Knight of Talassar - Steve Lyons Read online

  Dast, with his captain, led the way down a flight of shallow steps, chiselled out of the hard ground. Only Sicarius and his command squad, which included Lucien as the captain’s second-­in-command, followed them. They left the bulk of the strikeforce behind with their vehicles to await further orders.

  Ultracius was left behind too. The trenches were a tight enough squeeze for an ordinary Space Marine, so the Dreadnought would have struggled to negotiate them.

  The remaining members of the squad included the captain’s standard bearer, his Apothecary and the Company Champion. They were joined by a Techmarine called Renius. While a loyal battle-brother, in some ways he seemed to stand apart from the other Ultramarines, in power armour the rust-red of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  Some recent rain had left the trenches spotted with puddles of water: stagnant, foul-smelling and, according to Lucien’s auto-senses, mildly acidic. Improvised walkways of corrugated metal sheets spanned the largest of the trenches; more than one snapped, however, as the Ultramarines trampled over it.

  Passing a Termite burrowing vehicle, parked in a small, muddy enclosure of its own, they could hear the Death Korps’ guns still firing ahead of them, but the sound of aircraft engines had faded away.

  Commissar Dast had noticed it too, his eyes searching the sky to confirm the evidence of his ears. ‘I thought you might have kept the Thunderhawks on station,’ he said over his shoulder as they walked. ‘We could certainly use them.’

  Sicarius’s only response was a grunt of acknowledgement.

  ‘I, ah, feel I must apologise for the reception you encountered,’ Dast persevered. He was slightly in awe of the armoured giants behind him – in Lucien’s experience men always were – though the commissar hid it better than most. ‘Before today, we had only seen two ork fighter-bombers, and we thought we had crippled one of them.’

  ‘It isn’t like the orks to hold back resources,’ said Renius.

  ‘No,’ agreed Sicarius, thoughtfully. ‘Not like most greenskins.’

  ‘We know they’re in there,’ said Dast, ‘inside the star fort. They’ve made a few bombing runs, sent out the occasional raiding party, but they haven’t attacked us en masse. We know they have a leader, a warboss, by the name of Khargask.’

  Lucien clenched his teeth. The name was familiar to him.

  ‘Obviously, he over-reacted when you arrived,’ said Dast, ‘and hoped to destroy the equipment you were bringing with you. Other­wise, for the most part, he has been sitting tight behind his shields and ramparts. The orks we have encountered, we believe, have slipped out against his orders.’

  ‘You’ve been briefed on the Indestructible itself?’ asked Sicarius.

  ‘We know about the, ah, incident,’ said Dast.

  ‘The Imperial Navy would like its property back – intact, if that is at all possible.’

  Dast looked at Sicarius as if surprised, though it was difficult to tell with his face covered. ‘You do know the Indestructible is ancient? Thousands of years old. It had been damaged and was under repair apart when Khargask took it – and as we have seen, he couldn’t keep it aloft for long.’

  ‘I have my orders,’ said Sicarius.

  The commissar nodded his acceptance.

  ‘Well, fortunately, perhaps,’ he reported, ‘the Indestructible still lives up to its name. We’ve been bombarding it for weeks, but–’

  The Krieg captain interrupted him, speaking for the first time. His voice was low and husky, muffled by his facemask. ‘But no structure is impregnable,’ he growled.

  ‘There is another matter that concerns us,’ ventured Dast.

  At that moment, however, they reached the sunken entranceway to a dugout. The Krieg captain disappeared through it, followed by his aides. Dast paused, eyeing up his armoured guests. ‘Unfortunately, space is, ah, severely limited down here.’

  Sicarius nodded. He asked Renius to join him inside the dugout, the others to wait outside. Lucien couldn’t help but feel a little slighted. He hadn’t yet been given the opportunity to earn the Knight of Talassar’s trust and, at this rate, he never would.

  Even Dast had to duck to fit through the square opening, so the two Space Marines were forced to bend almost double, but the claw arm on the Techmarine’s servo-harness still caught on a support beam and almost tore it down.

