by Guy Haley
‘Brother!’ warned Marcomar.
A buggy was driving right by the hauler that followed Brusc’s. The tractor unit’s heavy stubbers could not reduce their elevation enough, their bullets raising tracks in the desert a good metre out from the buggy. Men gesticulated, their shouts inaudible as they leaned out from the container roof. One slipped and fell, hanging helplessly by his ankle cord. Another two stood to help him and were shot down. Brusc switched targets, targeting the buggy. He missed twice, a third round bringing a plume of steam from the buggy’s engine block to no noticeable effect.
Its gunner had abandoned his gun. He reached down. When he stood upright he held a large bomb.
A daring jink from the driver brought the buggy between the two haulers. The gunner attached the bomb to the radiator grille of the tractor unit. The driver of the hauler accelerated, trying to crush them, but with a flurry of obscene gestures from the gunner the buggy was away.
‘Get down!’ Brusc screamed.
To the credit of the driver of the second hauler, he realised his fate and turned sharply, taking the vehicle out of the convoy. A selfless move, but too late.
The bomb exploded, hollowing out the tractor unit. It bounced as it came to a halt, jackknifing into the path of the remaining north flank Chimera. The tank ran into it at speed, clanging to a sudden stop against the flaming wreck. The trailer detached, rolling over the towing bed of the tractor, and reared up. Men flew from it, helpless as ragdolls. It twisted, carried forwards by its own momentum, to land diagonally across the river bed.
The third hauler ploughed into it, sending men skidding off its roof. The stricken vehicles were immediately assaulted. The amount of return fire from them was inadequate. Brusc held his breath, but the other haulers avoided the smash, swerving around the wreckage. A small measure of retribution was earned when one ran over a careless buggy, crushing it under massive wheels. The Taurox gunned down a good number of the orks attacking the survivors as it sped by.
‘Do not stop! Drive on! Drive on!’ ordered Ghaskar. ‘If we stay to aid our comrades, we shall all die!’
‘We lost two,’ said Brusc to Sunno.
A gleeful howling drew his attention. Two of the fresh ork trucks had survived and were running hard by his trailer. Orks slammed hooked lines into the thin sides of the container, catching the access ladders with others, and swarmed up onto the roof.
They were quick, roaring with battle lust. Two were dropped by lasgun shots and fell back, knocking another ork from his purchase, then the rest were on the roof. The four remaining men of Jopal were dead before Brusc could shout at them to get behind him. Marcomar went on as if nothing were happening, coolly sniping high-value targets away from the truck. Commendable, thought Brusc.
Brusc dropped his boltgun. It clattered on the metal, skittering across the bouncing roof. His chainsword and bolt pistol were in his hands in an instant. He had no time to attach their lanyard chains to his wrists.
‘No pity. No remorse. No fear!’ bellowed Brusc. In truth, there was no need for such words; he could feel none of these things for the greenskins, they were vermin to be slaughtered. His hatred of them constricted his throat, strangling his battle-hymns. He stood firm, locked to the roof, as the orks attacked.
The first died from a bolt-round to its thick skull. The second fell screaming from the roof, holding its entrails into its belly. Marcomar drew his bolt pistol, shooting down orks trying to crawl up the rear of the truck. To the front, Sunno pulled Cataphraxes clear of the convoy, allowing Doneal to target the orks still aboard their trucks next to the hauler. He shredded the rearmost with a concentrated burst of fire, and it came away smashed to nothing by the convoy.
‘Die!’ screamed Brusc, his spittle coating the inside of his visor. His fury was unbounded. ‘You will pay for the death of Brother Osric! You will pay for the lives of every human your miserable kind has taken!’
An ork managed to get a blow past his guard, slamming down a crudely fashioned axe into his pauldron. The force behind it was phenomenal and he swayed back, with only the maglocks of his boots holding him in place. His sensorium buzzed his system with pseudo-pain, informing him that his pauldron was cracked. The ork did not get a chance to strike again. Brusc blew its guts out of its back. It was still snarling as it fell away.
Something landed at his feet. He caught sight of a fizzing stick grenade before it exploded and the roof collapsed beneath his feet.
