Knight of Talassar - Steve Lyons Read online

  Sicarius opened a private channel to him. ‘What’s the situation out there?’ he asked. ‘How high up from the ground are we?’

  ‘I can’t tell from here, Knight of Talassar,’ replied Ultracius. ‘Much higher, though, and these Guardsmen without faces won’t be able to breathe.’

  ‘The Krieg Korpsmen are…?’ He stifled the question. He was already mentally putting the pieces together, beginning to see what must have transpired in his absence. He didn’t much care for the image that was forming. He had to find that control room; apart from any other reason now, for the sake of hundreds of Imperial soldiers – at least, he hoped there were still so many – about to die by asphyxiation.

  ‘Never thought I would say this,’ said Ultracius, ‘about anyone, but these Krieg men are too fearless for their own good.’ He had, in fact, said the same thing more than once about Captain Sicarius himself, if only he could have remembered it.

  A blocked shaft had forced them to take a detour. Sicarius led his battle-brothers up a flight of steps, to what the star fort’s schematics called the command level. The engine room was now one floor below them. They followed a covered walkway with armaplas windows along one side, looking out upon the black sky.

  The orks came to meet them as they rounded the next corner.

  They were in a spacious atrium. Ahead of them, a pair of grand iron doors, inlaid with intricate carvings, stood wide open. Through these, Sicarius could see the Indestructible’s Grand Chamber, once a haven for prayer and reflection.

  Its rows of seats had been uprooted, its statues had been bludgeoned to pieces, while a row of five patterned windows, ten metres tall, had been defaced by crude ork glyphs. The whole place stank of ork faeces.

  A hole had been gouged out of the floor, twenty metres long and about a quarter as wide. Smoke was billowing up through it, along with a sickly green light. ‘The engine control room!’ Sicarius announced. Now, all they had to do was reach it.

  Eight brawny figures stood in their way already, and more were clambering up out of the ragged aperture. They were slobbering at the long-denied prospect of a brawl. The Ultramarines were almost as eager themselves and, for once, Sicarius sent his brothers into the fray ahead of him.

  Two lines of ruthless warriors smashed into each other like opposing tidal waves, and the air was filled with the sounds of revving chainswords, bolts and bullets, the pounding of axes and clubs against plasteel and ceramite. Sicarius’s hand twitched on the pommel of his Tempest Blade, but he held himself back.

  He had hoped the enemy line might give with that first impact, giving him a gap to slip through. It was no use. He should have known that, this close to their leader and his all-important project, the orks would be more disciplined than ever.

  He raised his sword and plunged into the melee.

  The next few minutes were a blur of slicing and shooting and punching, of hate-filled faces coming at him with drooling mouths wide open, of foetid ork breath and ultimately ork blood in his nostrils, the stench strong even through his helmet.

  For every enemy that fell, it seemed that two more emerged from the hole in the Grand Chamber’s floor to replace it. With no time to strategise, Sicarius placed his trust in his own instincts, enhanced by his armour’s auto-senses.

  ‘They’re stronger than the orks we faced below,’ Lumic grunted, ‘as strong as any I’ve ever encountered.’ Clearly, Khargask had held back the best of his mob for his own protection. They parried Sicarius’s blows with almost enough force to send the weapon spinning from his hands. Outnumbered, he couldn’t block all of their blows in return. A massive iron-headed hammer smashed into his ribs, and his helmet readouts told him that his armour had sustained hairline fractures.

  The star fort’s violent shaking only added to the Ultramarines woes, though it hampered the greenskins equally. The floor suddenly tipped away from Sicarius, throwing two orks in front of him off-balance; he helped the first of them on its way with a booted foot to its stomach. It reeled into the second and they toppled and rolled, hopelessly entangled, each howling indignantly at the other.

  Another ork appeared in front of Sicarius to replace them, but he had expected that and was more than ready for it. For the first time, momentarily, he had only a single opponent, and he took full advantage of that opportunity too. A fusillade of plasma bolts left the greenskin blinded and stunned. A follow-up series of swipes from the captain’s Tempest Blade carved it up neatly.

