The Last Wall

by David Annandale

  The Militant Fire flew beneath the cruiser’s hull. Narkissos had a sense of metal dense as muscle, large as a city. The cruiser was a hellish god that could annihilate his ship with as little notice as he would swat an insect.

  His shoulders hunched, as if the image alone of the ork vessel could crush him. But then they left it behind too.

  And now there was only the moon. The dark divinity of the cruiser faded to nothing. The star fortress filled the oculus. Narkissos confronted an entire world built for war. The monstrosity became all that was real, and it was a reality that was shaped to enact a greater monster’s will. It was a reality that travelled.

  There was too much impossible in his vision. Too much horror. In defence of his sanity, he narrowed his focus to the geography, to the purpose of landing his ship where there was no space port. He concentrated on what he knew would be the last act of his career.

  Tunnel vision. He saw mountains, and he tuned out their constructed nature. He looked for a plain. He clutched the dream of victory. It held reality at bay.

  Fuelled by the dream, followed by hundreds more dreaming vessels, the Militant Fire brought Juskina Tull’s vision to the orks.

  Sixteen

  The ork moon

  The moon had an atmosphere. The air was foul, ashy, reeking of burning gases and the effluvium of xenos industry. It was thin. When the Militant Fire’s cargo door opened, Haas felt the immediate urge to gasp. Yet the air was breathable, and no worse than the more toxic hives of Terra, except for the stench of the inhuman. The smell was acrid, a mixture of filthy industry and the foul organic. Though it was dry, it had the cloying grip of high humidity. Above all, it was an odour that she had never encountered before, and she bristled, a hunted animal reacting to the approach of the predator. The air had a taste, too. Haas wanted to spit. Her mouth was full of iron, promethium and rotten blood.

  The wind had a hollow, rasping sound, a snarl echoing through organ pipes.

  An atmosphere. The orks had given their artificial planetoid a surface atmosphere. There was no reason for them to do so. The outside of the star fortress showed no sign of life. The greenskins had performed a gigantic technological feat, it seemed, simply because they could. That excess of power was daunting.

  The surface visible from the ship was pockmarked rock, with no dust. The patchwork quality of the planetoid extended even to what had appeared from orbit to be natural formations. The orks had done more than carve an existing moon into the canyons and mountain ranges that suited them or raise barriers thousands of metres high and hundreds of kilometres long. Haas had the disturbing impression that they had assembled the fortress out of the pieces of other moons. They had created a world out of nothing.

  How can we defeat an enemy that powerful?

  Through their mistakes.

  Kord refused to disembark. He hung back at the rear as the civilians and Imperial Guard descended the ramp. He walked slowly, and when he reached the door, he stopped.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Haas demanded. She had joined him for the landing out of consideration of their partnership on Terra, but her patience was exhausted. The man who had talked up the Crusade had become a shameful specimen.

  Kord stared at the expanse of the ork moon before them. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

  ‘Get down or I’ll shoot you myself.’

  ‘No,’ said a third voice. ‘You will not.’

  She turned around. The last of the Astra Militarum contingents to disembark were the Jupiter Storm. Commissar Sever had come up behind them. ‘You are under military command now,’ he said. ‘That decision is not yours.’

  ‘I understand,’ Haas said. She stepped to one side.

  Sever regarded Kord with a cold, absolute contempt. ‘Disembark,’ he said.

  Kord spread his hands, pleading. ‘I–’ he began.

  Sever pulled his bolt pistol out of its holster and shot Kord in the left eye. The Arbitrator’s skull exploded. Blood splashed Haas’ armour.

  Sever turned to her.

  ‘Thank you, commissar,’ Haas said, ‘for preserving the honour of the Adeptus Arbites.’

  She followed the Jupiter Storm out of the Militant Fire.

  ‘They got greedy,’ said Captain Fernau of the Orion Watch. ‘They made a mistake.’ His laugh was relieved. ‘So they can make mistakes.’

