by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons
He felt the pull, as if there were a chain attached to his body that was being hauled on by Cassius. Donatus wanted very much in that moment to sprint into the open, to get face to face with the greenskin and deliver to it the justice of Macragge.
Among the Ultramarines massing behind Cassius was Brother Adelmo, who had been split off from the Sternguard and was now ready to join Cassius’ charge. Donatus felt a twinge of envy, for Adelmo could let himself be dragged forward by the pull of Cassius’ words, he could abandon the prohibitions that came with serving in the Sternguard and fully indulge his hatred for the greenskins.
‘Back him up!’ ordered Tatianus. ‘Keep the greenskins’ heads down, but do not expose yourselves to fire!’
‘Who will spurn the fight this day?’ cried Cassius as he ran, an ork rocket spiralling past him. ‘Who will wish his armour clean of xenos blood?’ The strike force followed him, firing as they ran, the storm of ork fire hammering in return almost hiding them from Donatus’ sight.
‘Eyes north, brothers!’ came Brother Otho’s voice, distorted by the gunfire and the whine of his gunship’s engines over the vox-net. ‘The forge opens!’
Donatus spotted the gunship overhead, weaving between columns of fire. The orks had fortified the landing pad with far more firepower than the Ultramarines had anticipated, and it had robbed them of their support from the air, but at least Otho had been able to use his eyes even if his guns were quiet.
Donatus ran to the end of the cluster of pipes, leaning around to look towards the northern edge of the landing pad, the cityward side where the forge walls rose like the bulwarks of a fortress. A massive set of doors was swinging open, and the ruddy glow of its fires bled out.
A vast shape was silhouetted in the opening doorway. It was a barrel-shaped machine, easily twenty metres tall, that crunched forwards on a set of enormous tracks. Even at this distance, above the storm of gunfire, Donatus could hear the throb of its engines and the awful grinding of its tracks. Diminutive greenskins scrambled all over its surfaces or scurried out of its way.
The machine was a bizarre representation of an ork, like an idol of some savage greenskin god. On top of the body was a leering face of sheet metal with open portholes for eyes, and banners and totems stood in a steel forest across its shoulders. Its body was covered in blackened armour plates filthy with the smoke of the forge, and greenskin riggers still hammered the rivets which held it all together. One of the machine’s arms was a gigantic claw with each of the three fingers covered in spinning cutting blades. The other arm was a cannon so big it was a miracle that the whole machine did not topple over. More skinny greenskins slave-creatures worked the ammunition hoppers on its shoulder to load a man-sized artillery shell into the breech.
‘It’s a gargant,’ voxed Donatus. ‘The greenskins have a gargant. Cassius! Brothers! Fall back, they have a war machine headed your way!’
The Ultramarines had fought the orks since the glorious days of the Great Crusade, for the greenskins were one of mankind’s oldest and most persistent enemies. The orks possessed, in spite of their apparent savagery, some natural talent for engineering, as evidenced by the heavily armoured specimen Donatus had killed in the chapel. Their finest engineers flocked to major war zones like Skemarchus, and would pool their skills to forge enormous war machines such as the one now grinding its way across the spaceport’s landing pad.
That was why the orks had taken Skemarchus – to create machines such as this one. The Imperial war effort was to take the city back before the orks could repurpose its forges, but at this one at least, they were too late.
A rocket burst just behind Cassius, throwing two Ultramarines off their feet – Donatus was sure that Adelmo was one of them. The Chaplain was almost at the control tower, bringing the rest of the force in his wake. He looked up at the war machine now advancing from the forge, and at the cannon being levelled right at him.
‘Do you see their blasphemy, brothers?’ cried out Cassius. ‘They fear the divine right of mankind, and to face us they have crafted a graven image of–’
The cannon roared.
A split second later, a huge shell slammed into the base of the control tower. A blackened plume of debris and smoke ripped out of it as the lower floors were pulverised by the explosive impact. The ork gunners and their anti-aircraft artillery were swallowed by the explosion and the tower toppled, its shattered windows like the black eyes of a skull.
Cassius and most of the strike force were swallowed in the wash of smoke. Secondary explosions crackled through the impact zone as ammunition cooked off.
