The Last Wall

by David Annandale

No.

  Surprise: there was no breath to be had.

  Surprise: the pain bursting from his chest, the pressure in his skull spreading red and black.

  His head rocked forward. There was a hole in his chest. A big one.

  Surprise.

  Had he seen something in the man’s fist?

  He couldn’t think any more. He couldn’t care any more.

  No more surprises.

  And after a great flare, no more pain.

  Only the dark.

  ‘Were you waiting for someone?’ Vangorich asked as they walked on.

  ‘No.’ The hesitation was very brief.

  Vangorich smiled. ‘Just as well. He won’t be coming.’

  Later, in his quarters, Vangorich said to Beast Krule, ‘Good to have you back.’

  Krule grunted. ‘This is getting messy,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t be helped.’ Vangorich held a bottle of amasec, debating. An Iaxian vintage, three centuries old. Was there ever the correct occasion for such a treasure? He decided there was, when there might soon be no more occasions at all. He opened the bottle and decanted two glasses. ‘Well done,’ he said, handing one to Krule.

  ‘Wasn’t difficult. They took the bait.’

  ‘Let’s not call it bait. I really had hoped Veritus wouldn’t push things this far. Think of it as a designated opportunity. If they were going to take action, better it be in a situation we could neutralise.’

  Krule shrugged. ‘Call it what you like.’ He sipped the amasec, and gave an appreciative nod. ‘Do you want me to do more?’

  ‘Not yet. I think we have Veritus contained, at least for now. He’s running out of allies and moves. Has Wienand reached the Inquisitorial Fortress?’

  ‘I lost track of her before she did. But we’d know if she hadn’t.’

  ‘Then we wait to see her move,’ Vangorich said. ‘That’s where we stand.’ He turned to the narrow window of his chambers. The strong winds of the day were granting him rare glimpses of the evening sky. The ork moon was there, the executioner’s sword half-concealed by the spires of the Imperial Palace. There were also faint glints like moving stars: the larger ships of the Merchants’ Armada manoeuvring. ‘And we wait to see what Juskina Tull is about to reap for all of us.’

  Twelve

  Klostra – Klostra Primus colony

  With a battering crash of iron and cannon and bladed siege shield, the Vindicators rolled through the wreckage of the colony. They came in the wake of the bombardment. The battle tanks were the follow-up to the Iron Warriors’ initial charge.

  The charge that had already turned into a retreat.

  The tanks, Kalkator vowed, would turn the tide. They had before. The Araakite Doom, the Barban Falk, the Pyres of Olympia, and the Lochos.

  They had fought on Terra, and on Sebastus IV. The blood of Loyalists had sunk into the grain of the metal and the joints of the treads. Statues lined the edges of their hulls. They were the representations of saints and generals, the Imperium’s heroes of war and of faith. Now they were defaced, broken. Heads leaned back as if to gaze in horror at the brutality of the universe. Limbs were shattered, replaced with barbed wire. They were the trophies of smashed sieges past, and the promise of fallen cities to come. Behind, the Demolisher cannons curved massive horns in the image of the Iron Warriors’ helms. The guns fired as soon as the tanks approached the remains of the wall. They were siege weapons, designed to reduce defences to lost hopes. Today, they were coming to break a siege.

  That fact was an offence to Kalkator’s pride and to the proper order of things. He could not make the situation otherwise through will alone. So he would exact retribution for the insult from the bodies of the orks.

  The cannon fire hit the ork advance, four shells simultaneously. The explosion was huge. Scores of the enemy vanished and the front half of one of the ork tanks disintegrated. Another kept moving, but on an erratic course, enveloped in flame. It was as if a giant scythe had culled the forward lines of the enemy infantry. The bombardment had done nothing to slow the orks, but now, for a moment, Kalkator saw a hole open up in their formation.

  He and his brothers had been forced back to the ruins of Klostra Prime. The bulk of the Great Company had been using the fallen walls of the central manufactorum as a bulwark against the orks. Now they pushed forward again.

