Tsu’gan raged at the death. It took all of his willpower not to turn around and climb up to wall to vent his fury.
“Vulkan’s blood!” he snarled, forcing as much venom as he could into the invective.
Elysius felt it too, rotating his crozius in small arcs to keep his wrist loose and muttering spleenful litanies under his breath. The Chaplain would wait for the opportune moment to give his canticles of hate full voice.
“Raise shields!” Tsu’gan heard Praetor cry out to the Firedrakes from the other side of the Land Raider. The clank of metal resounded in the courtyard as the Terminators’ storm shields met their pauldrons and locked in place.
The order from N’keln was imminent. Crackling static in Tsu’gan’s battle-helm gave way to the captain’s steely voice. “Unto the anvil, brothers!”
The gate came down. A long burst from the Fire Anvil’s flamestorm cannons burned clear the immediate area beyond it.
Led by Praetor, the Firedrakes were the first out, tramping onto scorched earth, smoking husks of orks crushed in their sudden charge. Thunder hammers filled the air with flashing discharge from their power generators. Trying to respond, the greenskins hurled themselves at the Terminators but found an unyielding rock against which they were smashed.
The Firedrakes were devastating, and Tsu’gan almost found himself agape at their fury. They moved amidst the greenskin horde, pummelling with their shields, crushing skulls with their hammers. Praetor extolled the glories of the vaunted 1st Company as they killed, his sheer presence impelling his warriors to even greater efforts. Tsu’gan saw the veteran sergeant’s plan at once. He had his sights set on the ork warboss.
“To the fires of war!” roared Elysius, once the Terminators had cleared the threshold.
Tsu’gan ran with him, closing the gap behind their 1st Company brothers swiftly. Close-ranged bolter fire tore into the orks, as Tsu’gan ordered “weapons free”, and blasted the greenskins apart.
Expulsed promethium merged with the stink of burning ork flesh as Honorious unleashed his flamer. To the rear of the assault group a combat squad made a staggered advance, allowing M’lek to loose his multi-melta. A brutish greenskin, two heads taller than Tsu’gan, its body an armoured shell of plates and whining servos, had its torso liquidised to visceral slag by the multi-melta’s beam. It fell back into a steaming heap, crushing two of its smaller brethren.
Tsu’gan heard the bass tones of Sergeant Typhos as he sang a Promethean battle anthem, describing bloody arcs with the rise and fall of his thunder hammer.
As the three squads slowly converged, forming into a spear shape with Praetor and the Firedrakes as its burning tip, the ork attack on the wall was stymied. Without constant reinforcements, the greenskins already contesting the fortress were left isolated. It allowed the defenders to cleanse the parapets.
Overhead, the warriors of Vargo’s Assault squad soared on wings of fire. Plunging down amidst the greenskins, they released bolt and blade with a zealot’s fervour, small bursts from the squad’s flamer adding to the carnage. They were the last element of the Salamander assault force, and in their wake the Fire Anvil rolled into the breach left behind by the fallen gate. The tank’s bulk easily filled the blackened arch. Sporadic spears of flame from its sponson guns kept the orks at bay. When the initial shock of the Salamanders’ attack had waned, they found themselves locked in a deadly melee. Ork bodies pressed on every side, raw aggression lending the beasts the impetus they needed to get back on an even footing. Only now, wading in the belligerent sea of green, did Tsu’gan fully appreciate what they were up against. Between bolter bursts, he heard a muffled cry and saw what he thought was one of Vargo’s brothers falling into the morass of orks. The Salamander didn’t resurface. Another, Typhos’ special weapons trooper Urion, took a chainblade to the forehead. The exultant ork was shredded by return fire from the dead Salamander’s battle-brothers, and the body was left quivering with the still churning blade that the greenskin had lost its grip on wedged in the wound. Soon Urion was swallowed up by the ork horde too.
They gained about three hundred metres from the gate when the Fire Anvil’s engines stirred into life. The assault tank barrelled into the killing field, barging greenskins aside with its hull or mulching them beneath its grinding tracks.
