The Relic - Jonathan Green Read online

From the Space Marines’ position at the mouth of the pass, sheltered by the shadows of the looming wind-scoured ice sculptures that surmounted the ridge in impossible overhangs, Brother Jarold surveyed the rift in the ice below them.

  The ork-dug crevasse was a hive of seemingly disorganised industry. Everywhere he looked he saw orks. The foul xenos covered the glacier in a thick, dense green carpet as they swarmed over the dig site, the clamour of their mining machines ringing from the ice walls around them. There were customised digging machines, and other ork vehicles had been pressed into strange service here too. Some of these machines bore banner poles, bearing the iconography that demonstrated the ork tribe’s loyalty. The sight of the Scarred Ork again – the ugly steel-cut tribal glyph bearing a rust red lightning bolt scar that bisected its crude simulacra features – filled Brother Jarold with both righteous satisfaction and indignation in equal measure.

  They had found the one tribe that Jarold had hoped they would. The orks labouring within the ice pit were of the Blood Scar tribe. Truly the Emperor was smiling upon their endeavours that day.

  But focusing again upon the coarse alien totem Jarold felt rage burn within him like he had not known since the moment the reconstructed warboss Morkrull Grimskar had made his cowardly escape, taking the body of the Emperor’s Champion Ansgar with him as he teleported out of the mekboy’s crumbling lab smothered within the foetid green depths of the equatorial jungle.

  ‘Is there a teleportation device somewhere here?’ Jarold demanded of the Techmarine, watching the waves of green corposant rolling across the underside of the thick clouds that covered the arctic valley. He had to be certain.

  ‘I have recalibrated the signum and fine-tuned the signal, brother,’ the Techmarine said. ‘And there is.’

  Excitement pulsed through the husk of Jarold’s mortal remains locked within the life-preserving amniotic tank of the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus.

  Had they really tracked down their long-sought-for quarry at last? Was the warboss here? And if he was, was Brother Ansgar with him?

  Jarold gazed down into the crater again and treacherous doubt began to creep between his thoughts of righteousness revenge. But it was not the size of the ork horde that filled Brother Jarold’s mind with appalled awe and wonder but the effigy that they had virtually finished digging out of the solid ice of the glacier that had spilled between the frost-chiselled peaks into this valley like some great frozen and fractured river.

  Venerable Rhodomanus saw it too. And remembered.

  The war machine. An appalling amalgamation of scavenged weapons and armour, the product of unholy alien engineering and genetically pre-programmed habit, the living embodiment of ork savagery and the relentless desire for war.

  The monster – for it was a monster – crashed across the glacier, decimating the Crimson Fists’ frontline. The Space Marines brought their armour and heavy weapons to bear but it was too little compared to the might of the monstrous god-machine that now marched to war before them.

  Desperate times called for desperate measures and Rhodomanus had never known them more desperate. Something had to be done to bring about the destruction of this angry god.

  And so, supported by his noble brethren Fists, he had strode forth to conquer the beast in one final act of self-sacrifice. His battle-brothers falling one by one at his side, giving their lives – all of them – that he might complete his final mission, weathering shoota, kannon, gatler and a storm of rokkits, the ancient was able to breach the stompa’s shields and place the thermal charges at its very feet.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ he intoned, quietly resigned to his fate.

  Then all was white noise, heat and light.

  For one brief moment the ice of millennia became a torrent of liquid water again and the blazing stompa sank beneath the sudden waves. The force of the blast hurled Rhodomanus across the sky like a blazing comet and he thought he heard the Emperor calling him to serve at his side in the next world…

  ‘The idol lives,’ Rhodomanus breathed.

  It was clear to all – and not just Techmarine Isendur’s practised eye – that the orks had finished carving the remains of the war machine from the body of the glacier and were now busy attempting to reactivate it; re-fuelling it, testing its growling motive systems and firing off bursts of random weapons-fire from its many and varied weapon emplacements.

  There was a hungry roar of pistons firing and thick billows of greasy black smoke gouted from the proliferation of smoke-stacks and exhaust flues that rose from the back of the alien war idol.

