The Last Wall

by David Annandale

  Behind, the las-fire ceased with the snap of a neck.

  Van der Deckart swung his blade at Rendenstein’s throat. She hunched lower even as she yanked on the strut in her right hand. It shot out of the wall and flew upward. The makeshift javelin struck van der Deckart through the chin and burst out the top of his skull. Rendenstein snatched the blade from his hand as the corpse toppled over and landed face-down above Wienand.

  Wienand stared up at his features. Even in death, they were pursed. The meticulous discipline of his cropped beard and hair was spoiled by his flowing blood.

  Krule was with them now. He tossed van der Deckart’s corpse into the depths, then held Wienand’s left arm while Rendenstein used the power sword to cut through the webbing and free her. They hauled her up and headed back towards the walkway.

  ‘So much for the story of my death,’ Wienand said.

  ‘It stood up long enough for us to get this far,’ Rendenstein pointed out.

  Krule asked, ‘Did you recognise any of the attackers?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wienand. ‘Audten van der Deckart. One of Veritus’ political allies. He must have relished the chance to put me in my place once and for all.’

  ‘His presence might be another good sign,’ said Rendenstein.

  Wienand nodded. ‘Veritus must have limited forces at his disposal.’

  Krule held up a hand, listening. He lowered his voice and pointed back towards their point of entry into the hall. ‘Not that limited. More coming.’

  Wienand thought quickly. ‘Can you take them?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Then you have my thanks.’ To Rendenstein, she said, ‘Let’s go. No more delays.’

  They ran parallel to the walkway, weaving their way past the heaps of marble bodies. Half-finished expressions of faith reached for them with judging hands and blurred shouts. Gunfire erupted behind them.

  ‘He’ll catch up,’ Rendenstein said.

  ‘Maybe he’ll take the hint. And maybe we’ll outpace him yet.’

  They ran on through a forest of arms.

  Three

  Klostra – Klostra Primus colony

  They would hold out at Klostra Primus as long as they could. The orks had already smashed Secundus. Tertius had also fallen. There was no question that the orks would overrun this last outpost too. Gerron watched the great flood of orks rushing forward over the barren plain below the ramparts, and knew that he and his fellow mortals could not triumph. The war’s outcome was a certainty, if the lords of Klostra did not intervene. They were coming, though. He had to believe in their arrival. To show any lack of effort in the defence would be unforgivable.

  An ork star fortress filled the sky. It was as large as Klostra. Its mountains and valleys of iron formed the laughing face of an ork. Its tusks looked almost long enough to gouge the surface of the planetoid. The moon was an insult, a mockery of the principles upon which Klostra had been founded. From the vast maw at the centre of the face poured the ships that were bringing extermination to Gerron’s home. On the flat, cracked, rocky vista before him, he saw nothing but orks as far as the horizon. And still the streaks of new launches came from the star fortress. The orks could not be stopped.

  But he fought as if he could kill them all himself. At his sides, so did the other inhabitants of the Primus outpost. Las-fire from the high ramparts was so dense it became a blinding sheet of lethal energy. Gerron aimed and fired, aimed and fired. It took him several shots to down each ork. There was nothing wrong with his accuracy. It was simply that the greenskins refused to die. Gerron wished he could be marching against the foe. War on the defensive was disgusting. But there was nowhere to march.

  It was the orks who were the ones on the move. They had no positions to take. They kept coming forward, always forward. Their losses were insignificant. And their return fire was even more blistering. It was lightning and hail, energy and projectile weapons. It was tearing apart the defenders of the wall. The ramparts were, for the moment, standing up to the assault. They were a jagged iron face thirty metres high. Their strength was the only reason the orks were not yet burning Klostra Primus to the ground.

  ‘We’re not making any difference.’ Bernt, at Gerron’s right shoulder, sounded like he was on the edge of panic.

  Gerron didn’t take his eyes off his targets. He shot until the rifle’s energy pack was drained. He crouched behind the battlement to swap out packs.

