The cavern was the largest yet, its ceiling cathedral-high. It was another teleporter room. It appeared to be powered by the same method as the first, and though the machinery was as large and complex as before, there was only one cage, one prisoner, the eldar that Tellathia had called Merentallas. The tunnels that arrived in the cavern at ground level were larger than the seam through which Ghazan had passed, but none of them could admit a vehicle. The thing that filled the space had been constructed here. It stood on the teleportation pad that took up most of the cavern floor.
Ghazan activated his vox-bead. ‘Temur Khan,’ he whispered, ‘the orks have a Stompa.’
He used the Gothic approximation of the greenskin name for the monstrosity. The syllables tasted unclean to Ghazan. No subject of the Emperor should ever have to speak a word that had no meaning outside of the human frame of reference. But the obscenity needed a designation, if only to rob it of at least some of its grotesque mystery. There was no proper word in the human tongue that could act as a name for the thing.
It stood well over twenty metres tall. It looked like all the detritus on the surface of the plateau had come together into a rusted mountain of an idol. Above a wide skirt of shielding rose a colossal approximation of a torso, arms and head. Smoke stacks emerged from what would have been a shoulder blade. There was a rumble, tectonic-deep, coming from its chest. Its engine was already active, its crew inside. Members of a diminutive ork subspecies scampered over the war machine, adjusting cables, tightening bolts, correcting the alignment of guns.
It looked like a mad construction that would fall apart the first time it tried to move. Ghazan knew, though, that it would work, that it would walk, and that it would be as indestructible as it would be devastating in its actions. Its torso was ringed with gun emplacements. Its right arm had twin-linked cannons, each with a barrel almost wide enough for a man to stand inside. Its left ended in a power claw the size of a Rhino.
The Stompa appeared to be imbued with the same excessive strength as everything else associated with the orks on this moon. If it arrived before the bastion, it would be unstoppable. The Iron Guard would be destroyed within minutes. There was precious little that the White Scars had in their arsenal that could do more than dent the monster. The Fifth Brotherhood would fight until the end, but if the other Battlewagons were still active, then with their strength added to the Stompa’s, the end would not be long in coming.
‘Is it completed?’ Temur asked.
‘Yes. And operational.’
Ghazan listened to Temur curse under his breath.
‘It will be teleported,’ the Stormseer added.
‘Where are you?’
Ghazan described the cavern’s location as best he could.
‘We’re on our way,’ said Temur.
The ork psyker and the engineer were both here. The tech was overseeing the activation of the Stompa and preparing to climb aboard. The witch stood before Merentallas. It gave instructions to more underlings, who worked the controls of the psychic drain. The prisoner’s back arched. The energy build-up spiked. ‘There is no time,’ Ghazan said. ‘The teleporter is powering up.’ No matter how quickly his brothers could travel through the complex, they would arrive too late.
‘Do what you must,’ Temur told him. ‘For the Khan and the Emperor.’
‘For the Khan and the Emperor.’ Ghazan felt the fleeting touch of peace as he moved forwards. The constant, clawing sense of anticipation had vanished. Destiny was now. Fate was now. The fulfilment of his visions had arrived. He understood how mistaken he had been earlier to believe that the moment was upon him. He had not felt this calm. He had been responding to a prologue. Now the great act would begin.
He paused before entering the cave. If the orks in the Stompa decided to attack him, he would be dead in an instant. They would not dare attack, though, if doing so would put the teleporter at risk. He decided he could credit the psyker and the engineer with instilling that much discipline in their subordinates.
His first move was clear. If he could cripple the teleporter, the Stompa would be stuck underground. He had told Tellathia that he would free the last prisoner. In this context, death was the best hope the eldar had of freedom. It was the one in Ghazan’s power to grant.
He raised his bolter and fired.
As he did, he remembered that during the earlier battle, none of the eldar prisoners had been killed by ork fire, despite how copious it had been. Tellathia’s warriors had been hit, but the bullets had left all within the cages untouched. Now Ghazan saw why. His shells exploded as they reached the cage, their energy dispersing with a ripple in the air.