  ‘That, I take it, is not the source of the signal we have been tracking, is it?’ Jarold quizzed the Techmarine standing beside him.

  ‘No, brother. That is.’ Isendur pointed with his power axe.

  ‘I see it,’ Rhodomanus said.

  Jarold looked again, refocusing his optical sensors, and then he saw it too.

  It was a vast assemblage of iron beams and girders, crackling brass orbs and endless spools of cabling. It was supported by an immense scaffold and yet the whole massive structure had been hidden by the blizzard and the bulk of the ork effigy standing before it.

  The device culminated in a huge gun-barrelled probe that Jarold imagined to be a beam transmitter, supported on strong gantry arms.

  ‘By Sigismund’s sword!’ Jarold gasped.

  ‘Its designation in this warzone is an ork teleporter, I believe,’ Isendur said.

  ‘We should warn the fleet,’ Jarold said. ‘We cannot allow the xenos filth continued access to such weaponry or technology,’ he added as he pondered the matter in hand. It was clear to Jarold now that the orks intended to teleport their scavenged stompa out of the ice-locked Dead Lands to be used on another war front and bolster their forces there. Such a reinforcement could turn the tide of battle in the orks’ favour. Such a thing could not be allowed to happen.

  ‘Yes, brother,’ Isendur replied.

  Tense moments later, with Jarold watching the heavens as if he expected the Divine Fury to deliver a thunderbolt directly from heaven against the stompa, the Techmarine made his report. ‘The interference being generated by the teleporter that we detected from orbit is now preventing my signal from getting through to the crusade fleet,’ he said, delivering his bad tidings without any obvious emotion.

  They were alone down there.

  ‘We are going to have to deal with the stompa and the teleporter ourselves,’ Rhodomanus declared. ‘We cannot allow the greenskins to make it away from here with their idol intact. It is against the will of the Emperor.’

  ‘Then we shall face the enemy in battle once again; fight them hand to hand if that is what it takes,’ Jarold said, his assault cannon whining as it began to run up to speed. ‘Just the way we like it.’

  With the roar of bike engines and heavy armour running at maximum speed, the Black Templars poured through the ridge pass and into the carved crevasse in the ice before the orks had any warning as to what was happening.

  ‘No pity! No remorse! No fear!’ Brother Jarold boomed as he tramped down the glacial slopes towards the great ork-gouged hole, the toe-hooks of his Dreadnought feet locking him securely in place on the treacherous ice.

  ‘There is only the Emperor!’ Rhodomanus joined, urging the crusading Space Marines on. ‘He is our shield and our protector!’

  First came the bikes and attack bikes, pouring over the lip of the ridge, past the clumping Dreadnought. Then came the Razorbacks and the Rhinos, the heavy armour grinding over the ice of the glacier, pounding it to shards beneath their tracks, heavy bolter fire riddling both the ice sheet and those orks that had mustered enough awareness to try to do something about the approaching Space Marines.

  The Land speeder squadron hurtled over the ridge after the rest of the Templar armour past the advancing battleforce, the whub-whub-whub of their engines thrumming through the ice, the To
rnado’s assault cannon rattling off hard rounds into the milling orks as they hurried to respond to this new threat.

  With a whooshing roar, the Typhoon fired off a barrage of missiles. The rockets corkscrewed through the air and impacted in a series of scathing detonations amidst the moving ork armour. Bodies, armour plating and wheels were thrown into the air to land in broken burning piles.

  With a searing scream, the lascannon mounted on Techmarine Isendur’s Razorback fired, a blinding spear of light burning through the constant snow flurries and illuminating the crevasse like an incendiary shell-burst. A moment later the crater was illuminated again as an ork halftrakk exploded in a sheet of flame, the las-blast having hit both its fuel tank and the rokkits loaded into the back of it.

  There was the crack and crump of frag grenades detonating amidst the greenskin horde, and orks fell in their dozens.

  Some of the orks had climbed aboard their trukks and bikes again. They revved their engines as they turned their vehicles to face the oncoming Black Templars armour.

