Black Gulch

by Ben Counter

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  Black Gulch

  Ben Counter

  The scars made it difficult every time. Chapter Master Midnias had donned his armour on the eves of hundreds of battles, but each time the pain reminded him of everything that had gone before. His back was a lattice of ribboned skin separated by ridges of gnarled scar tissue, and they cried out as if they were newly-made as he buckled the breastplate of his power armour. His shoulder pads chafed the raw flesh on his shoulders, and he felt a shiver of new, cold pain as the armour’s interfaces slithered into the ports in the carapace under his skin.

  He opened and closed his hands. It felt like his gauntlets were lined with spikes, for of all the punishments Midnias had endured, the worst had been to his hands.

  This punishment, he told himself, we shall also endure.

  ‘My lord,’ said Scout-Captain Terundel. ‘My outriders bring word of the greenskins on the move. They are heading right for our position.’

  Midnias fastened the demi-cloak around his shoulder. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Their warlord could not hold them back forever. The most potent weapon against the ork is the nature of the ork himself.’

  ‘The first count is seventy thousand,’ continued Terundel. ‘More are landing on the Belishar Flats. Two hundred thousand in number, marching as reinforcements.’

  ‘Then we will have to see our warlord dead before they arrive,’ said Midnias. ‘Draw in the outriders and have them take their places in the line. We will need every gun here.’

  ‘It will be done,’ said Terundel. ‘This we shall endure.’

  ‘This we shall endure.’ Midnias placed the Crown of Obstiria on his brow before he put on his helmet. The crown was a simple spiked band that symbolised how Midnias was both the Chapter Master of the Obsidian Glaives and the Planetary Governor of Obstiria. Not that he ruled anything beyond his Chapter – the planet had seen off every attempt to settle it except for the Glaives themselves.

  Midnias had chosen the shadow beneath an overhang of rock to spend the time before dawn, praying to the spirits of Guilliman, the Emperor and the ancestors of the Obsidian Glaives. It was not quite grand enough to be considered a cave and had afforded just enough shelter to hide him from the eyes of any orkish fighter craft that might pass overhead. He emerged from the overhang into the bleached irradiated light of Obstiria’s sun.

  The knot of rocky ridges and crevasses at the head of Black Gulch was treacherous terrain for anyone but a Space Marine. It was broken and trackless, enough to whittle away an army of normal men who marched across it. But four hundred Obsidian Glaives had set up their battle lines there, with bolters and heavy weapons covering the long dark throat of the gulch.

  Black Gulch was a deep furrow in the surface of Obstiria, a long canyon carved by a glacier in ages past before the planet had drifted closer to its sun. An army marching across Obstiria, from the landing grounds on the high plains to the fortress of Penumbral Spike, would inevitably follow the path of the gulch. Its soldiers would drain into the gulch like water trickling down off the mountainsides around it, and when they came to the broken ground at the western end they would find themselves bottled in, the front ranks struggling across the terrain as the rear ranks bunched forwards into a formless scrum.

  That was the plan.

  Midnias answered the salutes of the Obsidian Glaives on the way to the front line. With the losses at Penumbral Spike, including Captain Seharra, the structure of the Chapter had been compromised and battle-brothers from various companies were set up in fire teams together. Devastator-Captain Keshuma was positioned ahead, lying on his front as he scanned the landscape of the gulch.

  ‘I can smell them from here,’ said Keshuma.

  ‘Can you see it?’ asked Midnias.

  ‘It’s in the heart of them,’ replied Keshuma. ‘It’s got plenty of xenos flesh in front of it. But to these eyes it’s hard to miss.’

  Midnias clambered onto the rock beside Keshuma. The captain hadn’t been exaggerating. The radioactive breeze carried on it the stench of alien sweat and blood. It carried the sound of the xenos too, rhythmic chanting and the churning of throaty engines.

  Black Gulch was full of orks. The mass of green-skinned bodies stretched from one side of the valley to the other, a kilometre and a half of seething, furious xenos killers. For as far as the gulch ran, winding across the jagged mountain ranges back to the flats, it flowed like a green river. Obstiria’s radiation didn’t seem to affect the orks at all. They were difficult to kill.

