Knight of Talassar - Steve Lyons Read online

  ‘For reinforcements to arrive,’ Dast suggested.

  ‘Perhaps, yes. It would have required a fleet of tug ships to drag the Ramilies through the warp to this system, more than can be hiding in its bays. What happened to the rest of them? You’ve found no other crash sites?’

  The commissar confirmed that they had not.

  ‘Do we keep up the shelling, captain?’ the Krieg captain asked.

  ‘And step it up,’ Sicarius confirmed. ‘I will add my personnel and armour – my Predator and Vindicator tanks – to your own. We will concentrate our attack upon the most damaged quadrant, here.’ He tapped a piece of paper. ‘Once the shields are down, however, and the ramparts have been breached, we hold our fire.’

  The basilica was the Ramilies’ heart, he thought. So long as that remained relatively undamaged, then the Adeptus Mechanicus ought to be satisfied.

  Renius spoke up: ‘Captain. It is possible that, when Khargask sees he is beaten, he might destroy the Ramilies himself rather than allow it to be recaptured.’

  ‘I had thought of that,’ said Sicarius.

  The Krieg captain’s aide had returned with another data-slate, which the Ultramarine took from him. The slate seemed fragile in his massive gauntleted hand, and he held it carefully. ‘The bombardment will serve primarily as a distraction. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of pairs of eyes inside the Indestructible – I want them looking this way. If we can tempt a few more orks out here, all the better. Otherwise, I want them defending the ramparts, manning their weapon emplacements, anything to keep them busy.’

  He plugged the data-slate into the interface jacks on his right gauntlet and loaded its contents into his armour. ‘In the meantime, I will lead a combat squad through the mine tunnels – yes, commissar, what remains of them – and attack the Indestructible from below.’

  ‘Permission to join that squad, captain,’ Renius requested immediately.

  Sicarius said nothing, only nodded. ‘The star fort’s base will have taken the brunt of the crash,’ he continued aloud. ‘If we’re lucky, it might already have been holed. Either way, that’s where it will be most vulnerable. With the Emperor’s grace, we can climb up right inside the basilica itself.’

  ‘We have tried that, captain,’ Dast cautioned. ‘We used a Termite to bypass the blocked tunnels, but the greenskins heard us coming and were ready for us. They laid ambushes for us underground. They set traps for us. We couldn’t get through their defences, couldn’t even get close to our objective.’

  ‘We lost close to two hundred soldiers in the attempt,’ the Krieg captain mumbled. His tone was rueful.

  Sicarius smiled grimly beneath his helmet. So, there was a route through the mine tunnels to the star fort, he thought; the orks’ presence down there proved it. ‘With all due respect, captain, commissar,’ he said, ‘you sent two hundred men into those tunnels – Imperial Guardsmen, perhaps, but just ordinary men all the same.

  ‘Five veteran Ultramarines are a different matter.’

  CHAPTER IV

  Kenjari bent his knees.

  He lifted another shell off the pile and onto his shoulder. It was heavy, but no heavier than the loads he was used to lifting. The repetitive nature of the work was also something he was used to, and it gave him some comfort.

  He straightened up. He turned and took three steps across the earthen enclosure. He waited for the loader up on the platform to turn towards him. He hefted the shell into his arms and turned away. Three steps took him back to the pile of shells. He bent his knees again. He didn’t have to think too hard about what he was doing.

  Kenjari heard the blast of the Earthshaker cannon behind him. Once, he had thought he would never get used to that noise, but now he barely noticed it. He thought he might be losing his hearing, for want of ear protectors.

  This wasn’t too different to working the mines, he told himself, to swinging his pickaxe at an unyielding wall of rock. Except that, if he dropped one of these shells, it could kill him. And an accident in the mines couldn’t?

  Working the mines had been different.

  Kenjari had known how he would likely die, then, and had resigned himself to face it. His future, now, was uncertain and terrifying to him. He had seen the xenos that lived inside the castle – the one that had fallen from the sky – tearing soldiers apart. Others, he had seen cut down by the xenos’ guns or shredded by their bombs.

