He had to get to that engine control room while there was still time.
CHAPTER XI
The Korpsmen were wheeling siege towers across no-man’s-land: tall, teetering wire-frame and canvas constructs, six of them in all. The Indestructible’s energy weapon stabbed out at one of them and reduced it to smouldering ashes.
The towers didn’t look as if they provided much protection. Most of the Death Korpsmen didn’t wait for them to arrive, anyway. The order had come for them to scale the star fort’s ramparts, so scale them they did.
Mouldings and gun emplacements provided plentiful handholds, and some Korpsmen were equipped with crampons and grappling hooks, so the climb itself was easy – but for the green-skinned creatures waiting at the end of it. Kenjari could see their brutish faces, peering through crenels above him; then the faces were replaced by guns and rocket launchers, firing downward.
He could almost have admired the men of Krieg, the way they never flinched nor wavered, just swarmed up those walls as many around them were riddled with bolts and bullets and sent hurtling back to the ground. He could almost have admired them – had he not been expected to follow them.
Kenjari shrugged his rucksack from his shoulders, sifting through it for climbing tools with shaking hands. He found a small hand axe, which would do. As he straightened up, he realised that his sergeant had seen him vacillating and was elbowing his way towards him – through a scrum of waiting Death Korpsmen – with his bayonet poised to deliver his customary encouragement.
Then, a series of warning cries rang out: ‘Look out below!’
Two orks had tipped a vat of something over the side. Some of the Korpsmen managed to leap for cover, but those higher on the walls were drenched in a viscous, silver tidal wave that sizzled through their flak armour. Several of them, these normally taciturn warriors, screamed. Kenjari gasped as a maimed body smacked into the ground at his feet, writhing in agony. His sergeant judged that the casualty couldn’t be saved and put him out of his misery with a gunshot.
He heard the voice of an officer over his comm-bead: ‘Keep climbing. Climb! Climb! The Emperor expects.’
He realised that the guns of both sides had fallen silent; it could only just have happened, because his ears were still ringing from their barks. Blue-armoured figures marched out of the battlefield smoke, and Kenjari was filled with awe at the very sight of them. The Angels of Death didn’t mount the ramparts themselves, but they aimed their bolt and flamer weapons up at the defenders and several brutish faces quickly disappeared from sight.
The remaining siege towers crashed into the side of the star fort, and the nearest Korpsmen poured into them at ground level, to emerge a minute later onto platforms at their tops. Kenjari tried to make it to a tower – it seemed like the safest option for him, relatively speaking – but too many others were in his way. He found himself pushed up against the Indestructible’s ramparts and, though he had thankfully been separated from his sergeant, he could feel a hundred other blank eyes upon him and he knew what he had to do. He had to climb.
It was like the trek across no-man’s-land again, just in a different plain. He was following pairs of booted feet above him, spurred on by the blank-faced men at his own heels when his every muscle only longed to surrender, fearing that he ought to pray for a speedy death because it might be the kindest fate on offer. Time after time, shots rang out above him – despite the efforts of the Space Marines below – and a nearby Korpsman lost his grip on his hand- and footholds and tumbled past him, no longer a human being but merely a sack of flesh and bones and blood.
A body glanced off him and almost took Kenjari down with it. His right hand lost its grip on the wall and that side of his body swung away from it. He hadn’t climbed as high as he had imagined; he could have survived a fall, but he would likely have been injured and his sergeant might have euthanised him too. To his relief, the Korpsman at his ankles caught his slipping right foot and boosted him back into position with a growl: ‘The Emperor expects.’
He felt light-headed, sweaty and sick, and just wanted to cling to something solid for a moment, but the masked man beneath him was still pushing and he had to climb again. He saw a gun emplacement within reach – no threat because the barrel of its cannon had been shattered – and gratefully utilised the broad, firm ledge it offered. As he pushed off from it, with a little more confidence, a green hand was thrust through the gap above the cannon and grabbed him by the knee.