  Not all his battle-brothers were faring as well.

  Brother Gallo had stumbled when the floor had tipped, landing in the midst of five enormous greenskins. They were battering him mercilessly, cracking open his armour and driving him into the ground. Brothers Filion and Lumic were doing their best to help him, but that meant turning their backs on other opponents, which left them vulnerable. Sicarius had to make a painful decision.

  He voxed his squad: ‘Leave Gallo to fend for himself. We can’t afford to be kept on the defensive. We have to reach that control room.’ One life was unimportant, he told himself, when so many more were at stake.

  Next, he voxed Ultracius, out on the ramparts, again. ‘We need you down here,’ he said grimly, knowing that the Dreadnought could lock onto the source of his transmission and find him.

  ‘On my way,’ came the immediate reply.

  From under the floor, Sicarius heard a series of small explosions, and the sound of orks cursing as they spluttered to draw breath. He heard one voice, deeper and more strident than the others, booming angrily as the floor bucked again beneath his feet. What are they doing down there? The background rumble of engines burped and hiccupped, then resumed in a slightly more throaty tone than before.

  ‘Renius?’

  ‘It sounds like… they’re actually trying to make a warp jump,’ the Techmarine returned his vox. His voice was strained, as well it might be; he was on the back foot against a pair of axe-wielding brutes. He employed his servo-arm as a weapon, clawing at one ork’s face, gouging blood out of its eyes as he struggled to hold it at bay. ‘If they do, and the energy shield around the Ramilies holds–’

  ‘A warp jump?’ repeated Sicarius, horrified. ‘While we’re still in the atmosphere? It’ll tear this moon apart – and we could end up anywhere in the galaxy.’ Most likely, in the heart of ork space, he thought.

  ‘Those of us that survive the journey,’ said Renius, pointedly. ‘Our battle-brothers on the ramparts risk being hurled out of the warp bubble and torn apart on the currents of the immaterium. That is, if the warp jump is successful.’

  ‘If it isn’t?’

  ‘If the warp jump fails and if Khargask refuses to abort the attempt…’

  Renius took a breath as he brought his favoured weapon to bear on his attackers: a power axe, with a ridged blade shaped like half of the Cult Mechanicus’s symbol. It crackled and blazed as it bit hungrily into an ork’s stomach. ‘In that case,’ he resumed, ‘the reactor will almost certainly explode, with enough force to consume the Indestructible and dislodge this moon’s flaming remains from orbit.’

  The orks, at least, were running out of reinforcements to throw at them. The flow of fresh bodies from below had finally abated, and the battle now had an end in sight. Sicarius continued with his tactic of hammering at one spot on the enemy line until suddenly – as another opponent fell with a gash in its throat, choking on its own blood – most unexpectedly, he found himself stumbling through it.

  There was nothing now to keep him from his goal, from diving through the hole in the floor and confronting his true enemy at last. Nothing but the knowledge, which Sicarius accepted grudgingly, that another was needed down in the engine control room more urgently than he was.

  Techmarine Renius was fighting three orks at once, one with each of his real and mechanical hands. Sicarius spun on his heel and slashed one of them across the back. Renius’s axe felled the second a moment later, while Lumic obligingly stepped in to engage the third. Sicarius yelled, ‘Renius, with
me. Lumic and Filion, keep us covered.’ Seven orks were still fighting and Lumic had been badly bloodied; they were leaving their brothers outnumbered, facing almost certain defeat, but what else could they do? Ultracius would arrive soon, hopefully.

  Sicarius and Renius burst through the Grand Chamber’s open doors.

  A greenskin howled as it saw what they were doing. It hurled a wrench at Sicarius, who deflected it with a backhand swipe. He couldn’t see anything through the rectangular hole in the floor – there was too much smoke down there; the hole, he suddenly apprehended, had been dug for ventilation – nor could his auspex give him any definite readings. Whatever was waiting for him down there, however, his duty was to face it. He didn’t break his step.

  Sicarius pushed off from the edge of the hole and plunged into the unknown. He dropped four metres and crashed down in the centre of a smaller chamber.

