by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons
The Valedictio pattern frag cannon was a massive automatic grenade launcher larger than a heavy bolter. Twin ammunition belts fed from a hopper on Grytt’s backpack into the cannon, along with power cabling feeds to his armour. With modifications performed in the armoury, he mixed the belt feeds with solid rounds for soft targets and fragmentation shells designed to obliterate harder defences.
‘Remember what I said,’ warned Ralon. ‘Fast and quiet.’
‘Tell that to the orks,’ replied Grytt, his voice a metallic growl through his visor.
The servo-skull chirped, the pict feed translating over the Devastator’s right eye-lens.
‘I’ve got something,’ he said. The team split, taking cover on both sides of the avenue.
‘Show me,’ Ralon replied.
Grytt twinned the feed to the commander. ‘North of us. Ork infantry, two light vehicles.’
‘There’s something else…’
‘Those are civilians,’ answered Grytt, watching the procession of grey figures stumbling through the ash. ‘They are rounding up survivors. Forced labour, or sport killing.’
‘We should shadow them,’ said Kitra. ‘They could lead us right into the hulk.’
‘Seconded,’ said Imre.
‘Agreed,’ replied Ralon. ‘Keep your distance, follow them in. No one fires unless I give the order.’
Grytt guided the servo-skull closer, magnifying the image. The forced march had stalled, as a man scrambled away after somehow breaking free from the group.
The poor human cried out as a blast took his leg off at the knee. He crashed into the ash, blood pulsing from the stump and rendering the ground into a sticky loam. The ork stomped down on his remaining leg, snapping bone and tearing a scream from the man’s throat that Grytt heard through the spotter’s pickups.
The ork reached down, its clawed fist closing over the man’s head. It wrenched its hand back and threw something into the street. The feed flickered with static. It refocussed, and Grytt watched the ork stomp back to the column, the man’s corpse left mangled in the dust.
Another greenskin approached, grunting a challenge to the first. Punches were thrown, and the two brawled in the dust, with the first beating the other severely before casting it back to the column to vent its frustration on the other prisoners. Grytt narrowed his eyes, linking targeting runes to the orks and blinking away the spotter feed as three shots rang out.
The ork threw its pistol aside as it clicked empty, and was raising a rusted cleaver when Grytt opened fire. Standing braced in the centre of the street, he unleashed a blistering salvo from his frag cannon. High-explosive shells slashed out into the two ork vehicles in deafening thunder, rupturing their dilapidated construction and littering the ground with chunks of greenskin flesh.
‘Grytt, you fool,’ barked Kitra. ‘You’ll expose us!’
The surviving orks turned to respond before solid shot rounds burst their bodies apart, leaving nothing but twitching lumps of meat. Silence descended as smoke mingled with the ash.
The Imperial Fist approached the trembling column of humans, and snapped the length of chain binding them together. The moaning wretches blundered about, unable to focus upon anything or anyone. They scrambled away in every direction. Grytt reached down to lift one up who was sprawled in the dust. The woman recoiled back, howling and clawing at his arm. Nothing human remained in her wide, unfocussed eyes, just the frenzied instinct of an animal to survive. He released her and she fled into the ruins.
‘Brother Rodricus Grytt,’ Ralon called out and he strode forwards, rapping an accusing fist against the Devastator’s chest. ‘You are hereby marked for disciplinary flagellation. Your actions have endangered–’
‘You would rather watch these people be butchered?’ Grytt demanded. ‘We are the protectors of Humanity. I will not sit idle while they are slaughtered by these xenos filth.’
‘If you seek more greenskins to combat,’ said Imre, looking up into the sky. ‘You have guaranteed it.’
Flares corkscrewed into the air between the kill team and the ork hulk, exploding in greasy bursts of red and yellow smoke. Roars sounded in the distance, a bestial overlapping din with no unity or rhythm.
Artillery burst behind the kill team.
‘They have our position,’ said Adomar, racking the slide of his boltgun.
Hundreds of orks poured in towards the avenue, whooping and firing weapons into the air. Their charge grew louder, shaking loose rubble and drowning out all sound in its terrible tumult.
