Echoes of the Long War

by David Guymer

  Iron Warriors poured through the breached barricade, laughing bitterly as they gunned down crushed and dazed orks where they lay. Tosque unpinned a frag grenade and rolled it between the wheels of the abutting vehicle. Blast debris blew out around their ankles as the Fists Exemplar followed in. Brother Karva hosed the street with promethium. Zerberyn was the last.

  Looking back, he saw scores of ramshackle ork bikes manoeuvering through the roadblocks at the street’s opposite end. From the vandalised tenement habs across the way, portcullis-like sheets of metal were being withdrawn over windows and doorways. Orks roughly jammed ammo feeds into newly uncovered weapon emplacements. Seriously outfitted heavy infantry – Bloody Axes and Leering Moons – and a chugging walker that looked like a Dreadnought rumbled into the street.

  Stowing his thunder hammer, Zerberyn crouched by the truck’s rear bar and took it in both hands, intending to block the way behind them. The ligaments rose up on his neck until his entire upper body shook. He let go with a gasp – the vehicle was immovable.

  ‘Karva, Reoch,’ he called, the strongest in his command. ‘Aid me, brothers.’

  A missile screwed over their heads before either of the Space Marines had moved. The warhead’s on-board guidance spirit jinked it between wrecks and debris, and then slammed it through the flame-effect front fairing of an ork attack bike. An implosive krak detonation ripped out its fuselage, drew fire back in through its exhaust, and sent what was left of the sidecar rocketing spectacularly into the air.

  ‘Emperor’s speed, brother,’ voxed Sergeant Columba.

  Zerberyn saw the green-lit armoured profiles of Tempestus Scions taking position amongst the ribs and angels of the station’s roof. Hot-shot and support weapon fire lashed across the wide road.

  ‘Many thanks,’ Zerberyn replied.

  ‘Give them to the major. He will make better use of them.’

  ‘Can you see Kalkator?’

  ‘To my shame.’

  ‘Then cover us until we are clear, then circle back and follow. I will praise you both in person.’

  Columba gave a snort and signed off.

  The road beyond the barricade was lit with drum fires, stripped-down vehicles of sub-human make abandoned around craters in the road. Greenskin dead exhibiting signs of mass-reactive trauma lay splattered and strewn. Zerberyn wiped chilly red condensate from his helm lenses. Drums of the sort he had seen being loaded onto trains bound for the agri-plexes were piled high in pyramidal stacks outside of warehouses. Where those outbound vessels had appeared empty, a handful of these were leaking a gelatinous paste where bolt-rounds had punctured them but not hit sufficient mass to detonate. Intermingled human skins were staked up under glowing electrical heaters. Tanneries. An acidic urine stench infused them and wafting out into the street with every flap and ripple of slow-curing flesh.

  The sound of gunning engines dragged him back.

  The last of the Iron Warriors were disappearing into an alley. Antille was there, waving for the rest of them to hurry.

  Zerberyn slammed his shoulder into the tipped truck, with his brothers’ help sending it squealing back into place in the barricade. He backed away, clapping rust from his gauntlets, and shoved Karva and Reoch after their traitor allies.

  The alley was narrow and desperately dark, wide enough for an Iron Warriors Terminator, but only just. The walls were crowded with metal escape ladders that vibrated with every bass grunt from the Beast’s augmitter network. Blended waste trickled through open sewage channels, carrying nuggets of bone, the occasional finger. Moments before, Zerberyn had thought he had seen the basest point to which human by-product could be rendered. Now, crashing headlong through knotted waste sacks and refuse drums, he was rudely re-educated.

  Kalkator’s vanguard had just cleared the alley when a pair of spotlights hit them from behind the row of habs. No, not spotlights.

  Headlights.

  There was a squeal of tyre rubber, a turbo-charged petrochem roar, and then an armoured troop truck smashed through the two Traitor Space Marines at point and straight into the wall. The lamps flickered. Masonry pattered over the crowded troop compartment. Orks in thick, spiked armour and enclosed helms fired their guns in the air, the rear wheels still revving up swirls of red dust as the fighters piled out into the alley.

