by David Guymer
The man bared his gums, squinting between Tosque and the others.
Then he screamed, shattering the night quiet like an intruder alarm.
It lasted half a second before mass-reactive rounds from four different weapons explosively ripped his body to pieces, vaporous parts of him filming the surrounding stalls.
The human cattle, mouths agape, began slowly to lick their lips.
Zerberyn held his breath as the echoes died. Chains and hoses clinked and swayed. Lips slurped. Tosque covered his angles warily. Columba calmly moved to cover another angle of approach through the maze of stalls. Zerberyn checked his visor display. Ident-runes shuffled across the display: there was Tarsus to his left, Galen and his team spreading out through the cattle sheds, Hardran in the plane above.
Nothing. He allowed his battle readiness to ease.
An enquiring grunt sounded from deeper in the complex. It was porcine, feral. Tension returned immediately to Zerberyn’s grip. The battle for Eidolica was fresh in his memory, the savage grunt-speak of the alien a repugnance he would remember until death relieved him of his duty.
‘Contacts!’ he roared, stepping away from the stall and aiming his bolt pistol into the swaying, clinking, snarling dark.
His beam hit something green. Metal winked from an axe-blade, tooth caps, the lead-hued base of tribal body art. He spared a passing split-second of a thought to the human cattle all around, packed in so close he could feel their body heat. He dismissed the minor variable. There was no longer any hope for them.
He fired.
The bolt-round exploded in the ork’s face, blasting the brute back and down against a partition wall. Reoch and Columba pushed forwards with him in lockstep, a perfect firing line, pistols blazing. From above, Tosque opened up with a strobing burst of fire, stitching a line of eviscerated ork green and human pink across a row of stalls. Without warning, the veteran-brother checked his fire, turned, and opened up on the second floor. Answering fire from stubbers and shooters bracketed the Space Marine’s armour and chewed into the steel wall behind him. He held firm, breaking up the incoming fire with controlled, even bursts of bolter fire.
A triumphant cry filled the unit vox, then cut off. Hardran’s rune blinked from gold to black in Zerberyn’s visor. Red threat icons, generated by his suit’s auspex, boiled around the edges of his display.
A firecrack bang hit the side of his helm with something hot and wet.
He staggered back until his genetic gifts could eliminate the aural shock and reassert his sense of balance. Reoch was down, a bullet in his temple. Zerberyn stepped over the downed Apothecary, solid slugs spanking off his battleplate.
Heavy stubber fire was thundering down on him from the second level. By weight of numbers and brute resilience, a mob of orks had taken the overhang that looked over the factory floor and forced Tosque onto the stairs. The veteran was firing point-blank now, descending backwards, ceding the stair step by step.
The orks were huge, bare-chested, arrogant in their simplicity. In a moment of clarity, Zerberyn saw them for what they were. They were the greenskins’ exemplars.
With a furious cry, Columba fired up his chainsword. The sergeant stepped up onto the air-cycler set against the stair-side wall and jumped across the walkspace, reaching the opposite side stall where he kicked, a servo-assisted release of superhuman force that drove his power-armoured bulk crashing through the metal balustrades and into the orks piling down the stairs. Blood sprayed across the wall, and for a moment it was impossible to distinguish the howls of the orks from that of Columba’s chainsword.
Reoch’s mouth-grille chewed out gravel sounds as he shook his head and rose with a slur of motorised joints, freeing a frag grenade from the clutch at his hip. He pulled the pin and lobbed the charge overarm onto the second level.
The explosion blew out the handrail, smashed the orks’ lacklustre fire discipline and brought down part of the ceiling. The Apothecary turned his half-metal grimace on Zerberyn. His face was a bloody mess, the bullet trapped between the metallic struts that secured his augmetics to the bone.
‘Retrograde aberrations,’ he snarled.
