She fired into its face at the same time that Sever did. She looked at the commissar just as he was struck from behind. He dropped to his knees. She fired at the ork towering over him while she lashed out blindly to either side with her shock maul, trying to stave off an ambush on herself.
There were orks on all sides. She and Sever were drowning in the green tide.
Haas’ maul struck bodies, drawing grunts. Her shots didn’t kill the ork over Sever. It was too big. But they drew its attention. It came for her, a colossus in spiked metal plate wielding a large hammer. Sever must have been hit by the most glancing of blows.
A hit from an ork behind her clipped Haas’ helmet and struck the cleaver still embedded in her shoulder’s ablative armour. The blade went deeper, drawing blood, before it fell out. She fell towards the giant, tucking herself into the tumble and rolling along the ground between the ork’s legs. She spun around and fired at its back.
The las did nothing against its armour. It turned, but then there were hands pulling her and Sever out of its path, and a storm surge of Crusaders, brandishing bayonets, crashed into the monster. It roared at them, smashed heads to pulp with its hammer, but they kept coming in endless, desperate frenzy. There were so many, they climbed over each other as they struck at the ork. Haas made it to her feet. Sever was already up, exhorting the civilians who streamed by on either side, buffeting him in their rush. She witnessed the impossible: an ork submerged by the human tide.
Dozens of Crusaders died. But they trampled the ork to death.
A group of orks came back hard, avenging their leader, and the greenskin formation was diluted still further. More platoons of Imperial Guard closed in. They turned heavy weapons on the orks. Rockets and flamers exterminated unlucky humans as well, but there were fewer greenskins, and always more humans.
We’re fighting like them, Haas realised, and that part of her mind that could still think critically was horrified that the children of the Emperor had reached this state. The rest of her met savagery with savagery, and she rejoiced to see the enemy’s advance slowed, then stopped.
Then reversed.
Haas didn’t realise, at first, that the miracle was happening. She and Sever were moving forward, acting as a coordinated pair against each foe. Forward, forward, forward, over the wreckage of the tanks, and at last it registered that they were never stepping back, and that the direction was consistent, and that they were speeding up.
The orks were retreating, and they were dying as they did so.
The Crusaders pursued. They tasted blood and victory, and the roar was unlike anything Haas had yet heard. There was all the hope and all the desperation that had fuelled the great cries of defiance on Terra. But now the enemy was before them, and the enemy was running, here, on its great machine of war that was the source of globe-spanning terror. The orks were fleeing. They could be defeated. In the name of the Emperor, they were defeated. The xenos threat that had annihilated the Imperial Fists was being routed by an army that had little more than faith and dire need behind it.
Haas joined in the shout. Her throat and her lungs were scraped raw by the air. She didn’t care. She was part of the triumph. Expelling all of the awful fear of the last days, she howled her hate and feral joy. She raced after the orks, and she was part of a massive wave of humanity so powerful it must surely sweep mountains aside.
The tiny part of her consciousness that still thought tactically wondered why the reinforcing ork army had not been larger. It wondered why it had all been infantry. It wondered why there had been no tanks, no artillery and no heavy weapons of any kind.
None of these questions mattered. Not now. Not in this moment of moments.
The orks retreated faster. They put distance between themselves and the humans. Haas was frustrated not to have more greenskin blood on her hands, but she rejoiced that the enemy was so desperate to escape.
The Crusaders were close now to the light, the glow that came from underground. At the point where the ranges met, Haas could now see that immense doors had slid apart to allow the orks to come up a ramp wide enough to accommodate a dozen tanks abreast of each other. The greenskins pounded down the steep slope, and the doors began to close. They were huge, metres thick, tall as a hab-block, but set in the ground only twenty degrees from the horizontal. With the leading edge of the human wave still several hundred metres away, they began to slide closed.
So did the mountains.
