Echoes of the Long War

by David Guymer

  ‘You should have brought more men.’

  ‘Daylight,’ Koorland called. ‘What was your personal tally of kills from the siege of Eidolica?’

  ‘Nine hundred and eight of the greenskins, brother. A long night fought over the promethium flats of my home, and then when the sun rose and my armour burned and my bolter ran dry and my chainsword died, I killed with my fists alone as the orks sought to take the caves of the Great Basin from me.’ He turned to look at Eternity. ‘I would have killed nine hundred and eight more to hold it had my brothers’ Thunderhawks not retrieved me.’

  ‘Eternity. Your count from Aspiria.’

  ‘Thirty.’ The Black Templar turned the hawk-like beak of his helm towards his Fists Exemplar brother. ‘Though I was disadvantaged by the orks sending only their best to take my vessel. I had minutes rather than days, and nothing but my gladius with which to do it.’

  Koorland smiled. Daylight’s rough chuckle filled the brothers’ private channel.

  ‘I command the might of the Imperium itself,’ snapped Udo.

  ‘Perhaps it is too grand a task, for one mortal to govern in regency of the Emperor of Man.’ Koorland selected his words as he would select targets, and from the impotent flush that came over the Lord Commander, he could see they had found their mark. Even Udin Macht Udo could not attempt to deny the truth of them. ‘By genetic birthright, and for the Imperium of Man that He built, I claim the title of Lord Commander. Stand aside, Udo, that you may serve Him without further impeachment of your honour.’

  Udo sneered.

  ‘I will back the Angels of the Adeptus Astartes,’ growled Zeck, almost reverently, and Koorland was thankful that the Provost-Marshal had chosen this day to end his exile from the Senatorum. ‘If you can restore order to our streets and sanity to this…’ his voice trailed off, contempt showing through the symphonic grate of his augmetised throat, ‘assembly, then you will have my support.’

  ‘And we,’ said Veritus. The Inquisitorial Representative clumped across the dais in cream-coloured power armour to take his stand beside Zeck. The two lords were giants – to Koorland’s eyes, in more ways than one. ‘As once we rallied behind your Father in Terra’s darkest hour, we will follow you now.’

  With Wienand joining her co-representative, the High Lords slowly, hesitantly, shuffled themselves.

  The Paternoval Envoy, Gibran, was the first to go to Zeck’s side, then Sark, Anwar and Lord Militant Verreault. Lansung hauled his bulk out of his chair and, with an almost apologetic look to the pulpit, joined them. Even Juskina Tull seemed to snap out of whatever fugue state she had been occupying to join the drift. Tobris Ekharth wilted under Udo’s stare, moving like a man with a powering conversion beam trained on his shoulder blades, but with a smile growing lighter with every step he took.

  Only Mesring and Kubik remained. The former looked on as though the goings-on of his peers were beneath him. The latter might have had his consciousness diverted to some other host for the duration of the recess for all the reaction he gave.

  With a defiant growl, the Lord Commander gestured to the detachment of Lucifer Blacks that were just then entering through the north precept. They moved in, shock-glaives powered, but faltered at the sight of Eternity, his two-handed sword as long as they were tall.

  More Guardsmen filed in from the east behind Koorland, blades lowered threateningly, bands of light striating the enamelled black of their armour.

  ‘Remove this man’s weapons and escort him from my chamber,’ snapped Udo.

  The ranking Lucifer Black, an angle-drawn lieutenant with a soft beret cap in lieu of a helmet, walked towards Koorland. He pursed his lips, his toughened stare sliding off Koorland’s pauldron plate to the High Lords and back again. He threw a salute and then dropped to one knee with head bowed across his chainsword. There was a yellow ribbon knotted around the hilt.

  ‘It’s my honour to serve you, Lord Commander.’

  Udo was boiling, good eye bulging, but he had nothing left to say.

  ‘You are a powerful man by your own reckoning, Udo,’ said Koorland. ‘But to my brothers and I, you are just a man. Stand down. You are done.’

  ‘I made this council. Lansung? Mesring? I made them.’

  ‘Provost-Marshal,’ snapped Koorland. ‘Please remove the former Lord Commander.’

