The Cost of Command

by Sandy Mitchell

  Lanthus stood still for a moment, allowing the thing to get back on balance, and sent a couple of bolter-rounds ricocheting from the beast’s thick armoured skull. Provoked beyond endurance, the creature roared a challenge, and charged straight towards him, thick strands of drool trailing from the corners of its mouth to mingle with the noxious ichor dripping from its wounds.

  He timed it perfectly, pivoting aside at the last possible instant. The beast barrelled past him, its scaly hide abrading a layer of encrusted filth from his armour, and slammed into the wall, embedding itself in the hatch they’d so recently climbed through, bending and tearing the thick metal around the sill as it rammed itself home. Jagged edges ripped into its rounded flanks, releasing more trickles of blood, but it thrashed wildly nonetheless, lacerating its own flesh in its determination to be free and renew the attack.

  As Lanthus turned aside, Beves fired the missile launcher. The krak warhead penetrated the monster’s armoured hide easily, detonating in a shower of bile and viscera.

  ‘Good shoo–’ Lanthus began, only to be interrupted by a massive fireball, which ripped through the chamber. The detonation had touched off the noxious fumes from the sump, now mixed with the oxygen in the air around them to create a lethally volatile mixture.

  Lanthus felt himself lifted from his feet and hurled across the room, amid a shower of deadly shards from the ruptured tank. Huge chunks of masonry plummeted from the ceiling, bouncing and cracking against the floor. One of the largest pieces pulverised the rockrete where Prius had been lying only a moment before, an instant after Kurtin dragged him to the safety of the tunnel mouth. Through his ringing ears, Lanthus heard both battle-brothers thanking the primarch for their deliverance. Beves had made it to the refuge too, protecting his heavy weapon from the hail of smaller detritus with the bulk of his armoured back.

  ‘What was that?’ Aldwyn’s voice echoed from the helmet vox. ‘It sounded like an explosion.’

  ‘It was,’ Lanthus said, rising to his feet. The other members of his combat squad were standing too, he was relieved to see, although everyone’s armour was pitted with impact marks, and Prius’ left shoulder was moving awkwardly where the creature’s first charge had damaged the joint. ‘No casualties.’ He looked around the chamber. The corridor down which Aldwyn and his group had disappeared was blocked by tonnes of rubble; neither combat squad would be able to come to the aid of the other now. ‘Proceed to the objective. We’ll rendezvous there.’

  The route to the gate controls led through a labyrinth of corridors, tunnels and chambers, every one of which bore the scars of desecration by the greenskin invaders. The closer they got to their objective, the more of the foul creatures there seemed to be, swarming in uncountable numbers, the noise of their quarrelling frequently interrupted by brief bursts of violence. In and around the milling orks the gretchin scuttled, even more numerous than their bulkier cousins, forever bickering among themselves and evading the anger of their hulking masters.

  Despite the burning desire he felt to visit the vengeance of the Emperor on every enemy they saw, Lanthus held his own feelings, and those of the men he led, firmly in check, conscious that every metre they gained before discovery would improve their chances of success. From half-forgotten gantries and service conduits he observed their enemies at a distance, avoiding detection by a hair’s breadth over a score of times, only giving the order to shed blood when it could be done silently. The greenskins that died, marking their passage with a trail of cadavers, did so in ones and twos, falling victim to the razor-edged crystal shards of the Astral Knights rather than being reaped in droves by their bolters.

  It came as no surprise to him that Aldwyn advanced with far less circumspection, carving his way up from the underhive in a hail of bolter shells. The distant echoes of his progress could be heard reverberating through the corridors and service shafts, and many of the orks Lanthus’ combat squad encountered were hurrying in the direction of the noise, so intent on throwing themselves into the fray that they never even noticed the four Astral Knights crouching in ambush mere metres away. The larger groups Lanthus let go, only giving the order to attack when he and his men had the advantage of numbers as well as surprise on their side.

  None of them liked these tactics, he could tell, but then neither did he. Only once did anyone venture to object, after a group of half a dozen greenskins had hurried by and disappeared into the darkness of the corridor ahead blithely unaware of how close they’d come to death.