  Gattan grunted. He wanted to believe Fernau. He didn’t dare. He had to take the realities of the battlefield as they unfolded, not as he would wish them to be. ‘We’ll see,’ he said.

  Fernau took in the deployment with a wide sweep of his arm. ‘We are seeing.’

  They were standing on the upper hull of the Militant Fire. They had a view of the plain where the ships had come down, and of the mustering of the army.

  The plain was fifty kilometres wide, bracketed by mountain chains that lost height as they converged to the south. That meeting point, fifteen kilometres away, was the target. During the descent, several ships had observed what looked like a massive gate closing. The Crusade needed a way inside the fortress, and the plain’s size and proximity to the goal made it a suitable starting point.

  Maybe Fernau was right, Gattan thought. The orks had taken many of the larger ships, but they had not sent out anything close to enough fighters to stop the Armada. Hundreds more vessels had made it through. By lighter, by shuttle, and by ships that would never take off again, legions of Crusaders had put boots to soil. Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and now millions. Gattan had never been part of an operation on this scale. A sea of warriors hungry for greenskin blood stretching back as far as he could see on land flat as sheet metal. The sight made the toll the orks had exacted seem insignificant. This was a triumph. Wasn’t it?

  Fernau thought so. Gattan was uneasy. There were enough companies of Astra Militarum left for some kind of coordination, but the losses had been great. Though the banners of the Jupiter Storm, Granite Myrmidons, Orion Watch, Auroran Rifles and the Eagles of Nazca were raised high, and the uniforms of each regiment were beyond counting, the vast majority of those uniforms were worn by civilians. Most of the heavy armour had been captured. All the senior officers had been aboard the big ships. There was no one ranking higher than captain on the ground.

  At least they’d been able to establish vox-communication with each other even as they were landing. And the broad lines of the strategy had been established before the Armada had left Terra. There had been enough guidance to make the target clear. The deployment itself had to be simple. There was little to be done with the civilians except to send them marching in the right direction with instructions to shoot the enemy.

  A squadron of ork bombers roared overhead. It did not attack. Neither had the few others that had overflown the landing site during the last few hours.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Gattan wondered aloud.

  ‘Reconnaissance,’ Fernau answered.

  ‘Unusual restraint. We’re a very big target.’

  ‘Too big. Nothing flights of that size can take on.’

  ‘So where are the others?’

  Fernau shrugged. ‘Not here, so no help to them. They’re making more mistakes. Giving us a chance to move against them.’

  Maybe. In the end, the truth didn’t matter. There was only one course of action open.

  Its engine growling, a Chimera pulled up beside the Militant Fire. Gattan clasped forearms with Fernau. ‘For Terra and the Emperor,’ he said.

  ‘For Terra and the Emperor.’

  Gattan climbed down onto the roof of his command vehicle. Another rumbled up behind it to collect Fernau.

  The march began. The heavy armour that had reached the star fortress led the way. Over a hundred Leman Russ battle tanks in all their variants, and half that number of Chimeras and Hellhounds formed something too wide to be called a wedge. They were an advancing wall. The surface of t
he moon vibrated with the force of their passing. Behind them came the foot soldiers of the Proletarian Crusade. Slowly at first, but then with mounting momentum, the immense army advanced on the gates to the enemy stronghold.

  Haas was in the leading elements of the attack, moving at a forced march speed behind the armour. She could see nothing ahead of her except iron and blue-black exhaust. Her ears rang with the roar of engines, but the guns were silent for now. The orks had not yet attacked.

  She looked up into the sky. The Crusade was on the night side of the planetoid. She could see Terra, large in its shining majesty, small in its vulnerability. That was what she had come here to protect. As long as she could see Terra, she wouldn’t mind dying in this place. The ork moon had besieged the consciousness of every soul on Terra for weeks. Now the orks were the ones besieged. That in itself was a victory. We’ve come this far, Haas thought, and you failed to stop us. You’ll fail again.

  Though her lungs laboured, her strides became stronger. She moved faster. She felt the hand of the Emperor at her back, and she gave thanks.

