The wind had a hollow, rasping sound, a snarl echoing through organ pipes.
An atmosphere. The orks had given their artificial planetoid a surface atmosphere. There was no reason for them to do so. The outside of the star fortress showed no sign of life. The greenskins had performed a gigantic technological feat, it seemed, simply because they could. That excess of power was daunting.
The surface visible from the ship was pockmarked rock, with no dust. The patchwork quality of the planetoid extended even to what had appeared from orbit to be natural formations. The orks had done more than carve an existing moon into the canyons and mountain ranges that suited them or raise barriers thousands of metres high and hundreds of kilometres long. Haas had the disturbing impression that they had assembled the fortress out of the pieces of other moons. They had created a world out of nothing.
How can we defeat an enemy that powerful?
Through their mistakes.
Kord refused to disembark. He hung back at the rear as the civilians and Imperial Guard descended the ramp. He walked slowly, and when he reached the door, he stopped.
‘What are you doing?’ Haas demanded. She had joined him for the landing out of consideration of their partnership on Terra, but her patience was exhausted. The man who had talked up the Crusade had become a shameful specimen.
Kord stared at the expanse of the ork moon before them. ‘I can’t,’ he said.
‘Get down or I’ll shoot you myself.’
‘No,’ said a third voice. ‘You will not.’
She turned around. The last of the Astra Militarum contingents to disembark were the Jupiter Storm. Commissar Sever had come up behind them. ‘You are under military command now,’ he said. ‘That decision is not yours.’
‘I understand,’ Haas said. She stepped to one side.
Sever regarded Kord with a cold, absolute contempt. ‘Disembark,’ he said.
Kord spread his hands, pleading. ‘I—’ he began.
Sever pulled his bolt pistol out of its holster and shot Kord in the left eye. The Arbitrator’s skull exploded. Blood splashed Haas’ armour.
Sever turned to her.
‘Thank you, commissar,’ Haas said, ‘for preserving the honour of the Adeptus Arbites.’
She followed the Jupiter Storm out of the Militant Fire.
‘They got greedy,’ said Captain Fernau of the Orion Watch. ‘They made a mistake.’ His laugh was relieved. ‘So they can make mistakes.’
Gattan grunted. He wanted to believe Fernau. He didn’t dare. He had to take the realities of the battlefield as they unfolded, not as he would wish them to be. ‘We’ll see,’ he said.
Fernau took in the deployment with a wide sweep of his arm. ‘We are seeing.’
They were standing on the upper hull of the Militant Fire. They had a view of the plain where the ships had come down, and of the mustering of the army.
The plain was fifty kilometres wide, bracketed by mountain chains that lost height as they converged to the south. That meeting point, fifteen kilometres away, was the target. During the descent, several ships had observed what looked like a massive gate closing. The Crusade needed a way inside the fortress, and the plain’s size and proximity to the goal made it a suitable starting point.
Maybe Fernau was right, Gattan thought. The orks had taken many of the larger ships, but they had not sent out anything close to enough fighters to stop the Armada. Hundreds more vessels had made it through. By lighter, by shuttle, and by ships that would never take off again, legions of Crusaders had put boots to soil. Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and now millions. Gattan had never been part of an operation on this scale. A sea of warriors hungry for greenskin blood stretching back as far as he could see on land flat as sheet metal. The sight made the toll the orks had exacted seem insignificant. This was a triumph. Wasn’t it?
Fernau thought so. Gattan was uneasy. There were enough companies of Astra Militarum left for some kind of coordination, but the losses had been great. