And then, amidst the clamour of battle and the cataclysmic roar of destruction, he heard a voice. “Brother,” it said. “Awake.”
The dull red glow behind the visor of the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus helm pulsed more brightly with every word the Dreadnought spoke. Its voice was phlegmy and cracked from age and lack of use.
“I am sorry, brother, but what did you say?”
A sound like vox-distorted coughing crackled from the ancient. Then the Dreadnought tried again.
“You are on Armageddon, brother,” Jarold replied. “You are here, within the Dead Lands.”
The coughing resumed, rose to a crescendo and then subsided at last.
“No. When is it?” the venerable asked. “My internal chronograph appears to be malfunctioning.”
Techmarine Isendur answered in terms precise to three decimal places.
The Crimson Fist was silent for several long moments.
“How long have you been here, brother?” Jarold dared to ask at last. “Since the conflict began?”
“You mean to tell me that Armageddon has been a contested world all this time?” the venerable said with something like disbelieving incomprehension.
“Yes, since the abomination Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka fell upon this world for a second time.”
“A second time?”
Jarold regarded the ancient suspiciously.
“Tell me, brother, how long have you been trapped here, entombed within the ice?”
Several moments more passed before the venerable was able to speak again. “Fifty years, brother Templar. I have been trapped here, lost, for fifty years.”
The vehicles had been parked up and the massed force of Brother Jarold’s avenging angels had formed a circle of unbreakable armour. All were included, from the newest neophyte to the oldest initiate. The formation of the praying Space Marines served as a barricade against the biting winds that swept across the Dead Lands, stabbing at any exposed flesh with knives of ice. It affected the neophytes—Gervais, Feran, Eadig and Galan—worst, for they were yet to earn the right to wear the full power armour as worn by their brethren and their heads were exposed. But if the freezing wind caused them any discomfort they didn’t show it. Weakness of the flesh was not permitted of a Space Marine.
Brother Jarold stood on one side of the circle and opposite him loomed the Venerable Rhodomanus of the Crimson Fists.
The latter’s crimson and regal blue paintwork was in stark contrast to the predominantly black and white power armour of the Templars—although some of the older, more ornamented suits worn by those veterans among the battleforce were traced with gold and red as well.
The moaning wind whirled flurries of snow around them but over the voice of the blizzard, Brother Jarold’s booming prayers could be heard quite plainly.
“We shall bring down His almighty wrath and fury upon the xenos and drive the greenskin from the face of this planet!” Jarold bellowed. “For the Emperor and the primarch!”
“For the Emperor and the primarch!” his battle-brothers responded with fervent zeal.
“For the Emperor and the primarch,” Venerable Rhodomanus echoed.
Brother Jarold had not needed to ask the ancient whether he would deign to join the Templars on the continuation of their mission. To awaken to a world fifty years into his future and so unchanged despite the passage of time, and yet finding his brother Crimson Fists with whom he had fought shoulder to shoulder against the greenskins gone, the prospect of fighting alongside the Templars had given him a noble purpose. Here was a chance to finish what he and his brothers had started.
For what purpose could there be for a Space Marine, other than eternal service? If he were denied the right to serve Him Enthroned on Holy Terra, a Space Marine’s long life, and all the battles he had fought, everything he had achieved in His holy name would count as naught.
The Black Templars and Crimson Fists—two Chapters formed in the aftermath of the Heresy ten thousand years before—were both successor Chapters of the original Imperial Fists Legion, created from the very genetic material of the Primarch Rogal Dorn. Templar and Fist owed their very existence to the lauded Rogal Dorn, so there had never been any question as to whether Rhodomanus would join the Black Templars of the Solemnus Crusade. They were brothers-in-arms; that was all that mattered.
Brother Jarold surveyed the assembled Templars, the ancient Fist and the ice-clad vista beyond.
“It is time,” he said, scanning the ridge of sickle-shaped peaks on the horizon. “Whatever the source of the anomalous signals detected by the fleet, it lies beyond that ridge. Today we show the greenskins why they should fear us. We let them see why we are fear incarnate. Today we take the fight to the enemy. Today we purge the Dead Lands of the xenos plague that blights this world. Move out!”
