by C. S. Goto
As the orks closed, Guardsman Larius could see the hungry saliva dripping between the monstrous teeth of the orks. He could see their tiny, beady red eyes burning with a deep, thirsty malice. And he could smell the gallons of toxic sweat and fresh blood that poured off the huge beasts as they rumbled unstoppably forward.
Larius looked down at the rifle in his hands and then along the line of his fellow Guardsmen, each with their lasguns at their waists sending delicate javelins of fire into the rampaging advance. He looked back up at the thundering figures of the orks, as they snarled and wailed towards him.
“Hold the line!” came Brom’s voice from behind him. “In the name of the Emperor, you will not falter!”
Another weak cheer arose from the line of Guardsmen and an auto-cannon team opened up with a volley of heavy fire, shredding a knot of orks as they leapt the final few metres that separated them from their prey.
Larius turned away from the orks and ran. He ran like he had never run before, driven on by abject terror. He threw his rifle aside and pumped frantically with his arms, trying to drive himself faster and faster through sheer will power.
A faint piercing pain brought him up sharply, skidding to a halt on the rockcrete deck. His hand clutched at his chest in a reflex action and he looked down. Blood seeped out from around his fingers, trickling down over the blues and blacks of his uniform. He carefully lifted his hand away and looked at the gaping wound with something approaching puzzlement. As his legs gave way, he slumped down onto his knees, noticing the polished boots that stood in front of him for the first time. With the last of his strength, he looked up at the hardened face of Colonel Brom whose pistol was still smoking. The last words that Guardsman Larius heard in this world were spat at him by his commanding officer.
“Coward.”
“Cowards!” yelled Carus Brom as a series of Guardsmen peeled away from the front line and ran. He fired some carefully placed rounds into the backs of the traitors as they fled. They flung up their arms and crashed into the hard-deck, skidding into death on their knees like the grovelling worms that they were.
“You will fight and die, or you will just die. It’s up to you,” he shouted at a group of men who had turned away from the fighting just in front of him. Wild panic danced across their faces as they struggled to understand their options. They twitched and hesitated, terrified of the horrors behind them but deeply shamed by the man before them.
“You are Tartarans, damn you! Turn and fight!”
One of the men, Guardsman Ckrius, suddenly snapped to attention and threw a crisp salute to Brom. Then he racked his shotgun and turned, screaming and firing madly into the fray. The rest of the group followed suit, inspired by the reckless bravery of their comrade and the steely gaze of their colonel.
But Brom couldn’t hold the line together by himself and he was not willing to spend all of his ammunition killing Guardsmen when there were orks to slay. Clutches of Tartarans turned and fled back into the relative safety of the spaceport, which was now spotted with mortar fire from hastily erected ork emplacements in the combat line.
Stepping up alongside Ckrius, Brom threw his officer’s pistol to the ground and snatched up a fallen hellgun that must have fallen from the hands of one of the ill-fated storm troopers that had tried to secure this position on their own. Damn glory boys, cursed Brom.
“For Tartarus and the Emperor!” he yelled as he sprayed las-blasts out into the wave of snarling green that roared straight towards him.
“WAAAAAAGH!” bellowed Orkamungus from the rear of the attack, slapping Gruntz across the jaw and knocking him clear of the wartrukk. The warboss pointed up at the sky over the spaceport and roared again, reaching down from his command post and grabbing Gruntz around the neck. The kommando thrashed in resistance, scraping at the warboss with his claws and hissing into his face. But Orkamungus shook him violently by the neck, beating him against the side of the wartrukk until he stopped kicking. Then he lifted Gruntz into the air with one immense arm, stuffing his snarling face towards the sky above the battle for the spaceport.
Crumpling to the ground with a resounding crash, Gruntz muttered under his breath, spitting globules of saliva and blood from his jagged mouth. “You’ze da boss,” he spluttered, pulling himself to his feet and thudding off to join the rest of his kommandos.
