The Last Son of Dorn

by David Guymer

  Keep moving.

  Fidus Bellator had kept him alive this long, but it was a millstone now, denying him the one advantage that might have bought him as much time as he needed – manoeuvrability.

  The Beast opened up as it closed the distance. Auto-rounds and stabbing bolts of green energy mauled the tiles around Koorland’s boots and burst against his armour. The Beast broke into a thumping run, hollering even as its wrist-battery kicked out a storm of abuse, muzzle flare lighting up its face like a tusked horror from a nightmare. Koorland aimed the last round in his magazine and fired, aiming for the eye. The mass-reactive burned up in a vibrant death against the energy shield. Koorland backed ponderously, to mitigate what he could of the Great Beast’s forward momentum. He brought his power sword to a position of guard.

  As it had been for Vulkan, so too then for him.

  The fate of mankind would be decided hand-to-hand.

  The ork swung up its combat weapon. It was a spiked vibro-mace, its head the size of a Space Marine. The haft was twice as long as Koorland. The arm added half that length again. All of it swung at Koorland with primarch-killing force. He was too slow to avoid it, and he knew without needing to try that a parry would not even be worth the attempt.

  He was not a primarch.

  The mace struck him in the shoulder and launched him across the chamber like a kicked stone. The vibro-blast was a parting gift, an extra metre or so of lift and a drilling numbness down the arm before he smashed into the wall. He fell to the floor on hands and knees, dust crumbling over his shoulders. Targeting reticules spilled over the spidery cracks in his faceplate as they sought locks. His armour emitted a complaining whine as he struggled to get himself back up.

  The harder we hit them…

  If only Koorland knew how to hit them.

  Tyris flicked his bolter’s shot selector to automatic. It felt like time. Orks were flooding down the stairs from the galleries, through arches flanked by sentinel gargants, and into the throne room in their hundreds. He raked one stair, picking his shots still even as his trigger finger kicked them out faster than a mortal man could follow. One ork dropped with a bolt through the mouth, mass-reactive explosion blasting its skull back out through its visor, but the rest of the clip clanged off thick armour and rippling force fields. The Beast aside, they were the biggest greenskins he had ever seen. He reloaded.

  ‘Simmias, Straton – cover left. Gadreel – forward. Icegrip, with me.’

  The warriors of Stalker were a firebase, a wall of bolter fire, but the orks were too big and too well armoured to be held at bay.

  Kavalanera and her sisters sallied and drew back, fighting like warrior angels to defend the ork psyker. Tyris had known they could fight, but finally unleashed they were magnificent. They killed like bolts from the heavens, righteous judgement withdrawn the instant it was delivered to leave the orks railing at smoke or left for another ephemeral hand to strike down. Watching Kavalanera herself was like watching the armoured avatar of silent death, summoned forth for one final battle in the Emperor’s name. The enormous servitors did not fight, and for that reason the orks had not thought to attack them yet. They were like stakes in the ground. Laurentis hid behind one, lashing out with a converted power emitter, arcs of current that the rampaging greenskins did not even feel.

  At the door, the fight had never stopped.

  Commissar Goss’ chainsword banged furiously against an ork’s armour, adamantium teeth fighting for purchase like a man running on ice. He foamed at the mouth, cap on the floor somewhere, grey hair streaming wild as he discharged his plasma pistol into the ork’s chest. It ignored the shot, hacked off the commissar’s arm with its own whining axe-blade, then delivered a boot to the chest that broke the man and heaped him on the ground three metres back. Olug bellowed fury and mashed the butt of his ripper gun through the ork’s face. Brokk held the door single-handedly, wrestling with a mega-armoured ork almost his size. The strain on both faces was incredible. Even over the chaos of melee, Tyris could hear matched sinews creak.

  Alpha 13-Jzzal cooly raked the ork mobs with plasma until an axe smashed through the back of his exo-skull. The skitarii ranger dropped with an electrical shiver and then self-destructed, an ultra-near-range implosion from a subdermal melta device taking out his killer’s arm. Asger finished the ork with a decapitating sweep. His lightning claws crackled and spat.