  Difficult, but definitely not impossible.

  Midnias could pick out the foremost bull-orks. The largest and most brutal of their kind, they had shouldered their way to the front to reach the battle first. They wore the colours and symbols of many tribes – a gouged eye, a clenched fist, a rack of horns, several variations on a skull. Once they had probably been at war with one another on whatever world spawned them. Now they were united and fought as one, most on foot, some from the crudely looted and adapted Imperial tanks that ground along in the middle of the horde.

  They were firing off their guns in celebration of the battle to come. Most orks sought to kill up close but they loved the noise and devastation of gunfire too, and the more powerful of them sported enormous multi-barrelled cannons that competed in the shows of fire and noise they made.

  It was a horde with no discipline or plan, funnelled inevitably down Black Gulch towards the Obsidian Glaives position. It could no more turn back the way it had come than take flight to soar over the mountains.

  ‘It’s working, so far,’ said Keshuma. ‘We’ll only fight a thousand of them at once instead of a hundred thousand.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Midnias, ‘this is not a storm we can weather. It must die. That is the only way.’

  ‘There,’ said Keshuma, pointing.

  Midnias saw it. It towered over the horde, wearing armour that looked like it had been nailed onto its frame: an ork of immense size, its face a mass of scars and its bare bloody fists wrapped with spiked chains. Its brutal skull was crowned with horns, but Midnias could not tell if they were a natural growth or if they, too, had been bolted onto the ork’s skeleton. Its armour was festooned with captured prizes. Whole corpses of Imperial Navy crewmen hung from wooden gibbets fixed to its shoulders. Dozens of skulls rattled on its chest. It was a walking monument to the hatefulness and fury of the ork.

  Grukk. The greenskins called it Grukk. It was the lord of an army that had come to the Sanctus Reach to despoil everything in its way, an army that had to go through the Obsidian Glaives first.

  But it was also the horde’s greatest weakness. Grukk’s underling, Flamegut, had fallen to Midnias at Penumbral Spike, and the orks besieging the fortress had broken. With Grukk’s death this horde, too, would fall apart. If Obstiria was to stand, Grukk had to die, and again it would be Midnias who killed it.

  ‘Lord Midnias! Darkest Hour here.’ Midnias recognised the voice of Captain Draegan of the Second Company, and the vox-echoes that told him the message was coming from the void far above. ‘We are in position in low orbit. Ready to deploy at your mark.’

  Midnias glanced upwards. Against the blue-white sky he could make out a dark splinter. ‘Then stand by,’ said Midnias. He switched vox-nets. ‘Chosen brethren! To me! The battle is too long awaited.’

  The Obsidian Glaives that Midnias had chosen joined him at the front. One of them buckled a jump pack onto Midnias’s back. They included members of Squads Benilar, Voken and Gaerdigan, assault units whose sergeants had been lost in the fighting at Penumbral Spike. It was a tradition among many Chapters for battle-b
rothers who had lost their leaders to form the forlorn hope, the first assault through the breach. Midnias was their squad leader now.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Midnias.

  The assembled Obsidian Glaives saluted. There were eighteen of them in the markings of three different companies. None of them said anything. There was no need to.

  ‘Your objective is the alien known as Grukk,’ said Midnias. ‘With its death, the greenskins fall. Have faith that your brethren will be at your side, but fight as if you fight alone. Keshuma, cover us! Elhalil, ready the charge! Chosen brethren, with me!’

  Midnias stepped forwards. Below, the greenskins let up a cry to see the first Obsidian Glaive standing in their way. They were close enough for Midnias to see the blood-flecked anger in their eyes.

  Midnias leapt off the edge. He activated the jets of his jump pack and his fall was arrested, the momentum switched forward. He hurtled down Black Gulch over the heads of the foremost greenskins. Eighteen Obsidian Glaives were right behind him, the sound of their jump packs like the air itself being torn apart.

  The jump pack would take him far, but not all the way to Grukk. Midnias and his brethren would come down in the middle of the horde. Before Grukk was to fall, there were a great many greenskins to kill.

