The force of the venting pulled at Lanser like chains. Blood burst from his nose and ears. The door was halfway down. He pushed against the hurricane of decompression. He gripped the side of the doorway and lunged forward, shoving against struggling backs. The man in front of him fell. He banged into Lanser as the wind took him back. Lanser clutched the doorway harder. The yank tried to dislocate his arm.
The door was less than two metres from being closed. The roar became a desperate, whistling shriek. Lanser ducked low and hauled himself around the corner, into the corridor. He slammed the top of his head against the descending barrier and collapsed against the wall. The door closed, trapping a handful of Crusaders beneath it. The wind’s shriek continued a few seconds longer as flesh and bone held back heavy steel for a moment more. Then the pressure of the mechanism and the weight of the door won, severing and crushing.
The wind died. Lungs rasping, Lanser stood. He moved forward to take the lead of the column of Crusaders who had managed to reach the corridor. He pushed past perhaps three hundred civilians before he reached Bessler and Parten’s squads. They were the only Myrmidons who had made it.
‘Doesn’t make sense,’ Parten said. She wiped a smear of blood from her upper lip. ‘Why go to the trouble of peeling the ship open? Why not just torpedo it if they’re not going to board?’
‘Because it amuses them?’ Bessler suggested.
Lanser shook his head. ‘I’ve never known greenskins to entertain themselves by taking a slower approach to violence.’ He shouted for silence. The sobs of the civilians quieted enough for him to hear what he had feared: more of the vibrating grind coming from elsewhere in the ship. ‘They are boarding,’ he said. ‘That was a decapitation move. They took out most of the opposition we could muster at a stroke.’
‘Which means they knew what they were doing,’ Parten said, awed.
‘I’m not interested in what they planned,’ said Lanser before Parten could continue. The implications of orks taking the time to attack a ship based on its layout and probable complement of defenders did not need airing. That talk would not help with what needed to be done, and would change nothing.
So what do we do? He thought of the Expanse of Destiny’s other cargo bays, holding tens of thousands more Crusaders. They orks had likely vented them too. ‘We stick to the interior passageways,’ he said. ‘Make for the bridge. If they are boarding, that’s where we’ll have to hold them.’
He looked back at the civilians. Many still looked determined. All were terrified. The dream of the Crusade had soured.
‘You wanted to fight the greenskins?’ Lanser shouted to them. ‘You’re lucky. You’re getting the chance early. Let’s go tear them apart.’
He led the charge aft, towards the ship’s superstructure. Parten and Bessler’s troops shouted defiance, spreading the will to fight. And in the tighter confines of the corridors, three hundred souls became a crowd, a force, a surging wall of anger looking for an enemy to kill.
Deeper in the ship, the vibrations of the breaching faded. It became possible to pretend that nothing was happening. Lanser sensed the confidence of the Crusaders build still more.
Two-thirds of the way to the bridge, they found the enemy. About twenty orks burst out of a side passage linking to one of the smaller cargo holds. Lanser had no chance to give orders. He and the Myrmidons dropped into crouches and started firing at the intersection ahead. The first ranks of the civilians fired too. There was no discipline to the volleys of las, but there was no way to miss, either. Orks went down. The humans cheered triumph and rage, loud enough to shake the walls of the passageway.
The orks didn’t return fire. They barrelled down the hall towards the Crusaders. A few more fell. Then Lanser drew his sword and ran forward. He couldn’t let the orks steal the momentum. The Crusaders charged with him.
The two forces collided. The humans had the numbers. The orks had the physical strength. The battle became a melee, a riot of blades and blood. The Crusaders’ arsenal was basic: lasguns and bayonets. Few had any armour. The orks all carried guns, but waded in with their own blades.
Lanser had fought the greenskins before. He was used to seeing their huge machetes and axes, but he had never felt his own weapons outclassed by the brutes’ armament. The weapons these orks wielded, and the forms of armour they wore, were as massive as ever, but it seemed that their exuberant brutality was the product of skill rather than crude overcompensation. Imperial blades dulled and bent against orkish plate. Imperial bodies came apart beneath orkish blows.
