The main swell of the greenskin horde was far off at the iron fortress, yet still their masses could be seen by the defenders of the Vulkan’s Wrath, spreading across the land like a dark stain. A tributary had peeled off from the major force and was surging towards the stricken strike cruiser.
Do you feel them, Dak’ir? Pyriel asked psychically.
Dak’ir nodded slowly. Yes, he felt it.
“Such rage…” he muttered.
The orks were not that far away now. Dak’ir could make out the crude and jagged forms of their vehicles and see their brutish weapons as they discharged them into the air. He discerned the snarled visage of the barbarous greenskin and his fist clenched. These were the spore of those beasts that virtually wiped out his ancient brothers. Here, upon the same ashen fields, the battle would be refought — Salamander versus greenskins. Dak’ir was adamant that this time, the orks would not be back.
The comm-feed spat static for a few seconds and then cleared again.
“Sergeant,” growled the voice of Agatone. “I need your forces now.”
“On our way,” Dak’ir returned and cut the feed. He ordered his combat squad to move out. They left the dune swiftly, Illiad in tow, and went to liaise with Agatone and the others.
Rounding the vast bulk of the Vulkan’s Wrath, Dak’ir saw that the medical tents were already emptying. The injured that could walk or be moved safely were trailing out in ragged groups.
Battle-Brother Zo’tan — from the other half of Dak’ir’s squad — had taken charge of the armsmen and able-bodied human crew, forming them into auxiliaries. A quick head count revealed almost three hundred troops, divided into six fifty-man battalions, assigned squad leaders and commanders. The auxiliary had started to assume strategic positions around the medical tents.
They were the last line of defence, there to protect those still festering in their pallet-beds. Even though the badly wounded probably wouldn’t survive, the Salamanders would not leave them to be butchered.
Brother-Sergeant Agatone was stalking towards them. Sergeant Ek’Bar remained behind where they had been discussing a holo-chart, and waited patiently.
Agatone dispensed with any preamble.
“We have three Tactical and one depleted Assault squad,” he began. “Venerable Brothers Ashamon and Amadeus have also been roused from slumber by Master Argos.” The doughty forms of the Dreadnoughts loomed in the distance, prowling the extremity of the defensive cordon designated by Agatone.
As he looked, Dak’ir noticed acting Sergeant Gannon also up ahead. He was kneeling upon a high dune, his Assault squad gathered around him, surveying the orks through a pair of magnoculars.
Agatone was interrupted abruptly by the comm-feed. The sergeant pressed a gauntleted finger to his gorget, as his battle-helm was mag-locked to his belt.
“Go ahead,” he instructed.
Gannon’s voice came through.
“I estimate four thousand enemy,” reported the acting sergeant, “with assorted vehicles and bikes. Armament is mainly automatic chain-gun and solid shot rifles and pistols.”
“Good work, sergeant. To your positions. In Vulkan’s name.”
“In Vulkan’s name.”
Gannon secured the magnoculars and stood up. A second later he and his squad took to the air, jump pack engines screaming as they ignited, and trailing smoke and fire.
Agatone gestured to the middle distance, where the Thunderfire cannons had patrolled earlier. There was no sign of the tracked heavy guns now, or their Techmarine operators.
“The grenade line is still untouched,” he told them, “and we’ve added additional explosive payloads. Our stratagem is to funnel the orks into it, launching a full assault into their vanguard when they’re scattered, hurting and confused.”
Dak’ir regarded the greenskin splinter force as Agatone relayed his plan. The xenos had forged some distance between themselves and the parent horde; the latter was just a dense black line cresting a far-off high dune now. He also noticed that the splinter force had become stretched in its eagerness for a fight. A vanguard of bikers, trucks and the faster orkoid elements ranged ahead of a much larger body of greenskins comprising foot soldiers and rumbling half-tracks.
“See how they are spread?” said Agatone. It was wide, widening all the time as the speed-obsessed orks raced and tried to out do each other. Dak’ir was put in mind of a giant maw slowly opening as it prepared for its first bite. “We need them to become a dense column.”
“Corral them,” said Dak’ir, seeing the potential at once to manoeuvre the fast, but brittle greenskin advance forces.
