.
Skorchslag raised one of his singed fingers by way of reply.
Roaring back at him, Grimruk made a string of increasingly violent threats against Skorchslag if he didn’t follow orders. The big ork still looked unimpressed, but when Grimruk drew the pistol from his holster, it seemed to convince Skorchslag he might do worse than follow orders. The kommando hefted his burner, the muzzle of the weapon dripping liquid fire. With a last look around, Skorchslag sprinted towards a tank-trap closer to the bunker. Instantly, both of the heavy bolters inside the bunker began to fire on the ork with the deadly flamethrower.
Grimruk slapped the shoulder of the kommando sheltering beside him, gesturing for him to rush the bunker from the other side while the soldiers were distracted by Skorchslag. The kommando seemed just as reluctant to break from cover. Snarling his annoyance, Grimruk pushed the other ork from cover, waited a moment to see if the soldiers in the bunker noticed him, then followed.
The two orks rushed across the killing zone in front of the bunker, diving against the thick wall of the fortification. They reached the safety of the wall an instant before the bolters tore through the tank lashed across Skorchslag’s back. The kommando vanished in an explosion of liquid fire, transformed into a screaming, staggering torch. Another burst of fire from the bunker put the blazing ork down.
Grimruk ripped a wood-handle stikkbomb from his belt, nodding for the kommando with him to do the same. The two orks smacked the heads of the grenades against the wall of the bunker, then cast the activated explosives through the firing slits for the bolters.
The walls of the bunker failed to restrain the fury of the blast. In a shower of flame and debris, the bunker virtually collapsed in upon itself. The two orks who had attacked the fortification were thrown like rag dolls, smashing into the ground a dozen metres away.
Grimruk painfully lifted himself back onto his feet, one arm hanging limp and broken at his side. The kommando with him had fared even worse, the force of the explosion impaling his body on one of the tank-traps. The kaptain glowered at the mutilated ork, then scowled at the smoking wreckage of the bunker. He’d need to talk to the mekboyz about how much punch they packed into their stikkbombz.
Grimruk shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears. He stared at the ground, looking for the peaked cap that had been blown off by the explosion. He stopped looking when Wizgrot appeared beside him, timidly handing the battered hat to the ork. Grimruk snatched the hat from the gretchin and stomped towards the wrecked bunker. Now that the heavy bolters were quiet, other kommandos were breaking cover to close upon the destroyed objective. Grimruk pushed his way through the press of orks, determined to be the first to see whatever was left.
The bunker was a shambles, twisted supports protruding at crazy angles from shattered blocks of processed stone. Here and there the mangled wreck of a soldier jutted out from the jumbled mess. Grimruk snorted contemptuously as he looked at the walls. The stikkbombz had blasted them to bits, like they were nothing but paper. Maybe he’d suggest the mekboyz keep making the grenades the way they were. Provided of course that they let him know first.
The kaptain scratched at his scar and listened to the sounds of fighting elsewhere. The ground trembled as mortars began to shell the captured stretch of trench. Grimruk grunted in annoyance. It would be the height of satisfaction to climb up there and feed the humans their blasted mortars, but he knew he had bigger squigs to catch. He had to get information for the warboss, let him know how tough this human position was.
Grimruk glanced at the kommandos with him, then nodded at the rubble. The orks shouldered their weapons and began to dig, exhuming the torn bodies of the soldiers. Each time one of the corpses was exposed, the orks tore at the front of their uniforms, ripping apart the cloth. As they collected scraps of uniform, the kommandos cast aside the bodies of their enemies like so much refuse. Soon, even Grimruk was satisfied that they had exposed everything there was to find in the rubble.
Wailing sirens shrieked across the battlefield. In the distance, Grimruk could see some of his kommandos retreating through the wire. Howitzers shelled the ground as the orks fled. Squinting, Grimruk could see the reason for their withdrawal. A pair of big armoured vehicles had lumbered into view, their guns blazing as they mowed down orks. The appearance of tanks made it clear to even the most stubborn of the kommandos that they wouldn’t be able to hold the trench.
Wizgrot pulled at Grimruk’s coat. The orderly’s scrawny arms were filled with the scraps of cloth the kommandos had collected. Grimruk took them from the gretchin and stared at the bloodied strips of uniform. It was a habit of humans to wear the colour of their mob on the collars of their uniforms. Grimruk had learned some time ago that the easiest way to tell how many humans were gathered in one spot was to see how many different glyphs they wore on their collars.
