Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1

by Warhammer 40K

  The Ceres Protocol was still in effect. Deguerro hadn’t reversed it, knowing Alvez’s original decision was the right one. Grimm knew he would have to make a choice soon: risk the lives of all those under his temporary command for the sake of a mere psychic trace, or fall back when it became clear the barricades would no longer hold. He desperately wanted to hold the underpass to the last, giving whoever was out there every chance they could of making it back to the fold, but paying for it with the blood of his brothers was something he could not do.

  No. Perhaps, if Deguerro had been sure, had named Pedro Kantor or one of his captains among the approaching party, it would have been an easier choice. Grimm would have stayed despite everything. The forces in New Rynn City needed a sign, needed one of their leaders, a member of the Chapter Council, to return to them. What might that do for morale?

  But without a name, without certainty, could he really justify the death of any Crimson Fist? Such thoughts resolved the issue for him. If no prodigal Fists showed themselves by the end of the next attack wave, he would pull his brothers back and destroy the underpass. He could not risk the orks gaining access to the city that way. Librarians were not infallible. They were known to err from time to time, and Deguerro himself admitted that they were forced to constantly wrestle against the psychic fog that emanated from the undisciplined minds of the ork psykers.

  Still looking at the summit of Jadeberry Hill, Grimm noticed sudden agitated movement there. Static crackled in his ear, broken by a voice that said, ‘Sergeant Grimm, the xenos are massing for another run on the barricades. They are behind the ruins to the south-east.’ He paused. ‘There are many of them, brother. More than before.’

  Of course there are, thought Grimm sourly.

  The voice belonged to Sergeant Tirius, formerly of the late Captain Drakken’s Third Company. The hard-faced Tirius and his squad had survived the debacle at Badlanding only to find themselves here, appended to the Second Company, and in a far greater mess than any had expected. Grimm was glad to have them. Tirius was strong and true, with little ego to get in his way.

  ‘Armour?’ Grimm asked over the link, hoping the answer would be none.

  ‘I count five tanks,’ said Tirius. ‘Looted Leman Russ. The turrets have been modified. I can’t begin to guess at their range or power now, but if they get within range of our lascannon and missile launchers, we will render them into scrap. You have my word.’

  Grimm was reassured, but the mere presence of the tanks meant that the orks were escalating their efforts to take this area. It was the greenskin way. They would throw progressively heavier concentrations of forces at a problem until they overcame it by virtue of brute force. Eventually they would overcome the Adeptus Astartes defenders. Grimm was no defeatist. He merely had to be realistic. Lives depended on it.

  ‘Ready your weapons, brothers,’ he called out over the comm-link. ‘Dorn watch over us all. They are no match for the sons of the Chapter. Nor shall they ever be.’

  Further words came unbidden into his mind, words he had heard on a score of battlefields out there among the stars, the words so favoured by the Chaplains of the Crimson Fists.

  There is only the Emperor, the Chaplains would intone before battle was joined.

  He is our shield and our protector, the ranks would reply.

  Grimm spoke that first line to his battle-brothers now, spoke it with feeling, and received an equally impassioned response. On his left and right, weapons were cocked and readied.

  Hulking figures appeared over the mounds of rubble to the south-east, great dark shapes with horned helms and flapping banners of flayed human skin. Severed heads bobbed and swung from their belts and from the poles that supported those crudely painted banners. Some were boxy, angular figures, weighed down by thick armour, but so impossibly strong that they were still fast enough to lead the charge.

  One, Grimm saw, was by far the largest. The horns that sprouted from either side of his helm curved outwards, then inwards with a twist, like those of a bull raumas, but plated in sharpened steel.

  The horned warboss raised a massive growling chainaxe into the air and roared long and deep, a battle cry that was taken up by its thousands of followers.

  They looked fearless standing there, all those orks, and well they might, for they faced only forty. But did they realise how much fight was left in that forty? Every Crimson Fist at the barricade was ready to fight like it was the last hour of his life.

  Perhaps it would be.