  The warsmith headed for the Pyres of Olympia. As he ran, he sent a stream of bolter fire ahead. Orks fell before him, their heads bursting. A few steps from the Olympia, he slammed into a massive brute whose armour had saved it from his shells. He knocked the ork off balance and thrust his chainsword forward, plunging it between skull plate and jaw guard, grinding through the ork’s nose and then its skull and brain. He blasted another foe coming at him from the right while he withdrew the blade from the corpse, before leaping to the roof of the Olympia. Varravo and Caesax followed him. Other Iron Warriors climbed to the roof of the other tanks while the rest ran close, tearing up the infantry.

  We’re trying to stop the ocean with a knife, Kalkator thought. Four Vindicators and the individual strength of the brothers of the Great Company was enough to shatter the walls of any fortress, but he had no illusions about their position now. Thousands of orks had already climbed the top of the plateau. Even if the Iron Warriors’ counter-attack repelled them, the oncoming force was many times that size. The orks had already landed an infinite infantry.

  Their heavy armour on immediate approach was no match for the Vindicators, though. Kalkator wanted to cripple the ork vehicles, and perhaps buy the company time to cohere again. Recreate the wedge, drive into the ork infantry, cause damage to force a retreat.

  Impossibility was irrelevant. Impossibility was the bloody constant of the Iron Warriors’ history. As ever, there was nothing to do but fight.

  At least their wars were their own now, as were the spoils. And even now they weren’t cowering behind walls, hoping for the battle to pass, like the bastard sons of Dorn.

  The tanks kept firing. After the first great blast, the squadron staggered the volleys, hitting the orks with a continuous string of explosions. The orks slowed, a bit. They did not stop. The tide flowed around the craters, ignoring losses, rushing to the challenge of the Vindicators.

  ‘All fire on the tanks,’ Kalkator voxed. ‘Base, maintain bombardment one thousand metres forward of initial target zone.’

  Three more ork tanks were gutted. The first of the Battle­wagons to reach Klostra Prime had traded thicker armour for speed, and the Vindicators’ cannons could take down walls wider than the tanks themselves. The Battlewagons were big, but they crumpled and burned when the Demolisher shells hit them. The ork vehicles had numbers, though. Line after line of them mounted the slope to the colony. They fired back. High explosives flared against the siege shields. Three of the Battlewagons trained their guns on the Lochos. Two died trying, but the third flanked the Lochos and gutted it.

  Over the vox, Derruo snarled in agony. Kalkator glanced back. Two other battle-brothers had been blown apart, but Derruo, his armour scorched black, his left leg dragging, was still in the fight.

  The Olympia was out in front now. Behind it, the Araakite Doom avenged the Lochos with a shot that hit the ork tank’s fuel reserves at almost point-blank range. The warmth of the fire washed over the squadron.

  Kalkator cursed as a shell clipped the top of the siege shield. He leaned forward into the wash of the explosion. It took out the ork that had just vaulted up from the front of the tank. More of the brutes followed. Kalkator, Varravo and Caesax moved forward on the roof. They turned their chainswords on the orks who made it past the Pyres of Olympia’s sponson bolters. The tank’s horns were magma cutters, taking down still more of the foe. The ground was littered with bisected corpses.

  And the orks kept coming.

  ‘What do they want with the place?’ Varravo voxed. ‘T
here’s nothing left.’

  ‘They want us,’ said Kalkator. Whatever other designs the orks might have for Klostra, their targets now were the Iron Warriors. Perhaps the planet had some other value. If it did, that was secondary to the promise of war. Kalkator had used the mortal colonists as loyal bait. He wondered now if the orks hadn’t done the same to him, luring the company in with the illusion that there was a possible strategy here.

  To the north, the great artillery explosions continued. A curtain of smoke, flame and raining debris rose between the Iron Warriors and the approaching body of the ork host. The Great Company and its Vindicators advanced further into the flesh and over the machinery of the enemy. They were almost at the base of the wall now.

  ‘Warsmith,’ voxed Occillax, piloting the Olympia, ‘do we descend the slope?’

  Kalkator never answered. His command was interrupted by a rolling wave of sound, the thunder of a mountain cracking in half. He looked back. In the distance, in the direction of the base, a volcanic glow lit the deep twilight that passed for day on Klostra. The rumble had a rhythm. Streaks of light cut through black clouds towards the glow. An orbital bombardment.