The ground beneath Haas’ feet shook, throwing her down. The grinding of a vast mechanism reached up through stone. And the mountains walked. The event was too great, too impossible, so that her mind refused for several seconds to accept what her eyes saw. The ranges moved towards each other with a metallic rumble that was the voice of an entire world. The moon was changing before her eyes.
Thousands of metres high, dozens of kilometres long, the barriers were coming together to form the last of all walls. The Crusaders had run into a trap that would kill millions at a stroke.
The race halted. The roar turned into screams. There was nowhere to run. The ships were too far. The mountain faces were sheer and high. There was time only for the fullness of terror to take hold.
‘Go!’ Sever yelled. ‘Deny them this victory!’
Only Haas heard him.
She ran for the doors. There was still an opening several metres wide. It shrank at an unhurried pace. It still might be too fast, because the shaking of the ground was so intense, she couldn’t run in a straight line.
Haas looked at nothing but her goal. The world was closing in on both sides of her. There was no sound except the apocalypse rumble of metal and stone. There was also no one in front of her. She had the lead.
She pushed all thought away. She banished hope. She ignored the pain in her lungs and her legs. She became a thing of one movement alone. If there were other runners near her, she didn’t know. They didn’t matter. Her flight mattered. The mountains mattered. Nothing else.
Adrenaline gave her wings. The limits of the human body clipped them. She was slowing down, a dozen metres from the end of the line, and the doors had almost shut. But something was happening behind her. A new sound had begun, almost as loud as the rumble. It was a sound that was wet, and cracked. The air became thick, coppery, moist.
A few more steps, her legs stumping like rotten logs. Was she still running? It seemed she was crawling. And a river of blood, foaming, torrential, rushed ahead of her. It lapped at the doors as if it would quench their thirst. The mountains were less than ten metres apart. She could see both sides in her peripheral vision. The edges of the world closed in. The entrance shrank. She wouldn’t make it. She was too far.
Grind and rumble and screams torn apart by the edges of splintering bones. The sound of an ocean snapping into shards. The blood surged. Torrent became deluge, became tidal wave. It lifted her up. She tumbled in the flow, gagging and choking. Her vision became a whirl of jagged horrors, the darkness of the blood tide giving way to the momentary sight of what lay behind, of the climbing swell of bodies rising to the heavens, millions of people fused into a mass of broken dolls. A flash of Sever disappearing beneath the blood. Up and down, over and over, tossed by the pressurised current, battered by the flotsam of bones. She lost her weapons. She tried to swim, but she was an insect in the clutches of the moon’s fist. Drowning, soul blasted by the hell-vision, she had no thoughts, no hope, no awareness at all. She had only her last instinct, the bodily drive to struggle, even when all point had been lost.
The world was nightmare. The world was speed and pain and the warm choking in her lungs and the towering shadows finally meeting. She hit something very large and solid. She started to black out. Then she was moving down, and still down, and the violence of the torrent faded.
Behind and above, a great, final, echoing boom. The blood released her.
She gagged, vomited blood. She wiped the g
ore from her eyes. She was lying on a slope, surrounded by red light pulsing green. On either side were moving pistons like great towers, gears the size of cathedrals. Below, she heard the stir of an uncountable army, of a strength in weapons and ships that denied all measure.
She was inside the moon.
Narkissos and Kondos watched the mountains come together from the ramp leading to the Militant Fire’s primary cargo bay. Narkissos felt a jolt up his spine, and realised he had sat down. His legs refused to hold him. Kondos remained standing, motionless, as if the sight had turned her to stone.
In the first seconds of the trap’s activation, Narkissos had thought the chains in their entirety were moving. They were not. The orks had constructed them in sections. Only the region of the plain where the Crusaders marched was sealed between the towering walls. The landing zone was untouched.
Kondos whispered something.
‘What did you say?’ Narkissos asked. He couldn’t hear her over the fading echoes of the metallic death of hope.
‘They never bombed us,’ she repeated.