  ‘You’d better not be thinking about abandoning your post,’ he said to Bernt.

  ‘Of course not.’ The other man’s voice wasn’t as strong as it should be, but he was still firing. ‘But we can’t win. What we’re doing doesn’t matter. The orks are going to kill us all.’

  ‘We’re doing what we have been commanded to do,’ said Roth as she passed their position. She carried a sniper rifle, and was moving from point to point on the wall, taking down larger, more distant orks in an effort to destabilise the advance. She wasn’t having any better luck than every­one else, but her other role was to exhort and threaten. ‘Are you questioning our orders?’

  ‘No.’ Bernt didn’t turn his head. In the darkness of the perpetual eclipse created by the ork moon, Gerron couldn’t make out anyone’s features. Even so, he heard Bernt turn pale at Roth’s implication.

  ‘Then shut up and kill more greenskins.’ Roth drove her point home by raising her rifle to her eyes and dropping another enemy. ‘Choose your targets!’ she called out to all within earshot. ‘Embody precision! Remember the example of our lords! Fight as they would!’

  ‘Oh no,’ Bernt said, so quietly that Gerron almost didn’t hear him. He pulled the trigger, but he had raised his head above his barrel. He was looking at something in the distance.

  Gerron popped his head over the top of the parapet. He resumed firing. He saw what had terrified Bernt. ‘Tanks!’ he shouted.

  They formed a solid line across the entire horizon. Gerron couldn’t make out any details beyond their monstrous size. The line flashed along its length as the cannons started firing, and shells arced through the dark. There was no precision to the bombardment. The orks had no need for that art. The shells landed short and far, blowing up scores of infantry in the plain, levelling the comfortless housing of Klostra Primus. Some hit the wall. It trembled from the blows. The first real wounds appeared in its face.

  The tanks rumbled across the plain. A black, greasy cloud rose in their wake. The roar of their engines rose over the battle like the voice of the star fortress itself. As they drew nearer, they became even more threatening. Their armour was massive and horned, designed for ramming. The cannons of their stacked turrets were gigantic. They were covered in secondary guns. Spiked cylinders rolled before them, already slicked with the paste of the orks who had not moved out of the way soon enough.

  ‘How do we stop those with las?’ Bernt demanded. ‘We don’t have enough rockets. Where are the lords?’

  ‘They’ll be here,’ Roth told him. ‘Now fight.’

  ‘Why?’

  She pulled a serrated whip from her belt and snapped a coil around his neck. She gave a yank. Bernt’s head bounced down against the parapet of the wall. ‘Our lords are coming!’ Roth shouted. ‘They will be with us. Now do them proud! Obey their commands! If you cannot destroy the tanks, hold them. Keep them from coming any closer until the great counter-attack is ready!’

  Gerron had already joined in the fire on the heavy armour. Searing light erupted against the vehicles. Flights of rockets launched from the rampart. Clusters of missiles struck one tank at a time. A dozen direct hits managed to stop one of them. Its cannon fired just as it was damaged, and the top half of the Battlewagon vanished in the explosion. At the same time, the heavy stubber turrets raked the nearest ork ranks, punishing the ones who had begun scaling the wall.

  The orks did not even slow. Their wave slammed against the wall. M
ore ladders went up even as the tanks improved their accuracy and started punching deeper and more destructively into the facade.

  We can’t stop them, Gerron told himself. We just have to hold them, for a little while, that’s all. He and the other mortals had not been abandoned or forgotten. They were acting as they had been ordered. The lords are coming. The lords are coming.

  Kalkator circled the display table in the strategium. The weight of his boots echoed like the toll of an iron bell in the hard, open space of the chamber. The hololith showed the green stain of the orks spreading over the whole of Klostra. There was no clear point against which to push back. The orks had swarmed over the surface of the planetoid before any adequate retaliatory force could be brought to bear. Kalkator and his brothers were outnumbered, outplanned, outmanoeuvred. Their base, a few kilometres from the front at Klostra Primus, built into the top of an isolated peak, could perhaps hold against the orks’ full assault for as much as a day.