  The looted tanks rumbled into view now, clanking between the skeletons of fire-gutted buildings, turning their stout ugly modified turrets towards the Adeptus Astartes. One fired a shot, a great gout of fire and smoke erupted from its barrel.

  The shell landed a hundred metres short, packed with so much explosive that it blew a crater in the rockcrete road two metres deep.

  This was the beginning, the sign the orks were waiting for. They charged forward, filling the air with war cries. They surged around the tanks, mindful not to be crushed by the grinding treads.

  ‘Steady!’ Grimm ordered. ‘Make every bolt count!’

  From the top of Jadeberry Hill, something streaked towards the leading tank on a trail of white and yellow fire. It struck the tank right on the gun mantlet, punching deep into the metal. The tank jerked to a stop. A second later, red fire erupted from its hatches. Burning bodies tumbled out, thrashing and screaming.

  One down, thought Grimm.

  The ork footsoldiers were almost in range. Grimm could see the gleam of bloodlust in the eyes of the massive warboss.

  All right, you foul bastard, cursed the sergeant. You’ve got my attention. It’s time you tasted the fury of the Crimson Fists.

  ‘Open fire!’ he yelled over the link. The sudden rattle of bolters drowned out all else.

  Battle was joined.

  If you are out there, brothers, thought Grimm as he loosed shot after flesh-searing shot from his plasma pistol, then in Dorn’s name, hurry up. Because it looks like this is your very last chance.

  The sight that greeted Alessio Cortez as he exited from the trees of the Azcalan rainforest was one of absolute mayhem. The city burned. He could see ork ships half-buried in the outer sections of collapsed city walls. Artillery flashed and boomed all along the remaining ramparts, but far more answered back from the ground, shells exploding on the walls, weakening them little by little, piece by piece.

  The mad beasts had even breached the city walls in places by ramming them with aircraft!

  Kantor and the others joined him at the forest edge, and froze.

  ‘In Dorn’s name…’ gasped the Chapter Master.

  ‘There!’ exclaimed Brother Fenestra. ‘Look to the base of the hill.’

  Cortez saw it at once. Up ahead, a great ork horde was racing straight towards a row of Imperial barricades. Azure figures leaned out from behind Aegis armour plating to fire tight bursts at the enemy swarming all around them. Five tanks lay just to the south-east of the barricaded position, each reduced to little more than a burning black husk. Even as Cortez registered all this, a bright burst of plasma streaked down from the top of Jadeberry Hill and turned a great knot of orks to so much bubbling black flesh.

  ‘To their aid!’ barked Kantor, and he broke into a run.

  Cortez was only a second behind him. ‘Charge!’ he bellowed at his battle-brothers.

  ‘Our charges, my lord?’ asked Sergeant Viejo, even as he too burst from the cover of the trees.

  Damn our charges, cursed Cortez. Our brothers need us.

  ‘Jadeberry Hill,’ Kantor snapped between breaths. ‘They’ll be safe at the top.’

  Kantor was almost on the orks now, but they had yet to notice the imminent attack from their rear. Tending towards tunnel-vision in a fight, they rarely noticed anything but the foe in front of them. It was a weakness the Crimson Fists had exploited many times throughout their history of violent encounters with them.

  Kantor reached striking range and p
lunged in amongst them, a living storm of violence and revenge. His power fist smashed his enemies aside, pulping organs and flesh wherever it connected, shattering bone.

  Pressed together by their sheer weight of numbers, the orks hardly knew what hit them. They were still reeling from the sudden attack of the Chapter Master when Cortez and the others joined the fray. Again, Cortez felt centuries of relentless training take over. Time seemed to slow down around him, as if he existed in some kind of bubble in which his synapses operated that much faster than everything else. Surprised orks turned to engage him, and were rendered headless before they could even raise their blades and guns in his direction. Others, just beyond these first, did manage to slash out at him, but the blows seemed absurdly slow to his super-charged senses, and he almost laughed aloud as he parried them on his ceramite vambraces. His pistol barked at point-blank range, killing almost as messily as his power fist.

  Cortez did not turn to check on his brothers. He trusted that they fought as he did, and he was right, but none save Kantor himself could match the lethal speed and prowess of the Fourth Company captain.

