by David Guymer
From the lower-level access ramps there came the sputtering hiss of superheated metal. A servitor with a melta-tool fitted to its wrist in place of a hand and a fuel canister integrated into its spinal column welded the zig-zagging door seal together, calm under fire as only a thorough lobotomisation could make something that had once been human. The muffled roar of two twin-linked heavy bolters from the other side of the door did not trouble it in the least.
The fate of the two Praetorian-class servitors was of far less concern to the servitor than it was to Wienand.
‘I seem to recall Lord Warfist telling you to observe from behind our assault.’ The Deathwatch sergeant, Kjarvik Stormcrow, stood with crossed arms, deliberately in the middle of a team of workers trying to assemble a tactical hololith where he was standing. His long bone-braided hair spread over the dark curves of pauldron and gardbrace. Several weeks aboard Abhorrence had acclimated Wienand to the stature and bearing of the Adeptus Astartes. But they were all far from alike. The Black Templars held themselves tall, unbending, like pillars of rockcrete with proud, human faces. The Space Wolf was not like that. He was ever so slightly hunched over, an animal at its ease, his annoyance at Umbra being drawn from active assignment to safeguard the Inquisitorial Representative on as-yet-untried authority an unguarded glimmer in his inhuman eyes.
‘Do you always do as Lord Asger tells you?’
‘Often,’ said Kjarvik, then grinned.
Wienand made herself smile in turn. She might just win these warriors’ respect yet.
‘Initial soundings from the auspex,’ said Raznick, veering loosely between the hurrying workers to approach.
He was wearing a long coat over a dull-green flak jacket surplus to some regiment or other from the Ullanor Veterans. There was a brace of pistols holstered at his hip, needle and las, and a sleeve for a power maul. The battery pack for a two-person refractor field was clamped over his right buttock, the emitters set into a pair of braces worn over his ballistic vest. Bodyguarding for the Inquisitorial Representative was testing work at the best of times.
Kjarvik regarded him like a bear at once amused and annoyed by the barked challenge of a dog. The Inquisitorial aide swallowed and turned to Wienand.
‘Issachar has the ork fleet engaged, but is keeping them at arm’s length. Losses appear light on both sides. Alcazar Remembered and her escorts are in geostationary orbit above the corridor opened up by the Deathwatch.’ A nod to Kjarvik that the Wolf acknowledged with a snarl. ‘From the power signatures, it looks as though one teleportation cycle has been completed.’
‘Koorland’s first squad is inside,’ Wienand summarised.
‘On schedule.’
Wienand frowned. She wasn’t ready to start taking Koorland’s undemonstrated ability to outwit the Beast on faith. ‘We should have them on vox by now.’
‘We’re almost finished here, Representative,’ said one of the workers at the hololith array.
A dozen men were busily boxing up the device’s exposed innards while a second magos canted the final start-up rituals. Eldon Urquidex helped where he could. The magos biologis limped slightly. A string of bionic vertebrae now ran down his neck, a gunmetal accoutrement to match the left arm, the right hand, and the surgical plates in his skull.
The hololith powered up. Ullanor’s wrinkled topography flickered into being as a spectral green overlay, rapidly filling up with blips as it liaised with the auspexes to present troop dispositions. Wienand watched the shift in the tide of Veridi red with her heart in her mouth. Her first thought was to instruct the adept to shut the device down and begin his rituals again. Its spirit had been improperly awakened. It had to be. Only her trust in the two magi’s superior knowledge kept her from doing so.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Kjarvik grunted.
‘The orks are disengaging, falling back towards the palace fortification.’ The voice was Raznick’s, his summation unnecessary. Wienand had eyes, and the great withdrawal of red across the hololith like a receding tide spoke for itself.
‘This is no rout,’ said Kjarvik, indicating with jabs of his power fist’s wolf-claws to where overwhelming numbers still hemmed in the frayed wedge of gold that represented Maximus Thane’s contingent. ‘They have left enough force behind to hold up the Guard.’