  Lucien decided to take a tour of the earthworks. It behoved him to learn about the resources available here, and the men alongside whom he would be fighting. The latter he began to encounter almost immediately.

  Following the sounds of shelling, he found his path teeming with Krieg Guardsmen in their hundreds, like industrious ants scuttling around a giant nest. Many of them carried digging equipment and were busy extending the already-expansive trench network. They moved aside for Lucien to pass, but always returned to their work as soon as he had. They never spoke to him.

  The Earthshakers, he discerned, had been placed as far apart as possible, the better to protect them from enemy bombs. He made for the nearest emplacement. The trench he was following eventually opened up into a large, square pit. There were four Korpsmen here: two of them stood on the cannon’s firing platform, behind its plasteel shield, while two more handed them shells from a pyramid-shaped stack.

  The gun itself was anchored to an X-form base, with four broad feet stretching to the pit’s four corners. It was broader than the passageways that led here, and so must have been lowered into its current position.

  The long barrel was set at a thirty-degree angle, peering over the emplacement’s edge. When Lucien lifted his head, he could see the towers of the Ramilies-class star fort, far closer and looming even larger now than before. He could also see tangles of razor wire, with several bloodied ork corpses caught up in it.

  ‘When was the last attack?’ he asked.

  One of the Krieg men answered him, even as he hefted another shell up to his comrades on the platform. ‘It happened sixteen hours ago, my lord. An ork mob came at us across no-man’s-land. Most of them were slowed by the wire, enough for our lasguns to put them down before they could reach us.’

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘The captain ordered a bayonet charge.’

  Lucien was surprised. ‘You went over the top? Why didn’t you use the cannons? If the greenskins were struggling with the wire, they’d have made easy targets. You could have simply blasted them to shreds.’

  No trace of emotion inflected the Krieg man’s voice as he answered, ‘Artillery shells are valuable.’

  Lucien had heard that Krieg men never showed emotion. He had heard that they never removed their masks in front of outsiders, even where the atmosphere was breathable. He was starting to believe it.

  This Krieg man was an officer, he realised. His coat was spattered with dry mud, which had obscured his stripes. This one – just like his captain, earlier – seemed especially deferential.

  ‘How many casualties, lieutenant?’ asked Lucien. He had encountered some orks in his time that were almost – not quite – a match for a Space Marine. They could probably have snapped a Death Korpsman’s fragile neck with one flex of their clumsy fingers, especially when worked into a frenzy.

  ‘Eighty-three Korpsmen were expended in the battle,’ the lieutenant answered, ‘but the threat of the orks was neutralised, so those lives were worthwhile.’

  Lucien found the man’s attitude unusually pragmatic for a human.

  One of the Krieg men on the platform had loaded the Earthshaker. The other sighted along its long barrel – though it would have been hard for him to miss his massive target – and fired. The recoil made the Earthshaker judder fiercely, but its heavy feet kept it in position.

  Lucien followed the shell with his eyes as it hurtled across the black sky like a comet. Almost six seconds passed before it struck one of the star fort’s towers; their size had made them seem closer than they were. There was a fierce, though distant, eruption of light and sound. However, when the smoke of the explosion cleared, the t
ower showed no signs of damage.

  The star fort had prodigious shields, of course, reinforcing its robust construction. A concentrated bombardment might have broken through both, in time – shield generators could eventually be overloaded – but it wouldn’t happen quickly.

  No structure is impregnable.

  Three more shells streaked over no-man’s-land, from different parts of the trench network. The Krieg officer had already gone back to work, helping the rest of his crew to reload their weapon, regardless of his rank. How long had they been going through these motions, Lucien wondered? Weeks, the commissar had said, and yet still they performed their duties patiently, efficiently, like automata.

  A more pressing question was why their enemies were taking it? Orks, quite literally, thrived on constant battle. If they were hunkering down in their shielded bunker, ignoring the cannons that threatened to blast its walls asunder, then that had to be for a reason. A Ramilies-class star fort had powerful weapons too, and vast ammunition stores, so why weren’t they returning fire?