He landed hard on his back, looking up at a hole in the ceiling of the trailer container. Panicked men were packed into bunks lining the inside. Medicae personnel reached for their sidearms. Brusc got to his feet as a pair of monsters jumped in after him. The first landed on Brusc’s chest. He caught its foot and sent it sprawling backwards. It crashed back into a rack of bunks, the weight of it alone enough to kill the injured men lying there. The second landed behind him. Before the first could rise, it died, its face blown apart. Sister Rosa nodded at Brusc from the far end of the container, a small calibre bolter in her hand.
He had no time to thank her. The second ork was on him, wrenching at his power pack with huge grasping hands. Brusc and the ork staggered backwards. He reached over his head, slapping at the plasteel of his armour before finding the flesh of the ork’s hand. He grasped it in a crushing grip, tearing it free of his battleplate. Turning around under the ork’s arm, he yanked hard, pulling it off balance and locking its arm. The ork was a mass of knotted muscle, stronger in truth than Brusc, but Brusc was the more skilled warrior. A blow of his forearm bent the thing’s elbow the wrong way, shattering it. The ork roared, maw revealing a wealth of yellow fangs. Its uninjured hand went for a big knife at its belt. Brusc smashed the knife from its fingers with his fist, his returning swing throwing the ork’s arm wide and exposing its torso. Brusc knocked it down with a kick to its sternum. Such a blow would have pulped the chest cavity of a man, but the ork was not even stunned. Brusc leapt onto it before it could get up again, pinning it to the floor with his knees. He held its good arm down and closed his other hand around its throat.
‘Suffer not the unclean to live, suffer not the alien, suffer not the usurper of worlds!’ The ork thrashed about, but Brusc would not be dislodged. His armoured fingers dug deeply into its throat. Dark blood ran over them. He wrenched backwards, ripping out its throat. ‘O lord Emperor!’ he cried, holding up the scrap of flesh. ‘Accept this token of blood!’
Incredibly, the ork still lived. Dirty talons scraped at its opened neck, blood bubbled between its teeth, but its eyes gleamed still with hateful life.
‘My lord,’ called Marcomar from above. ‘A brother should guard his wargear with his life.’
Marcomar let Brusc’s bolter fall. The Sword Brother stood and caught it in one movement. He levelled it at the ork’s head. Unthinking fury glared back.
‘I grant you release from your unclean existence.’
The double report of the bolter and the bang of its munition blasting apart the ork’s skull killed all sound in the container.
Brusc stared at the thing’s ruined face, only vaguely aware of his surroundings.
A massive detonation outside snapped him back to his senses. Brusc’s vox crackled into life.
‘The orks are retreating, Sword Brother,’ said Sunno matter of factly.
‘Praise be,’ said Brusc, and felt some of the shadow retreat from his heart.
‘We should save our thanks, brother,’ said Sunno. ‘There’s a storm coming in.’
Armageddon had not quite finished with its convulsions. One last wall of razored ash blasted across the wastes and into the hives. All across the twinned continents of Primus and Secundus the fighting stopped again.
The convoy drove on through the furnace winds laced with cutting ash. The vehicles slowed to a crawl, the remaining haulers rocking on their suspension in the wind.
‘Visibility’s down to t
wenty metres,’ said Sunno. ‘I’m driving blind.’
‘Keep on,’ ordered Brusc.
‘I never said I would not. I trust Cataphraxes,’ said the dour initiate, his vox roughened by the storm’s static.
Brusc sat alone in the damaged trailer. The wounded had been crammed into the other containers as soon as Sunno reported the storm. The Jopali had fixed a tarpaulin over the rent in the room, but it had been torn away as the storm strengthened. Wind whistled through the teeth of the gash. Already ash was building up on the floor, and the air was grey-yellow with suspended particles, coating Brusc’s armour.
‘Brother,’ said Sunno. ‘There is an abandoned facility upon my cartographia, very old, but it might give us somewhere to wait this mess out.’
‘Head for it,’ said Brusc. ‘We shall die if we do not.’