‘But why not crush them? Why pull back at all? Why…’ Wienand waved her hand as if to summon the absent thought. The boom of heavy bolters from the other side of the doors was an urgent distraction that she could do without.
A symphony of audially-coded alarm signifiers began to chime from the auspex units. ‘Force fields have just gone up inside the palace, Representative,’ came the report.
‘Inside?’
‘Yes, nothing projected outward that I can detect.’
‘What on the Throne… Can we raise Koorland?’
A shake of the head. ‘Some kind of signal deflection. The force fields, I think. I don’t know.’
‘Then raise Issachar. See what the fleet’s guns can do about it.’
‘No response from Punished!’
‘Try another ship.’
A tense moment later and several rows of shaken heads told Wienand that the answer was the same. The magos held up his digital manipulators in what was either a residually organic gesture of ignorance or an affectation painstakingly developed for maximal functionality as a human liaison. ‘The fleet is in range of this structure’s communications array. Supposition: we are too close to the palace, the electromagnetic output from its force fields is interfering with our equipment.’
‘Contact Thane,’ Wienand scowled, feeling her command of the situation unravelling fast. ‘Do it now. He’ll have no idea what’s going on, and he might at least have the chance to fall back and regroup. No point walking into a slaughter for no good reason.’
The operator looked up from his vox-caster. He looked broken.
‘We can’t reach our ground forces either?’
A solid thump from the other side of the lower access doors interrupted them, and the roar of four heavy bolters abruptly became that of two. Wienand would not have thought that the difference would have been so obvious. Stray slugs tapped on the welded door, almost politely.
The last weapon-servitor would not hold for long, and then Wienand would see close up just how impolite an ork could be.
‘Madame inquisitor,’ called the ranking officer monitoring the auspex staff. ‘More ships entering auspex range.’
‘There shouldn’t be any more ships.’
‘Ork ships. A hundred signatures, at least. They must have been waiting on the planet’s auspex dark side.’
Wienand felt a chill rise up through her and whisper round the base of her skull. The monitoring station had fallen deathly quiet, but for the much diminished thunder of heavy bolters. She swallowed, unable to articulate the cornered-animal sensation that had come over her with the appearance of those ork ships.
‘What should we do?’ asked Raznick.
Dumbly, she looked around the silent chamber, her eyes drawn inevitably, water running downhill, to Kjarvik’s yellow, vertically transected pair. She took a deep breath, felt it steady her nerves, and did not blink. She still had a task to perform, even if the total lack of long- and medium-range vox made that task impossible.
‘Leave everything,’ she said, directed at the two magi, and then to Kjarvik and Raznick: ‘Contact any gunships in range and have them pick up the remaining kill-teams. I’m going to have to direct things in person.’
Ullanor – Gorkogrod
As Koorland had suspected, the pre-teleportation position and facing of his squad members had had little bearing on how they were now deployed. The twelve of them had rematerialised into two half circles, facing outwards, a row of blue-white burners and butchery tools between them. He, Asger, Krule and the ogryn, Olug, had the two semi-circles’ four ends
. Commissar Goss was being violently sick. Koorland did not know if it was the teleportation or the stench, but he doubted that either would have been easy on a mortal’s stomach.
‘Where are we?’ said Asger. ‘Why are we not where we are supposed to be?’
With a blink-click over the activation rune jittering yellow in his helm display, Koorland bade his armour’s spirit to summon a tri-d cartolith of the palace complex. It wavered into being a moment later, filling the left side of his display with a slowly rotating image. It took a few minutes to interface his armour’s locator beacon with the cartolith and pin his current location to the display, towards the top of the labyrinthine tangle of corridors.
‘About four hundred metres from the throne room, though the corridors in this section are a mess.’
‘What happened?’
‘Force fields on my auspex,’ said Bohemond. ‘A scatterfield too, perhaps? Our teleport must have been redirected to avoid it.’
Koorland blew out a relieved breath. The teleport systems incorporated safety protocols to prevent incorporation into solid matter or other violent means of rematerialisation, but even First Company veterans did not hold much trust in those. He was glad to see they had functioned now, even if they had moved his squad some way from his target. ‘What of Kavalanera’s team?’