‘No, they didn’t.’ He struggled to his feet and wobbled down the rest of the ramp. There wasn’t much left to do. A shedding of denial, a full acknowledgement of the scale of defeat, was perhaps the only trace of heroism that could still be claimed. He turned around, looking at the plain, at the hundreds of ships that had reached the star fortress. The fleet that the orks had allowed to come this far.
He looked up. There were great vessels at low anchor. He could see their lights. Two of those would be the ork cruisers. The others were the spoils of war, boarded and captured by the orks. Narkissos understood that the Militant Fire’s heroic run through the gauntlet had been a farce. The orks had boarded only those vessels which would not be able to make moonfall. They had let the others deliver themselves into their hands, and had destroyed the ones not worth their bother.
We gave them the Armada, he thought.
Stretching almost to the horizon, with only skeleton crews remaining, the ships waited for the conquerors to arrive.
They came while Narkissos stood there. Around the periphery of the plain, at the base of the metal mountains, the great doors opened, releasing the green tide.
Narkissos walked back to the ramp. He joined Kondos, and together they re-entered the ship. They closed her down, and retreated to the bridge, along with what crew remained. They armed themselves.
The struggle would be brief and futile, Narkissos knew. But he would die fighting. He wanted his life to have had that much meaning, at least.
The pounding began.
Seventeen
Terra – the Imperial Palace
There was no scream. No cry. Now the time of the great silence had come. The eyes of the people of Terra had been on the ork moon. No one had expected to see the Crusade, though the collective imagination of the Emperor’s subjects had landed with the Armada.
All who were watching saw the end of the Crusade. The movement of the mountains was visible from Terra. It looked like an eye closing, a wink, a mockery directed at its hapless prey.
Vangorich saw it happen from the Cerebrium. He was alone. The other High Lords were in session. They had remained in the Great Chamber for the length of the Crusade. The effort had been less heroic than they had expected. The war had lasted less than a day.
The movement seemed small on the surface of the planetoid. It was a minor rearrangement of its geography. Vangorich knew what it meant, though. He had told himself that he had nothing invested in Tull’s folly. He was wrong. He discovered that when he felt a vice crush something in his chest.
He thought of the reports that had come back about the star fortress over Ardamantua. How it had been a face. How it had spoken. He hadn’t thought about the scale involved in such movement. He did now. He pictured being on the surface of the moon, of being caught in that collision of mountain chains.
Of being so insignificant that so small a gesture extinguished him.
He sighed and left the Cerebrium. He supposed he should be present for the end of the farce in the Great Chamber. He would bear witness. If Wienand, or a saviour not yet present in the Sol System, produced a miracle, then there would still be a reckoning.
He encountered the silence when he entered the Great Chamber. The parliament was as full as it had been at the launch of the Crusade. The assembly sat, robbed of volition. A hundred thousand servants of the Imperium, empty. There were some sobs. The weeping was so scattered and weak that it made the silence all the more palpable.
The stillness extended to the dais. Juskina Tull had been the presiding presence on the dais for the entire duration of the Crusade. As word of the landings had arrived, she had grown even more in stature, her energy of speech and gesture reaching for the superhuman. Now she was shrunken on herself. Her face, wan, seemed to vanish beneath the dead hand of her robes’ glamour.
Vangorich thought of that moment, walking with Veritus in the aftermath of Tull’s first speech, when he had contemplated the assassination of Tull and all the Lords who had stood with her. He had judged the move pointless. He believed he had been correct. Even so, he regretted the decision, and thought, I carry my portion of the day’s shame.
The pict screens that had been installed around the dais showed static.
Vangorich mounted the dais. He evaluated the silence of the other High Lords. Tull’s allies were as defeated as she was. Fabricator General Kubik was looking from static to static on the screens. Now and then, he uttered a short burst of binary cant, as if making notes to himself. Veritus looked thoughtful, but far from defeated.