There was a force field around the cage.
The orks on the ground sent a hail of bullets his way. The engineer ran for the Stompa. The psyker howled its rage and pointed its staff at him. Ghazan leapt from the opening. He landed in the middle of the rifle-wielding orks.
His mind reached into the ground itself. The bedrock answered his call. The stone rippled, heaving beneath the orks’ feet, throwing them off balance. He turned, sweeping his staff in a wide circle. It was suffused with lightning, electrocuting the orks he struck.
Then lightning struck him in turn, rocking him back on his feet. Overloaded, his armour locked up for a moment. He dropped to one knee. The witch advanced on him, the electrical residue of the strike crackling around its eyes. The ork’s snarl was also a smile, one of recognition. Ghazan realised that he had not been alone in the anticipation of this moment.
Already, the witch’s energy was again approaching an explosive level. The greenskin was in a state of unceasing battle-wrath. Ghazan was still attuned to the voice of the moon’s bones. He yanked at the earth. A slab of granite erupted from the floor. It knocked the witch over and Ghazan ran forwards, raising his staff to bring it down through the psyker’s skull.
He almost didn’t hear the whine. Almost didn’t recognise what it meant. But as he raised the staff, he realised something was coming to life at his back. He threw himself to the left in a roll. Huge bullets shrieked through the air where his head had been the moment before. They blew rock chunks out of the cave wall. The whine of the gun revving up had become a huge, thudding drum roll.
The ork witch scrambled away in the other direction, back towards the prisoner. The battle had taken Ghazan too far from that position. The crew of the Stompa could not fire the main cannons without destroying everything in the cavern, but the smaller guns could target Ghazan without fear of wrecking the teleporter or the machine of psychic torture that powered it. The witch was already standing once more. It was laughing, the sound a maniacal braying loud even over the battering of the gun. It brandished its staff. Green fire coruscated down its length.
The gun tracked Ghazan’s roll into the other orks on the cavern floor. The ones it hit became explosions of blood and bone. The rest ran for cover, shooting at Ghazan all the while. He lunged to his feet, and was almost knocked off them again when another blast from the psyker’s eyes struck the ground. He was under attack from too many directions. He couldn’t focus on one enemy without being taken down by another.
He turned for aid from earth to air. Once again, he made himself wind. He shot towards the Stompa. The orks tried to correct their aim, but he was already at the base of the monster before they were able to take in which way he was moving. Shutters had opened in the lower section of the skirt: more guns being brought to bear on him. He leapt up. One-handed, he grabbed the lower edge of the nearest opening and hauled himself through into a cramped compartment of uneven metal walls, an iron blister pressing into the body of the Stompa. He hit the orks inside like a ceramite bullet. His speed was such that he didn’t have to use a weapon. The impact shattered their bones and smashed the gun from its mount.
He stopped, feeling the moment of dizziness that came with the release of warp energy and the return to a normal pace. He rammed th
e weighted end of his staff through the skulls of the two orks in the compartment, silencing their snarls.
Outside, the witch and the rest of the orks were racing towards the shutter. The sight and their howls afforded him a rare form of grim pleasure. He had never before seen true outrage in an ork. It was there now. Even the greenskins had a conception of the holy, as debased and erroneous as it might be. They had their false gods, and the Stompa was in their form. He was trespassing on sacred ground.
He would do worse yet.
The psyker held back as the other orks ran pell-mell for his position. They were not firing yet at their own vehicle. Ghazan tossed a frag grenade out of the shutter. It bounced once, then exploded in mid-air into the faces of the charging orks. Two more died instantly, their torsos blown apart. The others started firing. Ghazan was under good cover. He used his bolt pistol to bring even more down with one skull shot after another.