  The soldiers were supposed to have rescued him. He remembered the flutter of hope he had felt upon seeing their ships, new stars shooting across the firmament.

  He didn’t know how long he had survived, waiting for them, waiting for the Emperor to send someone. Days had passed, but he had had no way to count them.

  He had taken rebreathers from the broken corpses of his workmates, when the filters in his own had become rotten. He had taken their food and water too, though it hadn’t been enough. He had buried himself in the debris of the mine workings, to shelter from the moon’s acidic rainstorms.

  He had seen them, occasionally: the xenos, green-skinned and heavy-browed, on the ramparts of their fortress. He had kept his head down and hoped not to be seen in return. Sometimes, the xenos had spilled out across the moon, apparently in search of salvage, and he had been forced to hide from them.

  They had found a survivor, once. They had dragged him from underneath the wreckage and slaughtered him for sport, making noises that sounded like barks of laughter. Kenjari had told himself it was a mercy; the man was crippled and dehydrated. He felt guilty, all the same, because he might have been able to help him.

  He had thought about searching for other survivors like him, but he had lacked the courage. He had stayed in hiding, except for when he needed new filters or when hunger and thirst overwhelmed him. He had kept on waiting.

  The ships had vanished over the horizon. They must have landed, but some distance away from the castle. Kenjari had waited another day, perhaps two, for the occupants of the ships to come and find him. Then, he had plucked up the nerve and marshalled the last of his strength to go and look for them.

  He couldn’t remember what had happened next. He could only surmise that fatigue had finally claimed him and he had collapsed.

  He had woken in a hospital tent, with something heavy on his chest and a faceless figure hovering over him like an angel of death.

  The figure had been wearing a mask, he had realised; he was wearing one too, in place of his smaller rebreather. The weight on his chest was a mechanical unit, connected to the mask by rubber hoses. Kenjari’s cuts had been dressed and his broken shoulder set. God-Emperor be praised, he had been saved!

  Less than an hour later, he had had a pickaxe in his hand again.

  He had been given a tube of nutrient paste, a mug of water and thirty seconds to ingest both. He had been issued with combat fatigues and a heavy black coat and told to dress in them. A pair of aides had attached flak armour to his shoulders, legs and chest; it was torn and bloodied, leaving no doubt as to the fates of its previous wearers. Heavy belts and holsters and a bulging rucksack had been added to his burden. A helmet, too small for him, had been jammed onto his head.

  Kenjari had been taken out onto the moon’s surface and ordered to dig.

  He had been surrounded by hundreds of other men with axes and shovels, doing the same. He hadn’t been introduced to any of them and none had spoken to him; few would even meet his gaze. They were intent upon their work. With their eyes, their faces, shrouded, they hardly seemed human. He was dressed the same as they were, he had realised; he must have seemed as inhuman to them.

  His new co-workers were nothing if not efficient. They had soon dug a trench, a metre and a half deep and several kilometres wide, out of the obdurate black ground. Dropping down into it they had begun to extend tunnels from it, leading eastward towards the xenos’ castle. He was inching his way back towards the one place he had been desperate to avoid.

  Kenjari hadn’t known that his helmet contained a comm-be
ad until a voice sounded in his ear, informing him that his work shift was over. He followed the others’ lead, waiting for someone to take his axe from him before he joined the throng clambering out of the trenches and returning to their campsite.

  The voice had spoken again, requiring a Trooper 3117-Delta to report to a Commissar Dast. Kenjari had recalled being given a number and, fumbling for his dog tags, had found it. He had had to ask where Dast could be found, and was pointed towards an eagle-shaped drop ship, one of several on the ground.

  Dast had turned the ship’s passenger compartment into his temporary quarters and office. He had been the first – and was still the only – soldier here who seemed to have a name; inside his air-conditioned sanctum, he had taken off his mask too.

  The commissar had heavy jowls, pasty skin and an unnerving, narrow-eyed stare. He was also possessed of a brusque, impatient manner. He had asked Kenjari his name, age, occupation, height, weight, birthplace and medical history, while an aide tapped his answers into a data-slate.

