‘And they can be replaced, in as little as nine months – or even less, if the rumours I hear about Krieg can be believed.’
Vox-chatter told Dast that more Korpsmen had made it to their goal. They were battling orks in the Indestructible’s shadow; once again, it appeared, just a handful had spilled out of their fortress against their leader’s orders. The Korpsmen outnumbered them and were faring well against them. It was something.
The Ultramarines Predators and Vindicators were advancing too. They were mercilessly firing at the star fort’s active battery. Dast grimaced upon hearing that an artillery shell had fallen short, exploding in the midst of the fighting orks and Guardsmen, decimating both forces.
‘At least,’ he implored, ‘send your Space Marines forwards now. Have them and the Korpsmen scale the ramparts together.’ Lucien didn’t answer him; Dast didn’t know if he was considering his suggestion or not.
He waited a moment, then ventured: ‘You undervalue them. I did the same when I first joined a Krieg regiment, but the Death Korps is one of the Imperium’s finest assets. Individually, yes, each one of them is expendable, yet that is also their greatest strength. En masse, they can be an unstoppable force.’
‘You are not of Krieg yourself?’ asked Lucien.
‘I’ve never been there.’
Others had made the same assumption – despite the fact that commissars never served with soldiers from their own planets. Dast only wore his facemask and rebreather when he had to – which, in itself, distinguished him from the rest of his regiment – but then, the Death Korps was often sent to worlds with poisonous atmospheres, worlds like their own. He had begun to notice that, when he was wearing the mask, he found it harder to make his voice heard.
Sometimes, his job was to save the Death Korps of Krieg from themselves.
‘If the men of Krieg have a failing,’ he said calmly, ‘it is that they undervalue themselves too. They will die for you gladly, if you tell them they are dying for a reason, any reason. I am asking you, please, do not abuse that trust – and don’t squander the resources you have here. That is all I have to say.’
He was talking to Lucien’s broad back. The Ultramarine had turned away from him in mid-sentence. Perhaps his helmet vox had distracted him again, Dast thought; perhaps he had more orders that he needed to issue. A moment later, without turning, Lucien said, ‘I must join my battle-brothers up on the surface. It is almost time for us to march on the Ramilies ourselves.’
‘Thank you,’ said Dast, although he wasn’t sure he had anything to thank him for. He hesitated for a second, then turned and walked back towards the command dugout. He had said his piece, as his field report would make perfectly plain. By the end of the day, the 319th Krieg Siege Regiment may well no longer exist, but at least he would have done his duty.
The Krieg captain hardly acknowledged Dast’s return, any more than he had acknowledged his departure from the dugout.
Hovering between them, the tactical hololith showed a closer view of the combat zone than it had before. The Indestructible was a dark shape on its eastern border; arrayed before this were the survivors of the 319th regiment, each squad represented by a black skull with wings and a helmet. There were far fewer skulls to be seen than when the commissar had left.
The orks were represented by skull symbols too, but theirs were green and malformed with tusks and horns, and there were fewer of them still. A vox-caster crackled and buzzed in one corner, a servitor’s hands flickered over the holo-projector’s runes and a number of the green skulls blinked out.
The captain spoke over his comm-bead: ‘Sergeant Lucien. My men have the orks outside the star fort under control. I can have ten squads disengage and begin to scale the walls.’ A rare emotion had crept into his voice: a hint of pride.
A long time passed, it seemed to Dast, before the response came: ‘Tell your Korpsmen to deal with the orks and then hold their positions.’
The vox-caster buzzed again, as did his comm-bead, each reporting a new presence on the battlefield. This new information was programmed into the holo-projector, and suddenly there they were: the blue stylised-U symbols that denoted the Ultramarines infantry, heading east, past the almost-static markers of their own armour units. One of them had to be Lucien himself.
The star fort’s lance stabbed out of its tower again.
Its interruptions had been decreasing in frequency, as if it was becoming ever more reluctant to recharge. Unfortunately, its blasts were still as potent as ever; already, the first of the blue newcomers had to be removed from the board.