Kenjari squealed in terror. It was the first time he had ever touched a xenos, and a tiny, irrational part of his brain insisted that he was contaminated now.
When the orks had attacked at the star fort’s base, the men of Krieg had saved him, though that hadn’t been their objective. They had saved him by getting between Kenjari and the xenos and by fighting them relentlessly, many of them to the death. Three squads of experienced Guardsmen – grenadiers – had charged the orks with bayonets and, though they hadn’t been able to match their strength, they had kept them busy while their comrades had sniped at them from the sidelines.
Kenjari had loosed off several shots himself, firing blindly in panic, and he knew that his efforts had amounted to precisely nothing.
No one else could save him this time. His lasgun was slung across his back again, but his hand axe was clamped between his teeth in case of need. He clung to the wall with his left hand, snatched the weapon with his right and struck down with it. He wasn’t thinking clearly enough to aim, and his blows made criss-cross patterns of cuts across the ork’s flesh instead of slicing through its muscles.
The Emperor was with him, however, and it proved to be enough. The ork’s fingers spasmed and let him go; his axe head must have struck a nerve. He dragged himself away from there as quickly as he could, his weariness forgotten.
To his right and above him, a siege tower had extruded a gangplank over the star fort’s battlements. Death Korpsmen were teeming across it, though it was only wide enough to accommodate two of them abreast.
He couldn’t see, but could imagine, the reception with which they were greeted. He could see the results of it too, as more bodies came hurtling over the parapet. Death Korpsmen were backed all the way along the gangplank, jostling to get forwards. Perhaps Kenjari was better off where he was, after all. Rather here, he thought, than queuing up the steps of one of those fragile towers, waiting for his turn to confront the monsters above…
He was nearing the top of the ramparts. Other Korpsmen had made it ahead of him; most had detached their bayonets and were wielding them like knives, knowing that the orks would quickly close upon them. Perhaps, Kenjari thought, by the time he was able to join them, the combatants on both sides would be occupied and he wouldn’t be noticed. Perhaps he could slip past them and find a nook somewhere inside the star fort to hide until the fighting was over.
The structure was shaking.
Kenjari hadn’t noticed it at first, with all the sound and motion around him. The vibrations, however, were growing fiercer, and suddenly the air was charged with electrical energy and he could see sparks of it, purple and green, flaring around him. The sparks seemed to be building inside the walls themselves, until they were too powerful to be contained. For a moment, the energy wreathed him, making his nerves tingle and his hair stand on end beneath his helmet, but fortunately doing no worse.
A new sound, far louder than the others, rose from the bowels of the earth: a groaning of tortured machine-spirits.
Kenjari had seen this happening before, but from a distance, standing up on his toes to sneak a glance out of a Krieg trench where no officers could see him. He had heard it suggested that the orks were building and testing a powerful weapon inside the Indestructible. Were they about to test their weapon on him?
The Space Marines were finally climbing the walls beneath him. They were climbing faster than any Korpsman could; in some cases climbing right over them.
The Korpsmen’s handholds weren’t strong enough to support them, so they were punching new ones through the star fort’s adamantium skin into the metal beneath.
One of them – a blue tank with two legs and a single arm – had been lifted by a gunship right onto the top of the battlements, landing with a thud, squashing countless ork defenders. He managed to swing out of the juggernaut’s way, into a space left on the wall beside him by a Korpsman who had taken a stray bullet to the head.
‘Follow the Space Marines,’ the ever-present voice in Kenjari’s ear buzzed. ‘They are the Emperor’s angels, and it is they who will bring justice to His enemies.’
The star fort was shaking more violently than ever and, suddenly, glancing down as he clung to its mouldings for dear life, Kenjari saw the reason why. The star fort – the castle from the sky – was straining to lift itself off the ground, to return to the heavens from which it had so unceremoniously fallen.