  The Wolf Lord’s howl echoed from the rapidly emptying galleries.

  It was drowned out by the rumble of engines.

  The great gargants standing sentinel around the throne dais revved to full power. Exhaust stacks belched black smoke. Not, Tyris suspected, because the orks lacked the technological capability to engineer something cleaner, but because they enjoyed the sense of power that only a rumbling engine gave. With a discordant blast of war-horns, the war machines started haphazardly forward.

  ‘Now?’ Tyris voxed, though he doubted Koorland was in a position to respond.

  Koorland pushed himself fully upright, back to the wall, as the Beast thudded towards him and swung. Koorland dropped heavily to one knee. The mace blew the wall apart. Vibrations drove deep cracks as high up as the gallery above his head. It swayed alarmingly as several brackets popped their bolts.

  He stabbed at the Beast’s belly. It did not even bother to block. The power field nullified the sword’s disruption field, and the blade skittered harmlessly over riveted plates. The Beast used its wrist-battery like knuckle dusters – two-tonne knuckle dusters, worn by a giant. The blow hammered so hard into Koorland’s faceplate that it fried the shock circuits and smacked his head back into the padding. He crunched into the wall. The rim of the helmet bit through the gorget softseals. Atmosphere hissed in and Koorland’s visually augmented array went black.

  On the second effort, he managed to tear the helm from the mangled gorget, then gave a deep roar of defiance as the Beast’s knee crushed into his plastron.

  Fidus Bellator cracked like a block of stone struck along a plane of weakness. The breath was forced from his chest, his multi-lung supplying his physiology with oxygen in its absence. Systems alerts, mechanical and biological, blurted from mangled audio sounders in his gorget rim. The Beast ground him under its knee.

  Koorland gritted his teeth, partially buried in rubble, and calmly ejected his storm bolter’s empty magazine. The Beast levelled its whirring wrist-battery. Not ten centimetres from Koorland’s face. He did not blink.

  ‘I defy you to my dying breath. Mankind defies you.’

  A shriek of punctured metal startled him, expecting instant death as he was, and the dark blade of a power sword sheared through the giant ork’s thigh plate from behind. Koorland laughed then.

  The Sword of Sigismund.

  The Black Templar’s armour was cracked up the middle, marked by a jagged line of raw ceramite where it had been sealed. Sparks trailed from an exposed power cable near his elbow. He turned a twist on his relic blade and pulled it back. Blood sprayed. The Beast arched its back and howled in pain. It lashed back with its vibro-mace, but the surprise of being injured threw it off and it failed to account for the fact that the High Marshal stood barely in line with its hips. The weapon sailed over Bohemond’s helmet, but the Beast’s knuckles nevertheless caught him a glancing blow that stunned his systems and crashed him to the floor. Blood from what must have been a severed artery in the Beast’s thigh continued to spurt across Koorland’s body.

  Koorland felt the pressure on his chest ease as the Beast drew in its wounded leg.

  He stepped out of the wall. Half fell. Damaged sections of armour powered down as he stood, the tremendous drag of his Terminator plate like pushing against a moon. He slotted a fresh sickle magazine into his empty storm bolter. Dragonfire rounds. The nearest to hand.

  He looked up at the Beast with eyes that swam in and out of focus.

  The harder we hit them, the
stronger the psychic field grows.

  ‘For Vulkan,’ he rasped, then opened a channel to Kavalanera. ‘Now.’

  The Sister acknowledged with a click.

  ‘I will relish this moment forever, Beast.’

  With Kavalanera leading, the Sisters broke from combat. It was there that Koorland saw the problem they had failed to foresee. The Sisters of Silence were mobbed in close combat by scores of the Beast’s bulkiest elites. Exquisitely as the women fought, as hard as Tyris and Stalker fought to pull them out, they simply could not bring the armoured hulks down fast enough to escape. Even so, Koorland felt a buzz of escalating force that tightened the skin of his forehead.