This was “hammer”, the second phase of N’keln’s assault stratagem. The captain was embarked in the Land Raider with the Inferno Guard and the Tactical squad of Sergeant De’mas. Filling the void left behind by the tank was Clovius and his squad. They would hold the gate, whilst the Devastators, utilising the respite bought by Praetor’s and the assault force’s bravura, would abandon the towers and defend the walls in the absence of the Tactical squads. Lok assumed command position over the gatehouse and was charged to hold the iron fortress in case N’keln needed to order a retreat.
Even as ork blood spat across his visor, Tsu’gan knew there would no such retreat. The Salamanders were committed now. It was a simple matter of do or die.
A cleaver rang against his pauldron, spitting sparks, and he staggered. The ork assailing him lunged forward, strings of spittle punched from its maw on stinking breath. Tsu’gan rammed his bolter’s muzzle into the beast’s mouth and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain matter burst out the back of the ork’s head, mixing with skull fragments.
Tiberon came in from the left and smashed the greenskin corpse aside, allowing Tsu’gan to drive forward. Iagon and Lazarus followed, maintaining pace with the implacable Firedrakes.
Praetor was battering his way to the ork warboss. Seeing prey and the prospect of a good fight, the immense leader of the greenskins spurred its biker-mounted entourage forwards. A thickening horde of orks still lay between it and the Terminators.
Assault cannon whining, the Fire Anvil scythed down a first rank of orks spilling from the throng with blades raised. More greenskins came in their stead and Tsu’gan met them with a bolter storm from his troopers.
Praetor exploited the slight gap, crushing the dead and wounded underfoot, as something huge lumbered into view. Orks scattered before it, bellowing and roaring for more carnage. A steel-plated machinery loomed. Trunk-bellied, resembling a can festooned with weapons and two razor-edged power claws, the greenskin war machine thundered forward on piston legs. One of the Firedrakes charged into its path, hammer aloft and crackling lightning. The machinery punched the warrior aside. Swinging its power claw, the crude creation clove a storm shield in two, overloading its force field and smashing its bearer to the ground. Buoyed by its own infernal momentum, the machine, with the band of orks following, drove a wedge into the Salamanders’ spear formation. The Firedrakes’ tip fragmented apart. Praetor, desperate to close with the war machine, was engulfed by greenskins. Capering gretchin, heedless of death, clung madly to his arms and legs in an effort to slow the hero of Prometheus.
Honorious bathed the sergeant of the Firedrakes with his flamer, burning the diminutive greenskins off him like they were an infestation.
The ork war engine was rampaging still. Its pilot was obviously deranged, so fuelled by the psychic energy of the orks that the machine was almost unstoppable. It turned and fought in every direction, battering at the Firedrakes who surrounded it, but couldn’t close.
Tsu’gan went to Praetor’s aid, rushing on even as the flames from Honorious were still dying, and forging a bloody path with the rest of his squad. The pressure on the Firedrake sergeant lessened and he broke free, ramming an ork aside with his storm shield as he approached the ork machine that had scattered them.
In the distance, something was happening. A thick cloud of dust spewed into the air and Tsu’gan swore he saw a duster of orks disappear below the earth. Bestial screams followed swiftly as the greenskins reacted to something in their midst. On the opposite side of the battlefield, another dust plume spiralled upwards, then another and another. Grey columns of ash were erupting all across the dunes and orks were sinking down into an unseen mire.
Beh
ind him, the clang of the Fire Anvil’s frontal ramp announced N’keln’s arrival on the battlefield. Tsu’gan turned briefly to witness the company banner unfurled by Malicant and his captain leading a fresh charge into the enemy with the rest of the Inferno Guard and Brother-Sergeant De’mas.
Turning his attention back on the greenskin machinery, Tsu’gan went in support of Praetor. The Firedrake sergeant faced off against the manic war engine, rebounding a blow from one its power claws with his storm shield. The ork pilot had overreached itself and was off balance. Praetor shattered the claw arm with a blow from his thunder hammer, before stepping in heavily to shoulder barge it. The ork pilot flailed at its controls, emulated by the machine itself. Tsu’gan, blindsiding it, ducked beneath a madly swiping claw and attached a melta-bomb to the war engine’s body. Throwing himself backwards, Tsu’gan felt the heat of the explosion wash over his armour as the machine burst apart. Chips of debris fell like steel rain, a steaming pair of ruined legs holding up an abdomen of sloughed metal all that remained of the machinery, collapsing onto the ash.