‘Displace!’ barked Imre, pointing to an alleyway beside them. ‘Through the buildings. I will draw their fire.’
A rocket jinked past their position, exploding in the second floor of a hab block and spraying them with debris.
‘Go now!’ The Iron Hand stood, snapping off precision shots from his plasma gun. The kill team crossed the open street and began moving through the building.
Imre sighted down his rifle, each shot taking the head from a screaming ork. He staggered as a solid round smashed into his shoulder. He leaned forwards and vaporised the greenskin’s torso.
Kitra took up a firing position in a doorway.
‘Imre, I have you covered!’
The Iron Hand rose, firing his plasma gun into the swelling lines of orks and moving to a mound of shattered masonry in the middle of the street. He made to advance as another pair of rockets corkscrewed into the mound, exploding in a hail of smoke and shrapnel.
‘Brother!’ Kitra shouted, unable to see the Iron Hand through the smoke. A barrage of artillery howled through the air, and Ralon pulled the Reviler back as the front of the building collapsed, cutting them off from the street.
Imre staggered against the road, his war-plate sundered and covered in ash-clotted blood. He made to rise, but reeled as the orks bracketed him with weapons fire. A grenade exploded, throwing him back to the ground. He rolled to his knees but toppled, his right leg nothing but a shredded stump of fused flesh and plasteel.
The orks surged forwards. Imre’s armour shattered under the fusillade of their guns.
He fired a blast into the mob as it encircled him, bringing cleavers and hatchet blades down and kicking the weapon from his grasp. His multi-lung was filling with blood, and his secondary heart had ceased to beat.
Imre faced the glaring maw of a massive ork chieftain. The brute drew a serrated axe, and drove it down into the Space Marine’s side as the mob roared. The Iron Hand reached out with his cybernetic hand, fighting through the storm of blades and punches to reach for his fallen plasma gun. The weapon’s barrel glowed from rapid firing, and its plasma coils writhed with the unstable energy building within.
The Iron Hand grabbed hold of the weapon as a cudgel smashed into his head. Blind, he cradled the weapon to his chest, overcharging it. The plasma coils shivered and sparked, groaning with inevitable overload.
‘The flesh…’ Imre choked, his voice wet with blood and oil, ‘…is weak.’
Reaching for the plasma coil, Imre crushed it in his fist, and the street vanished in a starburst of azure light.
Grytt watched the explosion from the overloaded plasma weapon in the static-laden pict feed of his servo-skull, as Imre’s ident-rune blinked out on his display.
Kitra’s fist pistoned into Grytt’s jaw, knocking him back. Grytt swung back but the Reviler dodged, ducking to swing around behind him. The Imperial Fist managed to seize hold of Kitra and throw him against the crumbling wall of a hab stack with a thunderous crash.
Grytt heard the click of a bolt pistol as he took a step forwards, and felt the weapon press against the back of his head.
‘That. Is. Enough,’ growled Ralon.
‘Dead,’ Kitra coughed, pulling his helmet free and spitting a mouthful of blood onto the ash. ‘Imre is dead because of you.’
‘I don’t see much else but death here,’ said Grytt. ‘Though it seems I am the only one doing anything to avenge it.’
‘Blood and fire is all you wan
t,’ the Reviler hissed. ‘You’re no different from the orks.’
‘I am here to kill the xenos!’ Grytt roared. ‘Blood and fire is all they understand. I will finish what my Chapter started and break the back of this horde, and keep the rest of this system from burning. Our focus should be on ending an invasion that threatens billions now, not blundering about this wasteland chasing ghosts.’
Ralon seized Grytt by the collar and hauled his face only inches from his own, the bolt pistol now resting beneath the Devastator’s jaw.
‘Go against my orders again, Fist, and by the Throne I will kill you myself.’ He released him with a shove. ‘We need to displace now, before the hell you have unleashed encircles us.’
‘Brothers,’ Adomar called from the avenue outside the tenement. Ralon pulled Kitra to his feet, and the kill team converged on the Prognosticator, kneeling in the ash.
‘What have you found?’ asked Ralon, taking the object that Adomar held out to him.
It was an elaborate helm, small even for a mortal, resembling a pair of angels with broken wings. It bore the heraldry of House Trigarta.
