Knight of Talassar - Steve Lyons Read online

  There had to be a way up through the wreckage, Sicarius thought, and into the Ramilies itself. His gaze strayed upwards, but alighted upon something else instead: the rounded edge of another large structure, relatively intact, welded to the star fort’s hull; something that had not been in the plans.

  It’s an engine pod, he realised. They were fighting almost directly underneath an engine pod! Was it operational, he wondered? If so, then Khargask only had to fire it, only had to operate a series of control runes somewhere, and Sicarius, the other members of his combat squad and their enemies would all be incinerated.

  He wondered why a Ramilies-class star fort – never meant to fly under its own power – had been fitted with an engine in the first place, and by whom? Khargask could have been the culprit, of course; Sicarius, however, suspected otherwise. There would have to be more of them, he thought. There would have to be hundreds of engine pods on the hull to stand a chance of lifting such a colossal mass.

  He needed to talk to Techmarine Renius.

  These thoughts – and more – raced through his mind in a second. A second too long, the captain chided himself inwardly. His brothers appeared to be getting the better of their enemies, but he knew how suddenly the tides of battle could turn.

  He saw an ork wielding a huge but primitive-looking blunderbuss, apparently fashioned from a pair of cannon barrels roped together. It brought the weapon to bear on Brother Lumic, and Sicarius shoulder-charged it, throwing off its aim as it fired.

  The ork peppered its own allies with explosive pellets. In its blind fury, it turned its gun around and clubbed Sicarius with the butt. The impact did more damage to the blunderbuss than it did to his power armour. An answering blow from his sword to the greenskin’s shoulder drew blood.

  There was no turning back now, even had he wanted to.

  If that engine should fire, then its superheated exhaust fumes would billow out through the surrounding tunnels. There would be no escaping them; not even an Ultramarine would be able to outrun them. The only safe place from the inferno would be inside the star fort itself – and the only way to reach the star fort was through the orks.

  Now, then, more than ever, it was imperative that they won this battle quickly.

  And with the Emperor’s blessing, thought Sicarius as he plunged into the heart of the melee, Khargask’s attention may just be held elsewhere. He may not have understood that he is facing not flesh-and-blood soldiers this time, but something more deadly, more powerful by far – and we may surprise him yet.

  CHAPTER IX

  Dast had left the shelter of the command dugout.

  He strode through the trenches purposefully. He had never seen them so devoid of life before. He had already passed three abandoned cannon emplacements.

  The captain had dismissed him without argument or question, with barely a glance at him. He had been too busy counting the casualty reports.

  As a commissar, he had been trained to be dispassionate. Sometimes, however, a feeling took him by surprise. Right now, he was feeling angry. He was keeping it in check, clenching his fists tightly.

  He was looking for Sergeant Lucien. He was surprisingly hard to find, considering his size; he moved more quietly than Dast would have imagined.

  At last, he caught a glimpse of shiny blue inside one of the enclosures. He stood in the entranceway and cleared his throat, calling attention to himself.

  Lucien was lost in thought, or perhaps he was voxing orders inside his helmet. Dast didn’t doubt that his presence had been noted, however. He waited impatiently until the Ultramarine deigned to acknowledge him.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he said, crisply. ‘I hoped we could talk.’ What he had to say, he couldn’t broadcast, especially not where the captain could overhear him.

  Lucien looked at him. His helmet rendered him expressionless, but Dast was more than used to that. ‘The battle is going well,’ he rumbled finally, as if that meant there could be nothing more to talk about.

  ‘For your Space Marines, perhaps. My regiment has lost a third of its strength, hundreds of men.’ Reports were still coming in from Krieg sergeants and quartermasters at the front, an endless litany of bloodshed in his ear.

  ‘Your soldiers fight with exceptional courage,’ said Sergeant Lucien.

  ‘They always do,’ said Dast, ‘even when they are sent to the slaughter.’

  Lucien stepped towards him, but the commissar stood his ground. He had never seen a Space Marine up close before today, and it was hard not to feel small and vulnerable in their presence. However, he refused to be intimidated.

  ‘The Ramilies’s generators are failing,’ said Lucien. ‘Its shields have already collapsed in several key areas. We have silenced most of its guns – and all this was made possible by the sacrifice of the Krieg Korpsmen. Had they not drawn the orks’ fire as they did, then our tanks would have been–’

  ‘Your tanks could have bided their time,’ insisted Dast. ‘Your captain, Sicarius, only asked for a distraction.’

  ‘I saw a chance to do more,’ Lucien snapped. ‘Your captain offered me that chance. It was he who offered to send his men out there – I did not ask him. If you have a problem with his decision, you should take it up with him.’

  He was right. Dast made himself breathe before he answered.

  Before he could, there came a renewed peal of thunder from the east, and the vox-net was flooded with fresh incident reports. The orks had got their big guns working again – a whole battery of them – and shells were raining down around the Imperial forces. Perhaps, thought Dast, the guns were never out of action in the first place, and Khargask lured us into a trap.

  His soldiers, those caught in the open, were being eradicated again, by the phalanx. The spiralling numbers of the dead were reported in a flat tone by the voice of a servitor. It was easy to feel detached about those numbers from a distance. Nor was Dast especially concerned about individual Krieg lives. As the captain had said, dying was his people’s sole purpose.

  ‘What would you have me do?’ asked Lucien, unexpectedly. ‘Summon your Guardsmen back here? Have them run the gauntlet of the Ramilies’s guns again?’

  ‘No,’ said Dast. ‘No, I–’

  Lucien clenched a fist. ‘This is only a temporary setback. Khargask believes he can outthink us, but an ork is still an ork.’

  ‘The Death Korps of Krieg are courageous,’ insisted Dast. ‘To a man, they are fearless, loyal and highly disciplined.’ They were the most disciplined soldiers he had encountered; they hardly needed a commissar. ‘Any one of them would surrender his life in a heartbeat, for the smallest advantage.’

  ‘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 shoulder, 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.