Overfiend

by David Annandale

  The hull did not burst open. The atmosphere did not rush into the void. Tiny mercies.

  The Fire Dragons leaped from cover to cover, covering ground with the grace and speed of las-fire. Ha’garen’s rolling destruction had given the eldar the chance to break from the ork forces that had been pinning them down. The Salamanders returned fire with bolters, using the weapons’ greater range to break the eldar rhythm and block another grenade toss.

  Battarus’s rasping roar turned into a word. ‘Go!’

  N’krumor had been leaning over him, carnifex aimed at Battarus’s temple to grant him the Emperor’s Peace. ‘Brother,’ he began, ‘you will be sacrificing–’

  ‘Go!’ There was nothing human in the cry, barely anything alive. It was the sound of pure, furious will animating a body just a bit longer, reaching out to punish the enemy one last time. Battarus raised the heavy bolter with arms that shouldn’t have been able to move at all.

  ‘Vulkan guide you, brother,’ Ba’birin said. The Salamanders left him, the mission overriding mercy and the need to recover progenoid glands. As they moved off, Ha’garen heard the heavy bolter open up, its murderous chug-chug-chug denying the Fire Dragons’ advance. Shells blasted through a weak cover point. The eldar warrior behind them exploded into pink mist.

  The Salamanders pushed forwards another dozen metres. The pathway dropped and twisted, turning into a trench through higher stacks of metal. More of these moved, crawling on their clumsy tracks as they carried out non-existent duties. They changed the route of the trench every few seconds. The orks had recovered and were hungry for retaliation. Only the narrow confines of the path now prevented them from crushing the Space Marines with the sheer mass of their numbers.

  The heavy bolter fell silent. Another melta bomb landed close, heat from the heart of a sun banishing a cluster of orks and scrap from sight and memory.

  Ha’garen faced the direction the grenade had come from. He couldn’t see the eldar. There were too many orks pouring over the lip of the trench. His chainaxe chopped down through the skull of the beast in front of him, splitting the greenskin in two. He raised his cutter arm high and fired the plasma beam. It was a blind shot, a raking sweep. He knew he was killing orks. There was no room to miss. As for the eldar, the best he could hope was that he was making them keep their heads down.

  Shrieking whistles. And then an eruption. Fireballs and smoke, an upheaval of metal and a rain of bodies and shrapnel. Enthusiastic carnage concentrated in the region where Ha’garen had last seen the eldar. It was a volley of rockets and grenades, blanketing the area, completely indiscriminate. There was no thought to ork casualties as long as the eldar got a taste.

  None of the ordnance came anywhere close to the Salamanders’ position.

  ‘What just happened?’ Neleus demanded. He plunged his chainsword point-first into an ork’s forehead. The greenskin’s jaw went slack in death and surprise. ‘And I do not want to hear that we just received covering fire from orks.’

  ‘Evidence suggests precisely that,’ Ha’garen answered. And still the orks pressed in. There was no quarter in their attacks, no lack of the furious desire to butcher the Space Marines.

  Neleus grunted. ‘I was wrong earlier,’ he said. ‘I am utterly sick of irony.’

  ‘Why aren’t they shooting?’ N’krumor wondered.

  The detail returned to the front of Ha’garen’s mind. It was insistent this time, demanding to be explained. The answer came a few moments later. A massive ork, bristling in spiked armour, chainaxe in one hand, power claw in the other, rounded the next corner of the path and slammed into Ba’birin. The greenskin was fully as tall as the Salamander, and the force of the blow knocked Ba’birin back a step. The ork raised both claw and axe to pound the Space Marine into the metal litter of the decking. Ba’birin raised his flamer. Ignited promethium engulfed the ork’s head and took out three others coming over the top of the trench. But right behind the big ork came a much smaller one. It didn’t even try to hit Ba’birin. Instead, it ducked around the Salamander’s legs and reached for Elisath. Ha’garen struck it down with his remaining grip arm. The ork collapsed, spine cracked. Ha’garen closed the vice over the greenskin’s head and squeezed it to jelly. He took in that the ork had nothing in its hands. It had a blade at its waist. Sheathed. Ha’garen had never seen a sheathed ork weapon.