  Zerberyn kicked in a side door partially hidden behind a pair of bins.

  ‘This way!’

  He ran through into what looked like a processing plant or manufactory. Karva followed, the pilot of his heavy flamer flickering blue in the utter dark like a serpent’s tongue, then Reoch, Galen and Tosque, and finally Antille, covering the rear with tight bursts of bolter fire.

  There were small windows high up in the two long walls, but these had been crudely boarded up and painted over in thick, primary colours. The skylight over the centre of the manufactorum floor had been successively stained red. It was like trying to look out from inside an artery.

  The veteran-brothers activated their helm lights.

  The beams stabbed up into towering lines of heavy machinery, chopped through steel ladders, and dug into the dark to glint back off meat hooks and ceiling-mounted suspensor platforms. The line was still running, conveyers clattering away unidentifiable chunks of gristle and flesh into the dark.

  Surrounded by horror, Zerberyn almost forgot the Iron Warriors.

  Firing on full automatic now, the Traitor Space Marines retreated inside. A warrior with a tusked helm and hellishly embellished battleplate tore a frag grenade from a clutch at his belt, leaving the pin behind, and then launched it through the open door. The confined frag blast stormed both ways down the alley and blew scraps of flesh and debris into the manufactorum. At a command from Kalkator, another slammed the door while two of his brothers dragged over a pallet loader laden with drums and jammed it up against the frame.

  Zerberyn quickly cast about for another way out.

  ‘We can carry on, further into the complex,’ said Kalkator, striding over and clearly reading his intent. One crimson lens on his helm was fractured and flickered crazily, while grey sealant gel welled up from breach points in his battleplate like a fungal infestation. The unpainted ceramite cloaking his apostate colours made him, just for a moment, appear almost noble. ‘The bunker’s entry point is not far, but we cannot fight every ork in this city to get there.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘And lessen my value to you? I am too old to be a fool, little cousin.’

  ‘Then go,’ said Zerberyn, ejecting a spent clip from his pistol and locking home another. Not many left now. They would have to count. ‘My brothers and I will hold them here.’

  He expected Kalkator to argue. A brother of the Fists Exemplar would have, for it was as deeply in their nature to be martyrs as it was to be contrary. True to his Legion’s harsh reputation however, Kalkator accepted the willing sacrifice with a nod of his horned helm and a flicker of his shattered lens.

  ‘Theron,’ he growled. The most elaborately armoured of the Terminators turned in answer to his name, in a shiver of razorwire and painful iconography. There was still an axe embedded in his gorget’s fibre bundles, restricting his helmet’s range of motion. There had been no time to address it. ‘You and your brothers will remain. You will follow the Fists Exemplar’s orders as though they were mine.’

  Zerberyn’s eyebrow arched. Honour from an Iron Warrior? He doubted it. More likely, the Cataphractii-pattern suits would simply slow the rest of Kalkator’s force down.

  ‘From honour cometh iron!’ the warsmith bellowed, backing off and summoning his warriors to follow.

  As the last of the Iron Warriors moved past him, Zerberyn brought his bolt pistol to cover the alley side entrance they had left behind. This is my ground, it said in his genes’ selfish voice, the voice of every Imperial Fist that had ever occupied a fort or defended a hill. I hold it. To s
top running, to turn and hold: tactical necessity it may have been but that was not why it felt right.

  Tosque joined him, then Reoch, Karva, Galen and Antille, pauldron to pauldron to pauldron in an unbroken circle. Corners were weaknesses. The sturdiest redoubts had none.

  A scuffling came from the alley, of steel boots and bulky weapons hitting bins. Zerberyn focused his hearing to gauge their numbers, but was immediately distracted by something else. Engines. Vehicles were circling the structure, disgorging troops. Zerberyn could hear them hammering up to the walls.

  ‘Fists Exemplar,’ cried Zerberyn, aiming for the door behind the rough barricade. ‘The First Wall.’

  A rapid beating like that from a crooked fan rotor droned overhead and the circle of Fists Exemplar was suddenly bathed in red light. Zerberyn looked up and squinted into the floodlight shafting in through the skylight. He scowled into the glare, shifting his aim upwards even as the shadows it had disgorged dropped towards the glass.