  It could be strange, the thoughts that came to a mind in the most extreme of circumstances. Even with the sleep-taught discipline of a Space Marine, even with the experience of a Chapter Master, Midnias still had a part of him that was very much human.

  The heat of the jump pack jets behind him was like a slab of hot metal against his back, very much like that of a cramped, stifling cell in the belly of a spacecraft. The brig was next to one of the reactor housings to keep it swelteringly hot. The prisoners kept there would sweat out all their defiance, so when it came to interrogation and sentencing they would admit to any evil in exchange for a glass of water.

  It was Midnias’s first memory. Some Space Marines retained nothing at all of their lives before their recruitment, as sleep-doctrination tended to force out previous memories to be replaced with battle-lore and tracts of the Codex Astartes. Midnias remembered the cell where he had been imprisoned, the prayers of admonition and penance inscribed on the steel walls and the hourly sermons from the brig chaplain. He remembered the manacles on his wrists, ankles and throat.

  His name had not been Midnias then. It did not matter what it was.

  A dark shape had stood in front of the cell door. Midnias was amazed at its size. It seemed too big to fit into the cell block corridor. It wore massive glossy black armour trimmed with white, the image of crossed swords on one shoulder pad. Its helmet had a faceplate in the shape of a skull. The sockets were set with green lenses and the teeth were picked out in silver. It wore a black half-cloak and around its waist were buckled the implements of a priest – books, an hourglass, prayer beads and ritual silver knives.

  ‘You are punished,’ said the armoured giant. It had a low, metallic grind of a voice.

  Midnias looked up at the apparition, but there was no expression to read from the skull. Perhaps this was some strange shipboard tradition. Perhaps this was his executioner, dressed up like a horror from a child’s cautionary tale. Whatever it was, answering it could hardly put him in any worse a spot.

  ‘Executed,’ Midnias said. His throat was raw and hoarse.

  ‘Are you punished enough?’

  Midnias smiled. Cracked lips pulled back over broken teeth. ‘For what I have done?’ he said. ‘No.’

  ‘What if you could be punished?’ said the giant. ‘Not killed here, but to live an entire life of punishment. Not pain, for pain can be adapted to and ignored, but a punishment of service that will never end. Even at your death it will not be finished. A true punishment as befits your crime against the Imperium of Man. What would your answer be?’

  ‘My answer would be, if you have the guts to imagine a worthy punishment then I have the guts to take it on.’

  ‘You see a challenge, then? That is interesting. Perhaps if we grind you down and break you, we can rebuild you into something worthy. Something to stand among the heroes of the Imperium. Perhaps you can be a Space Marine.’

  Midnias looked up at the dark shape, squinting in the half-light to make out the details of the ornate armour. ‘A what?’

  In the press of greenskin flesh it seemed Obstiria was gone, replaced by an endless, hellish plane of ork bodies stretching out forever.

  Midnias hacked left and right with his power sword. Flesh parted and more orks poured through. The air was thick with the stink of their blood. Around him the battle-brothers he had chosen to join him fought to keep up. Some of them had already been left behind in the charge, bogged down fighting the orks who sought to swamp and butcher them with cleavers and jagged blades.

  ‘To me!’ he yelled into the vox as he mounted a low rise and cleared the orks from around him with a wide two-handed sweep of his sword. ‘Form up! We strike as one or we strike not at all!’

  The Obsidian Blades struggled towards him. Behind them, up on the ridge, Captains Keshuma and Elhalil led the battle-line in firing volley after volley into the orks, forcing them back down the gulch and turning the ork advance into a brutal scrum. Grukk could not manoeuvre out of Black Gulch now, not with the entire army backed up around it. It was as vulnerable as a creature like it could be.

  Midnias grabbed an Obsidian Glaive’s hand and hauled him out of the melee. The battle-brother was slick with ork blood. His armour was nicked and scored all over by cleaver blows he had turned aside and his chainblade was almost clogged with stringy ork flesh.