Agatone nodded, a slight hint of irritation in his manner. “It is already in place.” He pointed to distant flanks, just beyond the Dreadnoughts. Dak’ir saw something moving there, obscured by the eerie half-darkness.
“Thunderfire cannons,” he thought aloud.
“Just so,” Agatone replied. “Subterranean blast shelling will commence as soon as we’ve got the orks’ attention. The tremors will force them into line. Any that don’t will be dealt with by the Dreadnoughts.”
Dak’ir’s eyes narrowed as he pictured abstractly the full realisation of Agatone’s plan.
“We need bait to draw them in.”
The other sergeant nodded.
Dak’ir checked the load of his plasma pistol, then secured it in its holster again.
“I’ll take a combat squad only,” he said. “Where should we deploy?”
“Five Astartes is all I can spare, Dak’ir,” Agatone replied. He gestured to a patch of rocky ground about two hundred metres shy of the grenade line. “That’s your squad’s position.”
It was as good a staging point as any. The rocks provided some cover and the ground was set into a small depression the Salamanders could use like a crater to hunker down in if necessary.
“Five Fire-born to engage a horde of about five hundred,” said Ba’ken, his tone sardonic. “Good odds.”
“And the rest of the force — what will you do about the ork reserves?” asked Dak’ir.
“Argos is working on something,” Agatone replied looking slightly uncomfortable for the first time during the impromptu briefing, “We just need to give him some time. Stall the greenskins.”
“How much time?” Dak’ir asked levelly.
Agatone’s expression was stony.
“As much as we can.”
It didn’t take an anthro-linguistic servitor to realise that Agatone’s obvious misgivings were grave. The sergeant went on.
“Once the vanguard is eliminated, fall back to the second line. You’ll see it because I’ll be stood at it with the rest of our forces.”
“And after that, if the orks get through?”
Agatone snorted in mock derision. There was a sense of pathos to the gesture.
“After that it won’t matter.”
CHAPTER TEN
I
Into the Dragon’s Mouth
Dak’ir cradled the bolter in his gauntleted hands, feeling its heft and running his fingers down its stock. He muttered litanies of accuracy under his breath as he familiarised himself with the holy weapon.
The Vulkan’s Wrath carried several additional Astartes armoriums aboard. It was well stocked with surplus bolters, ammunition and other materiel in the event that the company should require it. During his scout training, when he was just a neophyte and not part of the 7th Company, Dak’ir had been instructed in the use of the bolter by the stern-faced Master of Recruits. Old Zen’de was dead now but the lessons he had imparted upon Dak’ir lived on.
All of the Salamanders crouched in the shallow depression, the rocky outcrop to their fore, advancing orks glimpsed over the jagged tips of these crags, had a bolter slung to their sides. Bursts of sporadic fire, at range, were intended to attract the attention of the onrushing greenskin vanguard. The squad would then stay visible but hunkered down so as not to present an easy target. Only Ba’ken and Emek, bearing their flamers, wouldn’t
be so armed.
Dak’ir’s five had also become six with the addition of Pyriel. He too hefted a bolter, his force sword and pistol remaining sheathed for now. The Librarian had not been swayed by Sergeant Agatone’s arguments when he had insisted he stay with the main force. His talents, he surmised with a tone that brooked no further discussion, would be best served aiding Dak’ir.
Illiad was another matter, of course. With no time to explain what had occurred beneath the surface right now, Dak’ir had merely expressed how important the human was to them and that if they survived the fight with the greenskins, Illiad would need to be brought before N’keln immediately. As it was, the leader of the settlers was determined he would stand with his distant Nocturnean kin and so joined one of the battalions. The human could fight and had his own lasgun, so Agatone saw no reason to oppose him. Dak’ir would see him protected, of course, but supposed that standing shoulder-to-shoulder with fifty other armed men was about as safe as it got right now.
“A thousand metres,” Apion reported, keeping sentry on the orks’ approach with a pair of magnoculars.
“Weapons ready,” snapped Dak’ir. His tone was clipped and precise as he brought up his bolter. Each Salamander occupied a section of the outcrop, snug in makeshift firing lips rendered by the natural permutations in the rocks. A staccato of arming sounds disturbed the heavy silence before the air was still again.