  The orks were coming.

  Twenty

  Prax – Princus Praxa

  The skylight shattered.

  Zerberyn looked up, slowly, torturously, time stretching elastically into glittering stillness as his superhuman perceptions processed the sudden sensory overload. A million bladed reflections of himself looked out in all directions. Floodlights glared white, beaten into slices by the rotating wings of a hovering aircraft. He could hear the thump of its engines, suspended in time as its downwash held it in the air. Shards of glass the thickness of his hand tumbled. He saw it all. The ceiling had not been shattered evenly. Twelve discrete points of impact penetrated it, huge black-armoured bodies punching through the skylight and trailing glass like bullets fired into water. He began to shift his aim upwards, his brain gunning towards full speed.

  ‘–clear!’ cried a vox-fragment as glass cascaded over the manufactory floor.

  Tosque and Antille pulled into the cover of an overhead crawlway. Galen hit the ground. Still tracking his aim skywards, Zerberyn dropped to his haunches and covered his head with his arms. Glass broke against his battleplate like a thousand blades. The weight of it pushed him down. His ears filled with a crystalline rush, and he could see nothing but fragmented light and edges. He glimpsed Brother Karva. The veteran was bent backwards and backing up, squaring his chest to the onslaught to shield the volatile promethium tanks on his shoulders. Zerberyn could do nothing but yell an unheard warning into his vox-bead as a shard of reinforced glass the size of a Rhino’s troop hatch came blade-down through the faceplate of the Space Marine’s helm and staked him to the ground.

  Zerberyn rolled, glass caltrops disintegrating, just as a pair of armoured boots crunched down where he had been.

  It was an ork, three metres tall and almost as broad, clad in moulded black armour of some dense, energy-deflecting ceramic. Its shovel face and clawed hands were painted in black stripes. The metal parts of its multi-barrelled custom shooter had been rubbed in soot. Even its tusks were darkened. It punched the bright red release buckle of the line harness it was wearing, cables whipping up towards the broken ceiling, then levelled its weapon in one brute fist.

  Zerberyn did likewise. Too slow.

  The ork’s upper body vanished in a splatter of green vapour. An Iron Warriors Terminator pumped a torrent of combi-bolter abuse through its remains, turning ponderously as solid rounds spanked off his baroque battleplate.

  ‘Brother-captain. The door.’

  With a thunderous crash of spilling drums, the metal door from the alley shoved back the barricade and orks in spiked black-and-white armour pushed through. The lead ork roared, slugger spitting out lead even as it kicked aside a barrel. Zerberyn put a bolt-round between its eyes. Antille and Galen accounted for a further one each. Tosque hosed the entryway with fire, but the orks charged into it, unloading their bulk magazines as they came.

  What he would not sacrifice for Karva’s heavy flamer right now.

  Apothecary Reoch stood by the veteran’s remains, his narthecium’s sampler deep into his brother’s gorget softseals and the progenoid sacs in his throat. Off-hand, he blasted one of the ork drop-troops off its feet with a bolt-round in the gut. It would take a long time for a wound like that to kill an ork. Zerberyn suspected that the Apothecary knew that.

  ‘Exemplars, to your duty!’ Zerberyn roared, bolt-pistol executing one bloody headshot at a time. ‘We are the wall that stands forever!’

  A blast of rubble buried whatever reply he might have received.

  An articulated wrecking arm smashed through the street-side wall, the ork dreadnought Zerberyn had seen outside of the terminus station stamping itself a bigger hole. It resembled a uranium waste drum painted with yellow-and-black chevrons. Its other arm was fitted with a screaming buzzsaw, burning promethium dribbling from a dangerously crowded platform of grenade launchers and flamer weaponry. A bestial cry boomed from its speakers as it swung out its wrecker arm to knock in what was left of the wall.

  In a growl of engines, a refurbished Salamander command tank climbed the rubbled wall and slammed onto its glacis suspension on the manufactory floor. Glass splinters chinked across the floor or simply exploded under its mass. It growled menacingly, heaving with excess engine power, hull-mounted heavy bolter grinding about to maximise its threat angles. Its original dust-bowl camouflage had been patchily done over in red, a pair of crossed axes painted onto the side. A troop compartment that should have housed a full forward command squad of Praxian militia was filled by a single enormous ork. Its armour was blood red, massive plates swollen around a gnarled head wired in to some kind of vox-apparatus.