The other kommandos were under strict orders to collect collar tabs from every human they killed. Grimruk should have quite a collection when the survivors of his mission returned to the horde’s encampment. Then the ka
ptain would be able to study them at leisure. The warboss would be pleased to know how strong the human presence was around the mesa, and it was always a good thing to be thick with the warboss.
Grimruk barked the order to withdraw to his troops. They had done what they had set out to do. They had tested the strength of the human positions and they had secured intelligence about how great their numbers were. That was what the warboss had demanded of them.
Lord General Ro Nagashima smiled beneath the mask of his rebreather as he read the reports from the mesa. During the night, ork scouts had tried to infiltrate the lines. The defenders had allowed the aliens to penetrate deep enough to get a full taste of what the position had to offer, to see the fake bunkers and siege guns. They had allowed survivors to escape back through the defences, to take word of what they had seen back to their army.
There was one curious thing in the reports. The orks had torn the collar tabs from the soldiers they had killed. Nagashima was puzzled by this. Was it possible the brutes were trying to recognise which units were stationed on the mesa? Nagashima chuckled at the thought. If the aliens were that clever, then they would fall even more deeply into his trap. Elements from a dozen different regiments had been detached for duty in the custodian force. Should the orks understand the importance of insignia, then the xenos vermin would think there was an entire army group stationed up there!
Nagashima’s PDF troops stood at the ready. If the orks were going to strike the hive-city of Ko, then they would come over the plain. To avoid the seemingly formidable mesa, they would need to move into the hills. Once they did that, the PDF would cut the orks to pieces.
The boom of artillery snapped General Nagashima from his thoughts. A furious barrage thundered from the plain. He turned his head as he heard excited vox-chatter erupt from the communications terminals arrayed about his command centre. Beneath his mask, he turned pale as the importance of the frantic voices shrieking from the vox-casters impressed him.
Orks, tens of thousands of them, an entire army. They had boiled down into the plain in a moving ocean of warbikes and battlewagons, of crudely cobbled-together tanks and lumbering, titanic Stompas. The aliens surged down onto the plain in a tidal wave of destruction. But they did not turn from the mesa. Their ramshackle guns and missile launchers sent barrage after barrage into the mesa, blasting apart the faux-defences erected by Nagashima’s troops, obliterating the illusion of an impregnable bastion.
General Nagashima lifted his eyes, watching as a black pillar of smoke began to crawl into the dust-ridden sky above the mesa. Horror churned in his gut.
It was impossible! Everything had fallen into place! There was no way the orks could have guessed the mesa was a trick! Everything had been done to make the orks believe the mesa was a fortress manned by an army of Izanagi’s PDF. The orks had taken the bait. Reason dictated that they would avoid the mesa, take the shelter of the hills and bypass the fortress as they made their way to the hive-city.
Instead, the orks had advanced directly upon the fortress, despite every appearance that it was here Nagashima had concentrated his forces.
Instead, or because? The sickening thought made Nagashima’s knees turn to jelly. The horrified general sank into a campaign chair, his head sinking against his chest.
The orks were not human. It had been idiocy for him to expect the xenos to act like men. They had bought his deception. They did think the mesa was where he had concentrated his forces. But instead of scaring them off, the imagined strength of the position had drawn them in. The orks, spoiling for a real fight after weeks of ransacking isolated settlements, hadn’t tried to avoid the fortress. They had come straight on, eager to slake their lust for battle.
General Nagashima listened to the panicked voices on the vox-casters. Gradually the chatter died away as the positions were overrun. The officers under Nagashima were already shouting commands to their staff, trying to remobilise their entrenched positions.
It would be too late to save the troops trapped on the mesa. And once the orks finished swatting aside Nagashima’s mock defences there was nothing to stand between them and the billion inhabitants of Ko.
Nothing but the regret and shame of the general who had failed them.
SANCTIFIED
Mark Clapham
It was a view that few would ever see, an uninterrupted line of sight from the interior of an Imperial battlecruiser in space to the surface of a planet, with only the slight shimmer of a protective energy field between the two. The world below filled the vision, the halo of the atmosphere glowing fiercely. Even the most jaded of humans would concede it a rare sight, one deserving of at least a moment’s appreciation.