The floor was awash with blood. Lanser could barely move, caught in the crush of struggling human and greenskin bodies. The density of the struggle helped. The orks were crowded in as much as he was, and denied the leverage to use their greater strength to its full effect. He slipped his sword beneath the helmet of one beast. He drove the point up through the ork’s chin and into its brain. The press of bodies held the corpse upright long enough for him to withdraw the blade.
A taller ork made a noise that was snarl and laugh. It swung its cleaver at him. He couldn’t duck. He tilted his head to the side. It was enough. The blade sank into the side of the skull of the man behind him, chopping through at eye level. Lanser raised his laspistol and shot the ork in the centre of the forehead. The beast blinked, its skin smouldering with las burn. It pulled its arm back to strike again, knocking its smaller kin aside with the force of the gesture. Lanser fired again, five more times. He had to sear the ork’s face to slag before the monster finally dropped.
Lanser took half a step forward, walking on bodies. A huge fist struck him in the temple. Stunned, vision bleary, he lunged forward, sword extended. Luck or the Emperor’s hand guided his blow. The impact of the blade sinking through greenskin muscle to the heart almost dislocated his arm.
The orks kept coming. There was no forcing them back. They advanced, a battering ram of flesh that hit like stone and broke the human wall down. Step by step, the Crusaders were forced back down the hall. But they fought and they stabbed with last-chance desperation. They died by the dozens. The orks died one by one.
The numbers won.
Drenched in gore, Lanser leaned against the wall. He gasped for breath. His right side ached from a power claw hit. If the ork had been able to do more than glance him, he would have been crushed. As it was, he could feel the movement of broken ribs. He wondered how long it would be before a floating bone punctured a lung. He pushed away thoughts of a medicae bay. He didn’t have the luxury of that hope. He would be lucky to live long enough to die from this wound.
The corridor had become a slaughterhouse. The corpses of orks and humans lay in a mire of blood. Most of the ork bodies were still intact. Many of the humans were scattered remains. The stench was thick. Lanser felt like he was breathing blood and offal. Parten was as blood-soaked as he was, but none of her wounds were life-threatening. Bessler’s left arm had been crushed to jelly below the elbow. One of his troopers was applying a tourniquet to his stump. He was pale, barely keeping unconsciousness at bay. Both squads had been decimated. Two-thirds of the civilians had been killed. But they had won. The survivors’ eyes were wide with the dulled drunkenness of their victory.
Lanser pushed himself away from the wall.
‘Keep going,’ he called out, voice rasping. If they stopped to rest, they would lose the momentum of this hard triumph. Despair was one bad thought away. He started to walk, stumbled. He stopped, aware of the eyes on him, straightened, and when he was sure of his footing, started forward again. His gait was stronger. He wasn’t going to fall.
Ragged now, battered, slower, but desperate to fight because that was all they had left, Myrmidons and Crusaders headed for the bridge. Lanser kept hearing the sounds of combat, but they were always distant echoes, travelling through mazes of passageways to reach him. Whatever was happening, it was too far away for him to bring help. The bridge remained the go
al.
Parten moved forward to join him. ‘Permission to ask a question, colonel?’
‘Go ahead, sergeant.’
‘How long can we hold them at the bridge?’
‘We’ll seal the door. Even when they breach it, the entrance is narrower than this corridor. I’ve seen it. That will create a bottleneck for them, an edge for us. We don’t have to defeat them here. Just hold them back long enough.’
‘For what?’
‘For us to reach the moon.’ He said it as if that would be the end of things. It will be, he thought.
She nodded, believing in his optimism or accepting their fate.
They climbed the levels from the cargo decks, up towards the bridge at the top of the superstructure. The echoes of battle became more distant. Maybe there was time, Lanser thought. Maybe they had pulled ahead of the ork boarding parties enough to establish something like a real defence.
