Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon

by David Annandale

  I rapped on the doorway. ‘What mad order has he given now?’ I asked.

  She blinked and focused her attention on me. ‘Our only mobilisation is defensive.’

  ‘What?’ Von Strab overseeing the efforts against the orks filled me with dread. I could foresee only disaster in his leadership. But I hadn’t imagined even he would order that nothing be done. He was many things, but he wasn’t a fool. Or so I had believed until this moment. ‘He wants us to wait for the orks to come knocking?’

  Brenken’s grin was ghastly. ‘Not quite. He’s ordered Hive Tempestora Militia to mount the offence.’

  ‘They’re leaving the hive to fight the greenskins?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Von Strab’s decision was mad on such a colossal scale that for a few moments, I couldn’t shape a question capable of dealing with it. At last, I could muster nothing better than, ‘Why?’

  ‘He believes most of the orks must have died on impact. He thinks this is a mopping-up operation.’

  Put thus, I could see the overlord’s logic. The entire planet had felt the reverberations of that blow. It was difficult to imagine any being inside the space hulk having survived such a landing. ‘He thinks the militia is going to find a crater and nothing else,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. You don’t believe that, do you?’

  ‘No. This hulk is gigantic. It destroyed the fleet. It came straight for Armageddon. What are the odds against such a direct hit being due to chance?’

  ‘Astronomical,’ said Brenken.

  ‘The statue of the Emperor was not weeping over dead greenskins. The Tarot did not warn of a simple disaster.’ I shook my head. ‘How was von Strab’s theory received?’

  ‘Mannheim thinks it’s ridiculous. The other colonels are doubtful, and definitely not happy about being held back.’

  ‘But the hive governors fell into line,’ I guessed.

  She nodded. ‘And they’re happy at the prospect of having their territory protected.’

  ‘What about General Andechs?’ He had overall command of the Steel Legion regiments on Armageddon, though his ­authority was limited by the overlord’s supremacy over all armed forces. He was also a member of Armageddon’s nobility, and his family had a long history of political alliance with the von Strab dynasty.

  ‘He is cautious on both sides of the issue.’

  ‘In other words he’s equivocating,’ I said. Brenken had to respect her commanding officer. I had to follow their orders unless they were derelict, and I enforced the chain of command. But I didn’t have to grant my respect to anyone who hadn’t earned it. Andechs was a competent officer, but a better politician, and his elevation to general owed more to the latter quality than the former. ‘So what do you plan to do?’ I asked.

  ‘I can’t do much more than what has been ordered. We prepare to defend Infernus.’

  ‘I think you should make ready to head for Armageddon Prime. We’ll be sent there soon, whatever von Strab believes right now.’

  Brenken stood. ‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘The militia is going to be slaughtered.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It will be exterminated.’

  5. Kohner

  Uffern was gone. The space hulk had come down only a few hundred metres from its eastern edge. Entire neighbourhoods had vaporised and in their place were the sloping walls of the huge crater. The blast had flattened the rest of the city. Where spires had stood, there was only rubble. A few shapes reached upwards like broken fingers. They were fragments of towers, hollowed-out shells, a brittle trace of the city that had been.

  The Tempestora Hive Militia skirted the southern edge of Uffern’s grave. The land over which the columns marched had been scraped bare to the bedrock, and the new surface was rippled and cracked. Kohner had to watch his footing. It would be easy to break a leg in one of the jagged crevasses.

  True night had fallen during the march from Tempestora. Whatever dawn could still come to Armageddon was still a few hours away. The militia’s advance was limited to the speed of the infantry. Though there were Chimeras and Tauroxes in the field, the militia had no heavy tanks, and its artillery consisted of fixed emplacements at the hive. The militia was not the Steel Legion. Its function was defensive, and it had not left Tempestora to engage in battle for centuries. Kohner didn’t even know what its last campaign had been. There were rumours that it had been expunged from the historical record.

