by Nick Kyme
The area immediately beyond the wall had been heavily industrialised and comprised several shattered factorum buildings – boxy structures with a plain, austere appearance.
‘Functional’ was the word that entered Scipio’s mind as they followed Veteran Sergeant Daceus into the only building that had avoided being shelled by the greenskins and was more or less still standing.
Sodium lighting bolted up in strips across a ferrocrete ceiling cast little luminescence into a hexagonal chamber. Debris and scattered refuse had been swept into the edges of the room, and a large metal conference table with assorted chairs and stools stood in the centre. There were several antechambers, some cordoned off by rough sheets of plastek, others drenched in gloom. Soot coated everything and drifted from the ceiling in fitful motes turning the light grainy. Brownish stains ran down the wall in one of the corners from a ruptured water pipe that had been bandaged by an old bullet-ridden flak jacket. It was a poor fix, and the sodden piece of Imperial Guard-issue equipment dripped languidly into a murky pool below.
Scipio noted all of this in the first few seconds as he entered the chamber. All in all it was a rat-infested pit, barely fit for serfs.
‘My lords—’ A human had approached the Ultramarines as soon as they had arrived, and prostrated himself on the ground before them. ‘You have saved us all this glorious day.’ The man wore the black uniform and silver cuirass of a Sable Gunners officer. ‘I am Corporal Vormast, commander of the 81st, 23rd and 15th Sable Gunner regiments. Welcome to Ghospora Operational Headquarters.’
Struggling to his feet, a clearly awe-struck aide assisting him, Corporal Vormast was a wretched specimen. His armour was tarnished, his uniform dirty and torn. The troopers he had in his charge behind him were raw and ragged, many swathed in bandage and gauze.
Scipio regarded the men with pity. They had given their all and still would have been bested by the greenskins had it not been for the Space Marines’ intervention. Iulus showed only cold indifference; to him the corporal was no different to the rock of the walls or the metal of the hive’s guns – they were all just materiel. Praxor’s expression was one of utter disdain. He looked above the man, or rather maintained Astartes eye-level, searching for the presence of his captain, but none was to be found.
‘Captain Sicarius will be with us shortly,’ said Daceus, as if guessing Praxor’s thoughts, walking past the human and his rednue. ‘Corporal Vormast, please join us at the command table,’ he added without looking back.
The human gave up his genuflecting, his deference on hiatus, and scurried over to the giant Astartes who had left him in their wake.
‘A corporal,’ Scipio remarked when the human officer had caught them up. ‘That is a low rank for one in charge of the defence of an entire hive city.’
‘Yes,’ Vormast replied a little nervously. Scipio thought he looked young for such a post. ‘I am the highest-ranking officer left,’ the human told them, removing his corporal’s cap and wiping a sweat-drenched mop of hair beneath before replacing it. ‘The greenskins hit us hard.’
‘I’ll say,’ Praxor muttered under his breath, casting a contemptuous look around the festering sinkhole that was Sable Gunner Command.
A large blast door opened, spilling in grey light and the raucous sounds of engineers striving to repair the wall defences.
Captain Sicarius strode through the opening. He had his battle helm clasped beneath his arm and his voluminous cloak billowed as he walked. The Tempest Blade was cleaned and sheathed at his hip. Even for the other Astartes, he was a stirring sight. Only Iulus appeared unmoved.
Two other warriors, almost as impressive, accompanied him: one, the towering form of Arcus Helios stomping loudly in his Terminator armour, the other was Brother-Sergeant Telion, slighter but no less dangerous and imposing.
‘Brothers,’ said Sicarius upon reaching the table, regarding each of the Ultramarines in turn before setting his helmet upon the metal surface. He then lowered his gaze, glowering slightly at Corporal Vormast, aloof and in many ways as alien to the diminutive human as the ork was to him.
‘Rest easy, commander,’ he said, putting a giant armoured hand on the corporal’s shoulder. The man tried to muster some presence despite his tarnished silver carapace and ripped brocade, but he only came up to the edge of the Space Marine’s plastron. Sicarius looked down on him like a man regarding an infant.
‘The north wall is secure, the greenskin are broken,’ he continued. ‘Tell me now, where in the wastelands does the warlord make his lair? Answer quickly,’ he warned, ‘my gunships are already on their way here.’