A cleft in the rock appeared, wide enough to take the trucks. Brusc stood on loose gravel, eyeing it thoughtfully. After a moment’s consideration, he ordered Sunno forward and he walked alongside. Crags materialised out of the haze, tall and wind-worn. He checked the poorly detailed map imagery projected by his helmet. The sole large building and open pit it sat in on the far side of the canyon were unlabelled. ‘Is this a mine?’
‘Must be,’ said Sunno. ‘Even if not, we’ll be out of the wind. Hidden. No orks are going to be out in this. The humans need their rest.’ An edge of derision crept into Sunno’s voice.
‘That they do,’ said Brusc. He did not upbraid Sunno for his tone; it was a sentiment all of the Black Templars expressed. Their crusading spirit, the desire to head ever onward and to destroy the enemies of the Emperor bred into them a certain impatience with weaker men. Brusc was well aware that he felt it; indeed, he had said something similar only days before when they had come to the hospital. Osric had picked him up on it. He always had more patience for the unenhanced, for citizens. Contempt for the weakness of common men was not something Brusc was proud of feeling, but feel it he did. Osric had always been the better man.
He voxed back to Lieutenant Ghaskar, telling him to follow Cataphraxes in.
‘I will go first,’ said Brusc. ‘Follow me slowly. Marcomar and Doneal, cover me as best you can.’
Brusc unclipped his bolter. Holding it up to his eyeline ready to fire, he walked into the cleft.
According to his auto-senses, the way through was twelve metres at the nearest widest point. Stone walls rose up either side of him, trammelling the sky into the semblance of an ash-grey river. In the upper reaches of the canyon the wind moaned over the fluted strata of the rock, booming where it encountered cavities. But at the base of the canyon where Brusc walked, the air was unnaturally still. Cataphraxes’s engine bubbled behind him, a mechanical chuckle quiet enough that Brusc could still hear the dust falls hissing down from the wastes above. Visibility in the canyon was better than it was in the maelstrom outside, but he still could not see the end. Bulges of rock loomed in the murk, semblances of trees or mythical giants. The red tint of his helmet lenses intensified the effect, making them eerie despite its efforts to delimit the objects it saw for him.
If we are going to be attacked during the storm, it would be somewhere like here, he thought.
He proceeded carefully, gun up, reticule flicking to every dark place in the canyon’s wrinkled sides. None proved to be anything more than shadows. The deepest crack was a metre and no more – a simple faulting of ancient stone. The wrong kind of rock for caves, the wrong kind of environment. There was nowhere for anything to hide. Even so, he could not shake the feeling that they were being watched.
He thought he caught a voice and spun round.
‘Brussssscccc,’ he heard. He could swear he heard it, barely louder than the engine and the whine of his armour. ‘Brussssccccc.’
‘Anything wrong, brother?’ asked Sunno.
Brusc’s targeting reticle danced over an ash fall sheeting down, seeking a threat and finding none. His finger relaxed on the trigger of his boltgun.
‘No, nothing. The wind. Come on.’
‘You are getting nervous, brother,’ said Sunno.
‘Vigilant,’ corrected Brusc. ‘Let’s pick up our pace. There’s nothing here.’
The Sword Brother jogged on. Cataphraxes’s engines growled louder as Sunno re-engaged the tracks.
After another hundred metres, the canyon ended.
Brusc took in the wide space before him. Visibility had improved again, the clogged air forming a diffuse ceiling over his head. He could see all the way to the other side of the pit, a disused open-cast mine or quarry. The canyon gave every impression of being naturally formed, but the topography here was anything but. They emerged into a perfect square, the half-kilometre-long edges sharp as if cut out with a knife. On the far side were the dilapidated remains of a facility of some kind. Held off the floor on thick metal pillars, it climbed to the top of the pit wall opposite to a steep roadway that went from floor to edge via several switchbacks. The facility was made of local iron and had reddened in what little moisture there was in the air. He took in the corrosion from both ambient moisture and acid rain squalls and calculated that it had been unused for at least fifty years. More than that, Brusc could tell little about the place. His reticle flicked from point to point, unable to give him any more information than how far away it was, and what windshear would effect his bolts if he were to open fire.
‘The mine,’ said Sunno.
‘Any indication what they were doing here?’ asked Brusc. His voice sounded too loud in his helmet.
‘It doesn’t say,’ said Sunno. ‘Minimal information. Does it matter, brother?’