  Defensive or not, the militia was on the attack now. It was the largest mobilisation Kohner had ever seen. As far as he could tell, the entire force was marching with him. No, he thought. We aren’t the Steel Legion. But we know how to fight. They were disciplined, well-armed, and numbered in the tens of thousands. We know how to fight, he thought again. Then he called to his squad, ‘Are you ready to show the greenskins a proper Tempestora welcome?’ The shouts that came in response were picked up by other squads. The sound was a good one. He needed the reassurance as much as anyone else.

  Beyond the city, a monster loomed. From a distance, in the night, it resembled a new mountain. Its flanks still glowed from the heat of its passage through the atmosphere. There were many dark patches, as if portions had fallen away. Or had opened. The wind was no longer the wrath of a wounded planet, but it still blew from the east. It carried the sounds of a great clamour. Voices and machinery, guttural and savage, blended together into the low grumble of xenos thunder. The stench of ork bodies and smoking engines squeezed Kohner’s lungs.

  ‘Purge the alien!’ Captain Wendlandt cried. He was riding in the top of a Chimera a short distance to Kohner’s right.

  ‘Purge the alien!’ Kohner echoed.

  ‘Purge the alien!’ Thousands calling for blood now. Thousands united in their determination to defend their world. Thousands shouting to drown out the unclean snarl from the east.

  For a few moments, they succeeded. Kohner was surrounded by human rage. He was buoyed by the collective power it represented. He was hungry for the clash. The Tempestora Hive Militia would exterminate the greenskin survivors, and for once the glory of victory would not belong to the Steel Legion.

  He was still shouting when the orks roared. They swamped the human cry. The roar was huge as a wall, crushing as a fist. It went on and on and on, louder and louder, hideous in its eagerness and joy. It was not the sound of the battered survivors of a disaster. It was the triumphant exhilaration of millions.

  Kohner’s mouth went dry. The rallying cry choked off in his throat. Terror sank fangs of ice into his gut. The roar was something monstrous, beyond his comprehension. The thunder of the space hulk’s impact had been shattering, but he had understood what it was. This was something else again. It was exultation, an emotion rare enough on Armageddon. Kohner had a vision of bestial jaws opening wide, wide enough to swallow the sun, about to snap down and devour everything human.

  Caught by the headlamps of the Taurox following close on the Chimera, Wendlandt’s face was a skull, a thing of stark light and deep shadow. He was shouting something, but Kohner couldn’t hear him over the orks. He was gesticulating, waving forward with his laspistol, a desperate marionette. The order was clear: advance, attack.

  In the name of the Emperor, attack.

  Kohner tightened his grip on his lasrifle, but there was nothing to shoot yet. How far were they yet from the enemy? He didn’t know. The space hulk was kilometres distant, but the roar had seemed close, a beast’s breath on the back of his neck.

  He picked up his pace. He shouted, and couldn’t hear his own voice, but his squad joined him in the charge forward. The thousands of the Tempestora Hive Militia rushed to meet the foe. To think was to despair, so the only choice was to attack with speed, with ferocity, with desperation.

  The orks were faster. More ferocious. Even more consumed with the need to engage. The roar became the clash of arms and the snarl of heavy vehicles. Kohner was a third
of the way down the columns from the front ranks, far enough away that at first he didn’t know why the advance had stopped, why he could no longer run because the man in front of him had stopped running too. Then he made out the sounds of war. In the near distance, las flashes strobed in the night. The ork guns barked, so many of them that their reports blurred into a long rattle. Kohner could just make out hulking shapes and flashes of xenos hide. The beasts were taller than men, and wider. They were easy targets to hit, hard ones to drop. They walked into las fire and punched forward, eating into the column, stopping it dead.

  Kohner aimed high, firing over the heads of his comrades. He got off four shots, and four hits. He knew this because he could see the ork he was aiming at more clearly with each pull of the trigger. The orks had hit the front ranks so hard they barely slowed in their charge as they cut down Tempestora’s warriors. They were close enough for Kohner to see the viscous saliva drooling from their tusked maws, to see their corded muscles, and to feel his blood chill before the wave of greenskins. The blades they brandished were as massive, crude and varied as their armour. Some were defended by nothing more than a few pieces of scrap metal attached to their rough leather clothing. Others, much larger, advanced in massive suits, terrifying patchwork constructions of plates and spikes. The orks had draped themselves with trophy skulls of humans, eldar and other races. Raised above the horde was a forest of iron hacked into icons of horned bulls, serpents, blazing suns and more.