  ‘Surely we could have taken them,’ Beves said, secure in the neophyte’s privilege of asking for clarification of established procedures in the squad he’d just joined, although the statement had been phrased with only just enough of the inflection of a question to avoid an accusation of insubordination. Prius and Kurtin nodded, almost imperceptibly, making their own reservations known. ‘One burst would have…’

  ‘Brought the greenskins down on us as hard as they’re harrying Aldwyn,’ Lanthus said, making it clear the subject was closed. ‘There’ll be fighting enough when we reach the gates, I can promise you. But the mission comes first.’

  ‘Of course, brother-sergeant,’ Beves said, accepting the self-evident truth, but the reluctance with which he did so was all too clear.

  After such slow and frustrating progress, the first sight of their objective almost came as a surprise. Even more so, Lanthus thought grimly, than the fact that they’d made it this far without bringing an entire army of greenskins down on their necks. He held up a hand to stop the battle-brothers at his back.

  ‘We’re there,’ he said, edging to the mouth of the service tunnel which had brought them so close. A thick grille closed it off from the wide piazza, almost a kilometre across, which, in happier times had been a place of commerce and leisure, affording the combat squad he led a measure of much-needed concealment. Traffic in and out of the central hive had once congregated here, just within the gates, attracting innumerable traders, cargo brokers, guns for hire and pickpockets. Now it swarmed with orks and gretchin, snarling and squealing at one another, and, inevitably, coming to blows or casual slaughter. Not all the weapons fire Lanthus could hear seemed directed over the walls at the besieging Astral Knights beyond, and he smiled grimly, content to let the bestial creatures thin one another out a little more before commencing the job himself.

  In the distance, across the heaving mass of greenskin bodies, he could see two thick bronze doors, each twenty metres wide and twice that high, set in the far wall. Above them, the wide walkway was even more crowded with orks than the main concourse, fighting and struggling to reach a vantage point from where they could blaze away ineffectually at the rest of the company, which by now would be dug in just beyond the gates, eager to carry the fight to the invaders as soon as Squad Lanthus completed its mission. More than one greenskin failed in the attempt to gain the overcrowded ramparts, falling instead to a messy death, to the loudly evident amusement of the others.

  ‘We can see the gates,’ Lanthus voxed. ‘Combat Squad Two, location and status?’

  ‘Still two levels to go,’ Aldwyn voxed back. ‘Meeting heavy resistance.’ His words were interrupted by a burst of bolter fire, probably his own. ‘We’ve lost Spaets, but everyone else is still standing.’ The sound of firing intensified. ‘We’ll be with you as soon as we can.’

  ‘It won’t be easy getting through that many,’ Beves said speculatively, gazing out over the sea of orks, hefting his missile launcher as he spoke.

  ‘We won’t have to,’ Lanthus said, indicating a nearby staircase. ‘The control chapel’s up there.’ The lowest tread was barely a hundred metres from where they stood, but three or four score orks were milling around between them and it, passing the time in their usual fashion, with food and casual violence. The stairway had once been as elegant as its prominent position demanded, bannistered with marble filigree, incorporating finely-chiselled images of the aquila and an assortm
ent of local saints, but now much of the intricate carving had been shattered into fragments and dust.

  ‘Ready to move on your signal, brother-sergeant,’ Prius said, standing aside from the metal grille, and holding up a detonator. Strips of det tape now wound their way around the steel bars, and as soon as he pressed the activation rune, the resulting explosion would sever them simultaneously.

  ‘Wait,’ Lanthus said, his eyes on the greenskins. A visible change was creeping over them, one or two breaking off their argument to listening to something all but inaudible, and a couple of others were sniffing the air. Gradually, they began to cluster together, the sparks of aggression between them dying out, to be replaced by something else, harder and more focused.

  ‘Waaaaaaaaaaagh!’

  With a sudden bellow Lanthus could feel vibrating in his bones, the whole group suddenly began to move, charging away in what seemed to be a single mass of ork flesh.

  ‘Combat Squad Two, you’ve another mob heading your way,’ Lanthus voxed. How the greenskins had sensed the distant firefight he had no idea – perhaps they’d heard the bolter fire, or been drawn towards it by their innate affinity for conflict. But, in being impelled to respond, they had left the way clear for the party of Space Marines to reach their objective.