‘Chaplain!’ Tatianus shouted into the vox. ‘Speak, brother! Do you yet live?’
‘Adelmo!’ called Donatus. ‘Brother Adelmo, speak!’
There was no reply from his fallen squadmate.
Donatus saw gunports opening up all over the ork gargant’s body. Heavy mounted guns stuttered fire upwards, replacing the anti-aircraft guns lost moments ago.
Donatus leaned around the corner of the pipe junction and lifted his preysense scope to his eye. The multi-spectrum sight picked out fires burning in the smoky darkness, and hot shards of shrapnel studding every surface. Sundered corpses lay scattered around, their body temperatures registering as a fading glow – the remains of orks caught directly in the explosion. A few forms in the familiar shape of power armour lay on the ground while others moved through the darkness, retreating in good order back towards the machine sheds.
Ultramarines were disciplined. It was that which defined them. When even the bravest men and women of the Astra Militarum would be ruled by confusion and panic, the Ultramarines were still soldiers. That was what kept them alive as the orks tried to capitalise, the greenskins firing their heavy weapons at random through the smoke.
‘There,’ said Donatus, focusing on a figure that wore no helmet, propped up on one arm as it tried to get to its feet. ‘The Chaplain’s alive.’
‘He does not answer,’ said Tatianus.
‘I see him,’ said Donatus. ‘His comm-link must be down. He’s injured.’
The surviving orks were emerging from the ruin of the control tower. Dozens of them had survived, and more were running to the centre of the battlefield. Orks loved violence and destruction so the flame and smoke were magnets to them, promising them dying and wounded humans to kill.
Sergeant Senekus was taking the lead, forming the Ultramarines up into firing parties. Within seconds, bursts of bolter fire were scything into the orks, blowing limbs from bodies and ripping torsos open.
‘Firebase, brothers!’ ordered Tatianus. Felidus and the sergeant were up on the pipework, lending their own volleys to the crossfire that cut down the orks trying to charge through the blast zone.
‘Who will bring in the young Chaplain?’ asked Felidus between bursts from his heavy bolter.
‘I will,’ said Donatus. ‘I can see him in my scope. The greenskins, too.’
The gargant’s savage junk metal face loomed above the billows of smoke. The greenskin riggers were fighting to reload the cannon, forcing out the massive spent shell to load a new one. One of the gargant’s eyes was thrown open like a hatch to reveal the ork driver, its gurning face surmounted by a pair of crude bionic eyes like mismatched goggles. It leaned out, clearly trying to get a better view of the battlefield. Then it pointed down at the Ultramarines sheltering behind the coolant pipes and yelled an order to its unseen subordinates.
‘Displace!’ ordered Tatianus. The Sternguard and the other Ultramarines around them ran from behind the pipework as the cannon swivelled to face them. Brother Vibius supported Scevola again, Scevola blasting fire at the orks as he leaned on Vibius’ shoulder.
A few scattered chunks of wreckage lay nearby, offering little more shelter than a soldier’s foxhole. It was the remains of a crashed lander, brought down in the early days of the invasion. A band of fleeing citizens must have died inside as ork fire brought the shuttle down, leaving scorched sections of its cockpit and pa
ssenger compartment smouldering on the landing pad.
Donatus slid into the cover of the shuttle cockpit as the gargant’s cannon erupted. The pipework disappeared in another burst of flame and smoke, and a mane of coolant spurted up high into the sky. The shockwave shuddered the rockcrete floor and gobs of coolant spattered down like greasy rain.
The smoke was clearing from around the tower. The tower had fallen completely, the length of it a sprawl of shattered rubble spilled across the landing pad. A scattering of Ultramarines lay unmoving, the blue of their armour masked by the dust of pulverised rockcrete, and Donatus recognised the battle-honours clustered on Brother Adelmo’s chestplate. Chaplain Cassius was similarly caked in dust, but he was propped up on one arm. His bare head glistened crimson with blood.
A chunk of masonry had landed on his leg, pinning him in place. Cassius was trying to tear himself free but the weight wasn’t budging. A dazed ork wandered out of the smoke and Cassius put two rounds into its chest without aiming. Another ork loomed forwards carrying a heavy blade with whirring chain-teeth along its leading edge. The Chaplain blasted a gout of flame from the nozzle beneath the bolter’s barrel and the ork howled, stumbling as it tried to bat out the liquid fire engulfing its body.