The rest of the Ultramarines kept on going.
When the Death Korps of Krieg had advanced, it had been in a ragged line of black skull icons, through which the enemy guns had punched hole after hole. The line, each time, had reformed, a little thinner than before but relentless. The Ultramarines blue line, in contrast, was thinner to begin with, but it swept across no-man’s-land more rapidly and maintained its integrity throughout.
Within minutes, blue icons were mingling with the black and the green in the star fort’s shadow, and the green orks were dying more swiftly than ever. Dast picked out one of the many reports in his ear: a Krieg quartermaster, describing how the Ultramarines Dreadnought had ignited his fist and driven it through an ork’s chest, shattering its ribcage and its spine and emerging from its back.
‘Sergeant Lucien,’ the captain voxed. ‘My men are ready to scale the walls.’
‘Captain,’ Dast protested. ‘Might it not be, ah, a wiser strategy to allow the Ultramarines to take point here? Their armour will protect them from anything the orks have to throw at us, and, with their superior firepower, we can take the ramparts in a fraction of the time and likely with a fraction of the casualties.’
The captain fixed him with a blank-eyed look.
Dast decided to appeal to his sense of pride. He knew it existed, well-hidden but surfacing from time to time. ‘Why don’t we show them what the Death Korps of Krieg can do? Show these self-styled angels that we are capable of more than just lying down and dying for the Emperor, if only we are given the chance.’
He couldn’t tell if his words were reaching the captain’s ears or not.
At that moment, however, the vox-caster spluttered again, and Lucien’s voice rang out of it. He couldn’t have heard the commissar’s plea, and was responding to the captain’s latest broadcast. ‘Agreed,’ he said curtly. ‘Send your men over the walls, and advise them the Space Marines have operational command.’
The captain nodded and turned away from his commissar, abruptly. After a short pause, Sergeant Lucien spoke again, and Dast had no doubt that this postscript was meant for his ears specifically.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘they are your men, captain. You know how best to utilise them.’
CHAPTER X
Sicarius felt as if he had been fighting for hours, though he knew it hadn’t been nearly that long.
The orks in the cavern were tenacious, like any of their kind. They battled on after being dealt mortal blows, their bodies fuelled by rage and a primitive, mindless lust for battle. They had landed a few good blows of their own too.
At one point, Lumic had gone down. His brothers had fought their way to him in time, thank the Emperor, and a chainsword blade had severed his attacker’s weapon arm before it could complete a killing stroke.
Sicarius was backed up to the cavern wall, duelling with a massive brute with a head too big for its squat body, teeth like neglected gravestones and breath to match. It had a makeshift chainsword of its own, fashioned from real ork teeth, spitting out black gobbets of promethium as it whirred. The ork’s technique needed work, but it wielded the weapon with more than enough force to compensate.
His own blade parried each of its clumsy thrusts, but he quickly tired of being on the defensive. He allowed the ork’s next blow to land on his shoulde
r, the whirring teeth chewing into his pauldron. Some teeth were blunted or snapped clean off their chain; still, the cut was deeper than Sicarius had expected, nicking his flesh.
He thought about the engine pod, hanging over him like an executioner’s axe, and he pressed the advantage his feint had bought him. He slashed at his opponent, once, twice, three times, cutting a series of dark red trenches into its flesh.
The ork was on the back foot, but still struggling. ‘Emperor,’ Sicarius cursed, ‘how do you convince these things that they’re dead?’ No longer pinned, however, he could now bring his plasma pistol to bear, placing a shot right through the greenskin’s body in an eruption of blood.
The ork joined its comrades, many of them, in a growing heap of bloodied corpses. There were only three of them left now, outnumbered by their stronger and better-armed attackers, two of them wounded but fighting on beyond reason.
This was taking too long.