Asger shrugged. Only his exposed head moved. ‘If this is the nearest area to the throne room large enough for twelve men then the Sisters will likely be redirected here.’
‘How long to teleport?’
‘Chronos do not operate during the teleportion cycle,’ said Bohemond. ‘I cannot contact Alcazar Remembered to correct. Outward channels appear to be jammed.’
‘Then we must clear the area,’ said Koorland, sharply. ‘Or else there will be no telling where the others will appear. Krule, can you find your way to the throne room from here?’
The Assassin was subconsciously scouring his surrounds for threats and targets, but responded to the question with a curt nod and pointed to one of two doors. He was a large man, by mortal standards, but moved with a balletic grace. The firelight scattered against his synskin.
‘Sergeant Tyris, escort him and secure the passage. We will follow.’
The Deathwatch Space Marines, ogryns, commissar, Terminator-encased Chapter Masters, and one Assassin exited the chamber. Koorland stopped under the lintel bar and turned ponderously to look back.
He had felt a prickling on the back of his neck.
The air in the orks’ butchery chamber shimmered and folded, a kneading of the warp space liminal that broke the warm, surface-hardened crust of normalcy to which mankind thought it clove and mixed it with darkness. The tear existed for a fraction of a second, and in a splurge of ionisation that left Koorland’s eyes and throat stinging in spite of his protection, it was sealed, and twelve additional figures now stood where there had been none.
Kavalanera and five of her sisters stood in a ring with power blades drawn and charged. Torn pages of ancient scripture fluttered from their armour in the air-cycled breeze of a voidship they no longer occupied. Two were in the same antique carmine as the knight abyssal, designating them, presumably, as belonging to the same sub-order of the Sisters of Silence. The other three wore black plate with golden trim, led by a knight obsidian by the name of Drevina.
The chilling effect on Koorland’s brain of the pariahs’ mere existence in the same room was every bit as profound as the teleportation cycle that had preceded it.
The women surrounded the ork psyker. It was far larger than the Incus Maximal test subject and its muscles swelled against the chains that bound its wrist and throat. Three enormously reconstructed draught-servitors supplied from Verisimilis’ loading decks had the ends of the chains clamped in vice-hands. Another lesson from Incus Maximal. The servitors were more than strong enough to keep the struggling ork restrained, and they would not react to personal danger the way the Inquistorial storm troopers had.
Laurentis scuttled around them on his three metal legs, ducking under flexing chains, monitoring pulse and breathing and stabbing the ork’s thick hide with digital probes for reasons of his own. The grizzled ranger, Alpha 13-Jzzal, watched the ork psyker’s occasional lunges with a dispassionate eye, motionless but for the optic pulse of the complete-wavelength scan with which he concurrently swept the room.
‘Scan complete,’ grated Alpha 13-Jzzal. The words were synthesised by a throat implant, and emerged with an artificial cadence that involved neither the movement of the ranger’s jaw nor the making of eye contact. ‘Infrared and X-ray sweeps reveal nothing in the vicinity.’ His head turned sharply towards Koorland then, faceted metal reflecting the firelight on a dozen different planes. ‘Past behaviour suggests the high likelihood of a trap.’
The same thing had occurred to Koorland, and he had decided equally quickly that it did not matter. They were committed now. There was no alternative.
Ullanor would be annihilated. Or Terra would be.
Ullanor – Gorkogrod
Shards of sharpened debris from ork fragmentation bombs scythed across Thane’s armour. Bent nails. Metal scraps. Direct hits drove shrapnel at him, hard, licked by fire. Cloudbursts clotted the sky with whizzing screws and blades, raining indiscriminately over all. The high-tempo thump of heavy guns boomed through the frag storm. Thane’s battleplate recorded hits as he advanced through the rubble: prangs, stings, chips to unpainted ceramite that brought sealant gel hissing over lodged bullets.
