Stormseer - David Annandale Read online

  ‘I will accompany the Scouts,’ he said.

  Temur’s pacing stopped dead. He gave Ghazan a sharp look, but didn’t respond to him. He spoke instead to Kusala again. ‘When will you be ready to leave?’

  ‘Within the hour, khan.’

  ‘Good. Make ready, then.’

  Kusala saluted and left. To the rest of the sergeants, Temur said, ‘We will make what repairs we can to the bikes and Land Speeders. We will have constant, rotating patrols out there. We know the orks are coming back. I would have us hit them before they get so close again.’ He glanced at Meixner and visibly stopped short of issuing commands to the colonel.

  If Meixner noticed the near slight, he didn’t show it. ‘We will be ready as well,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, colonel.’ To the White Scars he said, ‘To war, then. For the Khan and the Emperor!’

  The war cry was echoed, and the sergeants left the command room, as did Meixner. Temur made no move to go. He stood beside the tacticarium table, as still as he had been restless a few minutes before. Ghazan remained where he was. The two of them waited until they were alone.

  ‘You are needed here, zadyin arga,’ Temur said. ‘On the front lines.’

  ‘Perhaps. But this is where I cannot be. I am fated to be elsewhere.’

  Temur’s scars darkened again. ‘You saw what we were up against. Your presence tonight was the difference between our provisional triumph and disaster.’

  ‘That is not a certainty.’

  ‘The certainty is that our losses would have been much greater.’

  Ghazan inclined his head once, conceding the point. He said nothing.

  Temur began to pace again. As he did, he tapped a finger against the surface of the table. He struck it with the rigid tak, tak, tak of a march. ‘You arrived on my ship without any notice, at the last moment before the commencement of the mission,’ he said.

  Again, Ghazan bowed his head. What the khan said was true. Ghazan saw no need to expand on that truth.

  Temur moved to the far side of the table. The tapping continued. He seemed to be expecting more of an answer. When he received none, he said, ‘I received you with, I believe, the respect due to your office.’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘Yet you will not do me the courtesy of telling me why you are here.’

  ‘I do not intend to be cryptic, khan. The full contours of my fate here are hidden to me. I have come to do battle with a powerful enemy. That is the full truth.’

  ‘And you don’t know who or what or where this enemy is?’

  ‘No.’ Ghazan gestured at the tacticarium table. ‘But my sense is that it waits for me in the north.’

  ‘Has it not occurred to you that this enemy might be drawn to the battlefield here? I have a great respect for the visions of Stormseers, Ghazan, but are they not open to different interpretations? You just admitted that the details are hidden from you.’

  Though his soul already knew the answer to the khan’s question, Ghazan did not dismiss it. He considered it long enough to confirm his certainty that he was choosing the right path. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This foe will not come to me.’

  ‘Then let the Scouts do their work, and in the meantime, fight where you are needed.’

  ‘I am needed in the north. With the Scouts.’

  ‘You are wrong. Your destiny may be pulling you there, but that is not where you should be at this time.’

  Ghazan was silent for a moment. ‘I am sorry to disappoint you, Temur Khan. But fate is not subject to pragmatism. I have no choice.’ He said the last sentence as if to speak it were to cast aside all doubt. He brought his arms to his chest in the sign of the aquila and left before Temur could answer.

  He did pause in the corridor outside the command centre. He understood Temur’s growing anger. His actions would appear, from the outside, to be selfish and quite possibly foolish. He removed his left gauntlet and held his staff with his bare hand. He felt the ridges of the protective sigils. He closed his eyes and opened himself up to the warp.

  The tug was there immediately. The chains of destiny were pulling at him with even more insistence. At their end, the figure of the foe awaited. The shape was no clearer than it had been before. But what it radiated had come into focus: triumph, bestial delight, destructive hunger. And power. Power that somehow was not entirely inherent to the foe itself. Power that was being fed, and was growing. Power that Ghazan must extinguish or die trying.