Following Zanzag’s escape, Sicarius had immediately ordered three additional gunships – Pilium, Spatha and Xiphos – sent from the Valin’s Revenge to convey those elements of the battle group that had not entered the battle via drop pod assault. To the captain’s mind, time was now at a premium. He wanted the ork dead, by his hand, and the deed done with the utmost haste. The High Suzerain’s glory, it seemed, would not wait.
Vormast bowed curtly at the Space Marine captain’s command, seemingly unable to speak for the moment, and shuffled around the edge of the command table to a small panel fused to one side. After pressing a sequence of icons, an expanse of platen glass flickered to life on the table’s surface, backlit by sodium bulbs.
Scipio saw Praxor sneer at the crude technology. Iulus, too, appeared unimpressed, likely wondering how Ghospora hadn’t already fallen before the Emperor’s Angels had arrived on streams of fire from the sky.
As the image behind the platen glass resolved, a map of Ghospora Hive and the surrounding area appeared – Sable, the northern continent. The view was top-down, the landscape expressed in gradients, contour lines and hues of mineral density. Principally it was a mining chart co-opted for use as a campaign map. Three hive cities stood out, marked Lylith, Sulphora and, of course, Ghospora itself.
‘Lylith is destroyed,’ muttered Vormast, partially to himself as if in bitter confirmation of the fact, scouring the map quickly.
Scipio absorbed the details in an instant, committing them to eidetic memory.
Ghospora’s nearest neighbour was Sulphora Hive to the south, a few hundred kilometres distant. The wasteland that lay between them was riddled with artificial valleys, dredging gullies and mountainous sandbanks, all interwoven by a web of black tributaries – Black Reach’s polluted, carbon-rich rivers. Many crossed and weaved like livid veins; others sprawled and stretched in thick, dark belts.
The largest and widest of the rivers flowed between both of the hives, and was named Blackwallow on the map. One of its minor tributaries fed into a narrow ravine, ringed by a dense forest, called Black Gulch. The mighty river then drove east until it fell off a sheer cliff in a waterfall. An expanse of water to the northeast, several thousand kilometres from Ghospora, and fringing the northern continent, was marked the Sable Sea.
Scipio assumed this was the reason the orks had not sacked the hive city sooner. It would have taken time to cross. The Imperial defenders would likely have erected blockades, mined the deep waters and sent vessels to impede the attackers. He imagined fleets of burning ships adrift on an oily sea, gutted and forlorn. A hopeless sacrifice against a brutal and implacable invader.
‘The greenskins took Cobalt, Kohl and Stygia with almost no warning,’ the corporal explained, surveying the map with a dull gaze. He scrolled the northern continent east, using a dial – Scipio noticed the human’s hand shaking; doubtless from shellshock or some other nervous condition he’d developed over the course of Ghospora’s defence – and the other neighbouring continents were revealed on a previously hidden area of the map. Each had three hive cities. All, barring those on Sable, had been sacked by the orks.
‘Two months, nine hives,’ said Iulus, partly to himself, partly to his battle-brothers. ‘The orks must have struck quickly and precisely. It’s not a tactic they’re known for.’
‘Any thoughts on how that could be possible, Sergeant Fennio
n?’ asked Sicarius, directly.
Iulus kept looking at the map, as if the answer to the captain’s question could be discerned there. His demeanour was iron-hard as ever, even beneath the High Suzerain’s scrutiny.
‘A water-borne ship of some kind,’ he said. ‘They’d need a fleet to cross the sea. It would have to be a vessel large enough to ferry an entire horde. It’s the only way the orks could have marshalled an assault so swiftly, possibly even coordinated multiple strikes.’
‘You believe the greenskin capable of such cohesion.’ The bone-hard voice of Telion seemed to chill the room as he spoke. It wasn’t a challenge, just a statement of fact.
Even Iulus paused as the intimidating scout sergeant stepped into the light-glare thrown from the platen glass.
The slab-faced Sergeant Iulus met Telion’s icy gaze in spite of the veteran’s formidable presence. ‘I don’t know what they’re capable of, brother-sergeant. They’re alien. Who can truly say what goes on in their depraved minds, what thought processes drive and impel them.’