At the base of the plain metal staircase leading to the bridge, he could hear activity from above. Purposeful, but not violent. That gave him hope. He ran up the stairs, his breath tearing into his lungs with a knife. The stairs ended in a wide passage leading port and starboard, with the doors to the bridge straight ahead.
There was blood on the deck. It seeped from the open doorway to the bridge; the orks were already here. The battle was over. The orks’ debased slave-race were hauling out the corpses of the crew and tossing them in piles lining the corridor walls. They glanced at Lanser. They snickered, then called out to their masters as they scampered back onto the bridge.
Lanser moved forward. He couldn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t feel his arms, either. His body was a collection of disjointed fragments, all acting independently, all moving forward with no purpose. His brain was numb. He was a servitor, completing a hopeless task because there was nothing else to do.
His left arm raised his pistol. His fingers were clumsy. It was hard to fire. His right arm hung limp, dragging the point of his sword over the decking.
Noises behind him now. Cries, wails, the thudding of boots. Was that the whine of las-fire? Maybe. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. It was so far away.
An ork warboss emerged from the bridge, a giant that had to bend in half to fit under the doorway. The deck shook beneath its armoured feet. It looked like a tank that had learned to walk. When Lanser shot it, its lips parted in a smile, showing fangs the length of his hand, its eyes amused. When it backhanded him, shattering his skeleton and sending him flying back down the staircase, the gesture was casual, maybe even disappointed.
Maybe even bored.
The Expanse of Destiny pulled up. Its nose tilted towards the ork cruiser riding above the cloud of the Armada. The movement was emphatic and slow, a glacier with delusions of ramming. Narkissos was about to order Rallis to stay in its wake when he saw the ork fighters moving away, heading for other targets. The Expanse was not attempting a suicidal attack, he realised. She was already lost. Her new masters were taking the ship out of formation to join with the cruiser.
There was no shelter here now.
The irony of worrying about shelter, given his ship’s destination, passed through his mind for the length of time it took him to draw a breath. ‘Helmsman,’ he said to Rallis, ‘no more hiding. Time to run. Full power.’
‘There are other big ships,’ Kondos said.
‘They won’t be ours long, not at this rate.’
‘Exactly. Look.’
He always paid attention when Kondos made that request. Their shared gifts were the reason the Militant Fire had survived to see this day. He was the improviser. She saw the big picture. She took in the myriad variables of a situation, creating the map for Narkissos to navigate.
So he focused on the big ships. The ork squadrons were thick around them, tearing them open and inserting boarding parties. Away from the giants, the smaller ships were falling prey. Many were boarded. The smallest were destroyed. But the ones closest to the mass conveyors and factory ships were being ignored as the orks concentrated on the big prizes.
‘Port,’ Narkissos said. ‘Down thirty degrees. The Europa Forge.’
‘Behind the engines?’ Rallis asked, already making the course correction.
‘No. Keep up the speed.’ Beneath his feet, Narkissos could just detect the faint vibration in the deck as the Militant Fire powered up. She was ready to race for her life, for the lives of all aboard, and for the life of any hope of victory. ‘Skim by her. Then the Spreading Word.’ He pointed to the colony ship just beyond the Europa Forge. ‘Understand?’
‘I do.’
‘We have a fast ship, helmsman. Let’s prove it to the orks.’
‘They won’t even see us.’
‘That’s the whole idea,’ said Kondos.
The Militant Fire streaked towards the Europa Forge. ‘Like a stone over water,’ Narkissos urged, and Rallis took him at his word. He took the ship in at a low angle of approach, as if he might really land on the other vessel’s refinery. He passed over the superstructure. The orks were clustered on the flanks of the hull. For a moment, the run looked clear, but then another squadron appeared off the prow, heading straight for the bridge. The Fire was flying level with them.
‘Down!’ Narkissos yelled.
A few decades earlier, Rallis would have questioned such a reckless order. Once, in the early days of the helmsman’s service, Narkissos had forced him at gunpoint to perform a manoeuvre that Rallis had maintained would tear the ship apart. It hadn’t, and they had escaped faster, more agile raiders. Rallis no longer questioned him. He plunged into the insane as if he were piloting a fighter, not a cargo ship.