  With a crack of servo-muscular knuckles and a grin of steel, Zeck stalked forward. Udo drew himself up as if meaning to stare the cyborgised Provost-Marshal down, as he had so many others in his years of rise and rise. Then at the very last, he appeared to wither inside of his plush white admiralty jacket, in his deflation visibly shrinking by half an inch. He dropped his head. Zeck’s augmetised hand clamped over his shoulder, and aside from a whimper of pain he didn’t make another sound as the Provost-Marshal led him from the dais and into the arms of the waiting enforcers.

  Koorland held his sword aloft and shouted, cheers beginning to spread through the Great Chamber and into the antechamber beyond as the reality of what the lords had just witnessed or heard sank in.

  ‘The next time an ork sets foot in this chamber, it will be met by the Last Wall!’

  The chamber buzzed with new excitement. Koorland’s twin hearts were thumping.

  The fightback began now.

  Nineteen

  Prax – Princus Praxa

  The locomotive rattled along the damaged track, steadily slowing as it curved towards Princus Praxa.

  The ork pressed up against the inside of the carriage window squeaked slowly down until Zerberyn arrested it with a firm hand to the back of its neck. A buckled sleeper jarred the carriage and touched acid to the raw tendons in his arm. These orks had been allowed to grow large, as great perhaps as those fought by the primarchs on Ullanor, and the continual buffeting made it feel heavier. With a grunt, he drew the brute back into place just as an ork sentry post flashed across the window.

  Scrap metal, painted red. Belt-fed combi-weapons in huge, gauntleted hands. Then columns, bullet-chewed ferro­crete blinking past as the locomotive passed under the terminus’ flat roof. Sunlight receded, replaced by spotty lumens and the drum fires scattered over the platforms and access ramps.

  Gangs of gretchin and the occasional leather-clad ork were busily loading and unloading. Zerberyn expected to see human slaves performing the greenskins’ labour, but what few humans he saw were in chained lines being fed out of dusty locomotives and into corrals. Moving in the opposite direction were big industrial storage drums, light weaponry and vehicles, and agricultural machinery. Orks in rugged yellow battlesuits showing off sneering moon glyphs oversaw the import and export with a brutish efficiency that any crude hierarchy would recognise. In another setting, Zerberyn might have been watching Administratum troopers extorting a local militia. Some kind of lumpen, enamelled currency changed hands.

  The march of columns slowed as the locomotive squealed towards an empty platform.

  A ten-strong mob of orks in thick red bodyplate followed the engine in, streaming down a frozen escalator from a pedestrian flyover. Some kind of boss, broader than the rest by half a metre and as dark as a Predator’s treads, waved a clenched fist for them to spread out and they did. At a barked command, two pairs clattered forwards to cover each of the carriage doors. Half of the mob hung back on overwatch.

  It was organised. Professional. Not at all like orks.

  Zerberyn drew his bolt pistol carefully. Columba and the rest of Veteran Squad Anatoq prepared themselves, keeping hold of the orks they hid behind with elbows, shoulders, whatever was practical.

  The Tempestus Scions crammed into the vestibule and underseat areas out of sight, calmly activated their weapons’ visual augmenter beams, flexing fingers, rolling shoulders, working space enough for each man to move when the moment came. The rising hum of hot-shot packs resonated through the carriage’s metal fittings. Major Bryce angled up th
e reflective edge of his slate monitorum to the window and grimaced.

  ‘Bloody Axes,’ he hissed. ‘That’s what we call them, for the symbol on their armour. Always kill them first.’

  ‘Noted,’ said Zerberyn, disengaging his bolt pistol from its mag-holster.

  The locomotive heaved onto its brakes and then cried shrilly to a halt. The Bloody Axes came running in, two by two. Zerberyn checked the countdown timer he had programmed into his helm display. It was locked on 00:00 and had been for half a second.

  ‘Brother Donbuss, are you sure that the greenskin munitions you recovered were–’

  A second sun rose over the pasture desert, white and furious, light burning up the track like a runaway train. Bryce grunted and slid back under the window, but Zerberyn’s auto-senses protectively filmed over a split second ahead of time. He saw the orks on the platform turn in surprise towards the thermonuclear explosion on the horizon, then clutch their eyes and stagger out of their ordered overwatch formation.