  Realisation dawned. ‘They want the prisoner back,’ Ha’garen said. ‘They want him alive.’

  Silence on the vox. For a few seconds, the only focus was on killing as implications sank in. Fact: the orks wanted Elisath badly enough that they refrained from using maximum deadly force. Inference: they were being led by a commander canny enough to think beyond bloody-minded violence. Inference: a commander powerful enough to impose restraint on orks. The schemes uncovered by the White Scars and the Raven Guard were proof enough of tactical ability and influence. But the degree of tactical attention on the current battlefield spoke of a moment-to-moment awareness of the conflict’s currents.

  That enormous shadow in the arena.

  The Overfiend was close.

  ‘If he wants his prize badly enough,’ Ba’birin said, ‘he had better show himself.’ He gutted two more orks, and walked over their twitching bodies.

  ‘Eager?’ Neleus asked, sounding like he was.

  ‘The final contours of this mission would be highly satisfactory,’ Ha’garen said.

  An amused snort from Ba’birin. ‘Contain your passion, brother,’ he said.

  ‘I will try,’ Ha’garen answered, making Neleus laugh. Laughing and snarling, beating and burning orks.

  They moved closer to the exit, but slowly, too slowly. The orks came on, and on and on. There was no end to them. If the Salamanders could reach the narrower space of the corridors, they stood a chance of fighting through to the boarding torpedoes. But as they rounded another bend in the junkyard madness of the hold, the path rose, and the final stretch was in the open.

  The cry of the orks took on a new note of triumph as they thundered in for the finish.

  In their midst was something huge and clanking.

  The kroozer was closing in on the decision point. Once it reached orbit, Mulcebar would have his hand forced. He could not permit the ork force on the ship to land. Not while there was something on that planet that would power them up. He would not betray the efforts of the Raven Guard, and he would not doom the people. The moment loomed when he would have to deem the mission a failure, and open fire on the kroozer. His grim prayer was that, if the moment came, it would be because his men were already dead. He understood the higher imperative. He knew what had to be done. That did not mean he relished having his warriors’ blood on his hands.

  The Verdict of the Anvil had shadowed the kroozer since the launch of the boarding party. Mulcebar had held the strike cruiser at a distance, presenting a less inviting target, and giving the repair crews a chance to heal what they could of the Verdict’s injuries. The kroozer’s fire had diminished since the boarding torpedoes had hit, as if the tactical intelligence aboard the ship were being distracted by other, more pressing problems. Now Mulcebar ordered the distance closed. Vox contact with the boarding party was becoming more and more sporadic. He knew the prisoner had been found, and he knew that the fighting was so fierce there was the very real chance that the boarding torpedoes were impossibly distant.

  ‘I want firing resolutions for the forward batteries,’ he announced. ‘And for the nova cannon.’

  There was no true pause before his orders were carried out, but there was a beat of silence as the Verdict of the Anvil prepared to annihilate some of its own.

  ‘Contacts,’ the augury servitor intoned. ‘Ork ships.’ It began a list of designations, and the list just kept going. Mulcebar called the readings up on a tacticarium screen. Ships were translating into the system. They were coming in force. This was not a squadron. It was a f
leet.

  Mulcebar saw his options become very few and very bad.

  He also saw his choice become very easy, if he could receive the answer he needed to a simple question. He opened the vox-channel to the boarding party. ‘Brother Berengus,’ he said, ‘link me to your sergeants.’

  Static. Explosions of white noise mixed with clanging and grunts. Then a clipped, ‘Brother-captain,’ as if squeezed in between death blows. Ba’birin’s voice.

  ‘Can you yet prevail?’ It was an honest question. Mulcebar required an honest answer.

  Ba’birin’s response was almost completely lost in the welter of growls and clashes of metal that erupted from the speaker. Only one word came through: ‘Anvil.’ Its two syllables were spoken with faith and determination.

  So it wasn’t just an easy choice. It wsas really no choice at all.

  ‘Helmsmaster,’ Mulcebar told Phanes, ‘we need a new bearing. We will face the greenskin fleet.’

