‘I am not.’
‘Then–’
‘Not yet. Give me a few minutes, brother-sergeant. Will you do that?’
‘Of course, zadyin arga.’ The respect due to Ghazan’s position permitted no other response.
‘Thank you.’ Ghazan wasn’t sure if Kusala was aware of the friction between himself and the khan. But he wanted the sergeant to know that he did not take his cooperation for granted. ‘This is necessary,’ he added.
Kusala nodded, non-committal. He stayed where he was.
Ghazan left the others and retraced their steps to the chute, and climbed back to the surface. He stood in the centre of the orks’ landscape of waste and turned around slowly. He stopped looking for a logical point of entry. There would be none, not in the normal sense of logical, not with the greenskins. The chambers below were proof of that. How many other semi-discrete workshops would they find if they kept looking? Some might be occupied, some not. Kusala was right that following the disposal line would bring them to an active facility. But if the manufactorum was spread out in bits and pieces, in haphazard fashion, underneath the full expanse of this plain, the White Scars could be searching for days and find nothing of any strategic value. There were great questions here. Not just where the tank-construction facilities were, but how the tanks were arriving at the battlefield. If the vehicles were being built here, how were they leaving? Shouldn’t there be a steady stream of them emerging from the ground at some point?
No, the answers were stranger, and deeper. They had to be. Surely that was why he had been called here. The being he must fight was tied to those answers.
He kept turning, letting the details of the plain blur into an impressionist continuum of debris. He opened himself to the warp, feeling the currents of the possible and the inevitable. He could not read the future, but he could feel its undertow, and he could sense the gathering density of the potential seeking to become the enacted. He reached out to the land. He spoke to its spirit. Its suffering must be great, wounded and abused as it was by the orks. We have come to free you of them, he told it. He sought the worst injury, the nexus of greatest harm.
The answer came in the form of an instinct. He stopped turning. He found that he was staring at a spot about a hundred metres away, further to the north-west. There was no landmark that he could see. He kept his eyes fixed on the location as he began to walk towards it. ‘Sergeant Kusala,’ he voxed. ‘I think I may have found something.’
He became more certain as he drew closer. There was nothing to confirm his instinct. There was only that growing certitude. It was enough. It fed on itself. He realised his lips had pulled back into a grim smile.
He stopped. There was still nothing to see, but this was the spot. He began tossing scrap metal aside as the Scouts joined him. He looked up at Kusala. ‘Right here,’ he said. ‘Our path begins here.’
Kusala was motionless for a moment. ‘Stormseer,’ he said, ‘there is nothing but more waste here.’
‘No. There is something. We have to dig a bit further. That is all.’ The sergeant’s tone had been flat, respectful, but his doubts were growing stronger. Ghazan was sorry for it, but not insulted.
Kusala and his squad helped with the dig. The scrap was deeper here. They kept going down, and had not reached the ground yet. Ghazan realised this was a declivity in the plain, smoothed out by the volume of rubbish. This, he thought, was camouflage. This entrance was too perfectly hidden. Here was more worrying evidence of something greater than cunning on the part of these orks.
The earth shook. There was a single, hard jerk. It almost knocked the White Scars off their feet. More debris slid down the heaps. The air was filled by the sound of thousands of torn sheets of metal scraping against each other. The shockwave was visible, the shadow of a ripple, as it travelled beneath the plain. Then the earth stilled. Metal settled with a rusty chorus.
‘What was that?’ said Tegusal.
‘The reason we are here,’ Ghazan answered. He reached down, grabbed a sheet of metal that looked as if it had been intended as a door, and hurled it away. Beneath it, a hatch, three metres across, was set into the rock of the plain. There was no visible way to open it. But there it was: the true door concealed by a false, discarded one.
Kusala examined the hatch. ‘Only to be used from the inside,’ he said.
Then the vox sprang to life. Their khan was calling. The reprieve was over.
No, Ghazan thought. Even before he heard Temur’s demand, he knew that he would refuse it.
