Klas Brauner said, ‘Then we’re fortunate to have seen this day.’
Styer told them what would happen. They showed no fear. By the end, they looked almost eager. As he left them to rejoin the squad, he experienced a moment of pity. It puzzled him. The colonists of Squire’s Rest were going to a warrior’s death in the service of the Emperor. There was nothing to be pitied about that.
He realised that he was listening to his own doubts. The mortals’ fate had been sealed the moment the first orks had made planetfall. Whether Gared found anything in the tomb or not would change nothing except the particular circumstances of their deaths. But if the prognostication was in error, then this battle was pointless. It was Styer’s anger at the possibility of futility that was making him pity the mortals.
He squashed the emotion. He walked downhill to prepare for Gared’s news, and for the arrival of the full strength of the orks.
Gared examined the sarcophagus. He confirmed his earlier impression: Orbiana had not opened it. He did not believe in unnecessary profanation, but the choices were running out. Before he took that step, he looked at the relics one more time. In the north of the chamber’s perimeter, in a direct line with the head of the sarcophagus, one of the trophies was an iron crown. The work was orkish. The object was massive, crude, a vulgar exaltation of violence. It was itself a collection of trophies, adorned with objects captured from the worlds conquered by the warlord who had worn the crown. Some of the objects were valuable, others were mundane. There were even some fingers – human, tau and eldar – embedded in the leaves of the crown, cast in iron. Gared surmised they had been torn from the hands of defeated commanders. The dust on the shelf where the crown rested had been disturbed. Gared picked up the trophy. He turned it around. On one of the leaves that had been facing the wall, there was a circular depression, about the size of a purity seal. Something had been removed.
Orbiana’s prize, Gared thought. He had an idea of its shape and dimensions now, but not its nature. Still, an object prized from a relic of clear xenos origin was well within the purview of the inquisitor’s ordo. There was no connection that he could see to the prognostication.
He returned to the sarcophagus. He raised the lid. When the seal broke, there was an exhalation of air, a funereal gasp. There was no coffin within. The skeleton of Major-General Luter Mehnert did not lie as if it had been arranged by the mourners. Instead of stretched out with its arms folded in the sign of the aquila, it was curled in a ball. Its spine was bent into a circle. Bent backwards. The back of the skull touched the heels. The arms were splayed, the fingers touching the sides of the sarcophagus as if the corpse had been clawing at the stone.
Had Mehnert been interred alive? That seemed unlikely. But so did a post-mortem twisting of the body into this agonised position.
He looked closely at the inner marble walls. There were no scratches.
The distortion of the body went beyond its position. Every joint, down to the individual knuckles, bent the wrong way. The bones themselves were twisted. The malformation was most visible in the femurs and other long bones, but Gared could see that even the skull had been reshaped.
There was a ring on the third finger of the right hand. Gared picked up the metacarpal. The jewel was oval. It appeared to be onyx. It was carved with minute hexagrammic sigils. Either its band had constricted, or the bone had swollen, because the ring was fusing with the finger. When Gared tried to separate them, ring and bone shattered, dust and glass.
There was another exhalation. This time it was not air that stirred, but reality. Until this moment, the mausoleum had been free of taint. When the ring disintegrated, the attack began. Beneath the sarcophagus, something was stabbing upward. It was a synaesthetic putrefaction. Touch and sight and hearing and smell and taste all began to rot. The thing was near, it was eager, and it was hungry.
‘Brother-justicar,’ Gared voxed. ‘The incursion is here.’
‘Do you require assistance?’
‘Not yet.’ The assault was debased, but its strength was limited. ‘I think I can contain it,’ he said. ‘But I will need a bit more time.’
‘Understood. Fight well, brother.’
The sense that the threat had a spatial location directly below the sarcophagus was powerful. Gared fired his storm bolter at the bottom of the tomb. Marble shattered into powder. The shells punched through the floor of the mausoleum and into a void. The hunger was an emptiness, a nothing that swirled with the desire to be, and the venomous potential to drag the real into the maw of the inchoate. Gared looked into the ravenous void, and it shot up for him. It was a narrow vortex, a warp tendril in the shape of a funnel.