The ork psyker retreated further, taking cover beyond the line of sight provided by the shutter. It hid somewhere to the left. Ghazan did not oblige the witch by poking his head out to have it consumed by orkish lightning. He killed a few more of the underlings, then left the gunner’s compartment.
He was in the workings surrounding the Stompa’s right leg. The interior was a tangle of catwalks, ladders twisting around pistons the size of cathedral pillars, gears as big as Chimeras. The space was cramped, humid with steam, choking with smoke, dripping with grease, and the behemoth wasn’t yet in motion. As immense as the leg was, it was short in proportion to the rest of the Stompa. The machine would not stride across the landscape with the majesty of a Titan. It would rock and stumble with the clumsy, unstoppable momentum of a walking rockslide.
The giant pistons rose at a diagonal. Midway up the skirt, they entered a great enclosure. Inside that, Ghazan thought, he would find the Stompa’s motive power. It would be the heart of the beast. It would be where he must plant his tulwar.
Mixing with the clamour of grinding machinery was the howling of the orks. They were rushing out of artillery and control blisters, leaping down the ladders and stairs, coming to kill the invader. Ghazan welcomed their folly. He slammed his staff against the metal decking. ‘Look upon me, xenos filth!’ he shouted. ‘I bring you the fury of Chogoris!’
He didn’t expect them to understand his words. They would comprehend his actions well enough. He stood where he was, an unmoving, inviting target. In a few moments, he would be surrounded. His pursuers from the floor of the cavern were climbing in through the open shutter. The orks on all sides were frenzied, in a state beyond rage, and yet no shots were fired. Whether their hands were stayed by religious awe of the Stompa, or a base level of self-preservation, Ghazan neither knew nor cared.
He was barely aware of their threat. He was conscious of them only as vectors of approach, and as vermin about to be swept from the sight of the Emperor and the Khan. He was with the storm again. He was the storm. The unmaking of all order that was the immaterium flowed through his being, and he imposed a shape upon it. He took that which was nothing and turned it into the most primal form of existence: the purity of lightning. Electrical hell built up in his frame until it seemed his flesh and bones and blood had become nothing more than a negative phantom, the searing afterimage of a shape that would vanish as it released the thunder.
At the last moment before he would be consumed by the energy he had summoned, he unleashed it. The lightning of the steppes struck the iron of the Stompa. The interior flashed with the catastrophic electrical discharge. The orks screamed. The bolt lifted them all, hurling them about the interior with enough force to smash their bones to dust against the metal of their creation. The superheated air turned all moisture into scalding steam. The stench of cooked flesh filled Ghazan’s nostrils. The smoke of incineration roiled through the interior of the Stompa. The electrocuted were a great choir, their shriek a stuttering crescendo. And then the thunder came, a gigantic, terminal clap that snapped time in two. On one side of the cleavage: the screams of brutes, the gigantic white noise of energy’s eruption. On the other: silence.
As he started moving again, Ghazan thought that it was a singular thing that there could be silence inside the Stompa. The din was, in truth, greater than ever. The engine’s rumble was a tortured fibrillation. The gears ground against each other as if at war. But there was silence. The voices of the orks had been stilled. All of them. Ghazan had turned the greenskins into carbonised corpses. They lay in heaps and angles. Many had become part of the wounded machinery.
He strode through them, kicking them apart where they blocked his way. He attached his staff to a maglock on his backpack and climbed the ladders towards the engine compartment. He reached a catwalk that ran around the perimeter of the enclosure. He looked down. He saw flames from ruptured gas conduits. He saw sparks of ongoing secondary electrical damage. He saw no movement of anything living.
He walked around the metal shell. It was sealed. Pistons and cables ran in and out of it, but there was no entrance. Whatever the nature of the power source the orks had assembled, once it was in operation, they had no interest in gaining access to it. Perhaps it would be fatal to do so. Ghazan thought of the ruptured cores of plasma engines.