It wasn’t going to make it. It wasn’t just the gravity of the Agides moon that was holding onto it. The star fort’s lower levels were entangled – inextricably so? – with the moon’s mine workings and its subterranean tunnels. It had failed to pull itself free of them before, he suddenly realised.
This time, however, was different. This time, the machine-spirits weren’t about to give up their struggle. Their groans had steadily increased in pitch and volume until they became full-blooded howls of defiance. The emissions from the star fort’s walls were combining to form a bubble around its massive structure, a flickering, flaring energy shield; there were still a few gaps in it, but they were closing up fast.
The Indestructible seemed to scream as it wrenched itself free from the grip of the hard, black earth and began to ascend.
It was, for Kenjari, just the latest in a succession of overwhelming terrors; one more than he could bear. He saw some Korpsmen shaken from the ramparts, plummeting towards the ground, and he felt a powerful stab of envy towards them. It occurred to him that he could plausibly fall too. He might break a few bones, or he might find a soft landing on the bodies that were piling up underneath him.
Either way, the xenos would fly their castle away from him, and take the Death Korps of Krieg and the bright blue Space Marines with them. They could carry on their bloody war without him, among the stars. Kenjari would live.
There was no time to think about it, to second-guess himself. The surface of the moon was already beginning to recede beneath his feet, and in a second it would be too late, he would be trapped. He had one chance to save himself, and that chance was now.
Kenjari jumped for his life.
CHAPTER XII
The Indestructible was in motion.
Sicarius was hurrying along a curving passageway, fighting to stay upright as the floor bucked like a panicked mount. The walls were getting the worst of it, his pauldrons leaving indentations in the stone and shattering lumoglobes.
Back above ground, he had been able to vox Sergeant Lucien. His second-in-command had been proud to report his progress. He had led their Chapter over the star fort’s ramparts and they were fighting its occupiers hand-to-hand. It was more than Sicarius had expected.
So far, as his command squad had journeyed to the star fort’s heart, they had met little resistance. A few gretchin had crossed their paths – inadvertently, he suspected – but not for long. Now he knew what was keeping most of the orks busy. Lucien had not seen the big mek himself, however.
Sicarius knew where Khargask would be; and he knew that, no matter the situation outside, he would not be alone.
‘These xenos are not so tough,’ a welcome voice boomed over an open vox-channel, ‘when they have no cannons to hide behind.’ Evidently, Brother Ultracius had made it to the Ramilies too.
Sicarius opened a private channel to him. ‘What’s the situation out there?’ he asked. ‘How high up from the ground are we?’
‘I can’t tell from here, Knight of Talassar,’ replied Ultracius. ‘Much higher, though, and these Guardsmen without faces won’t be able to breathe.’
‘The Krieg Korpsmen are…?’ He stifled the question. He was already mentally putting the pieces together, beginning to see what must have transpired in his absence. He didn’t much care for the image that was forming. He had to find that control room; apart from any other reason now, for the sake of hundreds of Imperial soldiers – at least, he hoped there were still so many – about to die by asphyxiation.
‘Never thought I would say this,’ said Ultracius, ‘about anyone, but these Krieg men are too fearless for their own good.’ He had, in fact, said the same thing more than once about Captain Sicarius himself, if only he could have remembered it.
A blocked shaft had forced them to take a detour. Sicarius led his battle-brothers up a flight of steps, to what the star fort’s schematics called the command level. The engine room was now one floor below them. They followed a covered walkway with armaplas windows along one side, looking out upon the black sky.
The orks came to meet them as they rounded the next corner.
They were in a spacious atrium. Ahead of them, a pair of grand iron doors, inlaid with intricate carvings, stood wide open. Through these, Sicarius could see the Indestructible’s Grand Chamber, once a haven for prayer and reflection.
Its rows of seats had been uprooted, its statues had been bludgeoned to pieces, while a row of five patterned windows, ten metres tall, had been defaced by crude ork glyphs. The whole place stank of ork faeces.