It surrounded him.
In the gathering dusk, the Harrower pounded the ridge, savaging the orks with cannon and rocket. It reaped casualties by the hundreds. The greenskins were packed shoulder to shoulder as they raced up the slope. Every blow that Warheit struck killed scores of them. But their numbers were so great, it would have taken a tectonic upheaval, a lava flow covering the entire slope, to stop them. Styer doubted that Warheit had even managed to slow the charge much. He had simply ensured that the numbers that descended on the cemetery were a little thinner.
Behind the infantry came more tanks. The gunship’s attacks shifted to the vehicles, and the ork foot soldiers rushed past. The Harrower couldn’t take out all the Battlewagons, nor could it kill all the clumsy, mad walkers, blasphemous imitations of Dreadnoughts, that had also joined the fray.
The orks hit the cemetery as a roaring wave. The wall fell before them, blasted apart by the guns of the walkers and Battlewagons. The tide flowed down the dip, then up the slope as it rose again. The only opposition was the weak fire from the humans at the mausoleum.
Styer waited until the cemetery was full of the enemy. He waited until the forward elements of the orks had engaged with the settlers and the more fanged resistance of Orbiana’s force. He let the orks believe this was the fight they had heard about and that had called them to this planet. He did not give them time to be disappointed. And when the attention of the horde was focussed on the knot of resistance in the upper reaches of the graveyard, he struck.
Styer had split the squad into two trios. They hit simultaneously, charging out from behind vaults close to the north and south walls. Six Adeptus Astartes counterattacked against the orks’ thousands. The number was small. For any other force, the idea that six warriors could mount a pincer attack would have been ludicrous. But they were six Grey Knights. And so when they hit the orks’ flanks, the blow was meaningful. It plunged deep. It drew blood.
The orks did not react with fear, but they were startled, and Styer took some satisfaction in seeing the fanged jaws gape in surprise. Isn’t this what you wanted? he thought. Weren’t you hoping for a fight? Here it is. He ran forward, crushing limbs with the mass and speed of his armour, and swung his daemon hammer in a wide arc before him, simultaneously firing his storm bolter. He was a wave of death cutting across the wave of the orks, a wave whose power was amplified by the actions of his brothers behind him, and by Vohnum leading the attack from the other side.
Vohnum was right. The orks were an enemy that was beneath the sacred calling of the Grey Knights. Yet he felt in no way diminished by this battle. He took pride in the death of this foe. For their crimes against the Imperium and the supremacy of man, the greenskins deserved extermination, and he was pleased to carry out the judgement.
His hammer coruscated with its rage. He was coated in xenos blood within seconds. Skulls erupted before him. And the orks reacted in disorder.
The forward ranks became aware of the conflict behind them. Some of them continued to advance into the fire of the settlers. Others turned back to answer the new threat. Downward of the pincer movement, the orks roared with anger and rushed forward to counterattack. They reduced their own freedom of movement by crowding in too close.
They sought their battle. They found it. And their bloodlust stopped their advance. The graveyard became a cauldron of violence.
Gared had his minutes. Styer hoped he would use them well.
The Tyndaris’s broadside lit up the lower hull of the kroozer. Flames billowed out of the bays. Furia saw the great ship shudder as the Scouring Light passed beneath it. For such a movement to occur, as deep and powerful as an earthquake, the damage must have been catastrophic. The fires continued to grow after the initial barrage. The ship’s nose rose. It pulled up from Squire’s Rest. There were no further drop-ship launches. She doubted whether cutting off the ork reinforcements would make a difference at this point to the Imperial forces below, but first blood had been drawn in the void war, and the kroozer’s wound was not closing.
The ork monster picked up momentum. It was heading for the Tyndaris. Furia watched the images on the pict screens looking aft. The strike cruiser was manoeuvring too. Two giants engaged in a glacial game, a slow race for the position from which to deliver the killing blow.
‘Are they going to ram?’ Montgelas wondered.
