The tanks rumbled across the plain. A black, greasy cloud rose in their wake. The roar of their engines rose over the battle like the voice of the star fortress itself. As they drew nearer, they became even more threatening. Their armour was massive and horned, designed for ramming. The cannons of their stacked turrets were gigantic. They were covered in secondary guns. Spiked cylinders rolled before them, already slicked with the paste of the orks who had not moved out of the way soon enough.
‘How do we stop those with las?’ Bernt demanded. ‘We don’t have enough rockets. Where are the lords?’
‘They’ll be here,’ Roth told him. ‘Now fight.’
‘Why?’
She pulled a serrated whip from her belt and snapped a coil around his neck. She gave a yank. Bernt’s head bounced down against the parapet of the wall. ‘Our lords are coming!’ Roth shouted. ‘They will be with us. Now do them proud! Obey their commands! If you cannot destroy the tanks, hold them. Keep them from coming any closer until the great counter-attack is ready!’
Gerron had already joined in the fire on the heavy armour. Searing light erupted against the vehicles. Flights of rockets launched from the rampart. Clusters of missiles struck one tank at a time. A dozen direct hits managed to stop one of them. Its cannon fired just as it was damaged, and the top half of the Battlewagon vanished in the explosion. At the same time, the heavy stubber turrets raked the nearest ork ranks, punishing the ones who had begun scaling the wall.
The orks did not even slow. Their wave slammed against the wall. More ladders went up even as the tanks improved their accuracy and started punching deeper and more destructively into the facade.
We can’t stop them, Gerron told himself. We just have to hold them, for a little while, that’s all. He and the other mortals had not been abandoned or forgotten. They were acting as they had been ordered. The lords are coming. The lords are coming.
Kalkator circled the display table in the strategium. The weight of his boots echoed like the toll of an iron bell in the hard, open space of the chamber. The hololith showed the green stain of the orks spreading over the whole of Klostra. There was no clear point against which to push back. The orks had swarmed over the surface of the planetoid before any adequate retaliatory force could be brought to bear. Kalkator and his brothers were outnumbered, outplanned, outmanoeuvred. Their base, a few kilometres from the front at Klostra Primus, built into the top of an isolated peak, could perhaps hold against the orks’ full assault for as much as a day.
Kalkator had no intention of being run to ground. The advance would be stopped at Primus, and then the march against the orks would begin. It would not matter that the greenskins had no base planetside. Kalkator would advance until he had scraped the last of the orks beneath his boot heels.
He told himself this. He told his men the same thing. The real outcome predicted by the tactical situation was unspoken, though they talked around it.
‘Any word from the Ostrom System?’ he asked.
‘None,’ Varravo said. ‘No communications since before the star fortress arrived.’
‘But our vox is functional again.’
‘It is. The problem isn’t at our end.’
The implications were troubling. They were also nothing that could be dealt with now. What was relevant was that there would be no reinforcements arriving on Klostra in time to make any difference. ‘Then this is where we stop the orks.’
‘I don’t like being forced into a defensive posture,’ Caesax said.
‘This is only a siege if we view it as one,’ Kalkator told him. ‘I’m not about to abandon doctrine. The strategic value of the colony’s strongpoint hasn’t changed. We use it for its purpose.’ Besides, he thought, we have no choice.
Caesax nodded. He put on his helm. ‘We are ready.’
‘Guns in position,’ Derruo said.
‘Then it is time to announce our displeasure.’
Is this holding them? Gerron wondered. Are we holding them? Will our lords be pleased? He hoped the answers were yes. That would be the only victory he could claim. Nothing the defenders of Klostra Primus could do had slowed the orks. But the greenskins were not moving beyond the colony. They were using their strength to annihilate it. Yes, Gerron thought. Yes. We are holding them. For a few minutes. He prayed he would live long enough to see the arrival of the lords and their vengeance. That would be victory enough for him.
The tanks were close now, too close for their cannon fire to miss. The wall shook with the unending barrage. The barrier still held, but it was deforming, weakening quickly. The fire from its battlements was becoming sporadic. While the tanks hurled their shells against the middle section of the wall, the ork infantry raised ladders on either flank, and the defensive fire now concentrated on repelling the climbing orks. Gerron was shooting into a rising swarm. The belief that he was doing anything to delay the inevitable was an illusion, but he clung to it.
Then, to the rear, booms in the distance. The voice of gods, raised in anger. Thunder and hatred from the skies, the whistling of incoming ordnance. Vengeance was here. Gerron allowed himself the luxury of looking up and back. He had an impression of clouds falling upon him with iron and flame. In the dark second before impact he had all the time in the world to realise that the bombardment was using the wall as the targeting point.
The shells hit. They were massive high-explosives. They were designed to shatter fortifications to dust, and with them any life in their vicinity. Gerron’s world shrieked. It disintegrated beneath a blow too huge to process. He flew through battering immensity. There was no real any more. There was only destruction. He burned. He felt his bones pulped. And still he flew.
He landed. The blasts broke time into pieces. His awareness floated in and out, tugged between oblivion and pain. At some point, the bombardment ended. The roar of war barely diminished, but the ground stopped its eruption. As he lay on smoking rubble, Gerron’s mortal agony granted him his wish. He witnessed the arrival.
There was nothing left of the wall. It had fallen on defenders and orks alike. In the near distance, the colony guttered red and black, its usefulness at an end. From beyond the wall, the orks bayed with the ecstasy of a war living up to expectations. Were there any fewer tanks? Gerron couldn’t turn his head to see. He could still hear the engines, though. He could hear the eagerness of the green tide for more and greater conflict.
Marching through the wreckage of the colony came the lords of Klostra. Gerron began to weep before the majesty of strategy he had been blessed to experience. The orks had come to besiege, but the lords had denied them that pleasure. Klostra Primus was not a point to be preserved. It was a trap for the enemy. The orks had concentrated their strength here, and the fire had rained down upon them. Now the march of the lords began. Through his tears, Gerron beheld the unforgiving glory of the Iron Warriors heading his way.
The orks, unchastened, rushed over his body to greet them.
Four
The final wall has fallen.
After they were spoken, the words became a silence strong as iron, heavy as death. It spread over the council hall of the Abhorrence. It seemed to Koorland that he could sense the silence spreading down all the corridors of the battle-barge. It was the silence that followed the tolling of a funeral bell. He had made real a defeat so great that for the Chapter Masters before him, until this moment, it had been unimaginable. The fact that it had occurred opened the door to other terrible possibilities.