‘This was worn by the one we seek,’ said Adomar, rising to his feet. ‘He lives, and his soul-echoes will lead us to the hulk. We will find him within.’ He turned to Grytt. ‘It seems that all shall have what they desire.’
Sai cried out, struggling against his bonds to recoil from the leering ork. He hissed as once again it twisted the jagged metal pinning him in place, and he felt warm blood trickle across his wrists as the wounds reopened.
The ork gave a gurgling, choking laugh at the Navigator’s suffering as it leaned closer. The beady red eyes of the creature widened and glazed over, as if filling with cataracts.
Sai screamed. He had felt others step within his mind in his training, but never like this. Where his mentors had slipped beneath his consciousness like warm oil behind his eyes, the ork’s intrusion was tantamount to dashing his head open against a rock and prying his skull apart. Images stabbed into Sai’s mind, jagged and edged in barbs of black malice and ochre rage.
He saw himself, screaming silently from within an iron casket, his third eye pried open by savage hooks and staring out into the void.
Vertigo and nausea soaked into Sai as the vision became rippled and unfocussed. With a stab of heat to his mind it resolved again. The casket was bolted onto the prow of the xenos hulk ship like a barbaric figurehead. The hulk ploughed through the void, tearing free of Basatani’s gravity. Lightning coursed through Sai within the casket, and blood streamed from his warp-eye even as reality itself began to bleed in response. A rift opened like claws tearing through the curtain of stars, and billions of hands reached out, hauling the hulk into the roiling insanity of the warp…
They meant to use him to take the ship back into the Sea of Souls. The ork’s savage grin grew wider.
A roar thundered up from deeper within the hulk, issuing from a single throat but of unbelievable depth and volume. Bolts of sickly colour shot through the meat of Sai’s mind, flashes of bright fear and panic. The ork psyker tore its mind from his like a rusted blade. The Navigator collapsed against his bonds in horror and exhaustion.
The greenskin scrambled back from Sai’s hanging form, barking at the gaggle of minions toiling within the chamber. It issued growling, threatening noises to its underlings, who recoiled from it and their captive, fearing him despite the cage of iron fastened about his head.
Sai looked down, watching in horror as the alien brutes continued their crude construction below him, locking rebar and metal framework around his legs and torso.
They were building the iron casket from his visions.
‘Stand by,’ said Ralon through the static of the vox. ‘Now!’
Grytt blink-clicked a rune on his retinal display, relaying the signal to his spotter. A booming detonation engulfed the side of the hulk, sending smoke and debris soaring into the sky.
The kill team crouched some distance away, near a narrow trench carved into the rocky hull of the ork war craft. Kitra had set the breaching charges near one of the main points of entry before rejoining Almuta.
Flares burst over the site of the explosion, and the Space Marines watched as hordes of greenskins converged on the area.
‘That won’t buy us much time,’ said Grytt. He received no response from the rest of the team.
‘Kitra, take point,’ said Ralon. ‘Adomar, behind him. I need you to track any trace of the asset. Let’s move.’
The kill team advanced into the tunnel. Grytt blinked rapidly, and his visor cycled to thermal vision. His servo-skull flittered above his shoulder, its sensors pulsing scarlet in the darkness.
The tunnel wound into the hulk, threaded with sporadic steel grating and coils of exhaust piping. The machinery was decrepit and volatile, remaining functional seemingly out of spite alone. The air grew hotter as they went, and Grytt tasted smoke and scorched iron through the filters of his helm.
As the temperature increased, so did the noise. Greenskin industry was a frightful cacophony of tearing metal, smashing hammers and the howls of thousands of orks as they laboured, along with the enslaved population of the hive, to restore the colossal ship.
‘Adomar, do you sense anything?’ asked Ralon as the team stalked past a massive factory cavern, reaching a junction in the tunnel.
The Silver Skull paused, and frost crept over his armour, carving runnels down the ash-caked plate as it melted again in the heat.
‘He is close,’ said the psyker distractedly. ‘There is something else with him. A presence. The warp channels through it, but it is unrestrained, like a wildfire. It wields great power, but the power is killing it.’