At the head of the Fifth Brotherhood, the engine of his bike snarling its hunger for xenos blood, Temur Khan rode out from the bastion to meet the orks. The White Scars had had ample warning this time. The greenskin foot-soldiers were hours away when the report had come in from Kusala. Temur had the position of the orks, and the time and the distance to savage them utterly.
The entire mounted Brotherhood was part of the attack: the six bike squads and the five Land Speeders. The assault squad was carried by the surviving Thunderhawk, the Khajog’s Stand. What raced towards the orks was nothing as mundane as a mere opposing force. It was war and wind combined. The sudden change on the battlefield, the flash of fortune’s reversal, the decapitating blow of surprise: all of these things were embodied in the charge of the White Scars. The tribes of Chogoris had followed a tradition of combat for millennia. The technology had changed. The philosophy had not. The enemy was shattered not by overwhelming numbers or impregnable armour. It was speed, and the terrifying momentum that came with it, that routed the foe. It was lightning, not thunder, that was lethal.
Even so, the Fifth Brotherhood came with thunder. They eschewed the Land Raiders and Rhinos that were the mainstay of other Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, so the deep growls of the heavy vehicles were absent. But the snarl of Land Speeders and bikes in such numbers was monstrous. The air itself turned feral. The White Scars were a storm flying over the land, and it would flatten everything in its path.
The wind rushed at the green tide. It came to break the waves, to turn them back. It would blow so hard that it would show that a tide could be stopped after all.
Temur Khan did not believe in comforting illusions. He knew, when he saw the ork mob stretching out for kilometres, that he was here to perform a miracle. So be it. He knew what he and his battle-brothers could do. He closed the distance with the orks, the landscape a streak in his peripheral vision, and he laughed.
‘Behold the greenskin numbers!’ he called out over the vox’s company channel. ‘Do they imagine that will make any difference to us? All they have done, brothers, is ensure that each of us may quench his thirst for xenos blood this day. Destroy them! For the Khan and the Emperor!’
The orks started shooting as soon as they saw the Space Marines. For the first few seconds, the range was too great. Then the gunfire became something to take seriously. The orks were not marksmen, but they didn’t need accuracy when they had volume. The calibre of most of the bullets could do little against power armour, but the vehicles were vulnerable.
Speed was the answer here, too. The orks couldn’t get a fix on targets moving that fast.
Temur kept the Thunderhawk’s heavy arsenal in reserve for now. The White Scars struck as a series of spearheads. Temur’s bike squad hit first, killing the orks at a distance with bolter fire, and then driving hard into the centre of the lines and moving forward to cut the march in half. As the orks’ resistance stiffened, the squad broke to the left and right, slicing through the greenskin flanks and out. Next came the Land Speeders, plunging the knife deeper into the enemy’s heart. And when they veered off, the next wave of bikes followed on. By then, Temur and his squad were harassing the periphery of the horde as they looped back for another run.
The White Scars attack was a perpetual shock. The orks reeled. They were hit in the centre and on the sides simultaneously, and they were unable to get
a fix on one group of Space Marines before it had moved on and another was renewing the charge. The bastion’s plateau was barely visible over the horizon. The orks’ advance ground to a halt, and bit by bit the White Scars crushed them to pulp.
When it came, Temur didn’t see or hear the disaster. It happened on ground hidden by the gentle swell of the landscape. From the perspective of the battlefield, nothing had changed for the bastion. Temur wasn’t even looking in that direction. He was focused on the next group of greenskins about to go down under his wheels and be shredded by his guns. The White Scars were tearing the enemy apart, moving so fast that the orks had yet to claim a single kill, unless it was their own kin as they fired indiscriminately in all directions.
The Fifth Brotherhood had absolute control over the battlefield, and yet Temur knew that it had all gone wrong. Something had changed. Perhaps the corner of his eye caught the flash of energy discharge in the distance, back towards the base, as he began his turn once again to drive through the orks’ disintegrating front lines. Perhaps it was something as simple as premonition. But his heart was already sinking when Colonel Meixner was suddenly on the vox.