Praetor had withstood the blast and drove on almost instantly, whilst Tsu’gan was still getting to his feet. The intensity of the ork assault was lessening. The guttural cries from those greenskins seemingly swallowed by the dunes were much closer now. At last he saw the cause.
Swarms of enraged chitin were rampaging amongst the horde. The orks hacked away at the carapace bodies of the subterranean creatures, their silt-blood mingling with the ash dunes in a grey soup. Sink holes devoured greenskins by the score, the soft earth, churned up by the chitin, no longer supporting the weight of the orks.
Familiar forms followed in the ash clouds, surging from the emergence holes bolters flaring. Agatone and the Salamanders from the Vulkan’s Wrath had joined up with them, driving the chitin before them like cattle to dig their assault tunnels.
Flame bursts spat through the murk, burning down orks in a fire-tinged haze of grey.
Through the dissipating ash cloud and the rampant pull and thrust of warring bodies, Tsu’gan saw an Assault squad crest the edge of a fresh emergence hole. They took to the air immediately, jump packs screaming. Orks were set ablaze in the violent discharge; one stumbled blindly into the gaping chasm made by the chitin and was lost from view.
Then he saw Dak’ir amongst the reinforcements. The Ignean came out fighting, gutting an ork on his chainsword whilst vaporising the snarling head of another with a shot from his plasma pistol. Tsu’gan felt his jaw harden. He was determined not to be outdone. He caught sight of Chaplain Elysius going after Praetor and the Firedrakes. They were headed towards an inexorable confrontation with the ork warboss. Smiling darkly, Tsu’gan followed.
II
Be the Anvil. Become the Hammer
Islands of open ground were appearing in the green sea as Dak’ir led his combat squad up to the surface. Orks still thronged the ash dunes, just as Agatone’s scouts had reported, but a single mass had become isolated knots. The coherency alloying the greenskins together was breaking. Survival instincts were overthrowing the desire for conquest, and tribal rivalries, once quashed by their overlord’s brute menace, had begun to surface. Infighting ravaged groups of orks at the fringes of the battle, sensing the turn in fortunes and staking early claims of leadership.
“Stay with me, Illiad,” shouted Dak’ir, the flare of his plasma pistol dying down as a headless ork crumpled away from him and the humans reached the surface.
Sonnar Illiad merely nodded. His rugged face was pale, his muscles bunched tight as he gripped his lasgun harder than he needed to. The other settlers were the same. To their credit, they were organised and steadfast, but they had obviously never fought in such a conflict before. For a moment, Dak’ir regretted not opposing their role in the battle in front of Agatone. When a lasgun salvo shredded a mob of onrushing orks, he changed his mind. A man fighting for his home will do so to the death and with all of his resolve. Dak’ir wouldn’t deny the settlers that.
Even as the orks broke, Dak’ir saw N’keln bringing the disparate forces of the Salamanders together.
Be the anvil. Become the hammer.
The captain’s words returned to him.
“Cleanse and burn,” Dak’ir barked into the comm-feed.
Ba’ken was the first forward from his sergeant’s right shoulder, spewing a carpet of fire into the greenskins.
A second burst erupted from the heavy flamer of Venerable Brother Amadeus, who had lumbered from the chitin emergence hole behind them.
“Cleanse and burn,” echoed the Salamander Dreadnought. The dully resonance of its vox-emitter boomed above the roar of the conflagration engulfing the orks.
Scorched earth was all that stood between Dak’ir and the Inferno Guard once the flames had died. Ashen husks broke apart under booted feet as the brother-sergeant sought his captain’s side. N’keln was cutting his way through the greenskins with his power sword. Behind him, the company banner was providing a glorious backdrop upheld by Malicant behind him. Fire Anvil ground slowly after them, spitting out plumes of fire and stitching orks with explosive rounds from its assault cannon.