  There were no ships available to take him home, Dast told him. Nor could the Astra Militarum afford to feed a useless mouth. Kenjari had hurried to assure him that he would earn his keep. Dast had nodded, grimly, brought a stamp down hard on top of a sheaf of forms, thrust the forms across his desk towards Kenjari and informed him that now he belonged to the 319th Krieg Siege Regiment.

  He was told to report to the quartermaster to be issued with arms and ammunition. Kenjari had felt his throat drying up. He had tried to explain that he hadn’t been trained to fight, but Dast had dismissed him sharply. He had stepped out of the drop ship’s hatchway in a daze. Suddenly, he was a soldier.

  He had grown to hate Dast almost as much as he feared him.

  His was a constant, interfering presence in the newly-dug trenches; with the drop ships returned to their orbiting cruiser, he wore his mask at all times, but was recognisable by his broad frame and commissar’s cap.

  It was the commissar’s job to enforce discipline, though it seemed to Kenjari that few of the Krieg men needed it. In contrast, Dast could always find fault with Kenjari’s conduct: he wasn’t working quickly enough, hadn’t cleaned his lasgun thoroughly enough or saluted the commissar smartly enough.

  He had threatened to have Kenjari flogged or shot.

  Once, Dast had pressed his bolt pistol up against a Guardsman’s temple and squeezed the trigger. The safety catch had been on; the commissar had called it a warning. Kenjari had learned later that his victim was another non-Krieg citizen, another Agides miner, one whose name he vaguely recalled. He too had escaped the crash of the xenos castle relatively unscathed, to find himself enlisted.

  At last, he had thought, someone he could talk to, someone who might understand.

  By the time his shift had ended, however, the other man had faded into a crowd of black greatcoats and blank-eyed masks, and Kenjari couldn’t find him again.

  He had longed for the sound of conversation, to begin with, if only to break up the monotonous rhythm of the cannons. He had come to appreciate that rhythm, however, and to fear the sounds that disturbed it: the occasional answering crumps from the turrets of the castle; the drones of xenos bombers overhead; or an officer’s voice, coldly feeding life-and-death instructions through his earpiece.

  Thus far, Kenjari had been lucky. He hadn’t been sent over the top of the trenches yet. He hadn’t had to draw the gun that sat so uncomfortably at his hip. When the xenos – ‘orks’, the voices in his earpiece called them – had attacked, he had been left to man his Earthshaker cannon against them from a comfortable distance.

  The closest he had come to the sudden, explosive death he so feared had been when a shadow had passed over his head and his failing ears had thrummed with the roar of aircraft engines. He had dived, instinctively, for cover. His sergeant had hauled him to his feet, screaming in his face – Dast hadn’t been present, fortunately for him – but Kenjari hadn’t been able to hear the reprimand.

  The bomb that had been meant for their emplacement exploded on its lip instead, lighting up the sky and showering them with dirt and shrapnel.

  Kenjari, still shaken, had been thrust back into work. The Earthshaker had been loaded and its barrel cranked skyward, waiting for the enemy to make another pass.

  Instead, the xenos bomber had wheeled around and flown back towards the castle, venting black smoke from an engine pod. It must have been hit by one of the other cannons. Kenjari’s heart had been beating like a hammer, and his face had been drenched in cold sweat behind his mask.

  An hour later, he had been digging again: not a trench this time, but a pit, a mass grave for those who had been less fortunate than he had; rather, for their bloody, dismembered limbs and mangled heads and torsos.

  These past few weeks, he had done a great deal of digging.

  This morning, there had been new stars in the sky again: more xenos, he had feared, until he had learned the truth. The newcomers were more servants of the Imperium: Adeptus Astartes, humanity’s much-vaunted defenders. He had wondered, briefly, if they would defend him too; if they might be the ones to rescue him, after all.

  He had chased the thought away: a foolish dream.

  He knew there was no saving him now. Kenjari knew how he would likely die; at least, where his mortal remains would come to rest: in a burial pit like this one, unidentified, un-mourned and indistinguishable from all the others.