A new sound echoed between the tunnel walls: a deep, metallic clunk. Sicarius knew where it must have come from, and his auto-senses confirmed it. He looked up at the engine pod in the roof. It hadn’t ignited yet but a second clunk came from somewhere inside it, like the tolling of a death knell.
‘Brother Filion,’ the captain yelled, ‘we don’t need you here. Climb up inside the star fort. Renius, behind him!’ The Techmarine was his most vital squad member on this mission, and had to be saved. Filion would go ahead of him to take the brunt of any more ork ambushes or traps.
He took Filion’s place in the melee. Another ork, a walking mass of blasted flesh, had finally lost too much blood to remain standing, so only two remained. At that moment, however, the engine pod emitted a third clunk, which was followed this time by a cough and a puff of acrid, white smoke.
Brother Filion voxed Sicarius: ‘I’m inside the gun tower, sir. You were right, I think there’s a way up through here, through the debris of the internal bulkheads. It’s narrow – but wide enough for an ork to squeeze through, after all.’
Techmarine Renius reported that he was having more difficulty. His servo-harness was a definite problem for him, but it also provided a solution. He could cut or tear his way through any blockage, and thus was making slow but steady progress. Sicarius sent Brother Gallo after him, while he and Brother Lumic squared off against a single ork each. He took the biggest and healthiest-looking brute for himself.
The engine pod was spluttering and coughing up more smoke, denser clouds of it, while sparks were beginning to dance around its mouth. The engine was struggling to fire, there could be no doubt of it. Sicarius was alive thanks only to its decrepit state – and any second could bring an abrupt end to his reprieve.
Lumic despatched his wounded opponent with ease and, with the same blade stroke, cleaved into the last remaining greenskin’s back. Sicarius bundled his battle-brother ahead of him, towards the gun tower. A bright bolt of energy discharged itself from the engine pod, striking the ground between Sicarius’s feet. He followed Lumic through a gash in the star fort’s outer wall and began to haul himself upwards, away from the threat, through twisted hunks of stone and metal.
His ankle snagged on something.
Looking down, Sicarius realised that a massive green fist had closed around it. He saw a snarling green face glaring up at him, and recognised the brute with the ork-tooth chainsword, the one he thought he had slain. It was screaming something, but he couldn’t make it out because the engine’s spluttering had turned into an unrestrained roar. The ork was trying to drag him back down into the tunnels; it didn’t have the strength, but then nor could he seem to shake it loose. He wanted to stamp on its crooked gravestone teeth, but his free foot was wedged into a crevice, while his pistol was pinned to his side.
The ork was dead, it just hadn’t accepted it yet; not while it could still drag its killer down into the inferno behind it.
Superheated exhaust smoke billowed up the inside of the gun tower.
Sicarius saw the ork’s flesh stripped from its bones. Its face was little more than a leering skull when he lost sight of it; still, its eyes glared up at him, full of hatred, as intractable as its death grip on his foot. Alarms began to screech and wail and blink inside his helmet, detecting intolerable temperatures without.
He pulled for all he was worth, and finally tore himself free of the clinging fingers. He felt as if his every nerve was afire, but he couldn’t allow himself to succumb to the pain. He scrambled for handholds above him, straining every muscle and fibre bundle in his arms to lift himself out of the deadly cloud. He was grateful now for Renius, who had widened the way ahead of him.
He might have blacked out briefly, the conscious part of his mind at least. Like the orks, however, Sicarius didn’t know when to die; while, unlike them, he had selfless allies to make sure that he didn’t.
He felt Brother Lumic’s hands tightening around his wrists, felt himself being lifted when he didn’t have the strength to lift himself. He sprawled onto his stomach inside a large, octagonal chamber. Cracks ran through its walls, and its ceiling bulged in the centre and groaned ominously. He felt dizzy. He didn’t know if he could stand, but he stood anyway and refused to let his battle-brothers help him.
The alarms in his helmet were quieting one by one, while scrolling displays told him how many painkilling and invigorating drugs had been pumped into him: enough to keep him active and alert, which was all that mattered to him.