  Kalkator had no intention of being run to ground. The advance would be stopped at Primus, and then the march against the orks would begin. It would not matter that the greenskins had no base planetside. Kalkator would advance until he had scraped the last of the orks beneath his boot heels.

  He told himself this. He told his men the same thing. The real outcome predicted by the tactical situation was unspoken, though they talked around it.

  ‘Any word from the Ostrom System?’ he asked.

  ‘None,’ Varravo said. ‘No communications since before the star fortress arrived.’

  ‘But our vox is functional again.’

  ‘It is. The problem isn’t at our end.’

  The implications were troubling. They were also nothing that could be dealt with now. What was relevant was that there would be no reinforcements arriving on Klostra in time to make any difference. ‘Then this is where we stop the orks.’

  ‘I don’t like being forced into a defensive posture,’ Caesax said.

  ‘This is only a siege if we view it as one,’ Kalkator told him. ‘I’m not about to abandon doctrine. The strategic value of the colony’s strongpoint hasn’t changed. We use it for its purpose.’ Besides, he thought, we have no choice.

  Caesax nodded. He put on his helm. ‘We are ready.’

  ‘Guns in position,’ Derruo said.

  ‘Then it is time to announce our displeasure.’

  Is this holding them? Gerron wondered. Are we holding them? Will our lords be pleased? He hoped the answers were yes. That would be the only victory he could claim. Nothing the defenders of Klostra Primus could do had slowed the orks. But the greenskins were not moving beyond the colony. They were using their strength to annihilate it. Yes, Gerron thought. Yes. We are holding them. For a few minutes. He prayed he would live long enough to see the arrival of the lords and their vengeance. That would be victory enough for him.

  The tanks were close now, too close for their cannon fire to miss. The wall shook with the unending barrage. The barrier still held, but it was deforming, weakening quickly. The fire from its battlements was becoming sporadic. While the tanks hurled their shells against the middle section of the wall, the ork infantry raised ladders on either flank, and the defensive fire now concentrated on repelling the climbing orks. Gerron was shooting into a rising swarm. The belief that he was doing anything to delay the inevitable was an illusion, but he clung to it.

  Then, to the rear, booms in the distance. The voice of gods, raised in anger. Thunder and hatred from the skies, the whistling of incoming ordnance. Vengeance was here. Gerron allowed himself the luxury of looking up and back. He had an impression of clouds falling upon him with iron and flame. In the dark second before impact he had all the time in the world to realise that the bombardment was using the wall as the targeting point.

  The shells hit. They were massive high-explosives. They were designed to shatter fortifications to dust, and with them any life in their vicinity. Gerron’s world shrieked. It disintegrated beneath a blow too huge to process. He flew through battering immensity. There was no real any more. There was only destruction. He burned. He felt his bones pulped. And still he flew.

  He landed. The blasts broke time into pieces. His awareness floated in and out, tugged between oblivion and pain. At some point, the bombardment ended. The roar of war barely diminished, but the ground stopped its eruption. As he lay on smoking rubble, Gerron’s mortal agony granted him his wish. He witnessed the arrival.

  There was nothing left of the wall. It had fallen on defenders and orks alike. In the near distance, the colony guttered red and black, its usefulness at an end. From beyond the wall, the orks bayed with the ecstasy of a war living up to expectations. Were there any fewer tanks? Gerron couldn’t turn his head to see. He could still hear the engines, though. He could hear the eagerness of the green tide for more and greater conflict.

  Marching through the wreckage of the colony came the lords of Klostra. Gerron began to weep before the majesty of strategy he had been blessed to experience. The orks had come to besiege, but the lords had denied them that pleasure. Klostra Primus was not a point to be preserved. It was a trap for the enemy. The orks had concentrated their strength here, and the fire had rained down upon them. Now the march of the lords began. Through his tears, Gerron beheld the unforgiving glory of the Iron Warriors heading his way.