  Or was it simply that their leader was smarter than the typical ork? He had taken the Indestructible, after all, and dealt the Imperium a major embarrassment in the process. Did he have some cunning, longer-term scheme in mind?

  For that matter, why had Khargask come to the Agides System? It contained no worlds of any particular value. And why was the Adeptus Mechanicus so keen to recover his plunder, anyway?

  Lucien wished he could have attended the meeting in the dugout. He knew it was not his place to question; he would do as he was ordered, he didn’t have to know the reason. He couldn’t help but wonder, all the same, what he and his battle-brothers – perhaps even Sicarius himself – had not been told about their latest mission.

  What exactly was happening inside the Indestructible – and what made it so important to the orks and to the Imperium alike?

  CHAPTER III

  The dugout contained no more than a few sticks of furniture.

  The Krieg men folded up canvas chairs to give their visitors room to stand. Sicarius squeezed himself into one corner of the underground chamber. His helmet scraped the ceiling, causing dirt to rain on his neck and shoulders.

  A collapsible table was strewn with data-slates containing tactical maps of their surroundings – onto which the Krieg trenches had been stencilled like contour lines. There were also old-fashioned paper maps, chipped and yellowing despite their plastek coatings, bearing detailed but faded schematics of the Ramilies-class star forts. These included internal layouts; though, given the age of the Indestructible, they were unlikely to be especially accurate.

  A smaller, rickety trestle table supported a holo-projector, which one of the Krieg captain’s aides had just activated. A translucent shape flared brightly an inch or so above the big table: the Indestructible – the upper part of it, at least, the part that could be seen from inside the trenches – picked out in beads of light.

  There was something wrong with the hololith, however; it was shot through with purple and green flares, distorting the picture. Sicarius’s eyes narrowed as he realised what he was looking at: a vid rather than a still image; the flares were a part of the recording, not a glitch as he had assumed.

  ‘We recorded this six days ago,’ explained Dast, ‘but we witnessed the phenomenon three times before that and once more since. As near as we can tell, the flares are being generated by the star fort itself. At first, we thought they were the product of some weapon, but they’re simply too random, unfocused.’

  A weapon under construction, perhaps, Sicarius thought, one that the orks have not yet perfected, but when they do… He turned to the Techmarine to see if he had anything to say, but Renius was keeping his own counsel.

  ‘The flare-ups, when they come, are accompanied by an unholy racket,’ the commissar continued. ‘It rises from the bowels of the earth, like the groaning of tortured machine-spirits. We lack the equipment to capture that sound, unfortunately, and our tech-priests, frankly, can’t explain it.’

  ‘How long do these episodes last?’ Sicarius asked.

  ‘No more than twenty seconds, or sometimes less, before the flares – and the sounds – die down again,’ the commissar told him.

  ‘We have an ork prisoner,’ the Krieg captain spoke up.

  ‘It was part of a mob that attacked us a couple of weeks ago,’ said Dast. ‘It made it all the way into the trenches before we finally put it down. It has certain, ah, augmentations that might bear closer scrutiny. I thought, perhaps, with the resources available to you, you might wish to–’

  ‘Let me see this creature,’ said Sicarius.

  Dast led the way back out of the dugout, round several tight corners in quick succession and then some way along a northward-running trench.

  Sicarius’s standard bearer fell into step behind him. The rest of his command squad had found ways to make themselves useful: mostly routine maintenance work to their armour and weapons or praying. Sicarius kept Renius close to him.

  They negotiated one more turn then, four strides to the east, they reached a small, open-topped enclosure, guarded by two Korpsmen. The prisoner knelt inside it, almost filling it. It was wrapped in chains, tight enough to prevent it from standing or sitting comfortably, and shackled to four wooden stakes driven into the ground.

  It looked like any ork to Sicarius, with its jutting brow, lower-jaw tusks and flat nose, its shoulders broader but its legs stumpier than those of a man. On a second look, however, he saw that its right arm was metallic and that its eyepieces, which he had mistaken for pilot’s goggles, were fused into the flesh of its face.

  He had heard the ork howling and struggling violently as his party had neared the enclosure. Its chest was scarred with lasgun burns and bayonet wounds, and the lenses of its mechanical eyes had been shattered. It had been tortured.