The stillness ended with the inarticulate shouts of the witch. Ghazan looked over the edge of the circular decking. The psyker had entered the Stompa through an opening on the other side of the skirt. It stood near the base of the left piston, gazing up at Ghazan. Its eyes glowed with energy. It seemed to be waiting.
‘Well?’ Ghazan called down. He trusted that the mockery in his tone crossed the barriers of language. ‘How long do we intend to delay the moment? I know you want this fight. Show me how ridiculous your worst is.’
He would not go down. He would fight the witch here, where he might also kill the Stompa.
The witch responded in an unexpected fashion. It laughed. It was the sole ork alive in this space. The damage to the vehicle was already considerable. But it laughed as if Ghazan had fallen into a trap. It raced towards him, disdaining ladders and even stairs, leaping from level to level as if being carried by its unholy energy.
Ghazan left his pistol maglocked to his thigh. Shells would not stop this creature. He pulled the staff off his back. He held it crosswise before him. As he braced himself, he wondered how the ork could be supercharged in this fashion. He had witnessed earlier how it drew energy from the collective war madness of its fellows. Here they were all dead. Yet the witch was stronger than ever.
The ork made one more jump, a huge one. It rose several metres straight up, higher than Ghazan. It had its staff raised above its head. As it landed, it brought the staff slashing down at the Stormseer. It shouted with such fury that it spat blood.
The two staffs clashed.
The ork’s psychic assault was enormous. For the second time, lightning struck the interior of the Stompa. It was lightning in a form Ghazan had never encountered. It had none of the purity of the true storm. It was electricity born of aggression itself. It was the quintessence of ork being. If he had not been prepared, it would have incinerated him.
He tried to push back. But the energy he unleashed was barely enough to hold the ork at bay. The witch hit him harder, then harder yet. Its energy kept growing. The more it battered him, the stronger it became. The ork was untiring, while Ghazan felt the gradual unravelling that accompanied his own psychic exhaustion.
Where was the ork getting its strength?
With a still greater spike, the witch’s attack blasted at his defences against the immaterium. Instead of shoring them up, he let them fall and his consciousness rode the explosion deep into the insanity of the warp.
If he lost his grip on his conception of self, his mind would be scattered on the waves of the immaterium, and his body turned to ash. The pull of disintegration grew stronger.
He held fast. He was Ghazan of the White Scars. He was a
Stormseer.
Stormseer.
He saw the coherent powers that used the warp. He saw a line of force feeding the ork. He could not divine what it was, but its strength was gigantic. It was the source of the excess on this moon. The orks were too strong, too large, too inventive, too powerful. Yet though the orks were fuelled by this current, it was not of them.
Perhaps, then, he could use it himself.
Temptation rushed him towards the current. He could plunge into it. He could turn it against the ork. He could make it his own. He could use its immensity and its anger to make a victory of every battle, to make battle itself a victory, to make war and more war, always and eternally war, and war, and war…
No.
Stormseer.
If he did this, he would betray the Emperor and the Khan. He would betray his own identity. With fading strength, he rejected an influx of unlimited power.
He made a choice.
He sought the pure storm, the full storm of Chogoris. He found it. He saw it. It was there in the warp, a potential needing a thought and a faith strong enough to shape it. And once he saw the storm, he wielded it.
He fought back. He countered the rage of a species with the storm of a world’s soul. He struck with wind and lightning together. Into the cramped space of the Stompa’s interior, he brought a hurricane. He stood firm as winds of hundreds of kilometres an hour slammed against the ork psyker. Cascades of lightning struck it. The witch stumbled. It absorbed the electrical energy into its own, but its attack began to lose coherence. Ghazan encompassed the hurricane with his will, honed it into concentrated form. He fused winds and lightning. His shout was the storm, and he sent all its kinetic and electrical rage coursing down the staff.
What hit the ork was annihilation. The beast’s cry was cut short. It flew backwards into the metal shell. Its own attack lost all direction. The psychic energy was released. The explosion blinded Ghazan. A fragment of the time and space of the materium was destroyed.
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