‘Multiple heavy armour units inbound from the north,’ he said. ‘Six of them. They’ll be at the foot of the plateau in minutes.’
From the north? Temur wanted to roar at the impossibility. How could the tanks have bypassed them? Yet they had, and now his entire force was hours away from the bastion that was in immediate danger. The army of thousands of orks, the army that he was shattering, now looked like a decoy.
The idea that he might have been outmanoeuvred by orks was an obscenity that robbed Temur of words. It took him several more moments of outraged killing before he was able to answer Meixner. ‘Hold fast, colonel,’ he said.
‘We plan to,’ Meixner answered, clipped and assured, and fooling neither of them about the odds against six of the orks’ war machines.
Temur turned sharply, cutting his advance short. The rest of the squad followed behind as he cut his way back out of the howling mob of xenos beasts. ‘Brothers,’ he voxed, ‘we have been deceived. The bastion is in need of our aid. We must fly to the true battle.’
The orks were deciding where and how he fought. For that outrage, he vowed to coat the surface of the moon with their blood.
Then he opened a channel to the Scout squad.
Ariq was rigging a demolition charge on the hatch when Temur’s voice came through on the company vox-channel. ‘Have you found the manufactorum?’ the khan asked.
‘We have found another potential entrance to it,’ Kusala answered.
‘Six tanks are closing with the bastion. The greenskins’ ability to field heavy armour must be neutralised.’
‘Agreed,’ Ghazan put in.
‘Brother-sergeant,’ Temur said, and the slight aimed at Ghazan was clear, ‘how close are you to accomplishing the mission?’
‘I don’t know, my khan,’ Kusala said. ‘The lead is promising, but not definitive.’
‘Very well. Carry on. You are more useful to us there. Understand that it may fall to you and your Scouts alone to destroy the facility.’
‘Then that is what we shall do.’
‘Good.’ Still on the company channel, Temur said, ‘Stormseer Ghazan, you must return to base. I hope your aid will not be too late in coming.’
Ghazan switched to a private frequency. ‘I can best help the struggle here, Temur Khan.’
‘If the entrance has been found, the Scouts can do their work. Your work belongs here.’
‘I have no choice in this matter,’ Ghazan said. ‘And neither do you.’ He terminated the link. He looked back at Kusala. The sergeant had removed his helmet after leaving the abandoned ork workshop. He wasn’t even trying to hide his doubts now.
‘None of us has a choice now,’ Ghazan said, as much to convince himself as Kusala. ‘What is coming is destined. Now open this hatch.’
Chapter Three
Speeding south, away from the orks, Temur bit his tongue hard, preferring to draw his own blood than vent his rage pointlessly at the static that had replaced Ghazan’s voice. He focused the energy of anger into greater velocity for his bike. He willed the terrain to flow faster. He opened a channel to Meixner. He got through, and he heard what he thought was the colonel’s voice, but the man was drowned out by the sound of explosions.
The White Scars raced for the bastion. They flew over the land. They were a blinding streak of war. The ork force had vanished in the distance behind them. It seemed to Temur, though, that the greenskins’ laughter followed them across the terrain. His ritual scars burned. His blood was up with fury, and with humiliation. He would tear the sky in half before he saw his company defeated by ork strategy. He still had difficulty in believing that there even was such a thing.
Geography was his enemy now, too. He needed to be at the siege of the bastion now. But no matter how hard he pushed his bike, he could not compress the distance to nothing. The Thunderhawk was faster than the Land Speeders and bikes, and he ordered pilot Naku to take the Khajog’s Stand and its assault squad on ahead.
The gunship couldn’t cross that distance instantly, either. By the time it reached the battlefield, and Naku began appraising Temur of the situation, the orks had had far too much time to wreak their havoc.
‘Is the bastion still standing?’ Temur asked.
‘It is.’
‘The walls are holding against the bombardment?’
‘Not exactly,’ Naku said. ‘The Iron Guard has managed to draw the greenskins away from the walls for the moment.’