Donatus broke cover. He ran towards Cassius and jumped into a shallow crater. The rockcrete was hot and smoking beneath him as he ducked beneath a volley of ork fire. Everywhere was bedlam and smoke, and only the discipline of the Ultramarines forged any order from the madness. Felidus’ heavy bolter chattered behind him, forcing the orks to take cover, keeping a few more guns off Donatus as he advanced.
He made it to the length of the fallen tower, the crumbled masonry offering him solid cover against the orks. Cassius was a short sprint away, but the shadow of the gargant’s cannon passed over him and he realised it might as well be a thousand miles. Adelmo lay further beyond, still unmoving.
More orks advanced on Cassius. Donatus shot one down with a round to the throat and Cassius shot another through the knee. The greenskin fell and was finished off by a second round from Cassius’ bolter.
The gargant levelled its cannon at Cassius. The riggers had almost finished reloading another shell into the red-hot breech. Cassius tried again to force the weight off his immobile leg, but it would not budge.
‘You told me that one bullet would turn the battle,’ called Cassius, glancing over at Donatus. ‘I will show you how one can turn a war. The veterans of the Sternguard think they have seen all of battle, but you still have much to learn. See how one shot stokes a fire in the hearts of our brethren that will never go out!’
Cassius pushed himself up to a sitting position and aimed his bolter at the steel cliff face of the gargant’s hull.
‘Defiance, brothers!’ he yelled. ‘Thus, do I spit upon the works of the alien!’
Cassius fired a single shot. It pinged off the gargant’s armour. An act of pure defiance, a final insult to the foe. Even at the moment of death, Chaplain Cassius was inflaming the rage of his battle-brothers. Every Ultramarine there would remember that shot, that defiance. They would speak of it, write of it, have the artisans of Macragge work it into chapel windows and the illuminators ink it into the Chapter’s volumes of battle-lore.
Cassius was right. Donatus had much to learn. He had never before heard a cheer like the one that went up over the vox as the Ultramarines watched the Chaplain curse the orks with his single, futile bolter shell.
Donatus vaulted over the section of the broken tower. Orkish gunfire spattered and cracked around him. He lead with his shoulder as he ran, taking two rounds on the shoulder guard and another on the armour of his thigh.
He grabbed one of the magazines mag-locked to his waist as he ran. He rejected the Kraken penetrator shell, even though it might have punched through the weaker armoured eye-hatch of the gargant. It might have found the driver, or some critical system – a fuel cell, a reactor shield – to set off a chain reaction. It was possible, but unlikely.
The Metal Storm shells were perfect for ripping through exposed ork flesh, but the riggers on the cannon had finished loading and, even if they were reduced to a gory mist, the gargant would still fire.
Instead, Donatus took out a single Dragonfire shell and loaded it into his bolter. He backed against the slab of masonry that was pinning Cassius to the ground. The barrel of the gargant’s gun was aimed right at him, forming a staring black eye with a pupil of fire.
‘Sometimes, Brother-Chaplain,’ he said, ‘defiance is not enough.’
Donatus took aim, the preysense scope cutting through the haze of smoke and dust.
An army of orks possessed a cunning that had slain far too many of the men who had underestimated it. The greenskins had, after all, taken Skemarchus and turned its forges to their own use, churning out war machines to continue their conquest of this planet and the sector beyond.
But that was an army. An individual ork was stupid.
Such an ork had built the ammunition dump where the xenos heavy weapons were stationed. It had done so ignorant or uncaring of the fact it was right beside one of the Imperial port’s main fuel pumps, where the reservoir of promethium beneath could be tapped to feed the engines of a landed spacecraft.
Such an ork had then laid the heavy fuel hoses leading from the pump to the forge, to fill the gargant’s fuel tanks. The same greenskin had jammed open all of the safety valves to send a constant torrent of fuel into the war machine, and the pump’s joints and seals still leaked a greasy film across the rockcrete. Hoses had been torn free by the war machine’s advance, and greenskin riggers were hammering at the valves with wrenches and lengths of iron pipe to close them again.