Zerberyn yanked the Apothecary behind him as an ork wearing serpentine tattoos and what looked like human-skin shorts kicked through a stall door and charged. Its axe clanged against Zerberyn’s raised vambrace. Steel on ceramite, it never stood a chance. With a loud crack the haft splintered, the head spinning aside, but the strength behind the initial blow was phenomenal and sent Zerberyn reeling.
A bolt-round punched through the ork’s ribcage and blasted half its chest out through its back. A second round blew out the other half before a third in quick succession detonated between its eyes and finally killed it in its tracks. Brother Antille lowered his boltgun, the muzzle steaming hot.
‘Gunship inbound. Five minutes.’
Zerberyn nodded gratitude and opened a vox-link. ‘Pull back to the landing zone and regroup.’ He turned to Reoch. ‘Select your subjects, Apothecary. They are to be the lucky ones after all.’
The bloodied Apothecary lowered his pistol and stalked to the nearest stall to obey.
Antille hefted his boltgun to cover Reoch while Zerberyn slowly backed up, laying down fire to enable Tosque and Columba to break away and withdraw. A resounding clang pulled Zerberyn’s attention back towards Reoch and Antille.
A ventilator grille banged against the wall and a double-jointed runt of a creature, the serf caste called gretchin, slid on its backside out of the shaft. There, it freed up the stubber in its lap and let rip on full-auto. Ricochets sprang between Reoch and Antille’s heavy battleplate, but the runt’s aim was not nearly so discriminate. The bullet spray perforated the stall partition and several men and women took hits. They mewled like stricken animals, unable even to fall over as they died.
Zerberyn dragged the creature out by the head and crushed its skull with a mild application of force.
Reoch, a bald, plump female over one pauldron and a male over the other, indicated that he was ready.
Columba and Tosque joined them, the latter raking what was left of the second level with suppressive fire while the sergeant, grey plate a gory black, squeezed off snapshots at anything that so much as threatened to be green.
The four Space Marines formed a closed cage around the Apothecary, the orks hurling themselves against the wall made by the sons of Dorn and finding it unbreakable.
‘Out,’ Zerberyn yelled over the doubled thunder of bolter fire, anchoring the retreat as, one by one, his brothers followed Reoch out.
Exiting one firestorm, and entering another.
Fifteen
Prax
Orks crowded the agri-plex’s windows and chutes, pumping the loading yard between the buildings with high-calibre shot. Crude rocket-propelled grenades screamed through the air like kamikaze bombers and blew great spumes of earth from the road. Zerberyn and his brothers gathered around Reoch and his charges and returned fire, picking their targets, always retreating towards the landing zone. An off-spherical grenade crashed through the corrugated roof of one of the cattle sheds and gutted it with fire. Zerberyn raised his arm against the pelting shrapnel and tried to instil some sense into what had happened to his battlefield.
The fighting was too intense and widespread to be the work of his squad alone, and if the Iron Warriors had entered the field then he would surely know about it.
He could see Brother Tarsus. The veteran was firing from behind the thick metal legs of the water tank, minimising himself as a visible target. Brother Donbuss and his heavy bolter, meanwhile, were still watching over the landing zone, outdoing the orks’ combined firepower both for sheer destructiveness and for noise. The belt-fed torrent of high-explosive anti-personnel rounds left twisted metal and pulverised plate wherever the orks sought to establish a firebase.
Karva announced his presence some
distance to the right amongst the slurry tanks with the mighty whoomph of his heavy flamer. An expanding mushroom of promethium wash sent burning debris pattering onto the surrounding roofs like hailstones. Glottal shouts and more crude gunfire answered back. Staccato bursts. So far, so well enough within the mission schematic that Zerberyn had established during descent. At the same time as those flames were dying back however, a flurry of las supercharged to the red end of the energy spectrum spat between various silos, and even from the dust desert that surrounded the oasis of rusted tin and steel.
There was movement beneath the wind turbines.