  Though it was night, the visibility on the surface of the moon was high. To the reflected light from Terra was added a glow from the mountain ranges. They were lined with what looked like veins of molten lava. A wash of red reached across the plain.

  The mountains jutted like a monster’s teeth from the plain. There were no foothills, no rise of the land, no transition at all between a featureless level and the brutal vertical. The peaks could not be climbed. They were an absolute barrier. The valley between the mountain chains narrowed quickly, and Haas was close enough to the western range to see the welds on them, the seams between an infinity of overlapping metal plates, as if the orks had begun constructing a ship’s hull and been unable to stop. The jagged, crooked, intersecting streams of light were not lava. They looked even more like blood flowing just beneath the iron flesh. The mix of the geological, the artificial and the organic was unnerving.

  An hour into the march, a glow appeared in the distance, where the mountain chains met. It was a false sunrise in the eternal night. The light was a sullen red with irregular pulses of green.

  ‘We have a target!’ The voice over the vox-casters was Gattan’s. Haas could just see him, two vehicles ahead, riding high in the open hatch of the Chimera.

  The march became a charge. Haas began to run. They had overwhelmed the orks this far. They would do it again.

  ‘They’re going to open the gate,’ Gattan voxed his fellow captains.

  ‘Good,’ said Fernau.

  The light at the juncture of the mountain chains grew brighter. Then the clamour began. From the centre of the light came the orks. They began as a boiling disturbance in the distance. The threat gathered definition. Within minutes, Gattan could make out the figures of individual orks. Coming up the middle of the infantry were Battlewagons. As far as Gattan could tell, the human tanks outnumbered the ork vehicles. In spite of himself, he grinned in anticipation.

  Closer. The mountain chains were only a kilometre apart now. The yowling celebration of the greenskins competed with the war chants of the Astra Militarum and the shouted prayers of the civilians. Gattan tried to guess the size of the ork army. Thousands, he thought. It seemed a much smaller force than the human one. The Crusaders were a solid wall across the entire width of the plain. The orks were in a narrower formation.

  Closer.

  ‘Fire!’ Gattan ordered, and the other captains echoed his command.

  The Leman Russ cannons opened up. A wide cluster of blasts chewed up the ork advance. The barrage battered one of the lead Battlewagons to scrap. There was a strange cleanness to the explosions. Fireballs hurled chunks of bodies skyward, but there was no dust, no rocky debris. The shells left the surface of the moon unscarred.

  The orks rushed on, unfazed by their losses.

  The snarls and the prayers and the chants and the cannon fire and the pounding of running feet were all one, a giant, indistinguishable cacophony of war. The gap between the two armies shrank to nothing.

  Impact.

  The orks hit the wall of the Imperial armour. They broke against it like foam on rocks. Gattan felt the Chimera jolt as it ran over greenskin bodies. The Hellhounds sent out a torrent of flame over the enemy. For several seconds, the mechanised Imperial advance achieved a total purge. But the orks kept coming. Faster brutes and stronger ones pushed through the spaces between the vehicles and fell on the human infantry. Gattan manned the heavy bolter, gunning down as many as he could. He couldn’t get them all. Over the sound of the guns, he heard the rising wave of screams and snarls as the melee began.

  Human and ork tanks fired at each other at point-blank range. Every shot hit. The vehicles of both forces disintegrated in flames and tearing metal, their deaths savaging nearby infantry. The losses mounted, but the greater human numbers made the difference. The advance slowed, but it did not stop.

  ‘Faster!’ Gattan ordered. ‘Get us through!’ The Chimera’s armour wasn’t as thick as a Leman Russ’. It had already taken one hit that would have incinerated Gattan if he hadn’t ducked down the hatch the second before the shell struck. He was back up again the next instant, making himself visible to both orks and humans. Let one fear him, he thought, and the other take heart from his defiance.