Their act of worship concluded, with renewed steel in their hearts, shielded by the armour of their faith as much as by the ceramite of their power armour, the circle broke up as the Space Marines returned to their vehicles. With a roar of mighty engines, like the wrathful prayers of Brother Jarold himself, Ansgar’s Avengers moved out.
The force progressed slowly, so as to never leave the Dreadnoughts far behind. Brother Jarold had deployed into the heart of the Dead Lands by drop-pod and the Templars had not anticipated having another ancient join them in their quest to find the source of the anomalous readings. There was no means of transporting them, other than for them to continue under their own propulsion.
But it still did not take them long to climb the icy slopes of a pass between the jagged obsidian-black peaks. Initiate-pilot Egeslic took his land speeder on ahead, to scout out what lay in wait for them on the other side of the ridge. He returned presently, guiding his speeder deftly over the ice, compensating for wind shear as he descended from the crest of the pass, and brought the vehicle to a hovering halt beside the clumping Dreadnought.
“Brother Jarold,” Egeslic said, “you should see this for yourself.”
“That,” said Techmarine Isendur, pointing into the heart of the crater that had been dug into the ice, “is the source of the anomalous readings.”
From the Space Marines’ position at the mouth of the pass, sheltered by the shadows of the looming wind-scoured ice sculptures that surmounted the ridge in impossible overhangs, Brother Jarold surveyed the rift in the ice below them.
The ork-dug crevasse was a hive of seemingly disorganised industry. Everywhere he looked he saw orks. The foul xenos covered the glacier in a thick, dense green carpet as they swarmed over the dig site, the clamour of their mining machines ringing from the ice walls around them. There were customised digging machines, and other ork vehicles had been pressed into strange service here too. Some of these machines bore banner poles, bearing the iconography that demonstrated the ork tribe’s loyalty. The sight of the Scarred Ork again—the ugly steel-cut tribal glyph bearing a rust red lightning bolt scar that bisected its crude simulacra features—filled Brother Jarold with both righteous satisfaction and indignation in equal measure.
They had found the one tribe that Jarold had hoped they would. The orks labouring within the ice pit were of the Blood Scar tribe. Truly the Emperor was smiling upon their endeavours that day.
But focusing again upon the coarse alien totem Jarold felt rage burn within him like he had not known since the moment the re-constructed war-boss Morkrull Grimskar had made his cowardly escape, taking the body of the Emperor’s Champion Ansgar with him as he teleported out of the mekboy’s crumbling lab smothered within the foetid green depths of the equatorial jungle.
“Is there a teleportation device somewhere here?” Jarold demanded of the Techmarine, watching the waves of green corposant rolling across the underside of the thick clouds that covered the arctic valley. He had to be certain.
“I have recalibrated the signum and fine-tuned the signal, brother,” the Techmarine said. “And there is.”
Excitement pulsed through the husk of Jarold’s mortal remains
locked within the life-preserving amniotic tank of the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus.
Had they really tracked down their long-sought-for quarry at last? Was the warboss here? And if he was, was Brother Ansgar with him?
Jarold gazed down into the crater again and treacherous doubt began to creep between his thoughts of righteousness revenge. But it was not the size of the ork horde that filled Brother Jarold’s mind with appalled awe and wonder but the effigy that they had virtually finished digging out of the solid ice of the glacier that had spilled between the frost-chiselled peaks into this valley like some great frozen and fractured river.
Venerable Rhodomanus saw it too. And remembered.
The war machine. An appalling amalgamation of scavenged weapons and armour, the product of unholy alien engineering and genetically pre-programmed habit, the living embodiment of ork savagery and the relentless desire for war.
The monster—for it was a monster—crashed across the glacier, decimating the Crimson Fists’ frontline. The Space Marines brought their armour and heavy weapons to bear but it was too little compared to the might of the monstrous god-machine that now marched to war before them.
