by Paul Kearney
‘Gentlemen, brothers; the orks have become a Waaagh!. They have finally buried all divisions of tribe and clan and have united under their warlord. He is out there now, in their lines. Today they will give battle under a single command, and we can expect them to fight with a fury beyond that which we have known hitherto. They will not retreat. They will keep coming until we have broken them apart again, or they have slain all of us.’
The chant drew closer, rose up against the lightening sky. As the sun broke out over the passing clouds, so the word that the orks were chanting became clear to all those on the summit of the Vanaheim. The human officers there looked down in horror. The Ultramarines stood, giants of stern discipline, unmoved.
‘Calgaar, Calgaar, Calgaar,’ the orks chanted, making a mockery of the name. It carried clear across the city, horrible to hear out of the fanged maws of xenos.
Proxis stepped up, and tapped the haft of his axe on the ground.
‘They shall pay, for uttering that.’
‘That they shall,’ Calgar said. He checked his rangefinder, looked at the sky, as clear and blue as a summer’s morning on Macragge. He missed the mountains, the clean snow of his homeworld.
But one did not choose where one fought. There was only the battle ahead to think of. It was all that mattered now.
‘They know I am here,’ he told the others. ‘They know that the Lord of Macragge stands upon these walls. They will come for me, for the name I carry. For what I represent.
‘It may be I shall be able to use that against them.’
He keyed the vox. ‘All guns, range thirty-three thousand feet, axis one eighty, targets in the open, wide spread. Fire for effect.’
‘Now,’ he said to those beside him. ‘Let the dance begin.’
Twenty-Two
Morcault heard the battle open, and raised his head to listen. The air was full of fire, shells arcing up out of the guns and mortars of the city to streak south in high parabolic arcs. The sound of their impact carried north from the Vanaheim, a heavy thunder that sullied the air and tore apart the quiet of the morning. The storm had come at last. The final days were upon them. One way or another, the siege of Zalathras would soon be over.
The streets had cleared of all but military convoys and personnel, and now millions were cowering in bunkers and shelters and the basements of the sturdiest habs. The three hive-spires of the city rose up out of the sea of buildings and rubble, and for the first time in a long while were visible all the way to their sharp summits.
A haze of smoke still hung about the city and could be tasted in the mouth, but the sun was shining through it in wands and bars and lines of bright, bitter beauty. He was glad he had seen it again, glad to turn his face to the light.
Hester stumped down the ramp of the Mayfly towards him, head cocked, her black hair pulled back in a greasy ponytail and her coveralls rank with oil and smoke smudge.
‘So they’re at it again,’ she said.
The rest of the crew joined her, while past them filed the mechanics and engineers who had worked on the Mayfly all through the night. White-faced, their stations were now up on the wall, and the hell that awaited them there.
‘How does she stand, Jon?’ Morcault asked his engineer.
The big man was wiping down his blackened fists with a strip of cloth. ‘She’ll fly. For how long is anyone’s guess. She’s not vacuum-ready – you take her out of the atmosphere and she’ll fall apart like a pack of cards. What are you up to, Ghent? Macragge himself was here last night. I saw you talking to him.’
‘It may be I need to make one more trip in the old girl,’ Morcault said with a smile. ‘But it will be a short one. I will not be going off-planet, Jon.’
‘Where are you taking us this time?’ Hester demanded sharply.
‘Not us, Hester. This time I go alone.’
They stared at him. ‘We’re your crew,’ Gortyn said. ‘Where you go, we follow.’
Morcault looked them all over. Jodi Arnhal and little Scurrios stood silent, Hester had her hands on her hips, scowling. And Gortyn was wiping his hands mechanically, as though he had forgotten about them.
‘Sometime today or tomorrow, I aim to take the ship up myself,’ Morcault said. ‘You are all released from my employ, as of this moment. Find yourselves a safe place to hole up until this thing is over. If Zalathras is still standing at the end of it, Marneus Calgar will see to it that you are all well compensated. I have his word.’
‘You sound like a man on a one-way trip,’ Hester said.