‘I have encountered ork psykers before,’ said Kitra. ‘We must be on our guard. Their power swells from combat. I have seen them tear entire armies apart.’
‘This way,’ whispered Adomar.
The kill team proceeded down a branch of the tunnel, leading to a cavern filled with bizarre machinery. A pillar of iron scaffolding dominated the centre of the cave, with a crowd of orks gathered around, toiling at its construction. A slumped human form could barely be seen within the pillar, pinned in place in a cruciform position.
The chamber filled with booming boltgun fire as the kill team opened up on the orks within and slaughtered them. Unarmed, the brutes had little chance and were quickly reduced to broken, twitching corpses.
‘The ork psyker,’ asked Kitra, panning his stalker boltgun from corner to corner. ‘Where is it?’
‘That device in the centre imprisons the Navigator,’ said Adomar, pointing with his power sword. The Librarian stared up at the maniacal contraption. ‘What is this? By the Throne, what were they building?’
‘Do not seek to understand the xenos,’ said Grytt. ‘They are filth to be eradicated, not studied.’
‘We need to cut him loose and withdraw,’ said Ralon. ‘We are running out of time.’
‘No,’ said Kitra, as once more they heard the howling of alien throats. ‘We are already out of time.’
Kill Team Almuta formed into a firing line as fresh mobs of ork warriors approached.
Kitra braced his boltgun to his shoulder, poised as still as a statue as he sighted through the weapon’s scope. Ralon’s power axe shone blue in the hellish light as he loaded a full magazine into his bolt pistol. Adomar channelled his energy into the psychic core of his force sword, and mauve energy shivered up its blade.
They watched the flickering light of the tunnel fill with monstrous silhouettes. Gunfire thundered, and howling, wailing roars split the air. Grytt chambered a round into his frag cannon, and squared up alongside Ralon as the orks emerged.
Bolter rounds zipped through the flickering dark, a stuttering report as each one fired before detonating within greenskin flesh. Orks burst apart in welters of foul blood. Limbs swung orphaned through the air, still clutching rusted blades and decrepit firearms. Fyceline smoke filled the cavern, rolling about the ceiling like dri
fting spirits as filthy xenos innards covered the walls.
Grytt’s retinal display swelled with locked targeting icons. Thumbing the safety from his frag cannon and bracing in a wide stance, he fired a burst of solid shot rounds with a booming chunk! chunk! chunk!
The screaming anti-personnel shells tore through ranks of orks, coring torsos in clouds of pink mist. The fusillade killed dozens of the brutish xenos, and twice that number fell mewling and wounded on the ground, left to the mercy of their fellows who trampled them to death in their eagerness to close with the enemy.
Kitra fired the last round in his magazine and stowed his boltgun. Lightning claws slid out from the Reviler’s gauntlets, writhing with energy. He wove through the onslaught, striking in and out of range, slashing orks to ribbons with each strike of the energised talons. Ralon’s axe flared with each killing strike, the glowing blade fizzing and popping as alien blood boiled from its power field.
Adomar carved into the orks, his power sword wreathed in warpfire. Seeing the xenos’ attacks with his mind’s eye heartbeats before they occurred, he drove through their ranks, his strikes scorching swathes of the creatures with unnatural energies until the flesh ran from their bones like tallow.
Grytt smashed a greenskin aside with the barrel of his cannon, firing point blank into the horde. He stopped picking shots and fired on full automatic, blasting away the roiling host of screaming xenos as if he were tearing chunks from a mountain.
The orks faltered against the weight of fire, until a roar tore down the length of the tunnel, so loud that many of the aliens stumbled from their feet in alarm. The rest brayed, whooping and barking challenges at the Space Marines.
Their leader revealed itself.
The ork chieftain was massive, stomping head and shoulders above the rest of its kind. Veins the size of a man’s arm branched over iron-hard muscle, and dense plates of armour covered the creature’s body, riveted directly into its flesh. Steel horns had been drilled into its skull and curled out in all directions, their jagged tips sharpened into killing points. Scarlet eyes burned below its sloping brow, furnace-hot with alien rage. Both of its hands had been crudely removed, replaced by enormous pneumatic claws that gushed oil and crackled with caged lightning.