  ‘Acknowledged.’ Aldwyn’s voice held an uncharacteristic edge of tension. ‘But we’re hard pressed already. Klymer’s down too.’

  ‘Hold as long as you can,’ Lanthus said, and signalled to Prius to detonate the charges.

  The explosion echoed hollowly along the service duct, but Prius had placed them well, and the heavy metal lattice fell out and away, crushing a couple of stray gretchin whose reflexes had been outstripped by the speed of the blast wave.

  Even before the grille had come to rest, Lanthus was out of the duct, his bolter barking, confident that his companions would be hard on his heels. Stunned gretchin scattered, squealing, or exploded into mist as his bolter-rounds detonated, carving a bloody path through their obstructing bodies towards the all-important stairway. Prius and Kurtin were firing as well, driving the smaller greenskins back from their flanks, and after a moment Beves’ missile launcher coughed too. The rocket detonated ahead of them on the stairs, its frag charge hurling out a whirlwind of deadly flechettes, which cleared the lower flight of everything except cadavers and body parts.

  Inevitably, the orks closest to the carnage began to notice the new threat as soon as the firing started, breaking off from their headlong charge towards Aldwyn’s beleaguered combat squad, and turning back to face it. Crude stubber rounds began to rattle from the Astral Knights filth-encrusted armour, scoring bright slashes and pockmarks in the dried sludge, though many more missed their mark than hit it. In their eagerness to engage the Space Marines, the ork gunners cut down almost as many of the intervening gretchin as Lanthus and his men.

  ‘Guards!’ Beves warned, as a group of orks appeared at the top of the stairs and began to charge downwards, brandishing their heavy axes, trampling the gretchin trying to flee upwards as they came. Lanthus dropped them all with a single burst of bolter fire that blew apart their legs. Carried onward by momentum and gravity, they collapsed, bounced, and continued down the staircase in an avalanche of flesh. The Astral Knights hurdled the toppling, roaring bodies without breaking stride, and the luckless greenskins carried on to the bottom of the flight, skittling the first group of orks to have started upwards in pursuit.

  ‘Secure the stairs,’ Lanthus ordered, and the bolters of Kurtin and Prius began a continuous roaring, which all but drowned out the war cries of the enraged ork warriors below, sweeping the treads clear of the vanguard. Beves placed a couple of frag rounds further back, taking out a brace of other groups which had begun charging across the concourse to join the fight.

  ‘We can’t hold them for long,’ Beves said, and Lanthus could see at once he was right. Despite the disruption the carefully placed warheads were causing, preventing them from coalescing into a single unified swarm, the greenskins were advancing inexorably, like the tide up a slipway, each wave reaching higher than the last before being swept clear by the disciplined bolter fire. If it hadn’t been for the steadily growing pile of the dead and dying impeding their progress, the orks might well have been on them already.

  ‘We won’t have to,’ Lanthus assured him, sprinting towards the control chapel at the end of the balcony. Once it had been glassed in, allowing the tech-priests who tended the mechanica it housed to observe the gates they controlled, and richly decorated with devotional icons of the Cult Mechanicus; now the glass was shattered, and the embossed cogwheels battered or ripped away. Crude modifications had been made to the control lecterns, no doubt intended to simplify them to the point where they made sense to the average orkish intellect, and Lanthus had no difficulty in deducing their operation. He slammed home the heavy levers, muttering the benedictions provided for him by the company Techmarine, and breathed a silent, additional prayer to the Emperor.

  For a moment, nothing seemed to happen, then a loud grinding echoed across the plaza, drowning out even the bellowing of the orks, and the roaring of the Astral Knights bolters.

  ‘Set the charges,’ Lanthus ordered, and Beves hurried to obey, attaching small packs of explosive to the control lecterns. ‘Detonate as soon as they’re fully open.’