  Through the smoke haze, he could make out flickering flames, the dark, angular shapes of rune panels around the walls – and the silhouettes of several sturdy inhuman figures in frantic motion.

  Renius touched down heavily beside him and took a moment to get his bearings. ‘You deal with the engines,’ said Sicarius, ‘I’ll deal with the greenskins.’

  A shadow, much larger than the others, came hurtling towards him.

  He had a fraction of a second to try to work out what it was. It looked like a machine: an ork machine, haphazardly bolted together, heavier on one side than on the other, with all manner of random protuberances. It looked like a smaller and shabbier version of a Dreadnought – though not much smaller.

  It was only when the shadow let out a curdling war cry that Sicarius saw a slobbering mouth and a glaring, blood-crazed eye in among the mechanics and realised that it was a flesh-and-blood creature. That was when he recognised his ill-famed enemy, at last, and knew it for what – and exactly who – it was.

  Khargask!

  CHAPTER XIII

  Commissar Dast stepped out of the Centaur transport vehicle.

  He had planned to join the men of Krieg on the front lines of their desperate battle. He was too late. He had felt the ground – the whole moon, it had seemed – trembling as the Indestructible had slowly wrenched itself free from its moorings.

  He had had his driver bring the Centaur to a stop. Dast stood on the barren surface of the Agides moon; for once he was glad of the facemask that concealed his expression of horror.

  He knew what had happened, having picked up the details from the vox-chatter that filled his ear. He ought to have been prepared to face it, and yet to see the massive star fort just hanging in the sky, where it had no possible right, and no reason to be hanging… he wondered how anyone could have been prepared for that.

  He lifted a pair of magnoculars to his eyes. Even through their lenses, the Korpsmen clinging to the star fort’s walls looked smaller than ever. From this distance, even the Space Marines beside them appeared almost insignificant. Korpsmen and Space Marines alike, however, clung stubbornly to their uncertain handholds. Why didn’t they jump when they had the chance? Dast thought.

  Why didn’t their captain order them to jump?

  The commissar had excused himself from the command centre in the dugout, because he had done as much as he could there. Sometimes – more often than not, he had always prided himself – his captain actually heeded his advice; just not today. Today, the Krieg man preferred to listen to Sergeant Lucien.

  It wasn’t just that the captain was in awe of the Ultramarine. Dast knew that, at heart, he genuinely agreed with his point of view. He agreed that a Space Marine was worth a hundred ordinary men of Krieg. Perhaps he was right. Anyway, the captain had made the decisions he had made. He had given his orders, and that was all that mattered. Dast could better serve his regiment elsewhere now.

  The Indestructible had stopped climbing. It was shaking and groaning as if the effort of merely staying aloft might tear it apart. A transparent bubble of energy had formed around it, but it flickered and sparked as if it might burst at any moment.

  As Dast watched, another Korpsman fell off the side of the star fort, followed in short order by yet another. They tumbled through the energy bubble, and from here he couldn’t tell if their bodies had been burned or fried by it. Either way, their next stop was the ground, too far below them.

  Some of their comrades were hardier, or had been luckier. They had made it onto the star fort itself, onto the lowest of its stepped surfaces – the tops of its virtual ramparts – where of course they had a mob of eager, baying orks to contend with. Dast could only catch glimpses of the fighting from where he was, and hear breathless snatches of reports from those trapped in the thick of it.

  The orks, to begin with, had had the advantages of height and cover over their attackers, not to mention their bestial strength. The arrival of Sicarius’s Ultramarines, however, had tipped the balance. A tide of bright blue-armoured warriors were tearing into the green-skinned xenos, eviscerating them with their whirring blades. Dast wished he could have been with them.

  In addition, he was hearing – over the Ultramarines vox-channel, to which he had been granted access – that Sicarius’s command squad had penetrated the star fort’s heart. They were about to take on Khargask himself. He relayed the news to his regiment, to boost their morale. He told them that victory was almost within their grasp. Whether that was true or not, it didn’t matter.