‘Perhaps,’ Furia said softly. The kroozer’s speed was increasing markedly. Its engines were firing with reckless fury. Its attack was a brutal charge, a madness. The Tyndaris was accelerating too as it sought to evade, but Furia wasn’t sure if it would be fast enough. She almost voxed Saalfrank to urge him to greater speed. She held herself back. He was well aware of the threat.
The strike cruiser unleashed another volley. Cannons and torpedoes hit the nose of the kroozer. The ork ship drove through the sear of the explosions, the excess of shielding on its bow absorbing the damage. It returned fire now. Its forward cannons opened up. They hurled a storm of metal at the Tyndaris. The ordnance was not shaped shells. It was scrap metal, hundreds of tonnes in mass, hurled at such speed that it did not need to be any kind of explosive to kill its target. There was no accuracy to the bombardment. There was overwhelming quantity instead. At long range, the wild abandon of the kroozer’s fire was far less of a threat. At close range, it mauled.
The pict technician adjusted the magnification without being asked. Furia saw impact craters pepper its port flank. There were flashes too, bright enough to turn the displays to snow for several seconds. The orks were using plasma bombs. Some of them detonated in the void between the ships. Furia spotted at least two blooms on the kroozer itself, the guns immolating themselves as the bombs detonated at launch. But others reached the Tyndaris. One was too many. The hits were devastating. Gasses vented along the vessel’s hull. Her corridors, Furia knew, would be burning, while others would be dead, exposed to the void.
But the engines burned still. The Tyndaris continued to pull away from the kroozer’s path. She struck again. This time, the immense cannon shells hit in the junction between the upper and lower jaw shapes of the kroozer. The shields were not as thick there. The monster shuddered again. Furia saw an angry glow begin in its forward third. It spread, as if a furnace had ignited in the belly of the ship. The Tyndaris’s torpedoes hit in the same vicinity. The glow brightened. More flames gouted from the kroozer, some bursting out far from the impact points.
The bleeding was internal now.
The kroozer’s wounds were mortal. Furia was sure of it. And it had committed to its charge against the Tyndaris. ‘Fire at will, shipmaster,’ she said to Montgelas. ‘Target the enemy’s engines.’
The sloop’s plasma batteries and laser cannons were trivial beside the armament of the kroozer and the Tyndaris. Furia hoped they would tip the balance. She hoped they would cause just that much more damage than the ork ship could manage, or at least slow it down enough for the Tyndaris to clear its path.
She was rewarded by an ugly, void-tearing flash in the upper reaches of the kroozer’s aft. The glow of its exhaust dimmed. Its acceleration slowed. Even with the holocaust that must be consuming its interior, the kroozer continued to fire. Furia pictured a crew so consumed by the frenzy of war that it had no thought for self-preservation. There was something to envy in that single-minded hunger for the enemy’s blood. The catapulted masses of wreckage slammed into the Tyndaris. The flashes of the void shields built on each other, and the strikes overwhelmed them with numbers. The stern was hit, and hit again, and again. Furia winced when she saw an explosion in the superstructure, very near the bridge. Saalfrank’s stream of reports stuttered, but he did not break vox-contact. He kept updating Furia between barked orders to his crew, as if the calm with which he addressed the inquisitor was his own means to preserving a cool head.
‘You need to go faster, shipmaster,’ Furia said. She told him what he already knew as if by her will alone he might coax a bit more speed out of the battered ship.
‘True,’ Saalfrank said.
His voice was calm, fatalistic, and Furia knew that he had already ordered the impossible.
The Tyndaris shuddered too. Along her length were huge gouges. Furia could see entire sectors burning. The casualties must have been in the thousands. But the batteries kept firing, and the ship kept moving, pulling away from the angle of the kroozer’s approach.
Furia allowed herself the rare luxury of hope.
Then the wounded predator sensed its target escaping. The kroozer altered its course. Though the movement was barely perceptible in a vessel so vast, it was faster than should have been possible, and Furia saw it. The shift of a few degrees was all it took to make a mockery of her hope.