  Forward still, with more and more of the ork Battlewagons down. Gattan could see past them to the open gate itself. Then a huge shape emerged from the entrance. His eyes widened. ‘Hard right!’ he yelled. ‘Evasive–’

  He couldn’t hear his words as the enormous gun of the ork battle fortress roared. The shell blew up a Hellhound close to Gattan’s left. He turned his head away from the heat of the flames as the vehicle’s ignited promethium reserves splashed outward, immolating human and ork alike.

  The new ork tank was immense, four times the size of any other vehicle on the field. Its main gun looked like it belonged on a cruiser. The ork foot soldiers hooted their derision at the humans as they swarmed past their monster. The battle fortress moved forward slowly. Each shot was a high-explosive bomb, and each killed another Imperial tank. The few that missed made huge craters of human flesh in the infantry.

  ‘Surround it!’ said Gattan. ‘All vehicles concentrate fire on this target!’

  Clicks of acknowledgement on the vox, and Gattan had a moment to wonder when the overall leadership of the attack had fallen to him. Then there were no thoughts but the destruction of the monster. Leman Russ, Hellhound and Chimera encircled the battle fortress. Its gigantic turret moved with a sluggish laziness and picked them off one at a time. Their shells were pinpricks against its armour.

  Gattan prayed that the accumulation of pinpricks would be enough.

  The turret gradually moved his way. The Chimera kept circling, but the gun moved closer, each terrible blast consigning more of Terra’s regiments to oblivion. Fernau’s curses were cut off by a vox-squeal as his Chimera vanished.

  But the miracle happened. Gattan saw cracks appear in the battle fortress’ flanks. The fissures glowed red, then orange, then white. Even as he shouted to keep firing, that they were besting the monster, a terrible thought came to him.

  He realised that this was too easy.

  He realised too late.

  The battle fortress exploded.

  Haas threw herself down as the blast slammed fire and wind over both armies. The charge of the ork infantry had pushed her back even as other Crusaders, closer to the tanks, had continued to move forward. They were swallowed by the death of the battle fortress. The boom, so loud it was a physical force, echoed back and forth between the mountain chains. When it faded, all that remained of Imperial and ork armour was a coral reef of smoking, twisted metal.

  Ork reinforcements came leaping over the ruins. They slammed into the stunned Crusaders like a battering ram. They smashed through the soft bodies of humans, advancing dozens of metres befo
re the sheer volume of Crusaders slowed them down. The orks laid into the butchery with chainblades and power claws. For several seconds, the human force disintegrated further, its untrained warriors ground to pulp, their blood splashing over their comrades and killers alike, staining the ground red with the taint of folly. Many civilians broke and ran.

  ‘Fight or die, cowards!’ Sever, his uniform shredded and smoking, his face pouring blood, strode past Haas. Then he yelled, ‘Now!’ and ducked.

  Haas did the same. So did the Crusaders whose discipline still held, who listened to orders, who understood. Dozens more were cut down by friendly fire, clearing the way for the disciplined, concentrated volleys of las from a platoon of the Jupiter Storm to cut into the ork flanks. Grenades followed. The blasts killed humans too. Needed sacrifices as the counter-attack began to eat into the ork column.

  The greenskins fired back. They began to spread out. Their flank grew longer, opening up more opportunities for the Crusaders. Haas saw hers and rushed in. She drove her shock maul down on the skull of an ork that was reaching for Sever. The brute stumbled, stunned by the discharge. While it was slowed, she fired her laspistol into its eyes.

  Her training was in the suppression of mobs, not military combat. But she looked at the orks as a well-armed mob, and her instincts kept her alive. In their undisciplined rampage, they reminded her of rebellious underhive gangs. But much stronger.

  She took a step back as her target dropped. She hunched down, using its body as a shield. The next orks rushing forward swung without looking for her. Their blades went wide. She fired up, blinding one, then caught it in the face with the maul as it fell forward, tripping over the corpse of its fellow. Another brought its cleaver in too quickly for her to dodge. She turned her body and caught the blade in her pauldron. She rammed the shock maul into the greenskin’s belly. It snarled in anger. It was too big, too powerful to stun, but it reflexively lost its grip on its blade. It reached for her throat with both hands.