‘No,’ said Brusc. He walked forward until he was standing at the edge of a roadway similar to the one opposite. Evidently, the canyon had been co-opted into being a secondary entrace. The floor of the pit was not uniform. Cuboid sections had been lifted from it. the road headed immediately right from the canyon mouth, a generous arc provided for the turn at the top, three switchbacks taking it to the pit floor. He judged that the trucks would be able to go down, if they were careful. The road continued onwards, skirting the diggings, to the facility. ‘I am coming aboard, brother,’ said Brusc. ‘We will be stopping here tonight.’
Night fell quickly, hurried in by the ash’s gloom. The sky remained thick with ash and glowed strangely with the refracted lights of distant cities, but the pit itself remained clear. Were it not for rare gusts of wind, the mine would have felt like a cave. A stuffy stillness filled the place, the dying gasp of the Season of Fire.
Brusc walked around the camp set up beneath the broken facility. Chutes opened above truck bays ranged against the raw stone of the pit wall. The convoy did not occupy these, but had drawn up in a defensive horseshoe, ends anchored against the pit side. Within this corral there was little activity. Few without orders felt like daring the night; everyone was tired.
Loose sheets of metal banged when the wind gusted. When it did not, the facility groaned as the temperature changed. Bickering voices announced the approach of a Jopali patrol. When they saw Brusc they fell silent. Their sergeant acknowledged him with a nod. Once they thought he was out of earshot they resumed their arguments, their sergeant’s threats having little effect.
Brusc watched them go. It was dark under the facility, but his suit picked out their shapes clearly. They reached the inner edge of the camp, and tramped up a set of rickety stairs into the building. Another group was patrolling the road leading out of the pit. He could not see them from his position but they too were arguing and he heard them.
‘Keep your men quiet, sergeants,’ he growled. ‘Unless you want every ork within twenty kilometres to know we’re here.’
The Black Templar passed the stairs and headed past the lone sentry guarding the gap between trucks. The man stared at him, afraid of Brusc and the night in equal measure.
He walked along the edge of the truck
s, passing more men keeping watch over the pit floor and the road they had entered by. Brusc had the same impression of nervous energy from them all. He walked on until he was clear of the camp and the facility. It towered over him. He should have felt safe beneath it, but somehow he did not.
‘The Jopali are staying in their trucks. They don’t much like this place.’
‘Brother Sunno,’ said Brusc as Sunno joined him.
‘I have been walking the pit floor.’
‘There’s nothing down there,’ said Brusc.
‘It does not hurt to be diligent.’
‘You are uneasy?’
Sunno did not reply immediately. ‘I’d be a liar if I said I was not.’
Brusc was silent a space. Both of them spoke quietly, but even in the privacy of their helmets their voices felt like an intrusion into the quiet of the pit, as if the animus of the place were offended.
‘I have had to break up two fights. It is affecting them. I admit something about it sets my teeth on edge too,’ said Brusc.
Sunno looked about himself, his lenses glowing in the flat face of his crusader helm. ‘I feel it, I feel it brother. A… A rage.’
‘A geologic oddity,’ said Brusc. ‘Tectonic infrasound, localised magnetic field…’
‘Does your armour’s spirit detect any of those things? Because mine does not,’ interrupted Sunno. ‘Perhaps we should not have come here.’
‘Perhaps not.’ said Brusc. ‘Your diligence is correct. Stay so. The storm appears spent. We shall move out at first light.’ He looked around. ‘You are right, I do not like this place.’
‘Yes, Sword Brother,’ said Sunno.
Brusc resumed his circuit, skirting around outside the line of giant metal columns supporting the facility. The effect of the sky pressing down was claustrophobic. He experienced a sudden desire to remove his helmet and, seeing no reason not to, he did.
The neck seal hissed as it came undone. The air hit his face like a blast from an oven. Nevertheless, he breathed deeply of it, glad to be able to smell something other than himself and his suit’s coolant system. His mutilated face itched terribly, and he rubbed at the patchwork of scars and plasti-skin with armour-clad fingers. Without the red staining of his helm, the mine should have looked less sinister, but his sense of wrongness only grew.