Human troopers in moulded black carapace and dust-bowl fatigues were hurrying towards the main structure, providing rolling overwatch. Another two squads, twenty men and support weaponry, advanced more deliberately through the silos, flushing out lone orks and gretchin workers ahead of them with grenades and disciplined volleys of hot-shot. Zerberyn had seen skitarii units move like that. One will, one intent. For what looked like unaugmented human soldiers, their unit discipline was exemplary.
A mechanised growl pulled Zerberyn’s attention to the ramshackle ork tractor in the machine shed that he had marked on his initial approach.
With a trembling of its rust-brown frame, it powered back out of the shed at speed. It lurched into a handbrake spin, flat tyres skidding up dust, tarpaulin roof ballooning, then jumped forwards. There was an ork at the wheel, a dark-skinned patriarch with a leather eye patch and a massive jaw, firing one-handed out of the driver’s side window with a twin-linked stubber. A gang of squealing gretchin packed the rear container, holding on to the metal sides or to the single ladder that ran up the back, and blazed wildly in all directions. A bullet punched a trooper from his feet, reflex pulling a wild burst of las skyward as he fell. His squadmates spread out into the thin cover of the various silos and raked the careening vehicle with las-fire.
A fireball lit off under the truck’s rear exhaust, flipping the vehicle over and into a roll that ended with it on its side and white with dust.
‘Beautiful,’ said Columba, drilling a dazed-looking gretchin that staggered from the up-ended rear compartment with a bolt-round.
Zerberyn shot his gaze back towards the silos and the unexpected aid streaming from them. An officer and his bodyguard were running towards Zerberyn’s position, heads down, while the remaining troopers laid down suppressive fire.
On approaching the towering Fists Exemplar captain, the officer pulled himself straight, transferred the second of the two hellpistols he was carrying to his off-hand, and threw a sharp salute. Half the fingers of his hand had been replaced with augmetics. The horror of burned flesh that had cost him that side of his face and eyesight was old enough to have scarred and yet looked to have received little or no medicae attention.
‘Major Dannat Bryce. Seventeenth Gammic Dragoons.’ He spoke in an easy yell that carried his voice over the explosive chatter of gunfire. His damaged face glowed, flushed with supreme self-righteousness and the Emperor’s love. ‘And as pleased as you might expect to see you here, my lord.’
‘Astra Militarum?’ asked Zerberyn.
Bryce gave what was, by its own unfortunate necessity, a crooked smile. ‘You have something that needs doing, you call on the Astra Militarum. You have something that needs done then you call for the Seventeenth.’
‘Militarum Tempestus,’ muttered Columba. ‘Scions. There was a battalion of them deployed to the compliance campaign on Crantar Seven.’
‘We spotted two more gunships, one from another Chapter,’ said one of the major’s guards earnestly. A big man, only a foot or so shorter than Zerberyn, and from the weight of his gear some kind of mission specialist. Zerberyn guessed ordnance. ‘Are they hitting other targets? When can we expect the rest of the liberation fleet?’
‘You’re out of line, sergeant,’ snapped Bryce, then turned to Zerberyn with an apologetic shrug. ‘We’ve been a long time outside of chain of command, my lord.’
‘How long?’
‘I lose track. Several months. We’re here on a Commissariat Special Objective – slow the orks down in whatever way we can and prepare the ground for reconquest. Weren’t you informed?’
‘Months?’ said Zerberyn, ignoring the question. ‘Then you can tell us about the orks’ activities here.’
‘We could. Do you have time for a detour?’
‘We have time.’
‘Then we can show you. There’s an orbital command substation twelve hours east of here as you head towards Princus Praxa.’
‘Advise that we explain on the way,’ barked a female trooper with the coarse voice of a lho-stick lifer and the frosty exterior of an ice world. She was looking at the slate monitorum set into the back of her left gauntlet. It showed what appeared to be heat sources over a grid. A solid mass of them were congregating directly ahead, while still more continued to spill in from the edges. ‘The orks are regrouping inside the agri-plex, and Sergeant Cullen reports two vehicle squadrons inbound with flyer support.’