  He heard the Krieg captain’s voice: ‘Remember the value of the Adeptus Astartes to the Imperium – they are the Emperor’s angels.’ He knew he was speaking Sergeant Lucien’s words. He gathered that Lucien himself had attained the ramparts too and was leading his men from the front, fighting valiantly.

  At the same time, he had had the Krieg Korpsmen form up in front of the Dreadnought, Ultracius. He was their most powerful weapon, according to Lucien, and Dast had certainly heard nothing to gainsay this. He couldn’t keep track of every single vox-report – hence the tactical hololith and its attendant servitors in the dugout – but more than once he had heard tell of the Dreadnought’s twin-linked heavy bolter, tearing through ork flesh whenever it barked.

  Lucien addressed the men of Krieg again: ‘The orks are desperate to take our best weapon out of action. So, let them slice and shred their way through you to get to him – because even as you die, you are frustrating them in their efforts.’ Dast chose not to dwell on the picture that those words painted.

  The star fort gave another violent lurch, and he saw another score of figures – Korpsmen and orks alike, even a couple in blue – flung over the edge. The Space Marines had their armour to protect them, of course, and would survive the landing, perhaps even the passage through the energy bubble; the others had no such hope.

  Dast lowered the magnoculars.

  Only now did he realise that he had been walking across no-man’s-land, though he had no way of reaching his hovering objective. Even if he could, he knew he would be far too late. The Indestructible had shaken itself into a veritable frenzy. One way or another, it couldn’t endure the stresses being placed upon it much longer. One way or another, this battle – another war – would soon be over.

  Had Dast fought alongside his regiment today, he would likely have died alongside them too, and for nothing.

  The plain around him was almost eerily silent. The smoke that had smothered it had dispersed on a thin breeze. The Ultramarines artillery guns were biding their time, having done all they could for the present. There was no point in shelling the Indestructible any further, in dealing it any more damage than they already had.

  Beyond the blue tanks, five siege towers stood in a forlorn row. The star fort’s sudden take-off had left them stranded, and though many Krieg Korpsmen had jumped from the tops of the towers to the star fort while they could, others had been left behind. They milled around the bases of the towers, helplessly.

  Joining them were the men who had lost their grips on the walls, while the drop to the ground had been survivable. Das
t counted roughly sixty figures in all, some of them badly injured. They were the lucky few.

  There was little these few survivors could usefully do, little but try to stay alive despite the hunks of debris, pieces of unanchored equipment and bodies that were raining down from the teetering structure above them. Dast lowered his head and hurried to join them. He took charge of them, ordering them to heft their wounded onto improvised stretchers and begin to withdraw from the danger zone.

  Above, the carnage showed no signs of abating. The voices of three quartermasters competed in the commissar’s ear with their roll calls of the recently deceased. The reports were coming in too fast for the servitors to collate. His guess was that, at most, four hundred Korpsmen remained in the fray, and that number was dwindling by the second.

  ‘Ultracius is withdrawing from the battle.’

  ‘–just ordered the Korpsmen that were protecting him to part and–’

  ‘He caught the orks, the ones in his path, unprepared. He just charged through their line and scattered them around him. He–’

  Dast picked out Sergeant Lucien’s voice from the others: ‘Our Dreadnought has been summoned to assist Captain Sicarius inside the star fort. Men of Krieg, you follow in the shadow of the Emperor’s angels. Let them guide you to glory, let them guide you to salvation, let them be your shield against the alien and the unclean. Obey their orders without question for you serve the greater glory of mankind.’

  ‘Ultracius just shot out a stained-armaplas window,’ a quartermaster reported, ‘and crashed through its remains into the star fort’s inner compound.’

  ‘–left the greenskins reeling, disorganised in his wake. They can’t decide whether to follow him or–’

  ‘–paying dearly for their hesitation. The Ultramarines guns are cutting through them like–’

  Dast heard the scrape of a boot against the earth, where there should have been no such sound. Instantly, his attention snapped back to his immediate vicinity. He spun around, in time to catch a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. He whipped out his bolt pistol and bellowed a challenge: ‘Who goes there?’