‘So it is possible, then?’
‘Yes, it is possible,’ Iulus replied at length.
Telion nodded, as if satisfied, and Scipio felt the tension bleed back out of the room and some of the warmth return.
‘Your watch towers and sentries,’ said Iulus, ‘did they detect any vessels capable of delivering an assault of this nature?’
‘No, my lord,’ replied Corporal Vormast, ‘they did not. Once they’d crossed the Sable Sea, we saw no more ships. The greenskins just emerged from the water banks, swarming towards us in their thousands. Vox-casts from Colonel Nachthausser at Arachnis and then Captain Oben at Eusthenos indicated the same pattern before we lost contact…’ The corporal’s voice trailed off, and Scipio imagined the desperate pleas for aid, the gunfire and screaming in the background until static swallowed all sounds of life, and the irrefutable truth that Vormast’s superiors were dead seeped its way insidiously into his marrow.
Iulus fell silent, unaware of the corporal’s grief, instead seeing threads of strategy in his mind’s eye and trying to unravel them to get at the truth of the orks’ lightning raids.
‘We would have seen their ships,’ the man said at last. ‘There’s no way they could have concealed them.’
‘Something else then,’ suggested Scipio. ‘Some bastardised machinery of ork science we have yet to encounter?’
‘Our Techmarines recovered some of the weapons the greenskins used to pierce our slain brothers’ power armour with such ease,’ Veteran Sergeant Daceus remarked. ‘It suggests this Zanzag is no ordinary beast.’
‘It has some mechanical acumen, it would seem,’ Praxor put in, not wishing to be left out of the strategic analysis. ‘Do we know how these crude technologies fare against tactical dreadnought armour?’
Arcus Helios spoke for the first time since entering the chamber. He had removed his Terminator helmet. His head, complete with its shaven crest of white hair bifurcating his otherwise smooth skull, looked absurdly small encased within the massive armoured suit and almost touched the sodium strip lighting.
‘We engaged the greenskin scar-veterans,’ he said, his stentorian voice echoing loudly. His sheer presence and enormous size made the humans balk. ‘Our armour proved impervious. The crux terminatus left us unscathed.’
‘The very fact that the warlord eluded our wrath shows it is a singular beast,’ Praxor remarked.
‘It shows its fortune, its strong survival instinct – that is all,’ said Sicarius.
Scipio thought the captain’s clipped and even tone suggested another emotion: his profound dissatisfaction at allowing the creature to escape him. ‘My spike’ – he recalled Sicarius’s words spoken on the Valin’s Revenge.
‘And luck will always run out, Sergeant Manorian.’
‘Yes sir.’ Praxor rasped the words a little, clearing his throat afterwards as surreptitiously as he could.
‘So then, corporal—’ Sicarius concluded, returning his gaze to the slightly cowering human and his retinue. ‘My quarry?’
‘Your scouts—’ said Vormast, mustering his voice again. ‘Your scouts’ reports match our own intelligence. The few long-range antenna feeds that remain operational monitored the greenskin horde retreating to here,’ – the corporal pointed to the wasteland between Ghospora and its other intact neighbour, Sulphora – ‘where the orks have constructed a series of fortresses from the salvage taken from the sacked hives.’
Sicarius’s face hardened. Scipio thought he saw a brief glint in his eye at the thought of catching up to Zanzag and exacting his revenge for the ork having eluded him the first time.
The dense pitch of Thunderhawk turbofans decelerating to landing speed resonated loudly through the cracks in the prima-factorum building and curtailed further analysis. The transports had arrived right on time.
‘Gather your squads,’ Sicarius muttered darkly, sweeping up his helmet, ‘we deploy for the wasteland at once. Full attack. We’ll teach this alien scum what it means to incur the ire of the Ultramarines.’
‘My lord—’ The Astartes were already walking away when Corporal Vormast spoke up. ‘My own troops are severely reduced in strength, our walls are in tatters,’ he implored. ‘Should the orks return, we will be defenceless.’
‘No servant of the Emperor is ever defenceless, corporal,’ Sicarius told him, deigning to turn and face the man before jamming on his helmet. ‘Faith protects us all.’