  ‘Now!’

  Zerberyn yanked the release cord.

  The doors shuddered apart, far enough for him to force his right arm through to the pauldron and open fire. A single mass-reactive explosion ripped the shoulder from a bellowing Bloody Axe. He tracked left, fired again as its fellow brought up its gun blind, and dropped it with a spitting rupture in its chest.

  At the same time, Scions in full omnishield glare protection popped the roof escape hatches, swinging up plasma weaponry and hot-shot volleyguns and raking the platform with fire.

  Zerberyn got his fingers between his pauldron plate and the doors and pushed them open. He jumped two-footed onto the platform, cracking into it. A Bloody Axe flailed for him with eyes closed. A headshot exploded it, just as the window behind him shattered.

  Arriving at his own decision to move now rather than wait for his captain, Columba simply fired through the window on full-auto. Propellant trails criss-crossed the platform. Mass-reactive kill-shots painted it red. With their lighter profiles, the Scions climbed easily though the broken frames. Bryce was first onto the platform, emptying a charge cell into the Bloody Axe boss’ body armour, and then scrambling behind a pillar as the blinded ork let rip with a racketing burst of fire.

  Kalkator executed the creature with a single bolt-round between the shoulder blades.

  The warsmith stood on the platform by the doors of the rear carriage. He threw a mock salute. The orks at that end of the platform were dead. Traitor Space Marines were disembarking to take up firing positions over the shredded remains while, in a gnarl of corrupted motors, the three Terminators formed up into a line, a wall, and advanced on the steps up to the flyover. The escalator was a natural choke point and, drawn by the gunfire, orks were already piling bodies and heavy guns up behind the bent crush barrier at the top.

  Tactical Dreadnought plate had been built to withstand the worst a hostile galaxy could give out.

  It withstood this.

  ‘Major,’ Zerberyn boomed over the screams and thunder of abused plasteel. ‘Do you know where my cousin is leading us?’

  ‘Yes, lord – streetside access.’

  Zerberyn looked around quickly. The station was a maze of platforms, overpasses and panting locomotives that echoed with bestial shouts and weapons flare. Engines thundered through, not frequently, but at a speed and irregularity that made the tracks a genuine hazard, even for a Space Marine.

  ‘Do you know an alternate route?’

  ‘I do, lord.’

  ‘Then take it. We will force the direct route. Columba, take a five-man combat squad, go with him.’

  With a metallic growl, the veteran-sergeant jumped into the tracks in the direction that Bryce and the Tempestus Scions were moving. Donbuss, Borhune, Nalis and Tarsus fell in with him, squeezing off controlled bursts at the orks on the far side whenever the locomotives screeching between them left space for a shot. Zerberyn turned to the Iron Warriors.

  The Terminators walked into a gauntlet of missiles, bombs and explosive rounds like a vehicle’s dozer blade churning up a minefield. Kalkator and the Traitor Space Marines moved up behind them, taking snapshots over the massive head and shoulder armour of their Cataphractii brothers.

  Zerberyn accorded their efficiency a grudging admiration.

  Goaded beyond their febrile discipline, the orks poured over the crush barriers with a roar. Bodies exploded, ripped apart by mass-reactive rounds. The muzzle flashes of rapid-firing combi-bolters strobed in the narrow space. Beasts howled. Piped laughter boomed from helmet speakers.

  Tough alien flesh met ceramite composite like knuckles flying into a riot shield. Against men, against lesser orks, the line of Terminators would have been enough, but since the death of Eidolica, Zerberyn had never seen orks like these.

  A brute in black-and-white bodyplate, almost of a size with the Terminators, hammered its axe into the lead warrior’s gorget protector and bulled him aside. It roared, axe stuck in the Terminator, heaved a Traitor Space Marine up over its head and hurled him off the stair. It took a combat knife under its armpit, grunted, and elbowed the Iron Warrior so hard his plastron buckled under it. Then, severed fibre bundles sputtering with his armour spirit’s fury, the Terminator came about and pulped the rampaging ork with the crackling discharge from his power fist.

  But the line had already given.

