Machtannin’s concentration narrowed to the centre of Vangorich’s forehead. His finger tightened.
The rifle was yanked from his grasp. The stock slammed his head backwards. He rolled into a crouch and jumped to his feet, blinking away the stun. A man stood in the shadows of the wall. He had bent the barrel of the rifle.
‘Throne save us from amateurs,’ the man said.
Strong, Machtannin thought. Maybe not fast. He leapt at the man, striking with enhanced reflexes. Speed was his weapon. He had once deflected a traitor’s bolter shell with the edge of his hand. He landed four blows to the side of the man’s neck before the other could even drop the gun.
It was like hitting a column.
The Assassin punched him in the chest. He was fast, too. The hit came before Machtannin could think to evade. Something crunched.
He entered a land of surprise. He was surprised that he wasn’t sent flying. He stumbled back from his opening. He tried to attack again, and was surprised when his legs didn’t obey his command. He was surprised when they folded up beneath him and he sat down hard. He was surprised to find he was holding his breath.
No.
Surprise: there was no breath to be had.
Surprise: the pain bursting from his chest, the pressure in his skull spreading red and black.
His head rocked forward. There was a hole in his chest. A big one.
Surprise.
Had he seen something in the man’s fist?
He couldn’t think any more. He couldn’t care any more.
No more surprises.
And after a great flare, no more pain.
Only the dark.
‘Were you waiting for someone?’ Vangorich asked as they walked on.
‘No.’ The hesitation was very brief.
Vangorich smiled. ‘Just as well. He won’t be coming.’
Later, in his quarters, Vangorich said to Beast Krule, ‘Good to have you back.’
Krule grunted. ‘This is getting messy,’ he said.
‘Can’t be helped.’ Vangorich held a bottle of amasec, debating. An Iaxian vintage, three centuries old. Was there ever the correct occasion for such a treasure? He decided there was, when there might soon be no more occasions at all. He opened the bottle and decanted two glasses. ‘Well done,’ he said, handing one to Krule.
‘Wasn’t difficult. They took the bait.’
‘Let’s not call it bait. I really had hoped Veritus wouldn’t push things this far. Think of it as a designated opportunity. If they were going to take action, better it be in a situation we could neutralise.’
Krule shrugged. ‘Call it what you like.’ He sipped the amasec, and gave an appreciative nod. ‘Do you want me to do more?’
‘Not yet. I think we have Veritus contained, at least for now. He’s running out of allies and moves. Has Wienand reached the Inquisitorial Fortress?’
‘I lost track of her before she did. But we’d know if she hadn’t.’
‘Then we wait to see her move,’ Vangorich said. ‘That’s where we stand.’ He turned to the narrow window of his chambers. The strong winds of the day were granting him rare glimpses of the evening sky. The ork moon was there, the executioner’s sword half-concealed by the spires of the Imperial Palace. There were also faint glints like moving stars: the larger ships of the Merchants’ Armada manoeuvring. ‘And we wait to see what Juskina Tull is about to reap for all of us.’
Twelve
With a battering crash of iron and cannon and bladed siege shield, the Vindicators rolled through the wreckage of the colony. They came in the wake of the bombardment. The battle tanks were the follow-up to the Iron Warriors’ initial charge.
The charge that had already turned into a retreat.
The tanks, Kalkator vowed, would turn the tide. They had before. The Araakite Doom, the Barban Falk, the Pyres of Olympia, and the Lochos.
They had fought on Terra, and on Sebastus IV. The blood of Loyalists had sunk into the grain of the metal and the joints of the treads. Statues lined the edges of their hulls. They were the representations of saints and generals, the Imperium’s heroes of war and of faith. Now they were defaced, broken. Heads leaned back as if to gaze in horror at the brutality of the universe. Limbs were shattered, replaced with barbed wire. They were the trophies of smashed sieges past, and the promise of fallen cities to come. Behind, the Demolisher cannons curved massive horns in the image of the Iron Warriors’ helms. The guns fired as soon as the tanks approached the remains of the wall. They were siege weapons, designed to reduce defences to lost hopes. Today, they were coming to break a siege.
That fact was an offence to Kalkator’s pride and to the proper order of things. He could not make the situation otherwise through will alone. So he would exact retribution for the insult from the bodies of the orks.
The cannon fire hit the ork advance, four shells simultaneously. The explosion was huge. Scores of the enemy vanished and the front half of one of the ork tanks disintegrated. Another kept moving, but on an erratic course, enveloped in flame. It was as if a giant scythe had culled the forward lines of the enemy infantry. The bombardment had done nothing to slow the orks, but now, for a moment, Kalkator saw a hole open up in their formation.
He and his brothers had been forced back to the ruins of Klostra Prime. The bulk of the Great Company had been using the fallen walls of the central manufactorum as a bulwark against the orks. Now they pushed forward again.
The warsmith headed for the Pyres of Olympia. As he ran, he sent a stream of bolter fire ahead. Orks fell before him, their heads bursting. A few steps from the Olympia, he slammed into a massive brute whose armour had saved it from his shells. He knocked the ork off balance and thrust his chainsword forward, plunging it between skull plate and jaw guard, grinding through the ork’s nose and then its skull and brain. He blasted another foe coming at him from the right while he withdrew the blade from the corpse, before leaping to the roof of the Olympia. Varravo and Caesax followed him. Other Iron Warriors climbed to the roof of the other tanks while the rest ran close, tearing up the infantry.
We’re trying to stop the ocean with a knife, Kalkator thought. Four Vindicators and the individual strength of the brothers of the Great Company was enough to shatter the walls of any fortress, but he had no illusions about their position now. Thousands of orks had already climbed the top of the plateau. Even if the Iron Warriors’ counter-attack repelled them, the oncoming force was many times that size. The orks had already landed an infinite infantry.
Their heavy armour on immediate approach was no match for the Vindicators, though. Kalkator wanted to cripple the ork vehicles, and perhaps buy the company time to cohere again. Recreate the wedge, drive into the ork infantry, cause damage to force a retreat.
Impossibility was irrelevant. Impossibility was the bloody constant of the Iron Warriors’ history. As ever, there was nothing to do but fight.
At least their wars were their own now, as were the spoils. And even now they weren’t cowering behind walls, hoping for the battle to pass, like the bastard sons of Dorn.
The tanks kept firing. After the first great blast, the squadron staggered the volleys, hitting the orks with a continuous string of explosions. The orks slowed, a bit. They did not stop. The tide flowed around the craters, ignoring losses, rushing to the challenge of the Vindicators.
‘All fire on the tanks,’ Kalkator voxed. ‘Base, maintain bombardment one thousand metres forward of initial target zone.’
Three more ork tanks were gutted. The first of the Battlewagons to reach Klostra Prime had traded thicker armour for speed, and the Vindicators’ cannons could take down walls wider than the tanks themselves. The Battlewagons were big, but they crumpled and burned when the Demolisher shells hit them. The ork vehicles had numbers, though. Line after line of them mounted the slope to the colony. They fired back. High explosives flared against the siege shields. Three of the Battlewagons trained their guns on the Lochos. Two died trying, but the third flanked the Lochos and gutted it.