  Before Cortez realised what had happened, he found himself on the other side of the ork horde. The barricades were right there in front of him. He had carved an avenue of death straight through the aliens.

  He raced forward and leapt over the wall of armour plate and razorwire, then turned back to face the orks and resumed firing his pistol, every shot a kill, eliminating close range targets with a speed he could never duplicate on a mere training range. It needed the energy of real battle, the flow of adrenaline that only truly life-threatening danger brought forth.

  As he fired again and again, he saw Pedro Kantor whirling among the ranks of the enemy, severing arteries with his long, gold-hilted blade, spraying the air with crimson drops. Where his sword did not cut, his power fist obliterated everything it touched. Its power was incredible. It was master-crafted, as beautiful as it was deadly and, to Cortez’s eyes, it had never been as beautiful as it was at that moment, employed in the slaughter of those that had so gravely wounded his Chapter.

  Cortez heard a voice over the comm-link. It was a new voice – new in that it was not one of the sixteen other Adeptus Astartes voices he had become so accustomed to over the last ten terrible days.

  ‘Captain Cortez!’ exclaimed the voice. ‘And the Chapter Master, by Dorn! Bless you, Deguerro.’

  ‘Identify yourself, brother,’ barked Cortez as he picked off a massive one-armed ork that was loping in to engage the Chapter Master from behind.

  ‘I am Huron Grimm,’ said the voice, ‘Sergeant of the Second Company’s First Tactical Squad. We… we have been waiting for you, captain.’

  Squads Viejo and Segala fought their way through the horde now, rallying around Kantor and cutting him some room to move. Cortez wondered where the rest of his own squad were until, through a gap, he saw them guarding the Chapter Master’s rear.

  Las- and plasma-fire streaked down from the top of Jadeberry Hill and ripped into the ork ranks, killing scores at a time.

  ‘Get behind the barricades,’ Kantor yelled, and he charged forward and leapt clean over them, landing on his feet just beside Cortez.

  The moment he landed, he spun, and twin muzzle flares licked out from the barrels of Dorn’s Arrow. Massively muscled green bodies broke apart, erupting from the inside out as each mass-reactive shell detonated in quick succession.

  Something was bothering Cortez even as he fought. ‘Where is Benizar?’ he demanded over the link.

  ‘Where are Teves, Secco and Olvero?’ asked another. It sounded like Viejo.

  No, thought Cortez. Do not let it be! They did not come this far to fall now.

  But they had.

  More plasma-fire streaked down into the middle of the orks, killings so many, burning and maiming others, and a space cleared in the churning ranks. Through it, Cortez saw an armoured monstrosity with a great horned helm lift one of his brothers into the air, one massive, blood-slick power claw grasping the Adeptus Astartes by the neck.

  It was the leader of the ork assault. Did the creature feel Cortez’s eyes on him? Did it feel the captain’s hate stabbing out at it through all the noise and the killing? Perhaps it did. It turned its wicked red eyes towards Cortez and a sickening alien grin split its massive, tusk-filled maw. With Cortez’s eyes locked to it, the ork snapped shut the blades of its power claw.

  Snikkt!

  A blue-armoured body fell lifeless to the blood-soaked ground. For a moment, the Space Marine’s helmet, his severed head still inside, remained balanced on the huge claw. Then the ork boss flicked it away, as if it were mere garbage.

  ‘Bastard!’ roared Cortez, and he leaped over the barricade once more, barrelling into the orks, heading straight for the murderous abomination in the middle.

  ‘Alessio!’ shouted Kantor over the link, but there was no reaching him. Instead, his fellow Fists concentrated their fire around him, helping to cut him a path.

  Dimly, Cortez registered their aid. The orks on either side of him fell with great melon-sized wounds that exploded in their flesh. From somewhere high on his left, there was a great flash of light, and howls of agony burst from alien throats. He heard the distinctive shriek of a missile, and felt the ground under him shake as it struck thirty metres away. The explosion sent a fountain of blood and cooked flesh into the air to rain down a moment later.