A hole had been gouged out of the floor, twenty metres long and about a quarter as wide. Smoke was billowing up through it, along with a sickly green light. ‘The engine control room!’ Sicarius announced. Now, all they had to do was reach it.
Eight brawny figures stood in their way already, and more were clambering up out of the ragged aperture. They were slobbering at the long-denied prospect of a brawl. The Ultramarines were almost as eager themselves and, for once, Sicarius sent his brothers into the fray ahead of him.
Two lines of ruthless warriors smashed into each other like opposing tidal waves, and the air was filled with the sounds of revving chainswords, bolts and bullets, the pounding of axes and clubs against plasteel and ceramite. Sicarius’s hand twitched on the pommel of his Tempest Blade, but he held himself back.
He had hoped the enemy line might give with that first impact, giving him a gap to slip through. It was no use. He should have known that, this close to their leader and his all-important project, the orks would be more disciplined than ever.
He raised his sword and plunged into the melee.
The next few minutes were a blur of slicing and shooting and punching, of hate-filled faces coming at him with drooling mouths wide open, of foetid ork breath and ultimately ork blood in his nostrils, the stench strong even through his helmet.
For every enemy that fell, it seemed that two more emerged from the hole in the Grand Chamber’s floor to replace it. With no time to strategise, Sicarius placed his trust in his own instincts, enhanced by his armour’s auto-senses.
‘They’re stronger than the orks we faced below,’ Lumic grunted, ‘as strong as any I’ve ever encountered.’ Clearly, Khargask had held back the best of his mob for his own protection. They parried Sicarius’s blows with almost enough force to send the weapon spinning from his hands. Outnumbered, he couldn’t block all of their blows in return. A massive iron-headed hammer smashed into his ribs, and his helmet readouts told him that his armour had sustained hairline fractures.
The star fort’s violent shaking only added to the Ultramarines woes, though it hampered the greenskins equally. The floor suddenly tipped away from Sicarius, throwing two orks in front of him off-balance; he helped the first of them on its way with a booted foot to its stomach. It reeled into the second and they toppled and rolled, hopelessly entangled, each howling indignantly at the other.
Another ork appeared in front of
Sicarius to replace them, but he had expected that and was more than ready for it. For the first time, momentarily, he had only a single opponent, and he took full advantage of that opportunity too. A fusillade of plasma bolts left the greenskin blinded and stunned. A follow-up series of swipes from the captain’s Tempest Blade carved it up neatly.
Not all his battle-brothers were faring as well.
Brother Gallo had stumbled when the floor had tipped, landing in the midst of five enormous greenskins. They were battering him mercilessly, cracking open his armour and driving him into the ground. Brothers Filion and Lumic were doing their best to help him, but that meant turning their backs on other opponents, which left them vulnerable. Sicarius had to make a painful decision.
He voxed his squad: ‘Leave Gallo to fend for himself. We can’t afford to be kept on the defensive. We have to reach that control room.’ One life was unimportant, he told himself, when so many more were at stake.
Next, he voxed Ultracius, out on the ramparts, again. ‘We need you down here,’ he said grimly, knowing that the Dreadnought could lock onto the source of his transmission and find him.
‘On my way,’ came the immediate reply.
From under the floor, Sicarius heard a series of small explosions, and the sound of orks cursing as they spluttered to draw breath. He heard one voice, deeper and more strident than the others, booming angrily as the floor bucked again beneath his feet. What are they doing down there? The background rumble of engines burped and hiccupped, then resumed in a slightly more throaty tone than before.
‘Renius?’
‘It sounds like… they’re actually trying to make a warp jump,’ the Techmarine returned his vox. His voice was strained, as well it might be; he was on the back foot against a pair of axe-wielding brutes. He employed his servo-arm as a weapon, clawing at one ork’s face, gouging blood out of its eyes as he struggled to hold it at bay. ‘If they do, and the energy shield around the Ramilies holds–’
Ultramarines Page 29