Desperate times called for desperate measures and Rhodomanus had never known them more desperate. Something had to be done to bring about the destruction of this angry god.
And so, supported by his noble brethren Fists, he had strode forth to conquer the beast in one final act of self-sacrifice. His battle-brothers falling one by one at his side, giving their lives—all of them—that he might complete his final mission, weathering shoota, kannon, gatler and a storm of rokkits, the ancient was able to breach the stompa’s shields and place the thermal charges at its very feet.
“The Emperor protects,” he intoned, quietly resigned to his fate.
Then all was white noise, heat and light.
For one brief moment the ice of millennia became a torrent of liquid water again and the blazing stompa sank beneath the sudden waves. The force of the blast hurled Rhodomanus across the sky like a blazing comet and he thought he heard the Emperor calling him to serve at his side in the next world…
“The idol lives,” Rhodomanus breathed.
It was clear to all—and not just Techmarine Isendur’s practised eye—that the orks had finished carving the remains of the war machine from the body of the glacier and were now busy attempting to re-activate it; re-fuelling it, testing its growling motive systems and firing off bursts of random weapons-fire from its many and varied weapon emplacements.
There was a hungry roar of pistons firing and thick billows of greasy black smoke gouted from the proliferation of smoke-stacks and exhaust flues that rose from the back of the alien war idol.
“That, I take it, is not the source of the signal we have been tracking, is it?” Jarold quizzed the Techmarine standing beside him.
“No, brother. That is.” Isendur pointed with his power axe.
“I see it,” Rhodomanus said.
Jarold looked again, refocusing his optical sensors, and then he saw it too.
It was a vast assemblage of iron beams and girders, crackling brass orbs and endless spools of cabling. It was supported by an immense scaffold and yet the whole massive structure had been hidden by the blizzard and the bulk of the ork effigy standing before it.
The device culminated in a huge gun-barrelled probe that Jarold imagined to be a beam transmitter, supported on strong gantry arms.
“By Sigismund’s sword!” Jarold gasped.
“Its designation in this warzone is an ork teleporter, I believe,” Isendur said.
“We should warn the fleet,” Jarold said. “We cannot allow the xenos filth continued access to such weaponry or technology,” he added as he pondered the matter in hand. It was clear to Jarold now that the orks intended to teleport their scavenged stompa out of the ice-locked Dead Lands to be used on another war front and bolster their forces there. Such a reinforcement could turn the tide of battle in the orks’ favour. Such a thing could not be allowed to happen.
“Yes, brother,” Isendur replied.
Tense moments later, with Jarold watching the heavens as if he expected the Divine Fury to deliver a thunderbolt directly from heaven against the stompa, the Techmarine made his report. “The interference being generated by the teleporter that we detected from orbit is now preventing my signal from getting through to the crusade fleet,” he said, delivering his bad tidings without any obvious emotion.
They were alone down there.
“We are going to have to deal with the stompa and the teleporter ourselves,” Rhodomanus declared. “We cannot allow the greenskins to make it away from here with their idol intact. It is against the will of the Emperor.”
“Then we shall face the enemy in battle once again; fight them hand to hand if that is what it takes,” Jarold said, his assault cannon whining as it began to run up to speed. “Just the way we like it.”
With the roar of bike engines and heavy armour running at maximum speed, the Black Templars poured through the ridge pass and into the carved crevasse in the ice before the orks had any warning as to what was happening.
“No pity! No remorse! No fear!” Brother Jarold boomed as he tramped down the glacial slopes towards the great ork-gouged hole, the toe-hooks of his Dreadnought feet locking him securely in place on the treacherous ice.
“There is only the Emperor!” Rhodomanus joined, urging the crusading Space Marines on. “He is our shield and our protector!”
First came the bikes and attack bikes, pouring over the lip of the ridge, past the clumping Dreadnought.
Then came the Razorbacks and the Rhinos, the heavy armour grinding over the ice of the glacier, pounding it to shards beneath their tracks, heavy bolter fire riddling both the ice sheet and those orks that had mustered enough awareness to try to do something about the approaching Space Marines.