‘We are all on a one-way trip, Hester. That is what life is.’
‘What has that monster persuaded you to do?’ she demanded. ‘You’ve done enough for him already.’
‘I do this not for him, or for the Ultramarines or the Imperium – I do it for my own planet, for the world I love. There is nothing more to be said.’
‘And if we refuse to leave you?’ Jodi Arnhal spoke up.
‘You are all younger than I, by some distance,’ Morcault sighed. ‘I will not have your lives tied to mine any longer. Jodi–’ He set a hand on the Navigator’s narrow shoulders. ‘Where I am going, you cannot follow. Not yet.’
He limped slowly up the Mayfly’s ramp, his stick clicking on the plates. ‘Look after one other,’ he said, and punched the ramp control. The ramp began rise.
‘You are the best folk I have known, the best crew I have ever flown with.’ His voice broke. The ramp slammed shut on his face, leaving them standing there, dumbfounded.
The ork hosts broke into a charge and came careering across the plain with a roar that rose up into the morning like the fall of a stony avalanche. They carried scaling ladders, runged metal poles slotted to fit together, and at the vanguard of the formations were huge armoured orks bearing all manner of heavy weapons.
The Basilisks and mortars of Zalathras sent a hail of fire to meet them, the plain erupting in geysers of muck and water as the shells struck home in the leading formations. Hundreds fell, but the attack was not even slowed.
As soon as they came within range, the heavy weapons in the wall casements added their fire to the carnage. Heavy bolters, autocannon, stubbers and meltaguns blared out, streaking tracer and fire.
The entire first wave of the orks was chopped to pieces, but still the armour-clad vanguard came on. Some of these huge orks lifted their fellows and held them bodily in front of them to soak up the torrent of fire that was raining down. When the corpse was shot to pieces they picked up another lesser ork and it began again.
They were five hundred yards from the base of the wall, and now their own heavy weapons began to bark out. Ork weapons teams went to ground in water-filled shellholes and began to return fire. Missiles streaked out against the walls of Zalathras and impacted in pale booms of mottled smoke. They left barely a scar. It took time before the ork gunners realised their mistake and began to aim higher, at the lip of the battlements themselves.
They lacerated the casemate slits and the merlons that sheltered the defending militia with autogun fire, beginning the business of suppressing Zalathras’ defenders. The fire became intense beyond belief, the air in that deadly half-mile full of every kind of kinetic and energy projectile. The orks advanced stubbornly, but they were paying in hundreds for every yard gained. And at the end of it, the walls would still be looming over them.
‘I don’t understand,’ Boros was saying. ‘They’re just throwing themselves at us. Even if they made it to the foot of the wall, they couldn’t scale it – those ladders are too short.’
‘They’re keeping us in place and using up our ammunition, wearing us down.’ Marneus Calgar told him. ‘They can afford the casualties, and the ammunition expenditure. They are using us up, Boros. It is attrition, pure and simple. But it will not go on this way. They have other plans…’ He scanned the battlefield beyond the current hecatomb before the walls.<
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‘Lieutenant Janus,’ he said over the vox.
‘Janus here, my lord.’
‘Enemy formation shifting west around the walls at some four miles. Strength, perhaps eight to ten thousand. They are heading for the perimeter at the Minon Districts. Reinforce the wall in that sector and keep me informed of events.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
The noise was incredible, a concentrated assault on the hearing. And the blue sky above began to disappear as the smoke thickened under it, cutting off the sunlight.
But then something else cut off the sunlight. It came arrowing up from the south, at first a mere dot in the sky. But it grew larger, a contrail streaking out behind it.
‘That’s no fighter-bomber. That is a large craft,’ Colonel Boros said in alarm.
‘All anti-aircraft batteries are to concentrate on that aircraft,’ Calgar said. ‘Hit it with everything we have, Boros. It must be destroyed – it is imperative.’
‘Yes, my lord.’ Boros spoke into his vox-mike. ‘All guns, all guns…’
Calgar pulled up his own people on the vox. ‘Brother Valerian, it is approaching. Proxis, get into position. Inform the vehicle crew to stand to and begin loading of the ordnance.’