What had been a fuelling system sturdy enough to withstand a shuttle crash was now little more than an unexploded bomb thanks to the impatience and crudeness of the greenskins.
The Dragonfire shell was an incendiary, its core loaded with fast-burning explosives to turn the eruptive power of a bolter shell into an expanding ball of flame. The Kraken would have been certain to penetrate, but there was no guarantee the promethium would detonate as the bullet shrieked right through the machinery of the fuel pump and out the other side. The Dragonfire had to be aimed more carefully, at a weak point where one component joined another, but it was sure to have the desired effect.
Donatus pulled the trigger. The weapon bucked in his hand but he held it fast, the stock clamped against his shoulder.
In that moment, his world seemed to fall silent as the shot streaked through the air towards its target.
The shell punched into the side of the fuel pump. The promethium inside ignited instantly and ripped the pump apart in a burst of dirty orange fire. The flames washed through the ammo dump, silencing the orks who had been cheering Cassius’ imminent death.
The dump exploded, a thousand detonations going off at once as the unstable munitions went up. Every safety precaution the builders of the spaceport had made was rendered irrelevant as hundreds of explosive rounds ripped through the unsecured fuel lines into the rockcrete beneath the ammo dump. Multiple steel skins were ruptured and incandescent shrapnel tore into the main body of the fuel reservoir beneath the landing pad.
It took less than a second, but Donatus could follow every link of the chain. The fuel reservoir ruptured and near-tectonic ripples ran across the landing pad as the rockcrete rose up in fracturing waves. Gouts of flame lashed up high into the air. The underside of the landing pad gave way and the upper surface caved in, plunging what remained down towards the lava river below.
The hole grew as more and more shattered rockcrete fell. The burning stump of the control tower fell in and brought the chunks of fallen rubble with it. The slab of masonry pinning Cassius to the ground slid into the growing maw and Donatus grabbed the Chaplain by the shoulder guard, dragging him away from the chasm.
The edge of the collapse reached the track of the ork gargant. The riggers were leaping off the war machine’s shoulders, their bodies breaking ag
ainst the rockcrete as they chose to jump rather than face what was coming. The ork in the eye-hatch panicked as it tried to clamber out, but before he could haul his bulk towards safety the whole gargant tilted as its track tipped over the edge of the chasm.
The collapse halted as it reached the massive supporting beams that shored up the landing pad. The gargant was caught on the edge, one track hanging over the abyss, its metal hulk lit by the blood-red glow of the lava rushing past beneath. Vast masses of fallen rubble and machinery were disintegrating in the superheated flow to be submerged and swept away. Donatus could not help but stare down into the churning lava as he helped Cassius back away towards the machine sheds.
The gargant was immobile for a moment, the ork clinging to the front of its junk metal head grinning with relief as it sensed safety. Then its face fell as the edge of the collapse crumbled a little more and it slowly, painfully, tipped towards the hole. Artillery shells fell from the open hopper and loose tools and components rained from the open hatches. Riggers too cowardly to jump moments earlier dangled from handholds on the gargant’s jagged armour, one screaming as it lost its grip and tumbled into the scalding air billowing up from the lava.
The gargant’s fall sped up as the ground continued to give way beneath it. With a roar of twisting metal and fracturing rockcrete, it tumbled into the hole and its vast, ponderous bulk plunged into the lava. It hit hard, the top half buckling in the impact against the surface of the lava, the orks and countless tonnes of steel vanishing in plumes of oily flame. The rest of it was drawn slowly downstream, the metal warping and stretching in the heat, pulling the war machine apart like a body on a rack.
Cassius forced himself to his feet, leaning against the bullet-scarred wall of the machine shed.
‘One bullet,’ the Chaplain said over the vox. ‘One bullet is all it takes... and we have a thousand bullets to spare! The greenskins cower and grovel in despair. They beg for the silence of death. Let us indulge them, my brethren! The fires have consumed their god, and now let the fires of our vengeance consume the alien!’ Cassius limped a couple of steps on his wounded leg, combi-bolter and crozius in hand, before Sergeant Senekus ran forward to support him.