‘Of course, my liege,’ the corporal persisted, licking his lips nervously, ‘but—’
‘But you’ll feel better with the might of the Astartes at your back,’ Sicarius interjected, his voice tinny and resonant through his helmet vox. ‘Provision has already been made to galvanise Ghospora, corporal. The Ultramarines will guarantee your protection.’
‘Brother-Sergeant Telion,’ the captain added, turning to the master scout before departing with the other Space Marines.
The blast doors were opening already. Scipio saw Sergeant Solinus waiting there with news of the Thunderhawks’ arrival.
‘Brother-Sergeants Manorian and Fennion.’ Telion’s voice stopped both Astartes in their tracks. ‘The Shield Bearers and the Immortals with Squad Tirian will man the garrison in case the orks return,’ he said without further explanation, before following Sicarius.
Scipio watched Praxor fall into step behind them as he left Sable Gunner Operational Command. The sergeant of the Shield Bearers was crestfallen, his desire to find glory and honour at his captain’s side punctured. It couldn’t have been any worse had Sicarius taken a dagger and plunged it through his heart, Iulus, on the other hand, seemed utterly unmoved. He would simply do his duty, as he always did.
IN SECONDS THE room was empty again, except for Corporal Vormast and his men. He pored over the campaign map, visualising the fallen battlelines, the broken fortifications and the droves of dead troopers sacrificed to stem the ork tide. How many more would it take to rid them of the greenskin menace, he wondered?
‘YOU DIDN’T THINK he would leave you behind, did you, Praxor?’ asked Iulus. He was looking through a pair of magnoculars and scouring the sand storms kicked up in the wake of the Ultramarines’ battle group leaving Ghospora. Together with his enhanced Astartes eyesight and the magnification offered by the device, Iulus could see many kilometres with crystal clarity. The Thunderhawks moved in squadron formation, kicking up plumes of dust as they flew low over the sandy plains. The quartet of deadly gunships conveyed the bulk of the squads, whilst alongside a pair of Storm-variant land speeders soared ahead, carrying Telion and his scouts on advanced reconnaissance.
Gladius led the wing of Thunderhawks. Like its commander, it seemed eager to close with the orks. Somewhere amongst them, though, rode Scipio.
‘Fight well,’ muttered Iulus, ‘and don’t get yourself killed.’
‘Captain Sicarius has entrusted us with this Imperial bastion,’ Praxor replied to Iulus’s earlier remark. ‘We should be honoured
to receive such a charge.’
Praxor did not sound as if he were honoured; his tone smacked heavily of disappointment.
Iulus lowered the magnoculars, passing them to a Sable Gunner sergeant close by. The two Space Marines were standing on the uppermost ramparts of the Ghospora bastion wall right above where the human engineers, under the guidance of the Techmarines, had patched the breach. Iulus was greatly experienced at siege defence, having trained under Captain Lysander himself. It was for this reason he had been left to organise the Ghosporan defence, though, as his superior, Praxor was still technically in charge. Deeming the breach as the point of greatest vulnerability, Iulus had concentrated the Astartes forces there.
Above them, stationed in an armour-reinforced watchtower, stood Sergeant Tirian and his devastator squad. The lofty vantage point offered an unparalleled view of the open ground beyond, a killing field for his heavy weapons.
‘You are a bad liar, brother.’ Iulus’s glare was penetrating as he turned it on Praxor.
‘What glory is there in minding the humans,’ he said at last, in a tone that only Iulus could hear.
‘Sicarius is concerned for his glory alone,’ the stone-faced sergeant replied. ‘His rash and unconsidered deployment to the wastelands is an indicator of that.’ Iulus’s attention was abruptly commanded elsewhere. His eyes narrowed as he looked back out across the sand flats.
‘I wouldn’t worry about your own laurels, Brother Praxor,’ he said after a short pause. A grin split his features as he turned to the other Ultramarine. Like all Space Marines, he was a warrior forged, and exulted in battle. ‘The orks are coming.’ Iulus pointed northwards, towards a glittering black horizon.
Praxor followed the line of the sergeant’s gauntleted finger and saw the smoke clouds of a massive horde of orks heading their way.
‘The warlord split his forces,’ he muttered.