“Eight hundred…”
Dak’ir sighted down the bolter’s targeter.
“Seven hundred…”
Dull percussions from the Thunderfire cannon salvo were rippling across the dunes. Clustered explosions plumed in fiery grey, slowly pushing the greenskin vanguard together. “Six hundred…”
“In Vulkan’s name!” Dak’ir roared and the bolters roared with him.
Muzzle flares ripped into the darkness followed by the flash of explosive rounds tearing up the leaders of the motorised ork vanguard. Bikes spun front over end, chewed up by the brutal fusillade coming from the Space Marines. Trucks flipped as their fuel tanks ignited, turning them into rolling fireballs. Spitting shrapnel shredded those outside the heart of the bolter storm, forcing bikes to slew into others and trucks to veer widely and crash as their drivers were cut to pieces.
The frenzied ork advance slowed momentarily as the ones that followed on picked their way through flaming wreckage, and as the greenskins at the periphery were forced into a cordon by the distant bombardment of the Thunderfire cannons.
Bellowing curses like wielded blades, the orks regrouped and found a focus for their anger — the six Salamanders blazing away at them from an outcrop of rocks. Like a hot spear-tip the orks came together. In truth, the bolter fire had barely scratched them, but the bloody nose they’d received was stinging.
Errant bullets from the greenskins’ chainguns and solid-shot cannons chipped at the rock wall. A shard spanged against Dak’ir’s pauldron but he barely felt it. The spatial display on his right helmet lens told him the orks were just three hundred and sixty-five point three metres away.
In less than a minute they’d be hitting the grenade line. Then there would be two hundred metres between them and the horde.
“Reloading,” shouted Dak’ir, ducking back behind the rocks to expel the partially spent magazine and ram home another one. The process took less than three seconds. As he returned to the firing lip to resume the fusillade, Brother Apion ducked back in his sergeant’s stead, cycling through the ammo replenishment strategy Dak’ir had devised. This way, the Salamanders could maintain a barrage of uninterrupted bolter fire with little deterioration in intensity between reloads.
At the head of the greenskin pack, a howling ork biker was suddenly kicked up into the air, riding a blossoming fireball. It tore out the vehicle’s undercarriage, blasting off its rugged wheels, as well as shredding the ork’s legs and abdomen. The beast was still raging until it struck the ground with a wet crunch. Others followed it, shooting up into the air in a macabre, pseudo-pyrotechnic display. Explosions from the grenade line churned up ash in a dense cloud, causing further carnage and confusion. Riderless bikes trundled through the fog aflame, slowly succumbing to inertia without their throttles opened up. A truck barrel rolled out of the murk, its hapless passengers battered to death as they thrashed continuously against the ground. It settled into a mangled heap, a pair of ork bikers blinded by their ash-smeared goggles, colliding into it and exploding after the impact.
The damage was horrendous, the densely-packed greenskins, precisely corralled by the Thunderfire cannons and impelled by Dak’ir’s “bait” squad, suffering badly in the grenade field. Momentum carried the greenskins behind into deadly debris and the remnants of the sunken grenades yet to be disturbed. They couldn’t stop; their maddened fervour, coupled with the undeniable instinct to go faster, wouldn’t let them. The orks piled on through and kept on dying.
Two hundred metres became a hundred and fifty in Dak’ir’s helmet lens. With so many orks in the vanguard, it was inevitable that some would make it through. But the brother-sergeant had made contingency for that too.
Raking a slide of his bolter, he switched the gun to rapid fire. They’d burn through ammunition much faster this way, but the punishing effects of such a salvo would be irresistible. Loosing his fury, Dak’ir saw the muzzle flare at the end of the bolter expand into a knife-edged star of fire. The oncoming orks became a haze before it, rendered into steaming flesh and bent metal.
The orks, more tenacious than a plague, rolled on into the firing line, scarcely fifty left in the vanguard from the five hundred who had broken off from the slower element of the splinter horde.
Solid shot struck his elbow, finding a spot between the plates, and bit. Dak’ir grimaced, another deflecting off his left pauldron as the orks got close enough to be partially accurate with their return fire.