Reunited with his captain again, Dak’ir levelled his chainsword as more orks came at them. “Forward!”
As more Salamanders fought their way to N’keln, a nexus of strength started to gather.
The anvil was slowly forming. Next would be the hammer.
Dak’ir saw its target through a fiery heat haze.
The greenskin warboss ignored the bickering hordes, intent on the “tin men” who had just destroyed its orkoid war machine.
Slewing to a halt, barely a hundred metres away from the advancing Salamanders, the beast bellowed out a challenge. Sitting up in the bucket-seat of its wartrike, the warboss thrust its chin at Praetor.
Tsu’gan reached the veteran sergeant’s side in time to hear his order to the Firedrakes.
“Kill it,” he growled.
Praetor was a hero, a veteran of countless battles and campaigns. His personal roll of honour in the Firedrakes was long and distinguished with many kill markings. But he was also a pragmatist and not given to grand gestures. Vainglory simply didn’t appeal to him. Let the scribes and remembrancers write what they would. Praetor just wanted the green bastard dead. So, he’d level everything he had at it.
The Firedrakes came forward as one, an imposing wall of armour.
Annoyed that the tin man wasn’t responding to its goading, the warboss sent its biker squadrons ahead of it. A mob of its own clan orks followed, more heavily armoured and better disciplined that the other tribes.
Tsu’gan’s world shrank to a single combat — his squad with Elysius and the Firedrakes versus the warboss and his brood.
“Take them down!” he roared. The onrushing bikers were engulfed in a bolter storm.
Jagged white daggers seared behind Dak’ir’s eyes and he felt blood on the side of his head. He’d lost his battle-helm. Maybe he’d wrenched it loose, he couldn’t remember. The ork swung at him again. He could smell the stink of blood on its cleaver as it missed his face by centimetres. Swiping low, Dak’ir chewed up the beast’s leg with his chainsword. Brother Zo’tan put a bolt through its brain before it struck the ground.
Three more greenskins came howling at them from the side. A wave of heat rippled there for a few seconds as Ba’ken torched them with his heavy flamer. Dak’ir gave a curt nod of thanks and drove on.
The battle was far from over.
Orks were everywhere, and though many had died in the shock assault or were fleeing, fighting amongst themselves or finishing off the chitin, there were hundreds of others still intent on killing the Salamanders.
Illiad’s settlers had taken the worst of it so far. Easy meat, the orks must have decided. Of the fifty that had joined Dak’ir’s squad, only twenty-three remained. The Salamanders had tried to shield them, but with foes coming at them from every direction it was an impossible task.
Blood and death were ub
iquitous on the killing field. As a Space Marine, Dak’ir was able to assess and regulate every combat, carefully compartmentalise it and, in his enhanced battle state, prosecute the Emperor’s justice with efficiency and focused fury. The humans had no such resource and simply fought what they could and tried to stay alive.
“Stay with the captain!” Robbed of the comm-feed in his battle-helm, Dak’ir was forced to shout the order to his combat squad.
N’keln was several paces ahead of them, long strides taking him into the thick of the greenskins where his power sword flashed like an angel of judgement. The lead only increased as he killed, slaying the orks with utter impunity. The spirit of Vulkan was with him now, the indomitable will and matchless strength of the primarch. Even the Inferno Guard, his retinue, were struggling to keep up.
Dak’ir saw Fugis lagged the farthest behind. He was cradling Brother L’sen, one of Dak’ir’s troopers, part of the second combat squad — he hadn’t even witnessed him fall. Badly wounded, his chest opened up by an ork cleaver, but still alive, L’sen fired his bolter one-handed and shot the legs out from under a charging greenskin, whilst Fugis, bolt pistol bucking violently in his grasp, destroyed the face of another.
Illiad and the humans stayed with them as Dak’ir’s group caught up. They adopted a circle formation and issued a standing fusillade of las-fire into the approaching orks.
Dak’ir couldn’t protect them any longer. He saw the warboss looming in the distance. The Firedrakes were about to engage it.
[Tome of Fire 01] - Salamander Page 33