  The Stormseer opened his eyes. Temur was right to think that the White Scars had little time before the war became entirely a defensive one and was lost. But the key was in the north. That was where time was slipping away. Time for the White Scars, time for Lepidus. Time for many systems beyond.

  CHAPTER TWO

  They left at dawn, heading north from the bastion, travelling at close to top speed for several hours. Ghazan was on his bike. In the Land Speeder Storm were Kusala and the four Scouts: Tegusal, Ariq, Bokegan and Yekejin. Day on the moon was a smear. Visibility was poor, thanks to a perpetual ground fog that was knee-height over much of the land, but rose as high as three metres in patches.

  The ork army, though, was easy to spot. Ghazan and Kusala slowed their vehicles when they saw the greenskin horde appear over the horizon. They veered east, giving the orks a wide berth. The land had more pronounced rolls in that direction, and they were able, as they drove over the hilltops, to observe the size of the greenskin force and vox a report back to Temur. The numbers were greater yet, but there were no tanks. There were no vehicles of any kind.

  ‘I wish those were glad tidings,’ the khan told them.

  Ghazan agreed. In the initial stages of the first assault, there had been no sign of tanks. And then suddenly they had been there.

  ‘Well, they’re not hauling them down the road with them,’ Kusala observed. ‘That much we know now.’

  The greenskin army stretched for kilometres. Its clamour reached further yet. The moon’s day was filled with the yells and laughter and crude songs of the beasts. The cacophony of the voices was backed by the beat of thousands of trudging feet and the clanking of weapons and armour. It sickened Ghazan to think that he was looking at another nomadic army. That there should be any parallel between the orks and the culture of Chogoris was obscene. But the distorted, monstrous suggestion of the familiar was before him. It underscored the need to exterminate these xenos.

  But his fight was not with that army. Not with those orks. Not now.

  Half an hour after they left the marching horde behind, bike and speeder climbed a ridge, then stopped. Before them was a wide plain that had been transformed by the orks’ presence.

  ‘I do not like to credit the greenskins with genius,’ Sergeant Kusala muttered over the vox. ‘But the bastards can make our life hell without even trying.’

  The plain had been turned into a refuse dump covering hundreds of hectares. Broken and half-finished vehicles and tonnes of scrap metal covered the area. The fog eddied over and between the detritus, concealing and revealing jagged edges, senseless assemblages, and endless, endless waste. Scattered irregularly were much larger piles of cast-offs, some of them the size of low hills. Smoke rose from fissures between the debris, and from exhaust pipes poking out like toxic weeds. There was a deep, arrhythmic beat that Ghazan could feel coming up from the ground. It was strong enough that he could see the contours of his bike vibrate slightly in time. Now and then, flame would belch up from the plain. There was no consistency, though. Ghazan didn’t see the burn-off emerge from the same spot twice.

  ‘How did they do this so quickly?’ Tegusal wondered. ‘Or have they been here longer than we thought? Is this deliberate?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Bokegan asked. ‘It exists. Now we have to deal with it.’

  ‘Brother Tegusal’s questions are relevant,’ Ghazan said. ‘If the orks have been here
longer than we thought, that means they hid. Successfully. That means they planned. There is already considerable evidence for this. They established their heavy armour facility on an uninhabited moon, giving them plenty of opportunity to build up their arsenal unmolested before they attacked Lepidus Prime. Do those actions sound like the familiar tactics of orks?’

  Tegusal began, ‘On Armageddon–’

  Kusala cut him off. ‘We are not fighting that enemy. There cannot be two orks in the galaxy like that.’

  ‘Still,’ Ghazan said. ‘This is unusual. And in close combat, these orks seem... more resilient.’

  ‘Stormseer,’ Kusala said, ‘do you have any good news to bring to the table? Or is the galaxy already doomed?’

  Ghazan smiled. He gestured at the view before them. ‘Well, brother-sergeant, there can be little doubt that the greenskins are producing their vehicles somewhere here.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Kusala. The grunted syllable might have been amusement, or it might have been displeasure. With the sergeant, it was often both.