‘How?’
‘By mounting a charge.’
The implications of that tactic sank in. Infantry charging heavy armour. Temur could imagine nothing other than a massacre. ‘What is the status of the colonel’s men?’
‘They are still fighting.’
No elaboration was needed. Temur gave the Mordians a mental salute. He understood what they were doing. Their assault would distract the orks, who would seek to destroy the humans before them and save the bastion for later. He also understood the irony that loomed: the bastion might be standing after all the forces it was meant to shelter were dead.
Faster.
The terrain a vibrating blur beneath his wheels.
Faster.
The wind against his armour going from whistle to howl to shriek, its transfiguration of fury taking it from the voice of the moon to the voice of Chogoris.
Faster. And there, there, the bastion in sight, veiled by black smoke. On the plain before it, heroic but outmatched men fighting visions of giant, mechanised violence.
The voice of Chogoris calling him to battle, calling him to be wind himself, to be the gale, to be the violence of speed.
He rode with a thousand generations of tribesmen at his back. The wind was their voice, too. In his mind’s eye, the spirits raised the curved blades of their tulwars high. As he topped the final rise before the plain of battle, the ancient cavalry flowed with him.
Temur Khan took to the field with a momentum to shatter worlds. At his sides, and following, was the scythe of the Fifth Brotherhood. And if an infantry force had been before him, the battle would have been over. Human or xenos, a hundred or ten thousand, no such enemy could withstand the shock of that charge. But no such enemy was here. This enemy had taken the form of metal monsters. And they were laying waste to a different infantry.
What the Mordian Iron Guard had achieved was worthy of monuments. The mortals had three Chimeras at their disposal, and had hurled them against the ork armour, as they had their own fragile bodies. The Chimeras were outnumbered and outgunned. Their armour was not in the same league as that of the ork machines. One of them was already a smoking wreck, identifiable only by the sheer amount of blackened, twisted metal. The other two were damaged but still fighting. They had destroyed on
e of the ork tanks. And the foot-soldiers of the Iron Guard were still charging, again and again. The sun shone, resplendent, on their uniforms of blue and red and gold. They were pride and they were discipline. More than that: they were heroism, rushing to fight what could not be fought.
Worthy of monuments. Rewarded with a mass grave. Two of the Battlewagons moved around the field on random trajectories, pouncing on whatever large clusters of Mordians were closest at any moment. Gigantic, articulated claws were mounted on their hulls. They reached down into the mass of soldiers and pulled them up by the score, crushing them, spraying the ground with blood. The attacks were savage. With the claws, the orks had found a way to exaggerate even the violence of war. The machines appeared to revel in the sadism, to drink in the vitae that they squeezed from their prey as if downing casks of chinyua. At the same time, the main guns fired into the more distant formations, shattering charges, hurling body parts high into the air. The Iron Guard had diverted the orks from the goal of the bastion, and had given them the gift of enormous slaughter. The orks had accepted the gift with glee.
As he descended the slope, Temur saw a Battlewagon ram the side of one of the Chimeras. The front of the ork machine looked like a fist with teeth. The Chimera’s gun fired one last time. The shell might as well have been wet sand. The Battlewagon was untouched. It collapsed the flank of the APC as if it were vellum. Flame and smoke poured out of the wound. The tank rode up over the Chimera, crushing it down.
The Mordian vehicle exploded. The blast was muffled beneath the weight of the Battlewagon. Fire enveloped the tank, an embrace and surrender. The Battlewagon drove out of the flames. The huge, jagged metal cluster at its front looked like a snarl of triumph.
The remaining Chimera was limping, slowed by its injury. Its moments were numbered. Its crew pushed it towards another of the Battlewagons. The main gun fired, and fired again. Its heavy stubbers sent an unending stream of bullets at the target. Its opponent had two cannons on staggered levels above the hull. They were short, primitive, and with a bore twice that of the Chimera’s weapon. Their fire was a syncopated double-beat, the sound of a monstrous heart.
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