  ‘Klostra Base, report,’ Kalkator voxed. He called three more times, as he looked away and kept killing orks. Silence from the base.

  And silence from the guns.

  The artillery barrage ended. Occillax halted the Pyres of Olympia. The curtain faded. The wrecking yard of ork vehicles appeared and so did the forces that were coming on, the ones untouched by the Iron Warriors cannons.

  Four super-heavies. Tanks twice the size of the Vindicators, their guns with bores as wide as Demolishers, but the length of autocannons. As if they had been waiting for their proper introduction, they opened fire now.

  They had the rate of autocannons, too.

  And as the boom of greenskin ordnance battered the plateau of Klostra Primus, greater silhouettes yet loomed behind the battle fortresses. Colossi, three of them, greenskin idols fifty metres tall. They rocked side to side as they marched over machine and kin, a manufactorum’s worth of smoke belching from the chimneys rising from their backs. Flame gouted from their jaws. Their eyes were energy weapon turrets, blazing red lightning. The right arm of each terminated in a hand whose fingers were linked cannons, four strong. The left arm of one was a hammer the size of a tank. The second had a chainblade fifteen metres long. The third wielded a claw that could tear the hills apart.

  Beneath the roars of the engines, the beat of the cannons and the tectonic rumble of the orbital strikes, Kalkator heard another sound. It would have been inaudible if it hadn’t come from a hundred thousand ork throats in unison.

  ‘They’re laughing at us,’ said Caesax.

  Why wouldn’t they? Kalkator thought through his rage. The orks were bringing down a compounded humiliation on the Great Company. They attacked with overwhelming numbers, unstoppable armament, and then outmanoeuvred the Iron Warriors. In the gap between realising the doom of Klostra and bringing his blade down on still another ork skull, he understood that the orks were sending a message. They were speaking through the language of annihilation, and what they said was, Behold what we can do. We are more powerful and more clever than you. You are nothing.

  If hate alone were a force, he would have incinerated the planet in that moment.

  ‘Pull back,’ he ordered.

  ‘Where to?’ Caesax asked.

  ‘The mountains.’

  ‘Towards an orbital bombardment?’

  ‘It will be finished by the time we get there,’ he snarled.

  They retreated towards oblivion.

  Deep into the remains of the settlement, tens of thousands of blackened mortal corpses on all sides, the vox came alive with the first extra-planetary contact since the ork moon tore through space into Klostra’s orbit. It came from the strike cruisers Palimodes and Scythe of Schravaan. The gravity storms had destroyed all of the company’s fleet at anchor. The two cruisers had been at the Ostrom outpost, and had been silent since the initial vox-failure on Klostra. They had not been recalled. Kalkator didn’t know why they had returned. He didn’t care.

  He interrupted the torrent of shouted questions from the bridges. ‘I want the full complement of Thunderhawks planetside for immediate evacuation of all forces.’ He gave coordinates for a position just south of the settlement.

  ‘That moon–’ Attonax, on the Palimodes, began.

  ‘Do not engage!’ Kalkator shouted. The words were toxic. They were echoes of the foulest days of the Iron Warriors’ past.

  ‘Enemy launches detected,’ Attonax said.

  Kalkator roared at the enemy, and the orks roared back. The laughter grew louder. It seemed to him that there was mockery in every attack. Every ork that he cut down died with the belief that it, and not he, was victorious. The giant ork machines heaved into sight over the ruined wall. They were on the plateau. The company moved faster than the ork super-heavies, but the infantry was on all sides, slowing them down. The ork Battlewagons kept pace, pounding the retreating Iron Warriors. The Pyres of Olympia, the Barban Falk and the Araakite Doom moved backwards, keeping their Demolishers trained on the foe. Bolter, cannon and magma cutter tore swaths through infantry and smashed more tanks open. But the waves of the green tide closed over the gaps. And the fire from the ork guns grew more intense.

  Brothers died. Kalkator felt no regret when he saw them fall, but he did feel frustration. The orks were eroding his combat strength bit by bit.