  To Koorland’s astonishment, the staggered withdrawal actually appeared to be a boon in disguise. The psyker was absorbing power slowly, soaking in far more than it could have had it all come down on it in a rush. Its eyes rolled back. Its lids juddered as though electric current was being run though its chains. Froth boiled from its locked jaw. Veins bulged up from its body and turned a mouldy black as it seized uselessly in its restraints.

  Clutching its head, the Beast turned round on its good leg.

  With a grunt it raised its wrist-battery and fired.

  The torrent of bullets and las and weird gravitic blasts mowed through two of the servitors and half a dozen ork elites. Suddenly released, the ork psyker flopped about on the floor like a suffocating fish. The bullet storm howled towards the seizing psyker and would have shredded it had Drevina not thrown herself into its path at the final second. She danced for a moment, then her ravaged body fell on top of the ork’s and the barrage swept on. It took another crimson-armoured Sister in the knee and dropped her. She did not break her vows even to cry out.

  The Beast cursed as its myriad barrels whined empty and the auto-loaders set to work.

  The remaining Sisters of Silence continued their fighting withdrawal and then, as their injured sister was still dragging herself away from the ork psyker, it detonated.

  The ork’s mouth opened wide, a choking, gurgling sound trapped deep in its throat. Its head began to shake, like a loose bolt under pressure. Its eyes opened wide and bulged as though staring into the vivid core of the Primordial Annihilator. Koorland saw an ephemeral green shape swirl above the ork’s head. Sparks flew from its nose. It arched itself on the floor and then its head burst, slamming the back of it hard into the ground and spraying the mosaic tiles with blood and bits of skull.

  The psychic blast wave tore the flesh from the last servitor and whipped around the wounded Sister like boiling water around a rock.

  Emerald lightning sprayed from the glistening nub of the ork psyker’s exposed brain stem, like watching a weed flourish and die in accelerated playback, like current leaping from a broken wire in search of earth.

  It found it.

  Asger howled in triumph. Koorland had strength left only to remain upright. That felt like triumph enough.

  Psychic feedback raced through the fighting ork mobs with the speed of lightning, a darting witchstorm manifested by the xenos’ collective mind that reached through the eyes into their skulls and tore out their souls. It ripped through the mob, a chain of cranial detonations following messily where it passed. A blood splatter suddenly painted the greasy driver’s window of a gargant from the inside. The war engines ground to a halt. One toppled over. Wet bursts and a pelleting sound evocative of skull fragments on metal sounded from the staircases leading up the galleries and the doors behind Olug and Brokk.

  A snaking bolt snapped across the Beast’s tusked jaw, and it dropped to one knee, clutched the sides of its head in both hands and gave vent to a howl of pure, mental agony.

  Then it looked up at him and snorted. Its eyes flared like wild things.

  Something had gone wrong.

  The wounded Sister.

  Koorland aimed his storm bolter, range point blank, inside the Beast’s shield bubble, and unloaded the entire magazine into the ork’s face. Pyroclastic jelly burst over the ork’s armour and burned. With a dribbling howl, it knocked the storm bolter from Koorland’s gauntlet with a swipe of its left hand.

  Largely unarmoured and unpowered, Koorland felt the reinforced bones of wrist, arm and shoulder shatter under the force. The storm bolter thumped into the wall and skidded off along the floor. His mind blacked itself out to block the pain.

  Everything vanished but the feel of the power sword in his other hand.

  The Beast slumped back, dazed. Its face was molten wreckage, eyeless, nostrils merged into one flapping gill, wobbling polyps of congealed fat hanging from its lips. It was blind as Koorland drew his blade back one-handed, imbued it with every last straining sinew of Dorn’s stubbornness, and then rammed it through the Beast’s open mouth. The Great Beast spasmed once, mighty enough even in its death throes to rip the sword’s grip from Koorland’s hands as it crashed face-first into the tiles.

  And was still.

  The whole throne room was still.