  Kohner’s target fell, and he took heart in the knowledge that the orks were mortal. ‘They can die!’ he shouted, though only he could hear. ‘They can die!’

  The orks died, but they seemed immortal, and for each one that fell, the rest came on with greater frenzy. With the militia’s advance halted, Kohner took the time to steady his aim, and place each shot carefully into the skulls of the greenskins. The nearest brutes were only a few dozen metres away from him.

  The ork engines drew closer. There were two registers: the deep clanking of heavy armour, and the furious, giant insect rasp of bikes. Kohner looked to the right. Along the edge of the militia formation, ork bikes screamed past. Flames shot out of their exhaust, and from the muzzles of their forward-mounted guns. Their engines spewed dark, noxious clouds over the militia. Kohner choked, his nose and throat raked by the smell of burned, barely refined promethium. The riders butchered at high speed, scything through the human flanks, and they kept going. If it weren’t for the sheer number tearing past, Kohner might not have known what hit them. The warbikes disappeared towards the rear of the column.

  ‘Where are they going?’ Bessler was wide-eyed. He fired pointlessly at the bikes before shooting towards the front again. He wasn’t aiming, wasn’t thinking. He was a single shock away from panic.

  ‘To the rear,’ Kohner told him. ‘They’re going to surround us.’

  The battlewagons followed the bikes. The war’s flames leapt higher, and Kohner could see further into the dark. The ork tanks were an unending stream of metal, a bellowing, clanging, booming sea of destruction. They jostled against each other, too many huge vehicles fighting for the privilege of smashing the humans. The Chimeras and Tauroxes moved outwards towards the flanks, bringing their guns to bear against the ork machines, using their armour to stop the massacre of the flesh. The ork cannons dug huge furrows into the lines. The ground beneath Kohner’s feet vibrated with the impact of ork shells and solid rounds. A massive volley smashed into the side of a Taurox twenty metres to the rear of Kohner’s position. The hits were a series of rapid concussions, a doom-doom-doom-doom-doom punching through the armour, tearing it open, pulverising the soldiers inside. The Taurox exploded, and the fireball washed over the infantry surrounding it.

  Wendlandt’s Chimera blasted the driver’s compartment of one battlewagon. Still moving fast, the enemy vehicle veered wildly, grinding militia troops beneath its spiked wheels before it collided with another ork tank. The two were moving fast, and they were top-heavy with armour and guns. The first battlewagon flipped onto its side. The other, its front built up into a battering ram, drove into its chassis. The two vehicles fused. Metal scraped over rock, becoming a single burning scrap heap. The battlewagons came to a stop, blocking the path of the vehicles behind them. The flow of the ork monsters slowed as the other tanks manoeuvred to pass.

  Kohner experienced a surge of crazed, irrational hope. The destroyed battlewagon meant nothing beyond a minor inconvenience for the orks. Ten killed tanks, twenty, fifty… all meaningless. The army that roared past the militia column defied counting. Kohner knew how this must end. But for a few moments, he ­managed to push that knowledge away.

  The human ranks became more serried. There was no question of an advance. As the warbikes and battlewagons receded towards the rear of the lines, retreat became impossible too. The struggle now was to hold the orks back.

  Crackling green lightning blew the wrecked battlewagons apart. All along both flanks of the column, salvoes of the green energy struck. The orks had set up artillery beyond the path of the vehicles, and they unleashed the guns now. A storm of explosions fell on the militia. The barrels of the cannons were long, tapering conglomerations of coils coming to a three-pronged end which created a blistering nexus. The guns were not accurate. They weren’t even stable. Several blew up as they fired. The orks’ self-inflicted casualties didn’t matter. The power and the volume of the salvoes were overwhelming.