  There were no gaps in the enemy barrage now. Kalkator could see little but flame and eruptions on all sides. The Araakite Doom exploded, and then there were two tanks. ‘Palimodes, Scythe of Schravaan, where is our extraction?’ the warsmith demanded.

  ‘Right above you,’ came the reply.

  Kalkator couldn’t see the Thunderhawks in the midst of the ork fire, but his Lyman’s ear was able now to distinguish their engines from the din of the enemy machines. A few seconds later, Hellstrike missiles screamed onto the ork tanks, followed by the hard rain of multiple heavy bolters. For several seconds, the world vanished completely. There was fire, and there was nothing else, and Kalkator grinned, because the flames were on the orks now, and they were learning the price of their arrogance.

  He allowed himself that burst of savage pleasure. It lasted as long as the initial flash of the explosions. Then he faced again the reality of defeat, of humiliation, and of the fact that this was not a tide that could be turned by even a hundred Thunderhawks.

  The rate of the ork fire dropped. Four more Battlewagons were burning shells.

  The Vindicators were moving more and more slowly, providing cover for the battle-brothers on foot. They no longer had their flank escorts. A group of massive orks evaded the sponson fire of the Olympia and scrambled up onto the roof to Kalkator’s left. Before he could turn, one of them grabbed his left arm with a power claw. It squeezed, cracking the ceramite, crushing servo-motors. It would have broken his arm, had it still been flesh.

  It hadn’t been for three hundred years. The change had come upon it, the gods of Chaos visiting him with the gift of a string of grasping mouths from shoulder to wrist. He had taken his chainblade to the arm himself, amputating it in his quarters, taking the time to burn the offending limb while his blood poured onto the ship’s decking before he stormed off, still steady on his feet, to find the Apothecary. The left arm was bionic now, a thing of metal and barbed ridges. When he didn’t buckle, the ork looked surprised.

  Kalkator swung his bolter around and shot the ork in the face. The top half of its skull disintegrated, showering the roof of the Olympia with blood and brain matter. The claw released Kalkator as the body slumped. He kicked the corpse off the tank and flexed his arm. It moved in jerks, but was still functional.

  To the rear, the gunships were landing. Three of the twelve remained in the air, buying time with rockets and shell
s. The Vindicators slowed to a crawl. Kalkator looked back and saw the first members of the company embarking. He faced forward again and watched time stolen from them.

  The huge walkers and the battle fortresses were close. The walkers redirected their fire at the Thunderhawks. To the autocannon bursts were added missile launches from their shoulders. The attacks vectored onto a single target. The gunship’s pilot tried to evade. Two missiles hit the starboard wing, shells slammed into the nose, and the gunship dropped.

  As it fell, a torrent of flame shot from the jaws of the nearest walker and enveloped the cockpit. The Thunderhawk hit the ground with meteoric force. It collided with one of the battle fortresses, the impact fusing the two behemoths together. Embraced by flame, they became a mountain of clashing metal, a single being that was the madness and destruction of war. They lost shape. The blasts came, shaking the ground so hard that Kalkator was almost knocked off his feet.

  Above, a second gunship was trailing smoke, though it still fought. The Olympia fired its cannon through the flames of the collision. It hit one of the walkers in the centre of its wide skirt, and the ork titan seemed to stumble, then rocked forwards and came on. Its arms reached towards the Vindicator. Kalkator looked up at the cluster of autocannons aimed at his head.

  ‘Off!’ he yelled.

  He jumped to the right. So did Caesax. Varravo was a beat behind. The cannonade caught him. The Pyres of Olympia fired back – still operational, but its roof was slag. Some of the debris was just recognisable as Varravo’s ruined armour.

  The Olympia’s engine whined, but the tank didn’t move. ‘We’ve lost guidance,’ Occillax voxed.

  ‘Continue the attack,’ Kalkator ordered. He cut his way through more ork infantry. The brutes were stunned by the walker’s bombardment. Kalkator and Caesax made quick progress towards the rear.

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘Hold them off as best you can, brother.’

  ‘This is pointless.’

  ‘Step outside and I’ll kill you myself. Follow your orders.’