The land speeder squadron hurtled over the ridge after the rest of the Templar armour past the advancing battleforce, the whub-whub-whub of their engines thrumming through the ice, the Tornado’s assault cannon rattling off hard rounds into the milling orks as they hurried to respond to this new threat.
With a whooshing roar, the Typhoon fired off a barrage of missiles. The rockets corkscrewed through the air and impacted in a series of scathing detonations amidst the moving ork armour. Bodies, armour plating and wheels were thrown into the air to land in broken burning piles.
With a searing scream, the lascannon mounted on Techmarine Isendur’s Razorback fired, a blinding spear of light burning through the constant snow flurries and illuminating the crevasse like an incendiary shell-burst. A moment later the crater was illuminated again as an ork halftrakk exploded in a sheet of flame, the las-blast having hit both its fuel tank and the rokkits loaded into the back of it.
There was the crack and crump of frag grenades detonating amidst the greenskin horde, and orks fell in their dozens.
Some of the orks had climbed aboard their trukks and bikes again. They revved their engines as they turned their vehicles to face the oncoming Black Templars armour.
The orks were rallying. Jarold’s crusaders had made the most of the advantage that stealth and the blessings of the Emperor had brought them but now the enemy were starting to organise a cohesive defence.
As war trukks and heavy orkish bikes began to converge on the advancing Templar armour, those battle-brothers piloting the fleet’s venerated vehicles urged them forwards, Techmarine Isendur making supplication to the Omnissiah in the same unmodulated tone, over and over.
At the bottom of the crater, in the shadow of the dug-out idol, the two sides met with a roar of over-revving engines and the scream of shearing metal. Sparks flew, armour plating buckled, axles sheared and fuel tanks ruptured. Orks were thrown over the hulls of Rhinos and land speeders. Milling grots were crushed under the tracks of Rhinos and ork bikes alike. Others among the horde were gunned down by the blazing, blessed bolters of the Templars, the ork guns unable to matc
h the reliability or accuracy of the Space Marines’ arsenal.
But despite their primitive design there was one thing that the ork guns had over the Templars’ weapons; there were more of them. Far more. It was becoming painfully apparent that the Templars were drastically outnumbered, at least twenty to one. Although the Emperor’s chosen were renowned for their fighting prowess, those were odds that tested even a Space Marine. There was a very real danger that sheer weight of numbers would see them overwhelmed, if the orks were able to unify their attack.
But Brother Jarold—now part of the rearguard, finishing off those greenskins that had evaded the Templars’ guns—had realised this would be the case before he had committed his fighting force to this action.
It was clear that the Blood Scar orks were planning on teleporting the stompa from this location, to deploy elsewhere on Armageddon. Jarold’s plan had always been to infiltrate the dig site and bring down the war-effigy or, failing that, seize and hold the colossal ork teleporter until Isendur found a way to destroy it.
With a scream of failing engines, Initiate-Pilot Egeslic’s land speeder ploughed into the surface of the glacier: an ork shokk attack gun had made a lucky hit. A gaggle of snarling boyz piled onto the downed speeder, burying Egeslic and Initiate-gunner Fraomar beneath a flurry of thumping axes and stabbing serrated knives.
The two Rhinos slewed to a halt in the middle of the crater, dropped their hatches and the troops they were carrying poured out in a tide of funereal black and gleaming white. Boltguns barking and chainswords screaming, they met the milling rabble head on. They might be outnumbered, but they were in the thick of battle, which was the only place where a Templar might hope to win his honour-badges.
Venerable Rhodomanus’ multi-melta pulsed, and a swarm of orks died as their blood boiled and their own bodily fluids broiled their internal organs.
The ice field was lit up again, this time as a sphere of actinic light exploded into life like a miniature sun at the periphery of the Templar lines. The explosion pushed a great wave of concussive force before it as the land speeder Typhoon and its remaining payload of missiles were obliterated by a direct hit from the stompa’s now active deth kannon.
Legends of the Space Marines Page 14