  The orks were rallying. Jarold’s crusaders had made the most of the advantage that stealth and the blessings of the Emperor had brought them but now the enemy were starting to organise a cohesive defence.

  As war trukks and heavy orkish bikes began to converge on the advancing Templar armour, those battle-brothers piloting the fleet’s venerated vehicles urged them forwards, Techmarine Isendur making supplication to the Omnissiah in the same unmodulated tone, over and over.

  At the bottom of the crater, in the shadow of the dug-out idol, the two sides met with a roar of over-revving engines and the scream of shearing metal. Sparks flew, armour plating buckled, axles sheared and fuel tanks ruptured. Orks were thrown over the hulls of Rhinos and land speeders. Milling grots were crushed under the tracks of Rhinos and ork bikes alike. Others among the horde were gunned down by the blazing, blessed bolters of the Templars, the ork guns unable to match the reliability or accuracy of the Space Marines’ arsenal.

  But despite their primitive design there was one thing that the ork guns had over the Templars’ weapons; there were more of them. Far more. It was becoming painfully apparent that the Templars were drastically outnumbered, at least twenty to one. Although the Emperor’s chosen were renowned for their fighting prowess, those were odds that tested even a Space Marine. There was a very real danger that sheer weight of numbers would see them overwhelmed, if the orks were able to unify their attack.

  But Brother Jarold – now part of the rearguard, finishing off those greenskins that had evaded the Templars’ guns – had realised this would be the case before he had committed his fighting force to this action.

  It was clear that the Blood Scar orks were planning on teleporting the stompa from this location, to deploy elsewhere on Armageddon. Jarold’s plan had always been to infiltrate the dig site and bring down the war-effigy or, failing that, seize and hold the colossal ork teleporter until Isendur found a way to destroy it.

  With a scream of failing engines, Initiate-Pilot Egeslic’s land speeder ploughed into the surface of the glacier: an ork shokk attack gun had made a lucky hit. A gaggle of snarling boyz piled onto the downed speeder, burying Egeslic and Initiate-gunner Fraomar beneath a flurry of thumping axes and stabbing serrated knives.

  The two Rhinos slewed to a halt in the middle of the crater, dropped their hatches and the troops they were carrying poured out in a tide of funereal black and gleaming white. Boltguns barking and chainswords screaming, they met the milling rabble head on. They might be outnumbered, but they were in the thick of battle, which was the only place where a Templar might hope to win his honour-badges.

  Venerable Rhodomanus’s multi-melta pulsed, and a swarm of orks died as their blood boiled and their own bodily fluids broiled their internal organs.

  The ice field was lit up again, this time as a sphere of actinic light exploded into life like a miniature sun at the periphery of the Templar lines. The explosion pushed a great wave of concussive force before it as the land speeder Typhoon and its remaining payload of missiles were obliterated by a direct hit from the stompa’s now active deth kannon.

  Brother Jarold stood firm, as ork bikes tumbled end over end past him, carried before the bow-wave of explosive force. He then turned his assault cannon on the surviving greenskins now running from the epicentre of destruction, holy wrath pounding through what little remained of him that was still flesh and blood.

  ‘Brother Jarold,’ Techmarine Isendur’s voice crackled over the comm-net, the interference caused by the orks’ unstable teleporter technology affecting even close range communications.

  ‘What is it, brother? Report.’

  ‘We have our objective.’ Isendur declared with something dangerously like emotion tingeing his words. ‘The teleporter is ours.’

  ‘Your objective is the teleporter; reconvene there,’ Jarold commanded, his battle-brothers hearing him through the comm in their helmets, his words also carrying to them over the bestial roars and bolter fire of the battlefield. ‘Repeat, rally at the teleporter.’

  The device was huge, on a monumental scale that even an ancient such as Venerable Rhodomanus had never witnessed before. It was too big a target to miss. The Templars had teleport technology themselves, of course, hidden within the bowels of the Forgeship Goliath where it was carefully tended and operated by the Techmarine Masters of the Forge and their servitors, but they had nothing approaching the size of this brutal piece of esoteric machinery.