‘Acknowledged.’
‘Here it comes,’ he said, and watched as the aircraft drew closer.
It was a potbellied heavy lifter, of the kind used to transport massive ore skips and equipment pods cross-planet. Painted ork scarlet, it came on at high speed, an ugly craft even before the orks had got hold of it. The stubby wings were at least a hundred yards from tip to tip, and its engines were blaring and muttering as if badly maintained.
Skeins of anti-aircraft fire lanced up from the city to meet it. The surviving Hydra platforms on the walls sent up a thick curtain of tracer, and the aircraft was surrounded by black exploding clouds.
But now they could see, as it drew closer, that the lifter had been modified in another way. It was carrying something slung below its belly. Not an ore skip or pod, but something immense dangling from its hull, something that moved, an incredible bulk with a twitching tail.
‘What in Throne is that?’ Boros asked, wide-eyed.
‘An ork weapon, one that lives and breathes,’ Calgar told him grimly. ‘Brother Valerian encountered it in the Ballansyr mines where it was being housed, waiting for this moment. The ork name for it is squiggoth – a great marauding beast of war, the largest I think I have ever seen.’
‘’They’re going to drop it on us!’ Boros cried out.
‘Shoot it down, colonel. Do not let them drop it inside the walls.’
Calgar looked at the approaching behemoth in the sky. The orks had plastered the hull of the lifter with crude welded armour, and he saw the shimmer of a void shield as the Hydra rounds skittered across it and bounced back.
A single Fury could have brought it down. But all the Furies were gone, now. And he had to admit a grudging modicum of respect for the ork warlord. Whoever he was, he had played a long game, making sure that every defensive asset available to the city was used up before launching this last attack.
A squiggoth. They were seldom seen by those who lived to speak of it afterwards. Creatures of mindless ferocity, the largest of them had been known to contend with Titans.
The orks had indeed saved the best for last.
The huge aircraft was shuddering in the sky. Barely a mile away now, its shadow fell over the ork masses below, and they set up a great hoarse roaring, raising their weapons over their heads in exultation at the sight. The squiggoth suspended below the craft was tossing its head and adding a long, gargling roar to the din. Calgar could see the armour plating that had been implanted in its very hide, the gun platform on its back, the great gleaming spurs attached to its feet. It must have weighed eighty or a hundred tons, and its swaying bulk was dragging the battered lifter from side to side in the sky.
A lucky missile strike from a platform on the wall got through the darkening void shield, and struck the tailplane of the ork craft. It yawed in the air, the void shields flickered and died, and at once a thousand tracers speared into its scarlet hull. A ripple of bright explosions went down one side, and the aircraft dipped sharply, the nose aimed at the earth below.
Boros struck one fist into another at the sight. ‘Yes!’
It was going down. The squiggoth struggled in its harness, bellowing, and fell half-free. Seconds later a final missile streaked into the belly of the aircraft and exploded. The harness was blown asunder. The aircraft fell like a stone, the beast it carried tumbling free of it onto the battlefield below.
‘Take cover!’ Calgar shouted, augmenting his voice so it carried like a klaxon along the walls.
The ork craft crashed to earth some four hundred yards short of the walls, striking the wet earth with an enormous staggering concussion that could be felt even through the plascrete foundations of the Vanaheim Gate. It buried itself in the muck, its nose crumpling, the rest of it smashed apart. Seconds later, there was a massive explosion as the engines went up, and a huge, towering fountain of earth and metal was blasted almost a hundred yards into the air. Shards of metal were sent bouncing off the city walls. Others were hurled clear over them to flatten entire habs in the districts beyond. Burning fuel sprayed out in a flaming lake. The ork formations there were torn asunder, body parts blown halfway across the battlefield, scores buried in the muck that rained down in the wake of the crash.
There was a stunned moment almost of silence on that part of the field, and then the orks came on again, bellowing with rage.
And something hauled itself out of the mire along with them. Something monstrous that towered over them and raised its red maw to howl defiance at the Vanaheim Gate.