  Kohner’s senses were battered by the energy gale. His comrades became silhouettes backlit by searing green flashes. The explosions came from all sides. The incinerated corpse of a militiaman knocked him down. When he staggered up, he had lost all sense of direction. He was surrounded by destruction. He tried to locate Wendlandt. He spotted the captain, still riding in the hatch of the Chimera, just before a direct hit disintegrated both.

  To Kohner’s right, three ork cannons exploded in quick succession, leaving a gap in the artillery line. He could see a glimpse of the night through the emerald maelstrom. ‘This way!’ he shouted. He didn’t know if anyone could hear. He had no reason to believe his action would serve any purpose. But he saw a gap, and he took it. He would fight the greenskins. He refused to wait for their gunfire to come for him.

  Whether his comrades heard him or saw him, or acted on the same desperate instinct, he was not alone as he made his run. His squad and others followed him. They charged over terrain littered with charred corpses and smoking wrecks. Kohner clambered over a slag heap that had been a Taurox. At the top, he fired into the dark. Dazzled by the bombardment, he could see no targets. He knew they were out there, though. And they would know he was here.

  Ahead of him, more of his comrades were making the same rush. He started moving again, and he was part of a concerted attempt to escape the noose the orks had thrown around the Tempestorans. To the east, the ork infantry continued to press forward, heedless of the danger as they headed into the region being hit by their own artillery. To the west, the battlewagons drove over the militia, their siege shields grinding the humans to bloody smears on the ground, their guns blasting the rear-guard defenders apart. In the south, the energy cannon’s barrage went on unbroken.

  The column bulged to the north. In a matter of seconds, the struggle to break out involved thousands of combatants, backed up by the armour that yet survived. The Tempestorans shouted their rage as they stormed into the night. Kohner’s voice was part of the great shout. He ran faster. Over death and the rubble of a devastated land, he ran. He fired. His hatred was such that he could smash through the ork lines alone, and he was far from alone.

  At his left, he saw Bessler, as driven and enraged as himself, his mouth wide in the shout.

  Are you ready for this, xenos? Kohner thought.

  They were. Just as Kohner began to wonder about the enemy’s silence in this one area to the north, just as he began to suspect the sudden hole in their lines was too good to be true, the orks struck. They had
been waiting behind the destroyed gun. They were an army larger than they had appeared to the east. They had been standing in silence, weapons up, letting the humans run forward and take the bait. Before they fired, they roared again. Kohner was suddenly running against a sound so huge it was physical. Hope drained away, leaving only horror.

  How could orks show such discipline? The question tormented him even as the orks attacked. They fired, and the rounds were another storm, destruction so concentrated that there was no longer any air to breathe. There were only bullets and shells. Then the orks came on, an unbroken mass of brutal muscle and armour.

  The Tempestorans fell. The rout was beyond massacre, beyond extermination. The orks stampeded over the humans without stopping. The eastern and northern infantry were battering rams. They came together, annihilating the Hive Militia. The artillery bursts died down as the human force vanished.

  Kohner saw the slaughter before him, but he kept moving forwards. There was nowhere else to go. He drained his rifle’s power pack firing into the unstoppable tide. He reloaded, and looked up to see a giant heading his way. At the head of the orks attacking from the north was a warlord almost twice his height. The beast wore a horned helmet, and from its back rose a towering icon of iron, also horned, a crimson bull, almost as tall again as the ork. The monster wielded a power claw and a handgun whose barrel was as thick as Kohner’s arm. The warboss barely glanced at Kohner’s squad as it waded through. It clamped the claw over Bessler’s head and torso. The trooper’s blood sprayed over Kohner’s face.

  Kohner fired up at the ork’s head. It looked down at him and shot him once, hitting Kohner in the chest. It felt like a pillar of burning stone, and he stopped running, unable to feel his legs. His head rocked forward and he saw the hole in his body – his core was now gone.

  His legs folded and he fell. He lay on his back. His arms flapped on either side, dragging his splayed fingers over the jagged bedrock. The ork stopped to watch. Its minions held their position, awaiting its pleasure. It raised and lowered its arms, mimicking Kohner’s movements. It laughed, a braying, savage noise. The other orks joined it. The sound of mockery travelled across the battlefield, a contemptuous farewell to the dying humans.