Sergeant Katrn was sprinting across the spaceport, flanked on both sides by members of his Armoured Fists squad-a Tartarans team usually based in a Chimera transport. They had broken away from the fighting line when an ork had smashed down through their mortar emplacement with its axe and then ripped the weapon’s crew into pieces with its power claw. Colonel Brom had been nowhere to be seen, and so Katrn had bolted, bringing the remnants of his squad with him.
The Armoured Fists ducked and wove their way through the hail of ork bombs and mortar shells, striving to reach the flimsy cover of the spaceport’s buildings. Ordnance pounded into the ground all around them, blasting craters into the hard-deck and spraying lethal shards of rockcrete through the fleeing troopers. As one, they dived for the temporary cover of a gaping crater, rolling into a false sense of relief and security. Impacts rained down all around them, shaking the ground itself.
Katrn peered over the edge of the crater, back towards the chaotic scenes on the front line. The Tartarans were holding their ground, fighting with frantic desperation against the pressing, green muscle of the ork rampage. The greenskins were on top of the infantry now, hacking indiscriminately with their brute choppas, slashing in every direction and pounding the wounded under foot. The infantry were struggling with their bayonets and swords, thrusting at the immense creatures without much hope but with insane determination. Banks of hardened veterans had formed disciplined firing lines, sending salvoes of las-fire punching into knots of orks.
A squad of enormous, overly-muscled ogryns was pouring out of a Chimera transport and laying into the orks with their ripper guns and then using them as clubs to smash the greenskins when the range closed.
Striding out of one of the hangars on the far side of the spaceport came Mavo’s Sentinel squadron. Sergeant Mavo took the lead, stamping down with the huge legs of the armoured bipedal walker, squashing an ork instantly, and then opening up with the nose-mounted autocannon. He was supported on both sides by Catachan-pattern Sentinels that spewed chemical fire from their heavy flamers as they stalked into the mist of the battle.
Tucked away in relative safety at the rear of the ork rampage, Orkamungus cackled an inchoate noise to Fartzek and the stormboyz. He was jumping up and down and pointing towards the three large metal stomping machines that were laying into the orks at the front of the crowd. Under his immense feet, the wartrukk was gradually crumpling, and one of the axles snapped. Two stompers were spilling fire over groups of shoota boyz, and one of them was rattling cannon shells across the battle field, shredding the stikk bommas in the heart of the gaggle.
A glut of activity surrounded Fartzek as his mob responded to the cries from their warboss. Four of them held him down while another strapped a large rocket to his back. They snarled and slapped at him as a mekboy riveted the fixings into his leathery skin.
When they were done, Fartzek climbed clumsily to his feet, threw a thunderous punch into the face of the mekboy, and then fired the rocket. The ignition incinerated a gretchin that was creeping away from the mob under cover of the flight preparations. It squealed briefly and then collapsed into a pile of ashes.
As the rocket flared and propelled Fartzek into the air, he let out a gurgling cry and the stormboyz stamped their feet into the trampled earth in response. The huge ork arced through a shallow curve, rattling his slugga as he flew over the heads of his brethren. After a couple of seconds he slammed into the side of one of the metal stompers, smashing his choppa into an armoured plate to ensure purchase. The human inside the machine leaned out of the cockpit, eyes wide with horror, and Fartzek cackled into his face with a malicious and mirth-filled snarl. Then, without
even the slightest hesitation, he detonated the warhead on the rocket.
Sergeant Katrn watched Mavo’s Sentinel explode, ducking back into the crater to avoid the waves of concussion that radiated out from the destruction. Mavo had only been in the field for a few seconds.
Most of the Armoured Fists were already scrambling out of the other side of the crater, tripping and crawling their way though the rain of debris towards the port buildings. Katrn scampered after them, hunched over in the crazy belief that he would be safer that way.
A series of tremendous impacts smacked into the ground between the Armoured Fists and their objective. They all fell flat to the ground and waited for the explosions to shred them, but the detonations never came.