  Zerberyn ejected his clip and slammed in a fresh one containing armour-piercing vengeance rounds.

  Kill the Bloody Axes first, Bryce had said.

  With an alien roar, the big ork boss took the firing toggle of the Salamander’s pintle-mounted storm bolter and blazed at the Terminators as the vehicle beneath it filled the air with fumes. The cry was answered by something more palatable, but just barely.

  They were human mouths.

  Soldiers in what looked like local militia fatigues, with crossed axes daubed over their flak vests and unit identifiers branded into their shaven heads, charged over the broken wall after their tank. Las-fire lashed the rumbling production line and by sheer volume forced the Fists Exemplar into cover. A las-bolt scorched Galen’s faceplate and sent him stumbling behind a conveyer.

  Tosque moved protectively in front of his brother, took aim at the Salamander and, with a furious blast of white heat, unleashed the single-shot plasma charge of his combi-weapon. The crackling discharge struck under the light tank’s armour skirt and shredded its tracks. Links flapping, it slewed off to one side and crashed into a giant steel hopper that fed one part of the conveyer network. The mistreated hopper split up the side and spewed thousands of litres of partially-cleaned bone fragments and flesh scraps over the revving tank.

  Reoch growled some choice words of approval. Zerberyn did not register them. In his horror – no, in the white roar of his fury – he had not taken a shot since the arrival of the human troops.

  More were running in behind the wreck. Battalion strength. Maybe more. They had no hair, no teeth and their bodies marked with brands and maltreatment. This was humanity’s fate. This was why the orks waited for Terra’s surrender rather than simply levelling the world as they had Ardamantua, Eidolica, and a thousand others. They did not want another conquest.

  They wanted a client race.

  A trillion times a trillion, the citizens of the Imperium were numberless beyond count. As individuals they were negligible, to a certain mindset disposable even, but as a whole they were humanity. They were the gene-seed of Holy Terra, where He dwelt in His incorruptible glory.

  Unbidden, the image filled his mind of the xenos breaking Eternity Gate, sweeping through the Sanctum Imperialis, and hauling the Empero
r from His Golden Throne.

  No. No!

  He would virus-bomb every last world more than a week from Terra if that was what it took to end this. He would do it personally.

  With a wordless snarl he advanced into the las-storm, flipping his pistol’s shot selector to rapid fire and mowing armour-piercing rounds through the lightly-armoured troopers. Troopers? Traitors. The outcome was bloody overkill and better than they deserved.

  Around him, meanwhile, the orks’ pincers closed.

  Tosque and Antille stood back-to-back, rocks of rugged grey where reds, yellows and black-and-whites crashed over, and with Exemplar stubbornness refused to give ground. Inhuman voices bellowed. Servos screamed. Bolters were abandoned now in favour of knives and fists.

  Reoch pulled Galen to his feet. The latter shook a jam from his bolter, then emptied what was left of the clip into the onrushing horde. The first to reach him went down with a boltgun smashed through the side of its skull, but after that there were too many mobbing in to be sure what was being done to whom.

  The battle-brother’s rune in Zerberyn’s visor display went dark.

  Only the Iron Warriors were still firing. The Terminators were mobile firebases, arms outstretched, wrist-mounted combi-bolters kicking out a remorseless torrent of firepower whether there was an ork in front of their tusked helms or not.

  A jet of flame flooded over the Terminators, burning promethium lighting the Traitor Space Marines up like devils as the orks’ dreadnought stomped towards them.

  Beating a gold-armoured ork into the ground with a downwards smash of his hammer, Zerberyn shoulder-crushed through the mob of traitor auxiliaries to peel off three shots into the advancing dreadnought. Mass-reactive rounds splashed across a barrier of rigid blue force an inch above the walker’s yellow-and-black plate.

  His heart sank.

  A void shield. How could something that size generate the power to sustain a void shield?