  Koorland sank to the ground, a sudden weakness of the knees flushing out the battle-anaesthesia that had kept him on his feet for far longer than this one encounter. It was done. He had done it. His brain was, if anything, as numb as his body, and it refused to process the magnitude of what that meant.

  He had succeeded where a primarch had failed.

  They had succeeded.

  Through the jangling tinnitus in his ears, he heard Tyris’ shout of congratulation. He saw Krule saunter across, a smile on his face as he spat on the Beast’s corpse. Surprising that the Assassin had been so close during the fight without Koorland noticing. If he had to guess, he would say that Krule had been protecting him. Laurentis emitted a joyful data-squeal, so overcome that he had slipped into binharic. Asger howled, though not like before. This was for the dead and for a victory to end all victories. It sent a shiver down Koorland’s spine, and he smiled for what felt like the first time in his post-human life, shaking with the withdrawl of adrenaline and the delayed creep-back of pain.

  ‘We won,’ he said.

  What more was there to say than that?

  Bohemond reared up over the fallen Beast then, on his knees, and impaled the ork’s heart with his blade. He sagged into it, took a moment, then withdrew a hand to disengage his helm’s gorget seals. It came away with a hiss of magnetic suction. Hands around the cross-hilt of his relic-blade, already on his knees, he bowed his head.

  ‘The primarch was right to entrust this role to you, brother. Forgive me my doubts, they were unworthy of a servant of the Emperor. What you have made be this day is the greatest victory since the destruction of Horus. If I achieve nothing more in my own service it will be to see your name spoken for eternity in the same esteem as Sigismund himself.’

  Koorland took his brother’s hand and the two Space Marines allowed their weight to help the other stand.

  The new Imperium began here.

  As Koorland clasped the Black Templar’s fizzling elbow seal to congratulate him in kind, he saw the great doors at the far, far end of the throne room thrown open. He heard clamouring alien voices, the clank of a giant, armoured stride, and knew that he had been wrong.

  About everything.

  Eighteen

  Ullanor – Gorkogrod, throne room

  They had been wrong. So wrong. Koorland saw that now. He looked to the circular dais in the centre of the throne room and its six thrones. Six. He looked to the galleries and, again, six, unique identifiers that marked them apart. Illogical extrapolations ran through his mind as though the gates between what ‘could’ and what ‘could not’ be had been lifted. This was not like the ork empires of the past, not even the last true Waaagh of Urlakk Urg, carried by the iron rule of its single omnipotent ‘emperor’ figure.

  There was not one Beast, and there had never been.

  There were six. Prime-orks. Each a father to one legion within
the whole.

  From his position where the defeated ork had thrown him, some way around the circumference of the throne room from the slave’s entrance by which they had entered, Koorland could see the throne that had previously been hidden. It was larger than the others. It was covered with skins and furs, and adorned with black and white checks. As Koorland beheld it, struck by the familiarity of that particular pattern of black and white, the grinding clank of moving armour reached a crescendo and a second Beast passed through the massive main doors.

  A second prime-ork.

  Or was it the first?

  It was greater in stature than the ork Koorland had just fought and encased in armour that was both heavier and more splendid, intricately wrought plates adorned with those black and white jags. A helm with a tusked face made a gory red with encrusted stones enclosed its head. It looked over the ruined gargants to either side of the gate, the hundreds of messily slain orks around the throne room, and emitted a rumbling growl like the war-horn of a Titan. Its gaze set upon the fallen prime-ork and it started forwards. Koorland felt the ground shake. The air around the brute whined as its gauntlets burst into writhing green flame.

  This was the ork that had fought Vulkan.

  Koorland cursed himself for not seeing it, but then why should he? How could he have reasoned that there could have been more than one Beast?

  The how of it did not matter.

  He was an Imperial Fist – he should have considered everything.

  ‘Defend your Lord Commander!’ Bohemond roared, and Kill-Team Stalker opened fire at the same instant, shooting from the chest as they moved at a steady walk to intercept. Bolt-rounds scattered off the prime-ork’s shields. Melta beams and plasma bolts from combi-attachments sizzled across them.