Rallis dropped the nose. The Militant Fire arrowed at the refinery. A collision could take out a large part of the fleet if the smaller ship punched through the plasma containment tanks.
The surface of the reservoirs came closer. The Fire was below the height of the chimney vents. They rose like a steel forest on either side. Narkissos felt the vertigo of rushing disaster, but he said nothing. He sensed Rallis’ need to pull up, but the helmsman maintained course.
Another second. Then another. The orks passing overhead. Wait. Wait. The impact in two breaths. Now.
‘Level us!’
One breath. The perspective of the oculus changed with tectonic lethargy. The second and last breath… The Militant Fire flew straight. The struts of the belly auspex array snapped off as they brushed against the Europa Forge’s reservoir. Ahead, the ship bulked upwards. The orks were now behind. ‘Up,’ Narkissos ordered at the same moment Rallis altered the course again. They pulled away from the Europa Forge. Rallis held them in a close parallel flight with it until they passed over the bow. Then he angled towards the Spreading Word.
Any form of order in the Merchants’ Armada had collapsed. The fleet was a storm of ships, boiling with evasions and captures. Collisions killed more vessels than the orks as panicked flights intersected. The Militant Fire flew through a dissipating fog of plasma. Fragments of wreckage tumbled by. As she closed with the Spreading Word, she encountered what Narkissos thought was another debris cloud. The remains were corpses, thousands of Crusaders, frozen in their last agony, sucked out of the open flanks of the colony ship.
For every ship that destroyed another, and for every one that was boarded, there were two that kept running. The fleet was a confusion of movement, but it still closed with the ork moon. Some of its elements raced far ahead of the others. The distance between ships grew. The sense of a collective action disintegrated, but there were so many vessels that there was still a crowd, still a mass migration of humans towards the fortress.
Closer yet. Narkissos had to guard against the temptation to gaze at the moon’s gorgon image and lose the thread of the moment-by-moment decisions needed to see the Militant Fire to its destination. He was sweating. He was frightened. His ship’s path was crossed again
and again by squadrons of brutal predators. On all sides, the heroes of the Proletarian Crusade were dying, killed on boarded ships, ejected into the void, or vaporised by collisions. But he was also exhilarated because the Fire was not alone in its race. There was more than terror, flight and destruction visible in the oculus. There was also determination. There was strength. There were no more ork fighters emerging from the star fortress. For the first time, Narkissos dared imagine that their resources were not infinite.
The strategy that Speaker Tull had conceived was working. The Imperium had turned the orks’ own tactics against them. ‘We’re going to do it,’ Narkissos said, turning hope into words. ‘We’re going to flood them with our numbers.’ What he said was an incantation, an attempt at a great alchemy: hope into words, words into reality.
‘Port, upper quadrant,’ Kondos said.
Narkissos looked. ‘Are you serious?’ Kondos had indicated one of the ork cruisers. The Militant Fire was ahead of almost all the large ships now. Most of the Imperial vessels in its company were smaller than it was.
‘Why not?’ Kondos asked. ‘Aren’t we trying to get close to the greenskins?’
Narkissos grinned. ‘Yes, we are.’ There were very few ork fighters near the cruiser. The big ship was doing little beyond being a massive escort, protecting the squadrons against non-existent Imperial fire. ‘Helmsman, let’s embrace the madness.’
He imagined he could actually hear the blood drain from the faces of the bridge crew. He laughed. It was that or let terror close his throat altogether. Rallis muttered prayers under his breath, but turned the Fire’s nose towards the ork monster. They closed the distance quickly. They shot past a handful of ork fighters, which ignored them. Narkissos wondered what the greenskins thought when they saw his ship’s trajectory. Could orks be stunned by the lunacy of an adversary? It pleased him to think so.
The thought that the orks just ignored the ship pleased him less, because behind it lurked the question of why they would not care.
The Last Wall Page 14