  The orks, unchastened, rushed over his body to greet them.

  Four

  Phall – orbital

  The final wall has fallen.

  After they were spoken, the words became a silence strong as iron, heavy as death. It spread over the council hall of the Abhorrence. It seemed to Koorland that he could sense the silence spreading down all the corridors of the battle-barge. It was the silence that followed the tolling of a funeral bell. He had made real a defeat so great that for the Chapter Masters before him, until this moment, it had been unimaginable. The fact that it had occurred opened the door to other terrible possibilities.

  The silence lasted for a full minute. The Black Templars, the Crimson Fists, the Excoriators and the Fists Exemplar, represented in the persons of Bohemond, Quesadra, Issachar and Thane, looked back at Koorland, and he did not represent the Imperial Fists. He was the Imperial Fists. He was alone. As the silence pressed down, dense with loss, and Koorland saw the expressions of pity, horror and sorrow around the council table, his survival felt like a curse. He existed to spread the word of an extermination more complete than even the worst atrocities of the Heresy. How did he imagine that he, an avatar of disaster, could pretend to have authority over the assembled Chapter Masters? Even Thane, so recently elevated to that rank, still commanded a powerful force. Koorland must appear to them as the voice of the abyss.

  No, he told himself. Be the voice of experience, of necessity, of unity. Be anything less, and they will dismiss you.

  Bohemond spoke first. ‘Your loss, Second Captain Koorland, is beyond words. Nonetheless, please accept the profound sorrow of the Black Templars. We honour the victories and the sacrifices of your brothers.’

  Koorland would have liked to receive the wish at face value. However, he had to take notice of the deliberate use of rank. Possibly a pre-emptive gesture designed to keep him in his place. If so, he would have to disappoint the Chapter Master.

  ‘You have my thanks, Marshal. As do the rest of you, my brothers.’ He meant what he said, but he was also choosing his phrasing with care, emphasising that he was among peers. He remained standing. ‘Let me further express my thanks that you have all answered the call of the Last Wall. I sent out the signal because what befell the Imperial Fists must be our spur to action.’

  ‘None of us needed that spur,’ Bohemond said.

  Koorland bowed his head. ‘I did not mean to suggest that you did.’

  ‘Then what did you mean to suggest?’ Quesadra asked. His voice was calm, but the words were sharp. His gaze on Koorland wa
s scouring.

  ‘What has fallen must be rebuilt. Together we shall be the bricks of an even greater wall.’

  ‘Which is to say…?’

  ‘We must do more than act in concert. There have already been disasters thanks to inadequate communications. This must end.’ All four of the Chapter Masters were nodding. ‘It is therefore vital that our united efforts be coordinated by a single command.’

  Another silence followed, this one coloured by surprise. Koorland remained standing a few more seconds. He tried to find a balance, conveying authority but not giving offence. Then he sat, and awaited the reaction. He did not yet have the measure of the warriors he was addressing. He suspected that he might find a sympathetic ear in Thane, who at least had experienced some parallel loss and sudden, unwanted elevation. Issachar was hard to read, though he gave no sign of actual hostility. Quesadra’s gaze had grown even sharper. It now flicked between Koorland and Bohemond. The Black Templar’s face had taken on a determined cast, as of one about to do battle. Behind the Chapter Masters, their honour guards were as motionless as ever, but the rising tension gave the air a brittle taste.

  Quesadra said, ‘You are proposing a step of very far-reaching implications. Some might see it as an attempt to recreate the Legion.’

  ‘That is not my intent. There would be no change in banners or colours. We would be the individual fingers forming a single fist for the duration of the crisis.’

  ‘History is rife with provisional measures that became permanent.’

  ‘Brother,’ Issachar said to Quesadra, ‘do you seriously believe any of the men under your command would seek to surrender their identity as Crimson Fists?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The same is true for the Excoriators.’

  Koorland couldn’t tell if Issachar was supporting his proposal or pointing out its unworkability.