  Zerberyn killed two orks with two shots. Neat. Perfect. A third he demolished with a hammer blow. Tosque and Reoch closed in alongside. Too close for bolter work, the veteran-brothers made a wall of their knives.

  ‘Break them,’ barked Kalkator. His chainsword chewed messily through an ork’s leg while the full-sized bolter held steady in his bionic grip kicked out bursts of semi-automatic fire into the pack. ‘Would you have our cousins think us weak?’

  Growling their rancour, the Terminators slammed back into line and pushed on with visceral determination. In a blizzard of bolter fire they took the crush barrier. Traitor Space Marines spread out onto the walled flyover in both directions and immediately started firing.

  ‘Brother Karva, rearguard,’ said Zerberyn.

  Restricted in the use of his heavy flamer by the close fighting, Karva had held back on the platform until then. Antille came up with him, firing from the chest.

  ‘Agreed, brother-captain.’

  ‘Cataphractii forward. Brothers to the flanks. Grind them under your heels.’

  ‘Iron within!’ blurted a heavily augmented warrior of the Chosen.

  ‘Iron without!’ came the return, and a shiver ran down Zerberyn’s spine.

  They started forwards, like a phalanx from the Age of Bronze re-enacted from a treatise on ancient tactica. Shields forward, shields side, spears up, advancing as one.

  As Guilliman had once written: man never changes, so war never changes.

  Cutting themselves a path with bolter and power fist, the Iron Warriors and Fists Exemplar ground through the walkway and spilled out onto a pillared concourse of polished stone. A painted fresco showing the IV Legion liberating a verdant world lit the ceiling with vivid metallics. Engaged columns, rounded in the classical High Crusade style and carved in the likeness of unhelmed Legiones Astartes, looked in from the walls. A huge baroque timepiece hung from the ceiling’s central vault. It was broken, too badly shot up even to make out the time of death.

  Orks were pouring in through the large streetside doors ahead, as well as from subway accesses and smashed-up refectory rooms to either side. The space was too open for the Space Marines to take them as they had before and so they charged for the doors, firing from the hip as they ran. Sluggers and bolters chewed old stone pillars to the bone and blasted them apart.

  Zerberyn and Kalkator moved together into a storm of lead so intense it was like pushing against a falling wall. Where one was forced to let up to slam a clip into his bolter, the other emptied his to cover h
im. Where one engaged with thunder hammer or chainsword, the other was there at his side.

  It was as the Iron Warrior had said: together, they were invincible.

  Zerberyn cleared the doors with a thunderstrike of his hammer and chased Kalkator into the street, pistol tracking like a restless auto-targeter.

  The grand old buildings were grizzled by gunfire, their ornate blackwork twisted, pierced and scarred. The road, wide enough in this world’s heyday for a squadron of Leman Russ tanks, was filled with vehicle wrecks and blockaded at either end with garishly painted trucks and stacks of burning tyres. A fine red rain fell, gelid and horrible. He had expected it to be warm, but it wasn’t. He looked up. Blood vapour and chemicals pumped from the city’s rendering plants hazed high above street level, obscuring the chimneys and the higher rooftops. Over the rumble of running engines, he could hear a frenzied, guttural chant. He focused his Lyman’s ear, cutting away the immediacy of combat.

  He had heard it before, splitting the skies of Eidolica like thunder.

  The Beast.

  It was everywhere, booming through some kind of public address system rigged up all over the surrounding streets. Another transmitted recording no doubt, but the thought that the ork could be near filled Zerberyn’s chest with fury.

  ‘This way, little cousin.’

  Hugging the station’s columned frontage, Kalkator turned right and kept running. Iron Warriors and Fists Exemplar followed in ones and twos, staccato bursts of bolter fire stippling the walls and barricades.

  The warsmith dropped down by the rear of an agricultural sixteen-wheeler that was blocking the way. A mob of orks fired down from its iron roof, laughing, grisly by firelight. Space Marines stepped up and raked the truck in turn.

  Heedless of the firefight, Kalkator closed his bionic fingers around the truck’s rear bar and strained. The massive vehicle began to tilt. The gunfire abruptly ceased as eight of the transport’s wheels were pulled away from the ground. A metallic growl strained through the warsmith’s helmet grille as he heaved the truck over and onto its side.