  Again that beat of silence, only this time because of eagerness.

  The Verdict turned. The wounded predator raced to throw itself into the teeth of the swarm. Mulcebar watched the screens as the catalogue of attackers grew.

  +Designation: Onslaught.++

  +Designation: Ravager.++

  +Designation: Savage.++

  +Designation: Brute.++

  Over and over and over, a multiplying taxonomy of threats. And something else, multiplying and repeating like the beat of a savage drum:

  +Designation: Unknown.++

  +Designation: Unknown.++

  +Designation: Unknown.++

  To the massive punch of the attack ships was added a host of the eccentric and the grotesque. Many ships appeared to be formerly Imperial, killed, salvaged and reconfigured into xenos obscenity. Others, whatever they had once been, were now hulks, garbage given propulsion and made stupidly dangerous. There were transports, out of which came insect clouds of fighters and bombers. There were ships that should never have made it through the warp, but had reached the field of battle on the strength, it seemed to Mulcebar, of sheer ignorance. Some had not arrived intact, and were already burning, breaking up into high-velocity debris that crippled and killed nearby craft.

  But enough had come through. Too many. Mulcebar was looking at the green horde embodied in void-ships.

  There was really only one sensible response to the horde: burning it.

  ‘Nova cannon ready,’ Phanes said.

  The Verdict of the Anvil was still a fair distance from the ork fleet. Too far for either side to deploy guns and torpedoes to any effect. The nova cannon had plenty of range. It was the drake’s breath of the Salamanders, and it had been held back for too long. ‘Give me a target,’ said Mulcebar. ‘Anything of attack-ship size or greater. In the centre of their formation.’ The cannon wasn’t an accurate weapon. It didn’t need to be. It was a gun that embodied the idea that ‘close’ was good enough. Mulcebar simply wanted a point chosen for the moment of shell implosion.

  ‘There’s a very large mass,’ the gunnery officer said. ‘Bigger than a grand cruiser.’

  ‘Shoot that,’ Mulcebar said. ‘Fire.’

  The nova cannon was a marvel of war. It was a technological miracle worthy of the most hushed Mechanicus prayers. But in its fundamental conception, at the core of its being, it was simplicity itself. It was just a gun. A gun of godlike proportions, but a gun. Its barrel ran much of the length of the strike cruiser. Its projectile was fifty metres in diameter, and was fired at speeds commensurate with the weapon’s scale. When Mulcebar gave the order, enough stored energy to power the entire ship was unleashed. The weapon’s trigger automatically kicked the Verdict of the Anvil’s engines into a massive thrust forwards against the cannon’s recoil. Magnetic fields that bordered on the sorcerous impelled the projectile to near light-speed. Space bent as the shell blasted from the prow of the Verdict. It slashed across the Lepidus system to the storm of ork ships on the wings of wrath.

  Before it reached the implosion point, the shell passed through two ork craft. The encounters had almost no effect on the projectile. Massive as it was, its size was negligible by comparison to the hulk and the Ravager that crossed its path. But its kinetic energy was near infinite. The ships slowed the shell by a microscopic degree, to their doom. The energy transferred to their hulls blew them apart, every rivet and beam flying off as if in terror from the point of impact. For a fraction of a second, the ships retained their shapes, swelling, still moving forwards. Then they disintegrated, the blasts of their stricken fusion engines racing to swallow the metal debris.

  Then the light of their spreading destruction was eclipsed by the bright dawn of the shell’s death.

  The implosion stopped the shell’s flight. Kinetic energy was released as light and heat. The light and heat of hell. For a few terrible seconds, the system had a second star. It howled its birth and death in the dense centre of the ork fleet. The nearest ship was a massive transport. It had once been the Universal-class mass conveyor Benedictionis Aeternae. Twelve kilometres long, it had, before its first doom, been host to a voidfaring community that had developed a thousand years of unique culture. Its people had created blown-glass icons that were never seen outside the ship’s hull, and that would have moved the most unforgiving Ministorum cleric to tears. Now it carried an invasion force of half a million orks. The nova cannon strike blew a hole a third of the ship’s size in its stern. The demolished plasma engines added their screams to the new star’s. The Benedictionis bucked, its prow dropping as if in penance for its betrayal before it boiled out of existence. It took the last of its glass icons with it. The five-hundred metre winged statue of Cardinal Marat survived long enough to fly straight into the loading bay of a bomber transport, venting the entire ship’s oxygen supply.