  The ork spat at its two armoured visitors – evidently, it could see them well enough – and bellowed angrily at them in its ugly native tongue. Among the unfamiliar words, Sicarius made out the name ‘Khargask’.

  ‘The prisoner was also in possession of a weapon, captain,’ Dast volunteered. ‘Quite unlike any we have seen before. It–’

  Renius interrupted him. ‘Ork bionics are nothing new. This merely confirms what we suspected.’

  ‘That Khargask is no ordinary warboss,’ Sicarius agreed, ‘but rather what the greenskins call a “big mek” or a “mek boss”.’ He explained for the benefit of the Krieg men, who may have lacked his Chapter’s extensive knowledge of the subject: ‘Orks seem to have an instinct for making things, but that’s all it is: an instinct. Few of them have the intellect to actually know what they’re doing.’

  ‘It’s unusual for a more intelligent ork to gain power,’ said Renius, ‘in a culture that values strength and savagery above all else, but it can happen.’

  ‘If the ork is smart and strong and savage,’ Sicarius muttered.

  ‘This brute here is not smart. If it were, it would have reined in its primitive bloodlust and remained inside the Indestructible as it was told. I doubt we will learn anything useful by studying it – or its equipment.’

  ‘I assume we have no one who can speak its language?’ said Sicarius.

  ‘Even if we had,’ said Renius, ‘it’s unlikely that Khargask would have taken it into his confidence – or that it would have understood him if he had.’

  ‘We tried to find out how many orks are inside the star fort,’ explained Dast, ‘but as you say, there is a language barrier. It also seems that the prisoner can count no higher than five, maybe, so, ah…’

  ‘The ork is no use to us, captain,’ insisted Renius. ‘We should execute it and be done with it.’

  He was probably right. It struck Sicarius, however, that he had been too keen to speak up, to see the captive ork dead, to preclude any possible further investigations. The thought – and its likely implications – rankled with him. He was sorely tempted to gainsay the Techmarine, if only to gauge his react
ion.

  He decided to bide his time. He gave a grunt of assent, then turned smartly and marched away. Renius followed him gladly.

  Behind them, the Krieg captain issued an order to one of his sentries. They heard the distinctive crack of a lasgun being fired, followed by another bellow of injured rage, a fierce rattling of chains and the sound of at least one heavy wooden stake being shattered.

  It took another two las-beams to penetrate the prisoner’s dense hide and silence it at last. The Krieg captain had taken the Ultramarine’s suggestion as an order. He hadn’t questioned it, hadn’t tried to advance an opinion of his own despite his greater experience here.

  Renius was silent again as they made their way back to the command dugout. Sicarius opened a private vox-channel to the Dreadnought.

  ‘You were right,’ he told Ultracius. ‘I only suspected it before, but now I’m certain. The Techmarine is keeping something from us.’

  In the dugout, Sicarius studied the data-slates and ancient papers more closely, but they told him little that he hadn’t already known.

  ‘This moon was a mining colony, yes?’ he barked. ‘I need a plan of the mine tunnels.’ The Krieg captain immediately despatched an aide to fetch one.

  ‘Ah, most of the tunnels in this sector collapsed,’ Commissar Dast pointed out, apologetically, ‘when the Indestructible landed on top of them.’

  Sicarius nodded curtly. ‘Of course they did. It’s a miracle the star fort itself wasn’t disintegrated upon impact, shields or no shields.’

  He threw a pointed glance at Renius, who didn’t take the bait. ‘Are the Ramilies’ guns operational?’ asked the Techmarine.

  ‘Most of them,’ said Dast, ‘but Khargask employs them sparingly: a few warning shots when we venture too close to him, that’s all.’

  ‘He’s conserving ammunition,’ Sicarius deduced, ‘the same as with the fighter-bombers. He didn’t plan on getting into trouble out here. He didn’t plan on his star fort falling out of the sky. His stores are probably depleted and he has no supply lines. He isn’t trying to win this battle, just prolong it long enough for… what?’