Lying prostrate on the rumble-strewn deck, Katrn stole a glance towards the point of impact. A group of three steaming drop-pods sat imperviously on the rockcrete in front of him, errant ork fire ricocheting harmlessly off their armoured plates. With a deep metallic clunk and then a hiss of decompression, hatches began to open on each of the pods.
Striding confidently from the steam-shrouded doors nearest to Katrn came a huge warrior, fully two metres tall, bedecked in shining red power armour. As he cleared the cloud of steam, the massive warrior turned his head calmly from side to side, taking in the scene, his green eyes flickering with calculation and thought. The figure made no attempt to take cover from the hail of fire that rattled through the spaceport towards him.
Katrn’s jaw dropped in awe as he realised what these monstrous warriors were. They were the Adeptus Astartes-the Emperor’s Space Marines. These soldiers were hand-picked from the elite of the galaxy’s fighting men and then surgically augmented for years until they were finally implanted with a black carapace that ran under their entire skin, permitting them to interface completely with the ancient power armour that enwrapped them like a second skin. Katrn had heard the legends, but he never thought that he would live to actually see one.
Similar figures emerged from each of the other pods, and several more followed from the first pod, behind the eerily calm soldier. They deployed immediately into a wide fan around the first figure, the green eye-visors of their helmets scanning the spaceport and the battle on its edge, their boltguns already primed and trained on possible targets.
“Space Marines…” muttered Katrn to himself, unsure whether to celebrate their arrival or to hide back in the crater behind him.
The first Marine was the only one without a helmet, and Katrn couldn’t help but cringe away from his eyes as they caught sight of him lying in the rubble, clearly attempting to flee the battle. The Space Marine looked him up and down in undisguised disgust then waved an order to his squad.
Without a word, the crimson-armoured Space Marines broke into a run and pounded across the space port towards the thickest and most ferocious point of the front line. They vaulted over the mortar craters with single strides, spraying precision bolter shells from their guns with each step. Already the Tartarans who had held their positions were cheering with renewed energy as the bolter fire streaked over their heads and punched into the orks, driving them back for the first time.
Sergeant Katrn watched the Marines bound over his head and then launch themselves into the fray with selfless abandon, and he slid back down into the crater, struggling to catch his breath. He could still see those piercing green eyes accusing him of treachery and cowardice. He could see the disgust and the revilement, and he shared it. He was a coward, unworthy of the proud uniform of the Tartarans. He had presented the Blood Ravens with their first sight of his regiment: crawling, snivelling cowards sneaking away from their deaths like traitors.
But he was not dead yet, and he would show them what a Tartaran could really do. Katrn sprang to his feet and jumped clear of the crater. Pumping his rifle from side to side as he ran, building his momentum, he sprinted back across the deck in the wake of the Space Marines, screaming the air out of his lungs.
“For Tartarus and the Emperor!”
Still lurking at the rear of the battlefield, Orkamungus beckoned to one of the nobz in his bodyguard, Brutuz, who slunk over to his warboss with justified trepidation. The giant ork was casually staring into the sky above the spaceport, watching the rain of drop-pods as they flashed down through the atmosphere like meteorites.
Brutuz presented himself to the warboss, already flinching in anticipation of the strike. For a moment, he was saved as something caught Orkamungus’ eye. Gruntz and the kommandos had skirted the edge of the battlefield and the warboss could see them slipping around the perimeter of the spaceport towards the city of Magna Bonum beyond.
Orkamungus cackled deeply, baubles of phlegm bubbling in his massive oesophagus. He stomped forwards to the edge of the wartrukk and leant down to Brutuz, slapping him firmly on the back, causing the nob to spit in relieved shock.
The warboss pulled himself back up to his full height and roared his war-cry across the battlefield, “Waaaaaaaaagh!” Hundreds of orks turned their eyes to him as they stumbled and lumbered away from the Space Marines. For a moment they were caught between fear of the Emperor’s sword at their heels and terror at the wrath of their warboss. But it was only for a moment, and then they kept running.