  ‘They’re building the tanks underground,’ Ariq said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kusala, ‘but where? Everywhere?’ A gout of flame appeared at the base of the descent to the plain. It vanished. A moment later, another appeared a hundred metres further in. ‘No industry should work like this.’

  ‘Nothing about the greenskins should work the way it does,’ Ghazan said. ‘It is pointless, perhaps even dangerous, to try to reason it out. We must accept that it is so, and deal with its reality.’

  ‘All very true, Stormseer,’ Kusala answered, ‘and all very well. That doesn’t help us, though. We cannot be sure of destroying everything beneath the surface without deploying cyclonic torpedoes.’

  ‘We are here to reclaim the system, not destroy it,’ Ghazan said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Where do we begin to look?’ Ariq asked.

  ‘Near the bigger piles?’ Tegusal suggested.

  Kusala thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘There has to be some way in. Those are as likely spots as any.’

  Ghazan agreed. The tug of fate was stronger yet. The battle was waiting for him underground. He was not close enough yet, in time or in space, to know more precisely where to find the enemy.

  There were no orks visible on the surface. Kusala decided to favour mobility over stealth, so they kept to the vehicles and rode down onto the plain. They started with the nearest hill of debris, about two hundred metres to the north-east of their position. They circled it twice. There was no entrance. Nor did they see any means by which the discarded metal had arrived here in the first place. They moved on to the next hill, with no better luck.

  As they reached the third, not far from the centre of the plain, there was a shrieking grind of gears. It came from beneath the surface, a few metres away from the north face of the heap. The hill began to shake. Slag tumbled down the slope. The lower portion of the mound heaved, and a trap door rose on hydraulic lifts. A maw the size of a Thunderhawk troop compartment gaped. The interior was a throat descending beneath the surface of the plain. From within came the screech of metal against metal.

  Ghazan and Kusala steered bike and Storm around the curve of the hill and killed the engines. They kept the weapons pointed towards the entrance.

  ‘Did they spot us?’ Yekejin asked.

  ‘We’ll know in a moment,’ Kusala answered. ‘Do not fire without my order.’

  They watched a treaded vehicle crawl out from the interior. It was loaded down with scrap. It was followed by another, then a third.

  They were driven by grots. The diminutive greenskins had become permanent parts of the machines: the creatures’ legs had been amputated, and their torsos emerged from the centre of the guidance mechanisms. The ends of their arms had been fused with the gears and steering wheels. They were almost servitors, except servitors did not howl and complain about their fate.

  The grots did. Their litany of injustice continued without pause as they drove up the hill. The box of each truck tipped to the side. The dumped loads ran down the hill, creating a small avalanche of metal. The vehicles then backed up. They disappeared once more into the maw. Filthy smoke billowed out as the door lowered itself shut again. Debris continued to tumble down the side of the heap, covering the door once more with accidental camouflage.

  ‘Well,’ said Tegusal. ‘I suppose that’s one way in.’

  ‘It might be a way directly into one of their infernal machines,’ Kusala said. ‘It is clearly not used by the warrior greenskins. Better to find how they get in and out.’ He pointed to the door. ‘Note this location, though. We may yet have to use it.’

  ‘The other debris hills are likely more of the same,’ said Ghazan.

  The sergeant nodded. ‘Then we proceed on foot.’ He looked around. ‘This is close enough to pass for the centre. We’ll start here.’

  Twenty metres away, there was a pile of discarded vehicle parts. With the addition of a camo-net, the bike and the Storm blended in with that confusion of metal. The Space Marines began a search that moved out in a spiral from the hill.

  The hunt felt like drudge work. The orks had forced them into a humiliating slog through industrial offal. There were no options. The entrances to the complex, if that was what it was beneath their feet, could be doors or something as simple and lazy as holes in the ground. They would be hard to spot. Maybe the orks were hiding them, but it could also be that the greenskins simply weren’t bothering to mark them.