Bryce turned questioningly to Zerberyn, who nodded. They could spare another twelve hours. And he could already hear the sound of approaching engines. He doubted whether they could all be extracted by air before ork reinforcements arrived, and he would be loath to leave a useful force of Imperial soldiery to the captivity of the greenskins. The human chattel currently held within the agri-plex were another matter. They were, he had concluded, a neutral variable, neither an asset to the success of his mission nor a hindrance, and could thus most usefully be ignored.
‘Antille,’ Zerberyn voxed. ‘Contact Kalkator and inform him of the change in plan. Tell him to be quick, we have ork aircraft inbound.’
‘As you say, brother.’
Zerberyn removed his helmet with a hiss of demagnetisation and focused his hearing on the incoming petrochem growl, his Lyman’s ear isolating it from the din and sharpening it.
It was the distant but rapidly closing roar of a Thunderhawk’s combat engines.
Zerberyn looked up at the moment that the Iron Warriors gunship Meratara came down behind the line of wind turbines, losing itself in the dust thrown up by its underwing exhausts. The bi-blades spun until they blurred, droning, superfast, chips of metallic debris spanking off the blades. Turbofans angling to hover, the gunship’s box jaw pivoted towards the agri-plex and opened up with its full forward arsenal.
Zerberyn cursed, shoved Bryce to the ground and crouched over him.
‘Defend the Apothecary!’
Turbo-lasers, heavy bolters and lascannons chewed through the structure with a sound like a woodsaw biting on steel. Men and transhumans alike broke from combat and threw themselves down as a quartet of hellstrike missiles whistled from the Thunderhawk’s underwing hardpoints and into the agri-plex. Explosions blossomed along the building’s width, spread low like demolition charges rigged, primed and detonated in sequence, triggering a chain collapse that brought its metal walls crashing into dust and fire.
Zerberyn, still crouched protectively over the lightly concussed Tempestus Scions commander, turned his face into the heat storm. Bits of metal and burning cinders streamed down like a scene from the last days of the Siege. Massive warriors, veterans in ornate gunmetal and bronze, moved through the pyroclastic rain and brought bolters to bear.
‘Arise, little cousin,’ said Kalkator.
The warsmith’s deep voice resonated harshly from the glowing vox-grille of his horned helmet. His baroque Mark III power armour was embellished with hooks strung with barbed wire, weird devices, and campaign citations from a hundred worlds rendered lifeless by war a millennium before Zerberyn had been born. His left arm was a bionic of superb integration and design, the product of a craft lost to all but a few.
Dazed, Bryce looked from one Space Marine to the other, his mouth making confused, soundless shapes.
The twin barrels of Kalkator’s
combi-bolter were trained between Zerberyn’s eyes.
‘My gunship has room enough for your squad. Take what you came for and leave before the orks come back for vengeance.’
‘You are a soulless traitor, Kalkator. There were people in there.’
‘It is a war of survival we fight. I wage it as though it is one I intend to win. We received your update, were you not about to abandon them?’
‘There is a difference. Your own survival, I am convinced you treasure. But not mine, nor theirs.’
Zerberyn pointed to the Scions scattered about. A good number had gone to ground amongst the battered silos as soon as the agri-plex had gone up and most of them had visual augmenter beams dancing over the Iron Warrior’s armour. Had the Imperium seen fit to educate even its best with a fuller knowledge of its history and its foes, then things would have become very ugly very fast.
‘Truer words were never uttered by a bastard of Dorn,’ said Kalkator. ‘But at this moment my fate is dependent on yours.’
‘Our mission is unfinished. These men speak of an operation of some kind being conducted on the surface nearby, a data trove of the orks’ activities that is within our grasp if we can move faster than word of our presence here.’
‘Arise,’ Kalkator growled again. His gauntlet finger slid across his combi-bolter’s trigger like a whetstone over a sickle. ‘I will kill these men before they can lead you to your death.’
‘You would have to kill me to do it.’
‘Do you think you would be the first?’
