Over the vox, Derruo snarled in agony. Kalkator glanced back. Two other battle-brothers had been blown apart, but Derruo, his armour scorched black, his left leg dragging, was still in the fight.
The Olympia was out in front now. Behind it, the Araakite Doom avenged the Lochos with a shot that hit the ork tank’s fuel reserves at almost point-blank range. The warmth of the fire washed over the squadron.
Kalkator cursed as a shell clipped the top of the siege shield. He leaned forward into the wash of the explosion. It took out the ork that had just vaulted up from the front of the tank. More of the brutes followed. Kalkator, Varravo and Caesax moved forward on the roof. They turned their chainswords on the orks who made it past the Pyres of Olympia’s sponson bolters. The tank’s horns were magma cutters, taking down still more of the foe. The ground was littered with bisected corpses.
And the orks kept coming.
‘What do they want with the place?’ Varravo voxed. ‘There’s nothing left.’
‘They want us,’ said Kalkator. Whatever other designs the orks might have for Klostra, their targets now were the Iron Warriors. Perhaps the planet had some other value. If it did, that was secondary to the promise of war. Kalkator had used the mortal colonists as loyal bait. He wondered now if the orks hadn’t done the same to him, luring the company in with the illusion that there was a possible strategy here.
To the north, the great artillery explosions continued. A curtain of smoke, flame and raining debris rose between the Iron Warriors and the approaching body of the ork host. The Great Company and its Vindicators advanced further into the flesh and over the machinery of the enemy. They were almost at the base of the wall now.
‘Warsmith,’ voxed Occillax, piloting the Olympia, ‘do we descend the slope?’
Kalkator never answered. His command was interrupted by a rolling wave of sound, the thunder of a mountain cracking in half. He looked back. In the distance, in the direction of the base, a volcanic glow lit the deep twilight that passed for day on Klostra. The rumble had a rhythm. Streaks of light cut through black clouds towards the glow. An orbital bombardment.
‘Klostra Base, report,’ Kalkator voxed. He called three more times, as he looked away and kept killing orks. Silence from the base.
And silence from the guns.
The artillery barrage ended. Occillax halted the Pyres of Olympia. The curtain faded. The wrecking yard of ork vehicles appeared and so did the forces that were coming on, the ones untouched by the Iron Warriors cannons.
Four super-heavies. Tanks twice the size of the Vindicators, their guns with bores as wide as Demolishers, but the length of autocannons. As if they had been waiting for their proper introduction, they opened fire now.
They had the rate of autocannons, too.
And as the boom of greenskin ordnance battered the plateau of Klostra Primus, greater silhouettes yet loomed behind the battle fortresses. Colossi, three of them, greenskin idols fifty metres tall. They rocked side to side as they marched over machine and kin, a manufactorum’s worth of smoke belching from the chimneys rising from their backs. Flame gouted from their jaws. Their eyes were energy weapon turrets, blazing red lightning. The right arm of each terminated in a hand whose fingers were linked cannons, four strong. The left arm of one was a hammer the size of a tank. The second had a chainblade fifteen metres long. The third wielded a claw that could tear the hills apart.
Beneath the roars of the engines, the beat of the cannons and the tectonic rumble of the orbital strikes, Kalkator heard another sound. It would have been inaudible if it hadn’t come from a hundred thousand ork throats in unison.
‘They’re laughing at us,’ said Caesax.
Why wouldn’t they? Kalkator thought through his rage. The orks were bringing down a compounded humiliation on the Great Company. They attacked with overwhelming numbers, unstoppable armament, and then outmanoeuvred the Iron Warriors. In the gap between realising the doom of Klostra and bringing his blade down on still another ork skull, he understood that the orks were sending a message. They were speaking through the language of annihilation, and what they said was, Behold what we can do. We are more powerful and more clever than you. You are nothing.
If hate alone were a force, he would have incinerated the planet in that moment.
‘Pull back,’ he ordered.
‘Where to?’ Caesax asked.
‘The mountains.’
‘Towards an orbital bombardment?’
‘It will be finished by the time we get there,’ he snarled.
They retreated towards oblivion.
Deep into the remains of the settlement, tens of thousands of blackened mortal corpses on all sides, the vox came alive with the first extra-planetary contact since the ork moon tore through space into Klostra’s orbit. It came from the strike cruisers Palimodes and Scythe of Schravaan. The gravity storms had destroyed all of the company’s fleet at anchor. The two cruisers had been at the Ostrom outpost, and had been silent since the initial vox-failure on Klostra. They had not been recalled. Kalkator didn’t know why they had returned. He didn’t care.
He interrupted the torrent of shouted questions from the bridges. ‘I want the full complement of Thunderhawks planetside for immediate evacuation of all forces.’ He gave coordinates for a position just south of the settlement.
‘That moon—’ Attonax, on the Palimodes, began.
‘Do not engage!’ Kalkator shouted. The words were toxic. They were echoes of the foulest days of the Iron Warriors’ past.
‘Enemy launches detected,’ Attonax said.
Kalkator roared at the enemy, and the orks roared back. The laughter grew louder. It seemed to him that there was mockery in every attack. Every ork that he cut down died with the belief that it, and not he, was victorious. The giant ork machines heaved into sight over the ruined wall. They were on the plateau. The company moved faster than the ork super-heavies, but the infantry was on all sides, slowing them down. The ork Battlewagons kept pace, pounding the retreating Iron Warriors. The Pyres of Olympia, the Barban Falk and the Araakite Doom moved backwards, keeping their Demolishers trained on the foe. Bolter, cannon and magma cutter tore swaths through infantry and smashed more tanks open. But the waves of the green tide closed over the gaps. And the fire from the ork guns grew more intense.
Brothers died. Kalkator felt no regret when he saw them fall, but he did feel frustration. The orks were eroding his combat strength bit by bit.
There were no gaps in the enemy barrage now. Kalkator could see little but flame and eruptions on all sides. The Araakite Doom exploded, and then there were two tanks. ‘Palimodes, Scythe of Schravaan, where is our extraction?’ the warsmith demanded.
‘Right above you,’ came the reply.
Kalkator couldn’t see the Thunderhawks in the midst of the ork fire, but his Lyman’s ear was able now to distinguish their engines from the din of the enemy machines. A few seconds later, Hellstrike missiles screamed onto the ork tanks, followed by the hard rain of multiple heavy bolters. For several seconds, the world vanished completely. There was fire, and there was nothing else, and Kalkator grinned, because the flames were on the orks now, and they were learning the price of their arrogance.