They were not this.
He understood now. Laurentis understood. He understood why past eras of mankind had lived in fear of the greenskins for centuries, why the frontier wars had raged forever, why the periodic Waaagh!s had been threats that had caused the entire populations of colonised systems to evacuate and flee, why the prospect of a credible warboss and his horde was something that could make a sector governor or a warmaster quake. He understood why, more than any other accomplishment of the Great Crusade, the God-Emperor had been so determined to stop the greenskin threat dead at Ullanor.
He understood why the orks were an eternal menace that could never be ignored.
He just didn’t understand how they could be six warp-weeks from the Terran Core.
He looked up. The rain hit his face, washing blood out of his beard. He stared at the manifested moon. Its machined, pock-marked, plated surface was ork technology. He could see that. How? How had they done this?
The moon whirred. Surface features moved and adjusted. Vast armour plating structures re-aligned. Shutters the size of inland seas opened and folded. A huge maw appeared. The stylised image of a vast and monstrous ork face manifested on the surface of the rogue moon. Its eyes burned with magmatic light from the moon’s core. Its titanic, tusked mouth stretched open wide, and it bellowed at the world below, the loudest and biggest noise burst of all. It was like a pagan god screaming at a sacrificial offering.
I am Slaughter.
Laurentis shuddered. He was having difficulty standing up. A hand grabbed at his arm.
It was Nyman.
‘What are you doing?’ Nyman yelled. ‘Get into cover!’
At least one of the rampaging beasts nearby had spotted the magos biologis. It was coming for him through the rain, shield and cleaver raised. Nyman fired several shots at it with his pistol and then began to drag Laurentis back into the tunnels. The ork came after them. As it entered the confines of the blisternest duct, its roaring screams began to echo and resound.
Nyman stopped and fired at it again. The ork advanced. Laurentis could smell it. It seemed to fill the tunnel, head down, shoulders hunched. The rasping tone of its voice was deep, deeper than any human voice.
‘Run!’ Nyman told the magos biologis. Laurentis tried to obey, but he wasn’t very good at it. Nyman had pulled a grenade from his battledress pouch. He primed it and hurled it at the advancing monster.
The blast brought a section of tunnel down, either burying the ork or driving it back. Nyman and Laurentis picked themselves up and struggled back towards the magos’s chamber.
‘We’re finished,’ Nyman said. ‘Did you see their numbers?’
Laurentis realised he could hear the major quite clearly, because the major had opened the faceplate of his orbital armour.
Laurentis could hear something else, something tinny and thin crackling out of the man’s helmet set.
‘Your vox is working,’ Laurentis said.
‘What?’
‘Your vox!’
Nyman noticed the noise.
‘I… Yes, I suppose it is. The signal’s live again.’
Laurentis thought feverishly. He sank to his knees in front of his bank of devices and instruments, and began to reset and adjust them. White-noise screens flickered back into life. He had resolution on several of them, and dataflows. Some of them had burned out entirely, but many were functioning better than they had done in weeks.
‘There’s still gross interference from the noise bursts,’ Laurentis said as he worked, ‘but the gravitational storm has eased. Yes, look. Look.’
Nyman crouched beside him.
‘We’ve got vox-banding again,’ he said. ‘And data sequences.’
‘Exactly,’ said Laurentis. ‘All the while the moon was in transition from… from wherever it came from… there were colossal levels of gravitational disruption. The storm itself. The whole of Ardamantua was stricken with it. Most tech was as good as useless.’
The magos biologis glanced at Nyman.
‘But now the moon is here, now it is fully manifested, the gravitational flare has subsided. We have a little technology back on our side. Major, can you contact your fleet?’
Nyman had already pulled his helmet’s vox-jack out of his armour and was connecting it to the battered vox-caster unit that formed part of Laurentis’s equipment stack. He plugged it through to use as a range booster. Static fizzled from the speakers.
‘Azimuth, Azimuth,’ he called. ‘Azimuth taskforce control, this is Nyman. Repeat this is Nyman, surface drop. Do you read me?’
‘This is Azimuth,’ the vox crackled out.
‘The command ship,’ Nyman told Laurentis.
‘Azimuth,’ he said into the vox, ‘We’ve found survivors from the original undertaking, but none of us are going to live long. There are orks everywhere. Full invasion force. Unimaginable numbers.’
‘Reading you, Nyman. Ork threat identified orbitally already. Extraction of your personnel not viable at this time–’
‘Azimuth? Azimuth?’
There was a pause.
‘Stand by, surface,’ the vox hissed. ‘I have the Lord Commander for you, vox to vox.’
A different voice suddenly came over the speakers.
‘Nyman? It’s Heth. Great Throne, man, you’re alive?’
‘Just about, sir. It’s not looking good.’
‘What strengths have you got down there?’
‘Virtually nothing, sir. The Imperial Fists are decimated. We’re overrun and being murdered. Sir, do not drop or try to reinforce us. You could put every scrap of the ground forces at our disposal planetside and you would still never take this world back. I’ve never seen greenskins in these numbers.’