His umbra-pattern bolter answered back with more decisive effect. His helmet auto-senses compensated for the confusion of debris, filtering, ghostly reticules floating amongst the blizzarding buckshot. Bolter fire bracketed the faceplate ghosts one by one and blood sprayed from within them. Orks tumbled out as though pushed out in surrender, rolling with the unspent momentum of their charge, tracked by bolt and las until what lumped to a halt was an urecognisable ruin.
Thane drilled a bolt-round through a mouth that was somehow still sucking on air. The ork made a grunting sound, the subsequent detonation pasting Thane’s right greave with gore as he stepped over it.
‘Thesius, Agrippus, heavy weapons left and right.’ He pointed a gauntlet that was hatched with sealant scars towards a high, spiked tower. Burning rounds spat back and forth. He ducked instinctively from the whistle of an artillery shell. ‘Venerable Brother Otho, take a squad and help the Excoriators clear that tower. I want a corridor cleared for the Imperial Guard to follow. We are too thinly spread.’ The Earthshaker round thumped through the side wall of a building and spewed fire high back across the street. The famous aftershock rattled the entire connected superstructure.
The Excoriators had broken into the barracks blocks to the east, but had become mired in heavy urban fighting. Gun nests covering the bridgewalks and exits had them pinned in the complex’s near-side corner while hit-and-run attacks by aerially deployed ork shock troops, coordinated with armoured units on the ground, slowly ate into that slim territorial gain. But the Excoriators would hold. Venerable Brother Otho would see to it.
To north and west, the Black Templars continued to drive deep. Before passing out of vox-contact, Castellan Clermont had voxed in from a position almost three kilometres from Koorland’s teleport coordinates. Practically on the walls. But the Black Templars had been so intent on pressing forwards that entire mobs of orks had been able to slip through and assault the Fists Exemplar flank.
Thesius’ autocannon mowed them down before they could come within twenty metres. Brothers Tolemy, Preco, and Zaul moved into the kill-zone, cutting into the building fronts with precise bursts of bolter fire. None of them saw the shell before it landed. Thane did. It was unworthy of them, a lumpen metal casing for something incendiary, lobbed carelessly from a shanty block as if from a trebuchet, but it blasted a mighty hole out of the ground as well as any handcrafted munition blessed by the priests of Mars.
&n
bsp; And just like that, the galaxy had sixty-nine Fists Exemplar.
‘There are few of us left,’ Thane had said, looking through the viewport at the dense stellar clouds of the galactic core in which the Ullanor star shone with a bright, beguiling innocence. ‘Barely enough to continue.’
Koorland had joined him. The lumen bars in the mullions accentuated the grey in his hair. ‘We are sons of Dorn, brother. We do not surrender.’ He had tapped his throat, Thane remembered, the progenoids held there, the last precious gene-seed of his Chapter. ‘That is the burden the primarch has placed on us. He knew we could shoulder it. We stand while all around us falls, and because we stand, others will stand with us.’
‘Call for Apothecary Antonius,’ yelled Thamarius, because every Fist Exemplar carried in his make-up the conceit of command.
Antonius was of the Excoriators, attached to the remnant Fists Exemplar to perform that most vital function in the absence of a surviving Apothecary of their own.
‘Press the attack,’ Thane ordered, emotionless, gunning down an ork that appeared in an unglazed window even as his brothers turned their helms to him in surprise.
They would stand while all around them fell. They wore no colours, they showed no pride, but to a transhuman man they were the truest sons of Dorn.
‘Whirlwinds!’ he shouted. ‘I want that block brought down!’
Thane could see the greater picture despite the slaughter. He knew the mathematics. The Chapter had been hit too hard, its gene-stocks depleted beyond their ability to propagate a viable genetic population. The Last Wall stood, but the Fists Exemplar were already finished.
A column of Deathwatch vehicles, scuffed paintwork revealing the bright green of the Aurora Chapter, trundled up towards the front. The rubble was causing them difficulty, the cavalcade advancing at less than walking pace behind a pair of Vindicators specially modified with urban clearance dozer blades. Both of the glacis modules were pocked by bullet holes. One of them was on fire. The desultory whistle of castellan missiles and lascannon stabs were all they could give back.