  The damage radiated out of the implosion zone in chained explosions. When night fell again, half a dozen ships had been crippled or destroyed. The Verdict of the Anvil had struck a legendary blow.

  And an inadequate one. The orks broke formation, scattering from the devastation. The fleet lost cohesion. But still the horde was present. Still, it came on.

  In their crude language, the orks called the thing a Deff Dread. It was an insult, by its very existence. Ha’garen felt his gorge rise in hatred. His modified cortex suppressed the emotion, perceiving it as a threat to rational action. It transmuted the energy into strength and speed of motion.

  The ork creation was a blasphemous parody of a Dreadnought. Its body was a huge metal box, somewhat taller than it was wide. Spikes jutted from its base like tusks from a jaw. Mounted on each side was a massive gun barrel. The thing rocked side to side as it advanced, with a speed that belied its apparent clumsiness, on pile-driver legs. Steam and oil shrieked from the joints. It waved massive pincers twice the size of Ha’garen’s servo-arms. The right limb had the lower claw of its pincer replaced with a circular saw. The modification made little practical sense, but displayed a raw genius for violence. The pincer would automatically start shredding anything it grabbed.

  The Deff Dread thundered into the Salamanders’ flank. R’alum met it with bolter-fire. The rounds punched and dented the walker’s armour, but the monster didn’t notice. The painted, snarling face of the Dread appeared to laugh as its arms grabbed R’alum. The saw screeched as its teeth ground against ceramite. Splinters of metal and armour sprayed. The saw was digging into R’alum’s shoulder, working to sever his arm, when the Dread threw him into the air. Speakers amplified and distorted monstrous laughter as the mechanised ork opened fire. It tracked the arc of R’alum’s flight, slamming a rapid-fire stream of massive rounds into the Salamander’s body. He was a mass of butchered meat when he hit the deck.

  Ha’garen cut his way through the ork before him and closed with the Deff Dread. It still had its back to him, but swivelled as he drew near. Its reach was much greater than his, but he dropped a
s the enormous arms swept in to grab him. He angled his flamer nozzle up and bathed the front of the Dread with fire. He didn’t hurt the ork imprisoned in the war machine, but he did confuse the beast. It staggered blindly, flailing its arms, firing off random shots. Staying low, keeping the flames going, Ha’garen raised his cutter arm to a narrow horizontal slit, level with where he imagined the pilot’s head would be. He fired the plasma beam through the slit. The scream was very short. The Deff Dread stumbled forwards on nervous system reflex, the momentum of its mechanism sending it on a pointless march, its arms swinging like syncopated pendulums. It waded into the crush of orks, leaving a wake of crushed bodies.

  Orks wailed and fled the erratic path of the walking coffin. Then a moment came of precious hope and potential. Ha’garen saw the way forward across the last few dozen metres of the hold’s metal dementia to the exit and the corridors beyond. It was not clear, but the ork density had thinned. A short, concerted punch was all the Salamanders needed now. Not in a straight line, but lunging from enemy weakness to enemy weakness. Instinct, forged by decades, recalled by the molten light in the forge of war, had him call to Ba’birin.

  ‘I see it,’ Ba’birin answered before Ha’garen could speak. The same instinct there.

  But no, Ha’garen realised as the second of possibility stretched long in his consciousness. The instincts weren’t the same. Not his, at any rate. What had been unthought before was now the product of analysis. The battlefield resolved itself before his eyes as an exercise in the application of force. To act was not to follow gut impulse. The nature of the distance between himself and his battle-brothers achieved a still-greater clarity. Their actions would mesh, but emerge from different origins. He would forever be among brothers, but never again be part of them.

  Ha’garen worked through the thought process and reached its conclusion in the time it took Ba’birin to speak his three syllables. That was also how long the moment lasted. It ended with a storm: a hail of melta bombs and a wind of fire.