The squiggoth rose up out of the muck like some primeval monster of nightmare, streaming water, tossing the orks about it aside like toys and trampling them underfoot. It pulled itself free of the crater its fall had created, and looked around, as though striving to find a focus for its rage.
‘Brothers,’ Calgar said over the Ultramarines’ vox, ‘meet me in the shadow of the Gate. We have work to do.’
He turned to Boros. ‘Keep them at their posts, colonel – no matter what happens, your men must hold the wall.’
‘What about–’ Boros could only point at the immense monstrosity that was now powering towards them, slimed with mud.
‘You leave that to me.’
His brothers were waiting for him there, as calm and collected as though about to go on parade. In the shadow of the great barbican he stood with them, facing the piles of rubble and reinforced beams that had been piled up behind the damaged gate.
Back down the street leading up to the barbican, a huge shape sat in the roadway, covered with a cameleoline tarp. Before it was Lieutenant Lascelle and a company of militia. To its rear, half a regiment was hidden in the ruins and alleyways leading off the street.
Calgar turned to the militia. ‘Men of Zalidar,’ he said, and his suit speakers made his voice boom and echo to a great shout. ‘Today we must stand in this place and hold it. This is the last defence of your world, the last chance you have to save it. There must be no retreat today. The fate of Zalidar will be decided in this place, no other. You must stand fast, or die. There will be no retreat.
‘And I, Marneus Augustus Calgar, Lord Macragge, I stand with you here at this hour. Fight with me, and whether you live or die, what you do here today will never be forgotten.’
He raised his eyes to the sky, and in a quiet voice said, ‘Suscipiat Imperator sacrificium nostrum.’
Then there was a tremendous crash as the squiggoth hurled itself at the Vanaheim Gate.
Fifty feet high, the great beast of the orks absorbed bolter rounds as though they were flea bites. It charged the gate again and again, lowering its armoured head and squealing in bestial rage as it attack
ed. It was under the lip of the barbican itself, and thus it was difficult to direct fire upon it. Men dropped grenades upon its steaming back from the summit of the Vanaheim, but the orks swept the battlements with a withering fire and drove the defenders there below, into the casemates.
The animal was streaming blood from a hundred wounds, but its vitality was undimmed. The broken platform atop its back was smashed and broken, full of the mangled corpses of orks and gretchin, but the armour that had been affixed to its immense bulk remained largely in place, and its ten-foot skull was protected by a great helm-like carapace adorned with horns.
It smashed this into the buckled adamantium plates of the gate and tore them loose, buckled the steel underneath as though it were tin, and finally got its horned snout under one gate to tear it free of its hinges. Then it climbed over the wreckage and began to work on the piled barricade behind, while the orks crowded around its feet, oblivious to those it trampled and killed in its berserk rage.
Calgar saw the enormous snout root through the girders and rubble and worry them aside. He opened up with the storm bolters on the underside of his power fists, the ancient weapons springing to bright, blazing life, following the targeting reticle in his helm display.
As the opening under the Vanaheim grew, so orks began to wriggle past the head of the beast, into the barbican itself, firing bolters and flamers as they came.
‘Brother Antigonus, target the orks with your squad. Mathias, Proxis, mop up any who make it into the street. Brother Orhan, go to the vehicle and make sure it is ready to engage. Brother Valerian, I may need you soon. Stand ready.’
The Ultramarines went to work with the calm implacability of their kind. The infiltrating orks were shot to pieces, one blown up in a cloud of flaming promethium as the tank on his flamer was hit. The fire burned under the gateway, making the smoke-shrouded morning seem as dark as dusk.
The squiggoth seemed spurred to greater heights of effort by the flames. Its bellowing was magnified by the towering arch of the gate, a noise that could be felt in the flesh as much as heard. It powered bodily into the rubble, knocking aside the great bracing girders as though they were branches of green wood. Its forefeet appeared, scrabbling at the barrier and pulling it down. Lumps of rockcrete as big as Land Speeders tumbled down, rolling into the square before the gate.