Kaspel tried to ignore it, and kept his back turned to the gaping hole in the ship’s hull as much as possible. It was not that he suffered from vertigo—it was the presence of the world below that perturbed him.
As a tech-priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus, serving the glory of machines and the Emperor, Kaspel had never known the feel of alien soil beneath his boots, or faced one of the xenos in person. He had been raised on the brotherhood’s home of Mars, and then had performed his sacred duties within the engineering decks of the Imperial Navy’s starships. He had walked corridors of sanctified metal his entire life, and although he was proud to contribute to the fight against the enemies of man, Kaspel had no desire to have direct contact with either the aliens or their worlds.
He had his work. The tear in the hull of the Imperial battlecruiser Divine Sanctity was severe, the result of a damaged necron ship clipping the Sanctity in battle, demolishing part of the engineering deck and crippling one of the ship’s engine units. The battle had raged a day, fire lighting the sky as the battlefleet had rallied to repel the enemy.
Humanity had prevailed, but while the rest of the battlefleet had continued to push back the necron forces, the damage to the engines of the Sanctity had left it stranded in orbit over the now-dead world. While the temporary energy shields maintained the atmosphere and gravity within the exposed sections, Captain Rilk was eager to rejoin the front as soon as possible, and had expressed this desire to Kaspel in no uncertain terms.
Kaspel had found these entreaties unnecessary and vaguely offensive—he was a tech-priest, and would restore all systems to full and blessed order with the correct repairs and rites, as efficiently as possible. What more or less would he do?
With the atmosphere restored, Kaspel and his servitors could work efficiently and swiftly. The most severe damage had been to one of the ship’s engine units, each of which was a hexagonal tube of machinery as tall as a hab block that stretched down the full length of the vast chamber, terminating in a thruster cone at the rear of the ship. A plasteel wall separated the visible end of the engine unit from the thruster itself. The chamber was shaped around the engine unit, with crawl spaces above and below the unit, and an access walkway on either side.
From where Kaspel stood, staring down at the thruster end of the unit, the hull damage gaped to his left, while to his right teams of servitors were methodically repairing the damage to the engine unit. The hull tear stretched above and below, and to access the damaged engine the servitors had to negotiate a rig of temporary scaffolding, a flimsy mesh of wire and tubular girders that often opened out into a direct view of space.
The servitors did not have the sentience to be unnerved by the illusion of an endless drop below them. Kaspel only went on to the scaffolding when his attention was urgently required.
The work was going well today. Servitors could be unreliable, but with the correct monitoring and direct instructions, Kaspel found that their many hands—and other mechanical appendages—made light work of straightforward repairs. Unnerved by the sense of exposure from the tear in the hull, Kaspel was relieved to leave the engine chamber and returned to the darker sections of the engineering decks.
For the next hour, Kaspel roamed the dark corridors and access shafts which weaved around the mechanisms of the great engines, mostl
y on foot but occasionally using his three mechadendrites, mechanical arms connected to his spine, to climb to difficult areas. As he moved, he recorded progress and issued fresh instructions to the technomats, occasionally stopping to administer a necessary rite or prayer.
As he took a shortcut down an airshaft between two levels, his mechadendrites finding purchase where human fingers could not, Kaspel ran some diagnostic incantations, ritually working through the processes of the engine, and the ceremonies that would bring each repaired part back online.
There was something wrong. The work was progressing, but the systems were not responding as they should—whole areas which should have come back online were still dead. Curious.
Kaspel dropped out of the shaft, and landed on the deck, the floorplates clanking under his weight. The corridor he had dropped into was a functional tube plated with thick slabs of plasteel on the walls and floors. The more ornate decorations of the Imperial style were reserved for the other end of the ship, where the officers worked and lived. In the engineering decks, practicality ruled over aesthetics: pipes and cables threaded in and out of the walls, and unmarked doors led to small work areas filled with cogitator terminals and spare components.
Kaspel straightened the thick red robes which covered his utilitarian leather coveralls, and was about to proceed to the next point in his inspection when he noticed an arm extending from a recess further down the corridor. It was a fleshy arm, ending in a basic pincer attachment.
He approached to find one of the servitors slumped in the alcove, head to one side, mouth frothing and eyes wide. It was not uncommon for servitors to fail, to lose mental coherence and to be jettisoned into space, but there was something in the wild expression in those eyes which gave Kaspel pause.
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