‘Indeed!’ Bohemond’s voice boomed across the hall. It dropped in volume as he continued with furrowed brow. ‘I was surprised to find that it was not Cassus Mirhen that had sent the herald signal.’
‘The Chapter Master is dead,’ replied Koorland.
‘A tragedy we have recently experienced,’ said Thane, nodding in sympathy. ‘He was a great leader. You are the surviving ranking captain, I assume?’
‘The only survivor,’ said Koorland quietly.
‘And tell me, Captain Koorland, why it is that you come here alone, aboard an Imperial Navy vessel no less?’ asked Bohemond, darting a look of annoyance at Thane’s interruption. ‘Where are your warriors and the rest of the fleet? You call us to the Last Wall and yet you come alone.’
‘You misunderstand me, brothers.’ Koorland bowed his head. ‘I was not the only surviving officer at Ardamantua. I was the only survivor.’
Silence greeted this declaration.
Quesadra started to say something but the words died on his lips. Koorland looked at each of the Space Marines around the table and saw the same emotions in their expressions: hardened warriors brought to a standstill by confusion, anger, pity. It was the last that caused him the most pain and sent him surging to his feet.
‘The Imperial Fists are no more,’ he said, and speaking aloud the fact made the shame of it surge through Koorland. ‘Save for me, they are all dead.’
He swallowed hard. He had faced death without fear a thousand times. He had been wounded, three times grievously, and now ripped back from the edge of oblivion by the ministrations of the tech-priests. Even during the horrors of Ardamantua Koorland had never felt scared, not truly. To stand here and say what he was about to say was the most terrifying experience of his life. He did not know what was going to happen as soon as he uttered the words. The future was a black abyss waiting to swallow him, but there was nothing else to be done but to plunge headlong into its dark embrace.
He looked at each of the Chapter Masters in turn and said the words that no son of Dorn wanted to hear. They were words that signified loss. More than that, a defeat so great, so shameful, that to anyone not of the Imperial Fists or Successors the words might seem trite. Yet to those who had Dorn’s gene-seed it was a statement that would make such honoured blood run cold, an admittance of the worst failure imaginable.
‘The final wall has fallen.’
Fifteen
‘All hands! All hands! Prepare for fleet address! All hands! Attention for the Lord High Admiral!’
Shaffenbeck’s voice boomed out over every internal comms system across the Colossus, and the order was being repeated across the dozens of ships heading in-system towards the ork attack moon. The greater part of the greenskins’ strength still lay ahead, as scores of vessels rushed out from the star base’s vicinity to confront the Imperial attack. The sensor team aboard the Colossus had calculated the enemy strength at roughly forty-eight capital-sized ships and over a hundred smaller vessels.
‘Where did so many ships come from?’ Kulik asked Price as the two of them sat in the communications cabin waiting for Lansung’s speech. Neither of them were excited by the prospect of the Lord High Admiral’s bombastic self-aggrandisement and so they had cloistered themselves away from the main bridge for the moment. ‘I mean, not just here, but all across the segmentum? If every attack moon has a fleet this size, that’s decades, centuries of building.’
‘Yes, but not all of it by the orks.’
Price spread out pict-captures from the fleet of the ork vessels they had destroyed. Many were ghastly constructions, seemingly thrown together as much as they were designed. They sprouted improbably large and armoured gun turrets, packed weapons decks, oversized engines and outlandish decoration.
Quite a few, however, were recognisable as having once been other types of vessels. Kulik saw many Imperial ships, from destroyers up to heavy cruisers, that had been somehow taken by the orks and retro-fitted in their own fashion. Even just amongst those already encountered, there were enough captured Navy vessels to form a sizeable flotilla. There were also dozens of merchant ships that had been up-gunned and up-armoured with the simple addition of weapons turrets and shield generators.
‘That explains it in part, but they’ve got more of our ships than the Battlefleet Solar. How have they not been noticed missing?’
‘It seems the orks have been… stockpiling for some time.’
‘Stockpiling? You mean that the orks have been deliberately building their forces somewhere, waiting for this moment to attack?’
‘I don’t know about waiting for this moment, but the massed fleets, the attack moons, all have arrived almost simultaneously,’ Price said with a heavy sigh. ‘It’s impossible to put this down to coincidence. There is a far grander purpose behind these attacks, I’m sure of it. As to where and how the orks managed to build these things, that’s a mystery for another day. There’re huge tracts of space that have never been surveyed, even with our current Naval strength. It only takes a few systems to slip past us to hide a fleet this size.’
‘But… orks doing this?’ Kulik simply could not get his head around the idea. ‘Orks laying low and strategising in this manner is unheard of. It is, to put it a certain way, totally alien to them. I know we hardly know anything about them really, there’s been few encounters over the last centuries, but they’ve always been aggressive, invasive.’
‘Something has changed, that’s for sure,’ said Price. He gathered up the vid-captures into a pile and stacked them neatly to one side. ‘These damned orks not only have a plan, they have a larger objective, something we’re not seeing.’
‘Other than a steady encroachment, there’s been no pattern to their attacks,’ said Kulik. ‘They don’t seem to be heading anywhere in particular. Some have been strategically important systems, some are backwaters that nobody had heard of until they were invaded. If they’ve been hoarding ships all of this time, centuries probably, surely it would be for something more specific than just a huge jolly war?’
‘I don’t just mean the orks overall, I mean the orks here, in Port Sanctus. This fleet is large in comparison to some of the scattered reports we received. There must be something about the dockyards that they really want, pulling in a whole damned armada to get it. Why did Acharya have to choose this system of all the ones the orks have attacked to prove himself?’
‘It’s self-sustaining, isn’t it? The orks must have known about the shipyards, and if they can take them they know they can build even more ships.’ Kulik glanced at the chronometer. Lansung’s speech would be received shortly.
‘If that’s true, then perhaps it is best that we’re here. There’s no telling how much stronger they’ll get if they keep taking facilities and systems at this rate. Every conquest seems to be fuelling more, but to what end?’
‘I think you’re giving them too much credit, sir,’ said Kulik, standing up. ‘I doubt they even know why they’re doing half of this. Maybe there is a smart ork out there, something more intelligent than we’ve met before, but it certainly isn’t in control. It’s a figurehead, something like that. There’s not an ork in the universe that could prepare and coordinate an invasion like this.’
‘I hope you’re wrong,’ said Price, following Kulik as the captain made his way back to the bridge in anticipation of the Lord High Admiral’s address.