  His future was becoming more certain to him each day.

  And yet, still it scared him witless.

  CHAPTER V

  The tanks advanced on Sergeant Lucien’s mark.

  His Predator Annihilators and Vindicators separated into two columns, grinding their ways around the north and south ends of the Krieg trenches. Their guns had shorter ranges than the static Earthshakers, but would do more damage to their target when they hit it.

  Lucien stood outside the command dugout, reluctant to be confined within it. Inside, the Krieg captain and his commissar pored over a tactical hololith, which was constantly updated by tireless aides as voxed field reports were received.

  Lucien only had to raise his head to overlook the trenches, to see two lines of bright blue ceramite and plasteel converging upon their objective; as always, the sight spurred a patriotic fervour in his hearts.

  ‘Sergeant, what is our mission?’ a slightly slurred voice rumbled inside his ear. It was Ultracius, voxing him from the surface.

  ‘We are to take the star fort,’ he answered.

  ‘An Imperial star fort?’ the Dreadnought queried.

  ‘In ork hands,’ Lucien reminded him, patiently. When his body was blasted to pieces, Ultracius had lost some of his brain functions too. His long-term memory had survived intact, and he liked to reminisce about campaigns from many centuries past. More recent events, however, often proved elusive to him.

  ‘Have you been briefed on the ork theft of the star fort?’ asked Lucien.

  There had been a fleet review in the Ultima Segmentum, so the story went. In the midst of a thousand Imperial Navy ships, the Indestructible had had its shields down, conserving power, and the orks had swooped on it.

  It was whispered that the star fort shouldn’t even have been there. It had been brought out of hiding at the insistence of a vainglorious Lord High Admiral, overriding the objections of the tech-priests to whom it had been assigned. The orks had been searching for the Indestructible – for the Emperor knew what reason – and now they had known exactly where to find it.

  ‘They towed it away,’ recalled Ultracius with an effort.

  The orks had been flying hijacked vessels themselves, and had not been detected until it was far too late. They had boarded the star fort and quickly seized control of it. A protective energy bubble had flared around its ramparts and its crew had ceased to respond to urgent hails. The rest of the fleet had reacted too slowly to what was happening in front of them. They had destroyed a handful of the orks’ tugs, but not enough to stop them. The Indestru
ctible had plunged into the warp and was lost.

  It had not been seen since that fateful day – until now.

  ‘Orks!’ cried Ultracius, as if Lucien hadn’t just said so. ‘Greenskins hijacked the Indestructible.’

  ‘Now we’re taking it back,’ said Lucien. Now I’m taking it back, he thought. Sicarius had placed him in command of the operation, at least the above-ground part of it. He had reserved the most dangerous assignment for himself, still eager to make his mark. When the story of this incident was told in future, Lucien would be named in it, although his captain would probably be the story’s hero.

  That alone, he thought, was reason enough to fight this battle. He didn’t have to know anything more. It didn’t matter why Khargask wanted the Indestructible, nor why the Adeptus Mechanicus wanted it back. It only mattered to him that they did.

  More voices were breaking over the vox-net now.

  He picked out a report from the battle-brother at the head of the northern armour column; he was closing into weapons range of his looming target.

  Lucien told him to start firing as soon as he could, and reminded him to aim for the gun emplacements in the star fort’s north-west-facing quadrant.

  He watched as the tanks, having bypassed the trenches, began to fan out into two lines in front of them. The Indestructible’s guns – according to Techmarine Renius – had a long range; once they were close enough to start shelling the star fort, so would it be able to shell them in return.

  The Krieg captain voxed Lucien: ‘Let me send my men over the top.’

  Lucien scowled. ‘Not yet.’ What was the man thinking of, he wondered?

  A rumble of gunfire swelled from the east, like approaching thunder, almost drowning out the rhythmic crumps of the Earthshaker cannons. Staccato flashes lit the sky like lightning. The orks had fired first, the vox-chatter informed Lucien, the gunners behind their walls succumbing to their own impatience. He ordered his tanks to hold their positions, let their enemies waste as much ammunition as they wished.