  The Obsidian Glaive’s faceplate turned to the sky. Midnias allowed himself a glance upwards.

  ‘It’s the Darkest Hour,’ he voxed. ‘Our brethren have arrived. Onward, sons of Obstiria! While the horde fights a dozen battles at once, we shall win victory in ours!’

  The other Obsidian Glaives were reaching Midnias’s position. Most of them had made it this far. All of them were covered head to toe in gore. All of them had enough fight left in them for the final stretch.

  The orks would be busy facing the new threats raining down on them from above. Midnias had to strike now. There would never be another chance to save his Chapter.

  He opened up the exhausts on his jump pack. Blue-white flame roared behind him.

  ‘Charge!’ he ordered. As one, his chosen Obsidian Glaives rocketed into the air, making another leap across the horde towards Grukk.

  As the rise receded below him, a strange thought caught light in a corner of Midnias’s mind. He had been here before.

  Black Gulch was one of the few routes by foot into the foothills around Penumbral Spike – a bleak and brutal path, but one that a Space Marine could weather. For someone without the augmentations of an Obsidian Glaive, or whose augmentations had not yet begun to fully function, it was little better than a death sentence.

  Midnias had walked it in the night when the radiation was less severe. Even so it had covered his back, shoulders and newly-shaven scalp with burns that wept and cracked as dawn rose over the mountains.

  There was barely any shelter down there. If a recruit did not find shade from the radioactive sun, he would die. It was that simple. The Obsidian Glaives did not welcome new recruits who were willing to lie down on the scalding rocks and accept their death.

  Midnias shielded his eyes from the early morning rays. He had stumbled almost unthinkingly through the night and only now stopped to take proper stock of his surroundings. The knife-sharp ridges up either side of the gulch were out of the question – even if there was a cave or an overhang up there he would be dead before he reached it. A short stumble away was a rise in the ground, and perhaps on the other side there would be enough of a hollow for him to crawl into and wait out the day.

  His feet left bloody footprints as he walked to the rise. He rounded it to see that the stone overhung enough for a man to roll under it and, perhaps, escape the sun. He could tell this because there
was already a man there.

  Another recruit. Midnias had known he was not alone on this pilgrimage from the flats to the Penumbral Spike, but this was the first fellow he had seen since he had crawled blindly into the glare of the sun upon being dropped from a gunship. Both men had been dropped onto the flats with orders to reach Penumbral Spike, a test that had to be passed before he could call the Obsidian Glaives his brothers and walk amongst them as a Space Marine.

  There was not enough room in the hollow for both of them.

  Midnias caught his heart before it sank.

  He crouched beside the hollow. The recruit noticed him and the two looked at one another. The other recruit – Midnias had never seen him before – was as fit and muscular as Midnias himself, his body just starting to adapt to the new organs promoting bone and muscle growth. His shoulder and face were burned maroon with the sun’s glare. He wore nothing but a loincloth. In all respects he looked just like Midnias himself must have done.

  Midnias grabbed the other recruit’s arm and dragged him out of the hollow. The recruit wrapped an arm around Midnias’s neck and forced his chin down to his chest, trying to cut off his air and throttle him. Midnias kneed the recruit in the groin and pushed him back against the lip of rock. The recruit hit hard and his grip relaxed. Midnias wrenched his head out and drove an elbow into the recruit’s shoulder.

  Bone broke. The recruit sagged. Midnias only had a second. He grabbed the wrist of the wounded arm and twisted it around. The recruit cried out as the broken shoulder bones were torn out of place. Midnias spun on a heel and threw the recruit over his shoulder.

  The recruit fought back. He was staring up at death twofold – Midnias, and the burning sky above. He kicked out at Midnias’s leg and it buckled. Midnias fell on top of the other recruit and they wrestled on the rocks.

  Midnias forced an arm free and drove the heel of his hand into the recruit’s jaw. He felt his bones break. Ripples of pain and numbness ran up his arm. He found his footing and lifted the recruit off the ground, slamming him again into the rock. The recruit growled as he held on and Midnias hit him again, again, until both hands were unfeeling clubs of bloodied bone.