  As he re-emerged onto the balcony, he could already see movement by the opening gates, and magnified the image in his helm: Rhinos and Land Raiders were swarming through the widening gap, firing as they came, sweeping all before them in a blizzard of explosive and incendiary death. Behind them, the smaller figures of the Assault and Tactical squads were visible, dispersing smoothly to their assigned objectives, the greenskins falling back in the face of their well-disciplined advance.

  ‘They’re breaking,’ Prius reported from the top of the stairs, and Lanthus saw that it was true: most of the orks still clustered around the foot of the staircase were turning away, galvanised by this new and potent threat, charging to meet it with the beserker fury of their kind. The few too steeped in bloodlust to follow them, remaining determined to engage the small party of Space Marines above, fell almost instantly to the disciplined bolter fire of the Astral Knights, and for a few brief moments Lanthus found himself a mere spectator to the slaughter. Then the boom of the demolition charges echoed across the balcony, the sharp sound swallowed almost instantly by the clamour of the battle raging below, and a plume of smoke billowed from the shattered control chapel.

  ‘Objective secure,’ Lanthus voxed to Captain Galad, savouring a moment of pride in the fulfilment of his duty, then opened a command channel to Aldwyn. No doubt his hot-headed subordinate was as relieved at the success of their mission as he had been. ‘Combat Squad Two, status report.’

  Nothing but the hiss of static answered him. After a moment, he tried Klymer, then all the others in turn, even Spaets, the first to fall. The same lack of response greeted him every time.

  ‘Could we have lost them all?’ Beves asked, clearly unwilling to believe it. Lanthus shook his head with an assurance he didn’t feel.

  ‘We’ll know when we find them,’ he replied, leading the way back to the head of the stairs. There could well be survivors, and even if there weren’t, their gene-seed would have to be recovered. Trying not to believe the worst, he led the way back down the stairs, kicking the obstructing ork corpses aside as he went. But he’d made the right decision, he told himself. The mission always came first.

  As the last greenskin cadaver rolled out of the way, he caught sight of something plodding towards them, a single figure, too far from the battle-brothers still pouring in through the wide-open gates to be one of them. An Astral Knight nonetheless, the blue and yellow of his armour almost invisible beneath its coating of filth and ork blood. His helmet was off, hanging from one hand, its visor smashed. Wearing it, the Space Marine would have been blind.

  ‘Aldwy
n.’ Lanthus stepped forward to greet him with a surge of relief, then hesitated, reading the fury in his battle-brother’s eyes. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘They’re dead.’ The accusation was short and venomous. ‘We were a diversion, weren’t we? That’s why you separated the combat squads.’

  Lanthus’ momentary silence was all the confirmation the enraged Space Marine needed. In truth, he hadn’t been entirely certain that Aldwyn’s combat squad would distract the orks from the objective for the crucial few seconds which had ensured his success, but, given their leader’s impulsive character, he’d felt it more likely than not that they’d engage the enemy before reaching it. ‘The mission comes first,’ he said. ‘And we succeeded. The losses were acceptable.’

  ‘Not to me.’ Aldwyn’s face grew even darker, holding his rage close, nursing it into white heat. ‘Now is not the time.’ He turned, gunning down a wounded ork which had tried to raise its weapon, then swung back to face Lanthus anew. ‘But there will be a reckoning, brother-sergeant.’ He spat out the rank like an insult. ‘This I swear.’

  Lanthus felt the tide of the duel flowing inexorably in his direction. Strike after strike had failed to connect, and Aldwyn’s frustration was blazing out of him, bright as a plasma flare. Soon, Lanthus knew, it would overwhelm him, impel him to some desperate act, and the fight would be over.

  No sooner had the thought come, than the act followed. Lanthus feinted, opening his guard in a way a cooler opponent would surely have recognised as a ruse, but all Aldwyn saw was a chance to strike at his hated enemy. He took it, stabbing upward at the exposed nerve cluster beneath Lanthus’ armpit, but Lanthus moved in towards him, trapping Aldwyn’s elbow against his arm, keeping his opponent’s shard too far behind him to cut. He brought up his knee, hard, into the pit of Aldwyn’s stomach, and the Space Marine fell, winded, to the sand. An audible ripple of indrawn breath echoed around the arena from the tiered seats surrounding it, but Lanthus refused to be distracted.