The distance between the leviathans shrank. The inevitable loomed. The exchange of bombardments lit the void with an ecstasy of fire. The flank of the Tyndaris and the bow of the kroozer flashed with the rage of wounds given and received. Huge fissures, intimations of a volcanic eruption, opened up the length of the kroozer’s hull. Furia had to fight to banish the impression that she heard the roar of a beast as the dying ship made its final run. But of course there was no sound.
Neither was there sound when the kroozer’s battering ram bow slammed into the stern of the Tyndaris.
CHAPTER FIVE
SCORCHED EARTH
The two units of Grey Knights met in the centre of the cemetery. For a moment, the ork force was cut in half. Then the horde fused into one again. It continued to expand. Styer had slowed its advance, but he knew that the orks would still close in on the mausoleum by dint of growing numbers if nothing else. They would gain ground even if they weren’t conscious of doing so.
His squad formed a tight circle and lashed out, Nemesis weapons and storm bolters tearing the near ranks of the orks apart.
‘Move downslope,’ Styer ordered. He smashed the head of his daemon hammer through a greenskin’s helmet and its skull. He didn’t even feel the resistance of metal and bone. ‘We’ll draw them away from the mausoleum for as long as we can.’
He was facing west, towards the dip, as he spoke. The squad’s position was level with the crest of the shoulder. Warheit was still pounding the heavy armour. A Battlewagon tried to get past his barrage by speed alone. It failed. Warheit punished its presumption with heavy bolter shells. It exploded, still moving fast, as it passed the crest. The blast was huge, all its fuel and ordnance going off at once. It flipped end over end, a rolling fireball that flattened and burned everything in its path before it halted at the shattered cemetery wall. Flaming promethium spread out from the wreckage, incinerating ork foot soldiers.
But the orks kept coming. The more the Grey Knights sent to their deaths, the more rushed forward, drawn by the intoxication of war. And the battle grew fiercer. The common infantry were beneath Styer’s notice. The Aegis armour ignored their weapons. His blows passed through their bodies like air. But the larger orks had stronger weapons, and their armour stood up to far more punishment. Everything the orks threw at his squad was crude. It was almost insulting to be faced with such grotesque distortions of the craft of war. But there was brute power here too. It would be a mistake for him to under
estimate the orks.
He would smash them all the same, for Gared needed to complete his task.
A monster came at him. It was a full head taller than he was, and its shoulders were broader than his armour. Its own armour was driven by pistons, and belched black smoke. It swung a power fist at him with surprising speed. Styer parried the worst of the blow with his hammer. It still knocked him down hard enough to crater the ground. The ork reared over him and raised its fist high. He fired the storm bolter at the fist. The shells blasted the weapon backwards, too far. The ork’s armour accommodated the motion, but the beast’s arm did not. Its shoulder dislocated and the limb dropped. The sudden dead weight hauled the ork off balance and it stumbled to Styer’s left.
He rose to his feet, propelling himself upward with the hammer. He turned the momentum into a step forward, grounding himself and bringing the hammer around with the force of all his mass behind it. The head flashed with psychic anger, as if the weapon itself were outraged by the existence of the ork. Styer hit the greenskin’s chest plate. The metal shattered into jagged shards that drove deep into the brute’s torso. The ork stumbled backwards, its entire midsection distorted from the blow, internal organs crushed, broken ribs poking through flesh, blood cascading down its legs. The fire in its eyes dimmed as it fell, dead, but the rage lingered on its features.
‘Deff Dreads,’ Borsam said as Styer moved back into formation. He used the term that had entered the Gothic tongue to designate the particular obscenity of these ork creations. It was a name of contempt. It would have been an act of sacrilege to refer to them as Dreadnoughts. They were grotesque deformations of those sacred warriors. But they could not be dismissed.
They were coming down the shoulder. Warheit had killed two, but he was engaged with another Battlewagon. There were too many of them for the gunship to stop. Five of them were coming, rocking side to side with every step, mechanical arms stretching forward with shears and saw. Three that had guns on either side of their cylindrical bodies were already firing, cutting down the orks before them, digging a furrow through flesh to reach the Grey Knights. The two in the centre had some sort of energy blaster on one side, a rocket launcher on the other. They were monsters of greenskin war, and they were lethal.
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