‘Are you going to share your optimism with the rest of the Senatorum, inquisitor?’ Vangorich asked. ‘Do you see a way forward?’
Veritus frowned. ‘Your levity is misplaced,’ he said.
‘Is it?’ He paused, then nodded. ‘I believe you’re right.’ He turned his gaze on Tull and her allies. ‘We’ve had enough of lunatic frivolities.’
The screen to the left of Udo’s throne flickered back to life. ‘It’s Lansung,’ the Lord Commander said.
Lansung’s image steadied. ‘We’ve picked up a signal,’ he said. ‘A ship has left the ork moon. It’s on a trajectory for Terra.’
‘The attack has begun?’ Verreault asked.
‘No. This is a single ship. It’s Terran, and transmitting identification codes. It’s a merchant vessel. The Militant Fire.’
‘What is your recommendation, Lord High Admiral?’ Vangorich asked.
‘To let it arrive. This can’t possibly be the invasion.’
‘Then what is it?’ Ekharth asked. The Master of the Administratum’s cry was childlike.
It snapped Mesring from his catatonia. The glow of inspiration suffused his face. He stood up. He began to speak.
Encouraged by the Ecclesiarch, Ekharth’s cry was taken up. It emerged from the silence, a reed-thin complaint from the depths of an echoing well. What is it? What is it? What is it? The news of the approaching ship rippled out from the Great Chamber to spread across Terra. The ship could be seen only by Terra’s sensor arrays, but the haunted souls who stared at the moon imagined they could trace the path of the Militant Fire.
What is it? What is it? What is it?
Mesring’s sermon fed the question. It offered no answers. It took theories apart. The orks were not attacking. The ship could not be a doomsday weapon, because it was too small, and what would be the point?
‘Perhaps,’ Mesring said, ‘we are witness to a miracle. Perhaps, by the grace of the Father of Mankind, this blessed vessel has been delivered from our foe.’
An escape. The flight of a single ship could not offer true hope. But it was a dream.
What is it?
It is a sign.
The cry of frightened children was answered by a call to prayer. Summoned, the people came. Faith wa
s the last refuge. They turned to it with a vengeance. The Militant Fire lay at the heart of the prayers. The people did not look to it for hope, but they prayed to the God-Emperor that it would become the source of hope.
In the Great Chamber, Mesring led the Senatorum in worship. Vangorich watched him with a mixture of contempt and admiration. Tull’s moment had passed. The power dynamic of the High Lords had been in flux again with the failure of the Proletarian Crusade, and within minutes Mesring had the whip hand. Impressive. And pointless. How long did Mesring think the orks would allow him to enjoy his supremacy?
Mesring’s sermon was not long. He gave the yearning of the populace a shape, then cast them back into a silence from which his voice would only be the more welcome when it returned. He sat down and bowed his head, his hands clasped.
Vangorich rose. He walked over to stand before the Ecclesiarch. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘What if there is no miracle aboard that ship?’
Mesring looked up. He was calm as only a man who was as devout as he was devious could be. ‘Then we will need our spiritual strength all the more.’
Vangorich swallowed his disgust and turned to Verreault. ‘Is the Astra Militarum putting all of its trust into the divine?’
‘A company of the Lucifer Blacks will meet the ship.’
‘But not you.’
‘My place is here.’
Of course it was. There might be more power plays in the time it would take for the Fire to arrive. The High Lords would be keeping each other under observation.
Vangorich left. All he would see here would be the rearranging of furniture in a burning house.
He made his way to the Daylight Wall. The Lucifer Blacks were attempting to take the place of the Imperial Fists. The sight of simple mortals in guard posts that had been manned by giants drove the loss home again. Vangorich spoke to the officer of the watch. The ship, he learned, was transmitting a request for permission to land at the Inner Palace’s pocket space port. Vangorich considered the risk that the ship might be a bomb, come to wipe out the Terran leadership. The idea was so far removed from every aspect of the ork way of war that he snorted.
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