His power armour required repairs, when he had the chance to see to it. Its protective layer of ceramite had begun to bubble and crack with the intense heat – though it had maintained its integrity and thus preserved his life. The floor was trembling violently, no doubt because of the engine beneath it – and how many others, Sicarius wondered, attached to other parts of the star fort’s hull?
For the first time, he noticed a pattern on one of the chamber’s walls, picked out in coloured tiles. It was the icon of the Cult Mechanicus: a half-human, half-machine skull bounded by a cogwheel, representing the perfect fusion of Man with the Machine God.
The Machine God was a minor aspect of the Emperor, in Sicarius’s view. Still, it angered him to see that the mosaic had been defaced. Many of the steel-grey and ivory-white tiles that formed the composite skull had been pried loose, while others had been cracked or shattered in the attempt. Someone had spray-painted an ork face, inexpertly, over the image. The insult focused the captain’s attention on his mission.
He rounded on his Techmarine. ‘No more secrets,’ he growled, the throbbing of the engine – the engines – underfoot lending his voice a threatening undercurrent. ‘Tell me what the Adeptus Mechanicus were doing aboard the Indestructible.’
‘I’m sorry, captain,’ said Renius, setting his jaw stubbornly.
‘I need that information, Techmarine!’ Sicarius flared. ‘I’m standing in the bowels of the Emperor-damned thing, aren’t I?’
The rest of the Ultramarines closed in around Renius, in silent support of their leader. He looked at each of them in turn, then conceded defeat with a nod. ‘There was a project,’ he confessed. ‘The tech-priests were attempting to make a star fort mobile – independently mobile, I mean.’
‘By fitting it with engines,’ said Sicarius. He wasn’t surprised.
‘Many engines,’ confirmed Renius. ‘Thruster engines and warp engines. Think about it. The Ramilies’ greatest asset is its ability to traverse the immaterium. It can generate a warp bubble around itself, which allows it to withstand–’
‘I already know this,’ Sicarius said impatiently.
‘But imagine if, instead, the Ramilies could provide its own propulsion. Imagine if it could shift from one star system to another, without having to wait for a fleet of ships to tow it and with negligible risk: a mobile command base with weapons fully charged and fully-stocked repair and resupply facilities.’
He sounded almost evangelical about the pr
ospect.
‘Imagine,’ Sicarius growled, ‘if the orks had that capability.’
Renius inclined his head. ‘Khargask is attempting to bring the project to fruition, and has clearly come closer than we hoped. I suspect it was a test flight that brought him to the Agides System. Something went wrong. The Indestructible came down here, but its engines slowed its descent, at least. The damage to the propulsion systems and plasma generators may have been minimal.’
‘And what about the energy flares that the Krieg men saw?’
‘Attempts to re-establish the warp bubble,’ Renius surmised, ‘and to reconfigure it to maintain the Ramilies’s integrity, to hold it together against the incredible stresses of take-off.’
The floor and the bulkheads around them were still trembling, but less violently now. The engine below them had ceased its angry protests and settled into a comfortable rhythm, almost a hum. Sicarius asked himself why it was still running at all, now that the five Ultramarines were safely out of the reach of its backwash. He didn’t like the answer he came up with. He turned back to the Techmarine.
‘Is there a control room?’ he asked. ‘There must be a control room.’
‘The basilica,’ said Renius. Of course. ‘Beneath the Grand Chamber.’
Sicarius pinpointed the location on his schematics. He had already calculated his own position, towards the inner edge of the star fort’s south-west-facing quadrant, and he quickly mapped a route from one to the other.
There were narrow, winding, upward-leading staircases in each of the chamber’s eight corners. Most of them had partially collapsed, but the one he needed looked to be just about passable. Sicarius hurried towards it, his footsteps crunching on broken mosaic tiles, and his battle-brothers didn’t need to be told to follow him. If what he suspected, what he feared, was true, then his mission was more urgent now than ever.