The floor was awash with blood. Lanser could barely move, caught in the crush of struggling human and greenskin bodies. The density of the struggle helped. The orks were crowded in as much as he was, and denied the leverage to use their greater strength to its full effect. He slipped his sword beneath the helmet of one beast. He drove the point up through the ork’s chin and into its brain. The press of bodies held the corpse upright long enough for him to withdraw the blade.
A taller ork made a noise that was snarl and laugh. It swung its cleaver at him. He couldn’t duck. He tilted his head to the side. It was enough. The blade sank into the side of the skull of the man behind him, chopping through at eye level. Lanser raised his laspistol and shot the ork in the centre of the forehead. The beast blinked, its skin smouldering with las burn. It pulled its arm back to strike again, knocking its smaller kin aside with the force of the gesture. Lanser fired again, five more times. He had to sear the ork’s face to slag before the monster finally dropped.
Lanser took half a step forward, walking on bodies. A huge fist struck him in the temple. Stunned, vision bleary, he lunged forward, sword extended. Luck or the Emperor’s hand guided his blow. The impact of the blade sinking through greenskin muscle to the heart almost dislocated his arm.
The orks kept coming. There was no forcing them back. They advanced, a battering ram of flesh that hit like stone and broke the human wall down. Step by step, the Crusaders were forced back down the hall. But they fought and they stabbed with last-chance desperation. They died by the dozens. The orks died one by one.
The numbers won.
Drenched in gore, Lanser leaned against the wall. He gasped for breath. His right side ached from a power claw hit. If the ork had been able to do more than glance him, he would have been crushed. As it was, he could feel the movement of broken ribs. He wondered how long it would be before a floating bone punctured a lung. He pushed away thoughts of a medicae bay. He didn’t have the luxury of that hope. He would be lucky to live long enough to die from this wound.
The corridor had become a slaughterhouse. The corpses of orks and humans lay in a mire of blood. Most of the ork bodies were still intact. Many of the humans were scattered remains. The stench was thick. Lanser felt like he was breathing blood and offal. Parten was as blood-soaked as he was, but none of her wounds were life-threatening. Bessler’s left arm had been crushed to jelly below the elbow. One of his troopers was applying a tourniquet to his stump. He was pale, barely keeping unconsciousness at bay. Both squads had been decimated. Two-thirds of the civilians had been killed. But they had won. The survivors’ eyes were wide with the dulled drunkenness of their victory.
Lanser pushed himself away from the wall.
‘Keep going,’ he called out, voice rasping. If they stopped to rest, they would lose the momentum of this hard triumph. Despair was one bad thought away. He started to walk, stumbled. He stopped, aware of the eyes on him, straightened, and when he was sure of his footing, started forward again. His gait was stronger. He wasn’t going to fall.
Ragged now, battered, slower, but desperate to fight because that was all they had left, Myrmidons and Crusaders headed for the bridge. Lanser kept hearing the sounds of combat, but they were always distant echoes, travelling through mazes of passageways to reach him. Whatever was happening, it was too far away for him to bring help. The bridge remained the goal.
Parten moved forward to join him. ‘Permission to ask a question, colonel?’
‘Go ahead, sergeant.’
‘How long can we hold them at the bridge?’
‘We’ll seal the door. Even when they breach it, the entrance is narrower than this corridor. I’ve seen it. That will create a bottleneck for them, an edge for us. We don’t have to defeat them here. Just hold them back long enough.’
‘For what?’
‘For us to reach the moon.’ He said it as if that would be the end of things. It will be, he thought.
She nodded, believing in his optimism or accepting their fate.
They climbed the levels from the cargo decks, up towards the bridge at the top of the superstructure. The echoes of battle became more distant. Maybe there was time, Lanser thought. Maybe they had pulled ahead of the ork boarding parties enough to establish something like a real defence.
At the base of the plain metal staircase leading to the bridge, he could hear activity from above. Purposeful, but not violent. That gave him hope. He ran up the stairs, his breath tearing into his lungs with a knife. The stairs ended in a wide passage leading port and starboard, with the doors to the bridge straight ahead.
There was blood on the deck. It seeped from the open doorway to the bridge; the orks were already here. The battle was over. The orks’ debased slave-race were hauling out the corpses of the crew and tossing them in piles lining the corridor walls. They glanced at Lanser. They snickered, then called out to their masters as they scampered back onto the bridge.
Lanser moved forward. He couldn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t feel his arms, either. His body was a collection of disjointed fragments, all acting independently, all moving forward with no purpose. His brain was numb. He was a servitor, completing a hopeless task because there was nothing else to do.
His left arm raised his pistol. His fingers were clumsy. It was hard to fire. His right arm hung limp, dragging the point of his sword over the decking.
Noises behind him now. Cries, wails, the thudding of boots. Was that the whine of las-fire? Maybe. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter. It was so far away.
An ork warboss emerged from the bridge, a giant that had to bend in half to fit under the doorway. The deck shook beneath its armoured feet. It looked like a tank that had learned to walk. When Lanser shot it, its lips parted in a smile, showing fangs the length of his hand, its eyes amused. When it backhanded him, shattering his skeleton and sending him flying back down the staircase, the gesture was casual, maybe even disappointed.
Maybe even bored.
The Expanse of Destiny pulled up. Its nose tilted towards the ork cruiser riding above the cloud of the Armada. The movement was emphatic and slow, a glacier with delusions of ramming. Narkissos was about to order Rallis to stay in its wake when he saw the ork fighters moving away, heading for other targets. The Expanse was not attempting a suicidal attack, he realised. She was already lost. Her new masters were taking the ship out of formation to join with the cruiser.
There was no shelter here now.
The irony of worrying about shelter, given his ship’s destination, passed through his mind for the length of time it took him to draw a breath. ‘Helmsman,’ he said to Rallis, ‘no more hiding. Time to run. Full power.’
‘There are other big ships,’ Kondos said.
‘They won’t be ours long, not at this rate.’
‘Exactly. Look.’
He always paid attention when Kondos made that request. Their shared gifts were the reason the Militant Fire had survived to see this day. He was the improviser. She saw the big picture. She took in the myriad variables of a situation, creating the map for Narkissos to navigate.
So he focused on the big ships. The ork squadrons were thick around them, tearing them open and inserting boarding parties. Away from the giants, the smaller ships were falling prey. Many were boarded. The smallest were destroyed. But the ones closest to the mass conveyors and factory ships were being ignored as the orks concentrated on the big prizes.
‘Port,’ Narkissos said. ‘Down thirty degrees. The Europa Forge.’