‘Understood, Nyman,’ Heth replied. ‘To be brutally honest, a surface assault was not a likely possibility. We’re in the middle of a void fight. Assault drop not an option.’
Laurentis pulled at Nyman’s arm.
‘Let me talk to him,’ he said.
Nyman hesitated.
‘Sir,’ he said into the vox, ‘I have the magos biologis from Chapter Master Mirhen’s original undertaking mission here. He wants to speak to you.’
‘Put him on, Nyman.’
Nyman threw a switch on the caster and handed Laurentis the handset.
‘My lord, my name is Laurentis, magos biologis.’
‘I hear you, Laurentis.’
‘Sir, if I may be so bold,’ said Laurentis, ‘you need to do two things. You need, as an absolute priority, to communicate this emergency to Terra. This is just the beginning. Ardamantua is not a high priority target. Whatever mechanism the greenskins have used to bring their attack moon through subspace, Ardamantua is simply a convenient stepping stone, a rest point. Maybe it’s a matter of range limit, or power generation. Whatever. They will mass again from here. They will perhaps bring other planetoids through.’
‘Throne! How do you know, magos?’
‘I don’t, sir. I am speculating. But we have to prepare for the worst contingency. Yesterday, we did not know they could do this. Tomorrow, we will learn what else they can do, and it will be too late. Sir, you have to transmit a full disclosure warning to Terra. I have some equipment here. I have been trying for weeks to translate the noise bursts. Now we have confirmed the identity of the xenos threat, I can narrow my linguistic programs to include what data we have on record of ork syntax and vocabulary values. Sir, I need to open a direct data-link between your primary codifiers and my resources here. If we work fast, you may be able to include, in your urgent warning to Terra, some actual detail regarding the greenskin intention and operation.’
‘How so, magos?’ Heth asked.
‘By learning, sir, what they are telling us.’
Thirty-One
Ardamantua – orbital
Admiral Kiran had drawn his sabre. He’d done it subconsciously, his mind on the fight. The light on the bridge gleamed off its exposed blade. It was a habit of his during a void fight. The sword would play no part in a battle between behemoth warships, but Kiran always felt better with a weapon in his hand.
He had even admitted to his officers, just between them, over dinner in his stateroom, that he had a fear and a shame of dying unarmed.
‘When death comes for me, I won’t go quietly,’ he had said.
The bridge officers manning the stations and consoles around him, diligent and determined, saw the sword come out of its scabbard and knew what it meant.
They were going to deliver death to the best of their considerable ability, but they were awaiting death too.
The bridge of the Azimuth was a place of pandemonium. Alarms sounded, most of them notifications of damage to other decks, some of them target or proximity alerts triggered by the attacking warships. The air was rank with smoke from artifice deck fires. Crewmen rushed in all directions, delivering data, or attempting frantic repairs on crashed bridge systems. For now, the strategium was working again. On it, Kiran could see the ships of his line, a curve of green icons hooked like a claw into the nearspace region of Ardamantua. He could see the enemy too, a blizzard of red icons spilling from the hazard marker of the rogue moon.
The taskforce fleet was outnumbered thirty or forty ships to one. A bridge officer did not need years of training at the Imperial College of Fleet Strategy to know how this was going to end.
‘The odds are too great,’ said Maskar. ‘We run. Obviously, we run.’
Kiran shook his head.
‘No time, sir. They’d bring us down stone dead before we ever made it to translation.’
‘Then what?’ asked Maskar, horrified.
‘Tell the Lord Commander to make a full statement of the events as we know them, and send it via astropathic link as fast as possible. I will buy him as much time as I can, but it won’t be long. We will take as many of them with us as we can, general.’
Maskar looked at him.
‘Quickly,’ Kiran said, tightening his grip on his sword.
Maskar saluted him. Kiran saluted back. The Astra Militarum commander turned and hurried towards Heth, who was at the vox-station across the bridge.
‘Gunnery!’ Kiran yelled.
‘Gunnery, aye!’
‘Status?’
‘Status effective!’
‘Target selection is now at my station. Primary batteries live.’
‘Primary live, aye!’
‘Secondary batteries may fire at will.’ Kiran drew his free hand across the touch-sensitive hololithic plate of his console, aligning targets in order of priority.
‘Autoloaders live!’ a sub-commander called out.
‘Gunports open!’ yelled another.
‘Let’s kill them,’ said Admiral Kiran. He stabbed his finger at the glass to activate the first pre-programmed firing sequence.
The Azimuth’s main forward batteries and spinal mount fired. The recoil stresses made the vast ship’s superstructure groan. Beams of energy lashed out from the ship, followed by slower-moving shoals of missiles and void torpedoes.
An ork warship died in a ball of light, like a sun going nova. A second ship ripped open, spilling its mechanical guts into the void in a cloud of oil and gas and flame, tumbling end over end, inertial stability lost.
Kiran tapped the second sequence. He was already loading a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, his eyes never leaving the complex mapping of the strategium display. Two more kills. Then another two. The Azimuth’s shields began to reach saturation.