Brutuz turned quietly and started to walk away from the wartrukk, hoping that Orkamungus had finished with him. He had taken only two steps when the warboss leapt from the side of his trukk and smashed down onto Brutuz, squashing him flat against the earth under his awesome weight. Then, sitting on the nob’s back, pinning him against the ground, Orkamungus beat the hapless ork repeatedly in the head until he was sure that he had made his point.
In the thick of the fighting on the front line, an axe flashed down a fraction too late as Brom rocked onto his back foot, unleashing a spray from his hellgun at close range. As the ork smashed its weapon into the deck the blade caught in the rockcrete and the creature roared with frustration. Brom’s hail of fire strafed up the ork’s bulging abdomen, riddling it with holes.
The colonel sighed slightly, propping himself up on the barrel of his gun for a moment, before hefting it once again and opening up at yet another of the greenskinned beasts.
All around him was the constant roar of battle. He could hear the cries of his sergeants rallying the troopers against wave after wave of ork assaults, and he could hear the screams of men as they fell beneath the monstrous blows from the inhuman creatures. Explosions filled the air with concussions and the ground shook under the constant impacts of mortars, grenades and rockets.
“Colonel!” cried Ckrius, staring in horror at Brom as his hellgun coughed savagely into the gut of a charging ork, dropping it to the ground amidst squeals of frustration.
Brom stole a glance at Ckrius, but he couldn’t tell what the trooper was trying to tell him.
A projectile zipped over the colonel’s head-Brom could feel the heated air sizzle as it shrieked past him, singeing his closely cropped white hair. He turned his head, following the flight of the bolter shell as it punched into the face of the ork behind him. The creature was already riddled with gunshot wounds all the way down its chest, but it had freed its axe from the rockcrete and was holding it high in the air, ready to hack down into Brom’s back. The bolter shell buried itself into the beast’s skull and then exploded into tiny lacerating fragments that shredded the thick bone instantly.
Before Brom had a chance to react, a huge red-armoured warrior pounded up to his side, loosing showers of bolter shells into the frenzied mobs of orks that charged and lumbered towards the line. And the stranger was not alone, squads of similar figures deployed themselves into position in the heart of the defensive formation, towering head and shoulders above the Imperial Guardsmen around them.
In only a few moments the ork charge collapsed, and the chaotic assault seemed to fall into a frenzied retreat. The Space Marines pressed their advantage, striding forward of the Tartaran line and pressing the defensive action into an assault of their own.
By now
the orks were in even more disarray: charging shoota boyz skidded to a halt and others ploughed into the back of them, unable to stop in time. The cleaver wielding slugga boyz had already turned tail and were lumbering back into the midst of the mobs of orks in the mid-field and the snivelling gretchin were diving for whatever cover they could find as the Space Marines’ barrage continued relentlessly.
For the first time, the Imperial forces started to make ground against the orks. Blood Ravens strode forward at the head of the counter-offensive, scything their way through the disorganised greenskins with sputtering chainswords and disciplined volleys of bolter fire. The retreat rapidly collapsed into a rout, as the orks abandoned their positions and ran in erratic, wailing mobs.
Brom watched the fleeing orks with something approaching amazement, but was overcome with relief. He turned to the Space Marine who had saved his life and bowed deeply.
“I am Colonel Carus Brom, and you are most welcome here, captain.”
The Space Marine eyed him sceptically. “Captain Gabriel Angelos of the Blood Ravens Third Company. What is your status?”
“The Tartarans have suffered terrible losses, captain, but they have fought bravely and with honour… in the main,” said Brom, trying to draw himself up to a more respectable height before this giant figure.
Gabriel surveyed the ruins of the spaceport. It was spotted with ordnance craters and speckled with the corpses of Guardsmen-some of whom were facing back towards the centre of the compound with gunshot wounds in their backs. But he couldn’t see a single greenskin corpse inside the defensive perimeter.