  The Crimson Fists on the hilltop, he realised, were still giving their support.

  Then he was in front of the black-armoured beast with the horned helm. His target. The focus of his rage. He noticed the black and white checks on the monster’s battle-scarred armour. He noticed the icon on its banner of human skin, a red skull shaped like that of a bull auroch. And he noticed the size difference between them. The ork boss towered over him. Even hunched, the beast was at least a metre taller than he.

  ‘Keep the others off me,’ snarled Cortez over the link. But he needn’t have bothered. The ork boss bellowed something in what was just barely a language, and the closest orks pressed aside, making space.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Cortez, a lupine grin twisting his features. ‘One-on-one.’ He fingered the grip of his knife, flexed the thick digits of his power fist. ‘Let’s have it, monster!’

  The words blared from his helmet’s vox-amp at maximum volume.

  The ork growled back, recognising a challenge by its tone, though the words themselves were meaningless noise to its ragged ears. Its long metal claws snapped open and shut, as if its whole right arm had a mind of its own, and a beastlike appetite for raw, bloody flesh.

  In the other arm, it held a chainaxe no mere man could have hefted into the air. The weapon’s teeth were an angry blur, whirring too fast to see. It was this weapon the creature raised first, opening the combat with a blistering lateral swipe that Cortez avoided by millimetres, leaning back on his rear foot as the blade swept by.

  For all that armour, all that bulk, the monster was fast.

  But Cortez knew he was faster.

  The fight was on. There was little any of the others could do save to continue taking their own deadly toll on the rest of the ork band. They knew better than to interfere directly. Honour forbade it. One-on-one, Cortez had said, and that was how it would be.

  To the Fourth Company captain, the universe seemed to shrink. There was nothing else, only he and his opponent locked in a struggle of life and death, the definition of existence.

  Soon, there would be only one.

  Death surrounded them as their weapons clashed again and again, but they paid it no heed. They were well-matched, and the sound of blow after clashing blow resounded in the damp air. Cortez snarled as his power fist was, once again, deflected. The ork boss‘s great snapping claw was sheathed in a power field of its own. Every time the deadly claw met the Space Marine’s huge red fist, there were arcs of lethal, crackling energy.

  Against the monster’s chainaxe, the captain’s combat blade
looked pathetically small, but it was the skill with which the knife was wielded that truly mattered. Every time the monster ripped through the air with its axe, Cortez shifted just enough to avoid the blow and, little by little, his slashing, stabbing counterattacks began to take their toll. Thick ork blood started to stream from the gaps in the beast’s armour, and Cortez was sure the monster’s blistering swipes were beginning to slow, just fractionally, perhaps, but enough to offer him the opening he would need for a killing stroke.

  The ork boss now seemed to sense the fight was not going its way. It changed tactics, feinting with a wide claw-swipe and bull-rushing Cortez when the captain moved to parry.

  It worked. Cortez found himself grappling, wrestling desperately to stay on his feet. If he went to the ground under the bulk of all that armour and green muscle, he knew he would not be getting back up. He knew it would be the end of him.

  Was this the moment? Were all the stories, all the legends of his immortality, to end here? He had not thought a creature like this would claim that victory, but then again, even as he struggled, he conceded a grudging respect for the ork’s raw combat prowess. The creature had successfully executed a feint, something no other ork had ever done in combat with Cortez. There was more going on inside that thick skull than he had given the beast credit for.

  Cortez fought force with force, but only for a moment. He knew he would not win this fight on those terms. He had dropped his knife in order to free his right hand for grappling. It was locked around the beast’s left wrist, though it couldn’t close entirely over it. That wrist was as thick as Cortez’s knee. His power fist was, likewise locked around the armoured housing of the monster’s great metal claw, but the energy fields were reacting, making the contact slippery, like two magnets of opposite charge repelling each other.

  The ork had dropped its chainaxe to lunge forward and grab its enemy. It knew it had only to fall on Cortez for the battle to be won. It pressed all its weight forward, and tossed its head from side to side, trying to pierce Cortez’s visor with its sharp steel horns.