He ordered them forwards on their coursing plasma engines. The real space drive swept them in to meet the rising enemy swarm. To port, one of his frigates was engulfed and annihilated. A second later, the fleet tender suffered a shield failure, and was lost in a puff of superhot gas and vapour. To starboard, the grand cruiser Dubrovnic fended off swarms of ork boarding ships as it targeted and slew three bulk warships with its main batteries. It took the third with a passing broadside that shredded the monstrous attacker.
Kiran saw the massive ork cruiser hoving in on an attack vector.
‘Focus shield strength!’ he yelled. ‘Starboard bearing!’
The cruiser began shelling and lacing the void with beam-fire. The Azimuth shook, shields flaring, straining.
Maskar crossed the shuddering deck to join Lord Commander Militant Heth.
‘Summon the astropaths,’ Heth told him without looking up from the communication console. ‘We have to make this good. There will be data to send. As much as we can code and packet.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Maskar. He signalled to aides to prepare the astropath chamber.
‘Look,’ said Heth, gesturing to the comms console. ‘Look at this.’ Various images were displayed on adjacent pict monitors. One was of the rogue moon, showing the macabre ork visage that had been mechanically created to glare out at them. Maskar could hear both coded transmission signals and noise bursts running through the vox-caster station.
‘Help from the surface,’ Heth explained. ‘The magos biologis. We’re unravelling some of the ork transmissions. It’s all bloodthirsty threat, I think. Nothing of substance. Just declarations of hatred and pronouncements of destruction. And this began about three minutes ago.’
He indicated one image in particular, and then enlarged it onto a console’s main overhead screen. The image made Maskar blench. It was a pict feed, streamed through some exotic form of image capture system, that was being broadcast directly to them. It was a transmission for their benefit, for the benefit of any victims the orks came upon.
There was little sense of scale, but Maskar appeared to be looking into the eyes of the most immense ork warboss. The creature was so mature, so vast and bloated, its features were distorted. Broken tusks like tree trunks jutted from the cliff edge of its lower jaw. It was staring right out of the screen with tiny, gleaming yellow eyes, its jaw moving.
‘That bastard thing is aboard the moon,’ Heth said. ‘It’s their leader. I think he’s the size of a damn hab-block, Maskar. Saints of Terra, there hasn’t been an ork boss that massive since Ullanor. I mean, they just don’t develop to that size any more. Look, look. In the foreground? Those are greenskin warriors. They look like children.’
‘Save us,’ Maskar murmured.
‘Too late, my friend,’ said Heth. ‘Look at the bastard. Look at him. Those noises we can hear? The noise bursts? It’s him. His voice. He’s talking to us.’
Heth pointed to another display, one that showed the glaring face on the surface of the moon.
‘Look. See how the mechanical face moves? It’s working in sync with that bastard thing. Look, the lips part and close at the same time. That’s amplifying his voice, turning his vocalisation into that infrasonic signal.’
Maskar felt the ship jolt hard as its shields took more hits.
‘Oh, hellsteeth!’ Heth moaned suddenly. He spotted something new.
Other portals had opened in the surface of the attack moon: three large circles like giant crater rims or the red storm spot on Jupiter. From them, vast, glowing beams of energy were projecting down onto the surface of Ardamantua. Within seconds, they could see something dark and blotchy flowing up the beams into the attack moon.
Heth ramped up the magnification.
It was rock. Planetary matter. The attack moon was aiming immense gravity beams at Ardamantua and harvesting its mass, sucking billions of tonnes of physical matter and mineral content from the crust and mantle.
‘What the hell is it doing?’ asked Heth.
‘I think…’ Maskar began. ‘I think it might be refuelling.’
The attack moon clearly didn’t require all the material it was swallowing to replenish its mass ratios. Huge chun
ks of impacted mineral deposits began spitting out of the moon’s spaceward surface. The moon was manufacturing meteors and firing them at the Imperial ship positions using immense gravitic railguns. The Agincourt was blown in two by a direct strike from a rock projectile half its size. A huge chunk of quartz and iron travelling at six times the speed of sound raked the portside flank of the grand cruiser Dubrovnic and ripped away half its active shields.
Heth was lost for words.
‘We’ve… We’ve beaten them before, sir,’ Maskar said. It was all he could find to say.
‘What?’
‘The greens, sir. We’ve always beaten them before. Even at Ullanor…’
‘The Emperor was with us, then, Maskar,’ Heth replied darkly. ‘And the damned primarchs. It was a different time, a different age. An age of gods. Damn right we stopped them then. But they’ve grown strong again, stronger than ever, and we’ve grown weak. The Emperor’s gone, His beloved sons too. But the greenskins… Throne! They’ve come just six damned weeks shy of Terra. No warning! No damned warning at all! They’ve never been this close! They’ve got technological adaptations we’ve never seen before, not even on bloody Ullanor…. gravitation manipulation! Subspace tunnelling! Gross teleportation… whole planetary bodies, man! And they’ve all but exterminated one of the most able Chapters of Space Marines in one strike!’
‘The Emperor protects,’ Maskar said.