  Techmarine Isendur felt something approaching heretical awe on seeing the monstrous device arrayed before him in all its terrible, alien glory.

  The Templars were brutally outnumbered by the thuggish orks, but by launching a surprise attack, the vengeful Space Marines had been able to penetrate far into the dig site; the either arrogant or idiotic orks having failed to post anything like enough sentries to create an effective defensive perimeter. They had probably not thought to be interrupted out here in the trackless frozen wastes of the Dead Lands for little could survive in these bitter wastes other than the alien orks. But then, from what Jarold had witnessed first-hand, it seemed that orks could survive pretty much anywhere.

  The Templars’ fast-moving, heavy armour had been able to penetrate the ork crater that held the ice-locked stompa with ease, the Razorbacks and Rhinos ploughing into the aliens and their scratch-built vehicles as if sainted Sigismund himself were smiting the foul xenos from beyond the stars, where he now stood at Primarch Dorn’s right hand.

  But now the initially bewildered orks had rallied and were mounting an effective counter-attack against the Black Templars’ lightning assault.

  Despite the crusading Chapter’s prowess in hand-to-hand combat, even hardened fighters such as Brother Jarold’s avenging warriors would be hard-pressed to overcome when facing such impossibly overwhelming odds.

  The best they could hope for was to sell themselves dear. They might not have found their lost Brother Ansgar or their nemesis the warlord Morkrull Grimskar, but they could end their crusade here, denying the ork host the war machine that the greenskins had fought so hard to win again.

  Bikes – in both the black and white livery of the Templars and the scruffy red kustom paint jobs of the orks – roared past Brother Jarold as he stomped across the battlefield. He took aim and fired. The front wheel of a warbike that was pursuing a Space Marine attack bike – its gunner whooping wildly as it took pot-shots at the noble Templars – disintegrated in a hail of cannon fire. The wheel struts dug into the ice, halting the bike’s forward motion. The vehicle flipped over, hurling the ork gunner into the path of a hurtling land speeder – the surprised-looking greenskin bouncing off the hull with the unmistakable sound of breaking bone – while the bike’s driver was crushed beneath the great weight of the bike landing on top of it and crushing its spine.

  Jarold turned his bolter on a gaggle of greenskins that charged him, larg
e-calibre shootas and clumsy chain-bladed weapons in their meaty paws. A burst of flesh-shredding gunfire and then he was through. Nothing now stood between him and the ork teleporter.

  And he wasn’t the only one to have made it to the objective. Sergeant Bellangere had led the men under his command by example – bolt pistol in one hand, chainsword in the other dripping with alien gore – and hadn’t lost a single member of his squad in the process. He and his troops were even now finishing off the last of the resistance being put up by the orks that crawled all over the vast gantries of the teleporter, an augmented mekboy falling to Bellangere’s gutting chainblade.

  Jarold turned to survey the smoking craters and tight knots of fighting that characterised the battlefield dig-site. The crumpled wreckage of a devastated Rhino lay nearby, as did the smouldering remains of a bike. Most of the Templar armour had made it through to the objective, but not all. Jarold caught glimpses of scratched black and blistered white amidst the bodies of the slain between billows of smoke from burning wrecks strewn across the combat zone.

  On seeing his fallen battle-brothers Jarold felt his blood boil. The machine-spirit that resided with him inside his Dreadnought body informed him of the names of each and every one of the fallen – Initiate Garr and Gunner Heolstor, Brother Derian, Brother Eghan and Brother Clust of Squad Garrond, Clust’s heavy bolter lying useless on the ice under his eviscerated body.

  Brother Jarold was shaken from his enraged reverie by what felt like an earthquake.

  The ground shook, splinters of ice twenty metres tall breaking free of the glacier as the stompa began to move. The orks had finally coaxed their idol into unnatural life once more.

  Like Brother Rhodomanus it had lain locked in the ice for the last fifty years. Like Brother Rhodomanus it now had a second chance to finish what Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka’s hordes had started half a century ago.

  At the growl of the effigy’s engines, filthy smoke poured from its chimney-exhausts, filling the cerulean blue sky with stinking black clouds.