  ‘Here,’ Ariq called. He had found a chute. There was a rough ladder leading down into the depths.

  ‘Right,’ said Kusala. ‘Let’s see what sort of damage we can do.’ He started down the rungs.

  Ghazan waited as the other Scouts followed the sergeant. He frowned at the opening. He would have expected to feel something if he was moving closer to his fated appointment. Something as simple as rising heartbeats, or an intensified anticipation. He did not. Somehow, this route was not getting him closer to where he needed to be. He saw no better possibility for the moment, though, so he descended after the Scouts.

  The chute ended in a passage that appeared to have been blasted out as quickly as possible. Its width varied every ten metres or so, making it more like a series of linked caves than a tunnel. The floor was littered with bits of assembly.

  The Scouts used beam-lamps to illuminate the passage, though empty fixtures on the walls suggested there had once been lighting here. The tunnel led to a larger cavern where there were even more bits of incomplete war machines. They looked like they had been on their way to being eccentric variations of tanks, and had been abandoned because they did not work, or their creators grew bored. On the far side of the derelict workshop was another tunnel, from which came the noise of machinery. Ghazan looked down the short passage. The clanking grew louder. After a few minutes, he saw a grot-driven trash hauler arrive. It paused a moment, as if waiting to receive an addition to its load, then moved on.

  ‘This doesn’t connect to anything except their disposal system,’ he said.

  Kusala joined him at the passageway. ‘Then it seems we are fated to take that route.’

  Ghazan winced at the sergeant’s use of fated. It was wrong. No, he thought, not this way. ‘That will not serve,’ he said.

  Kusala turned to face him. ‘Why not? Clearly, construction is going on at the other end of that line.’

  Ghazan shook his head. The tug of destiny was suddenly strong, and it was pulling him away from this path. ‘That may be so, but it is not what we seek.’

  Kusala answered slowly, choosing his words with care. ‘The khan gave us,’ he gestured to his Scouts, ‘the mission of pinpointing, and if possible sabotaging, the greenskin manufactorum. Do you know something, Stormseer, to suggest this route will not take us to our target?’

  Now Ghazan was cautious as he answered. Thoug
h he outranked Kusala, he did not want to put him in the position of having to choose between two contradictory sets of orders. But there was no question of taking this path. In this, he did not believe he was being selfish. If the struggle he faced was so formidable that it sent ripples from the future to the present, then it would have an importance that went beyond the personal. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If we go this way, we will not reach our goal.’

  Kusala paused a long while. His face was concealed behind his helmet, but Ghazan could guess the doubts written on it. He could see them in the expressions of the Scouts as they waited for a decision. Finally, Kusala said, ‘Are you aware of an alternative?’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Then–’

  ‘Not yet. Give me a few minutes, brother-sergeant. Will you do that?’

  ‘Of course, zadyin arga.’ The respect due to Ghazan’s position permitted no other response.

  ‘Thank you.’ Ghazan wasn’t sure if Kusala was aware of the friction between himself and the khan. But he wanted the sergeant to know that he did not take his cooperation for granted. ‘This is necessary,’ he added.

  Kusala nodded, non-committal. He stayed where he was.

  Ghazan left the others and retraced their steps to the chute, and climbed back to the surface. He stood in the centre of the orks’ landscape of waste and turned around slowly. He stopped looking for a logical point of entry. There would be none, not in the normal sense of logical, not with the greenskins. The chambers below were proof of that. How many other semi-discrete workshops would they find if they kept looking? Some might be occupied, some not. Kusala was right that following the disposal line would bring them to an active facility. But if the manufactorum was spread out in bits and pieces, in haphazard fashion, underneath the full expanse of this plain, the White Scars could be searching for days and find nothing of any strategic value. There were great questions here. Not just where the tank-construction facilities were, but how the tanks were arriving at the battlefield. If the vehicles were being built here, how were they leaving? Shouldn’t there be a steady stream of them emerging from the ground at some point?