Ignoring the bullets skimming off his power armour, some punching small holes but stopping at the layered ceramite, Dak’ir rose to his feet. His brothers followed him.
“Purify!” roared the sergeant and the flamers opened up at last.
A curtain of fire swept over the last of the orks. Superheated promethium cooked engines and melted tyres to rubberised slag. The greenskins bayed as they burned, crumpling down as they were engulfed by the intense wave.
Caught between the twin storms of bolters and flamers, barely a score of orks remained. Roughly half staggered, bereft of their vehicles, dazed and enraged to within a few metres of the outcrop when Dak’ir let his bolter hang lose on its strap and unsheathed his chainsword. His voice buzzed like the sound of the blades churning with their sudden activation.
“Charge!”
Dak’ir led, bounding over the rocks with his brothers on his heels. A flash of cerulean blue in his limited peripheral vision told him that Pyriel had drawn his force sword.
The Salamanders descended on the battered remnants of the ork vanguard. And tore them apart.
It was over in seconds, and as the dust finally cleared the greenskin dead were revealed, littering the ground. Orks possessed strong constitutions; they were hard beasts to kill. Amongst the carnage there’d be those that still lived, but none posed a threat to the Salamanders at this point. Beyond the dissipating smoke and ash, the rest of the splinter horde was closing. It was a sobering sight that dispelled the heady battle-euphoria of their recent victory.
Over a thousand orks: more heavily armed, more resolute, more wrathful.
Whatever Argos was planning, Dak’ir hoped it would be ready soon and powerful enough to level a small army.
“Fall back,” he ordered, “and recover any partially spent clips. We’re going to need every single round.”
They arrived at the main Salamander deployment almost at the same time as the Thunderfire cannons and Dreadnoughts.
Agatone had ordered the withdrawal of the heavy guns as soon as the ork vanguard was in the “dragon’s mouth”, as he would later refer to it. Dak’ir’s troops had fallen back a
short time after that, but the better foot speed of the battle-brothers had averaged out the head start fairly equally.
The brother-sergeant seemed distracted. As Dak’ir approached him, he realised it was because Agatone was listening intently to the comm-feed in his ear. He nodded curtly, his face grim.
“A much larger horde of greenskins has amassed against the iron fortress. Captain N’keln is currently under siege,” he announced.
“How large a force are we talking about, here?” asked Dak’ir, aware that the main horde they would soon face numbered in the thousands.
“Estimations are hazy,” Agatone replied. “They reckon tens of thousands.”
Dak’ir shook his head ruefully, before pointing to the lunar eclipse. “The black rock up there orbits this planet, and when it closes the orks will increase in number again.”
Agatone looked up to the ghastly planetoid, like a baleful black orb, and frowned darkly.
“We must reunite our forces,” he decided. “Find a way to get to Captain N’keln and our brothers before they’re worn down by the siege.”
“We are in no position to lift it, Sergeant Agatone,” Pyriel interceded, displaying a cold pragmatism normally associated with their Chaplain. “Our brothers will be measured against the anvil, as will we all.”
Agatone nodded at the Librarian’s wisdom, but said in a low voice:
“Let us hope it doesn’t break them.”
After that he summarised the troop dispositions one final time and went to rejoin his squad, leaving Dak’ir to do the same. With Zo’tan leading the human auxiliaries a few hundred metres back from the line of Salamanders, Dak’ir would have been a trooper down if not for Pyriel appending himself to his squad.
The Librarian had taken a keen interest in Dak’ir; for good or ill, the brother-sergeant did not know. The only certainty was that Pyriel would not let him out of his sight.
A rugged defensive line of metal storage crates, partially broken down prefab bunkers and empty ammo drums was strung out for the Salamanders to take cover behind. Battle-Brother G’heb raised his fist to indicate to his sergeant where they would be stationed. Dak’ir could feel the questions in his burning gaze, reflected in the eyes of all the Salamanders, of what happened below the earth and who this human was in their midst. Discipline let them compartmentalise the desire for veracity; survival and the protection of innocent human life overrode it for now.
[Tome of Fire 01] - Salamander Page 30
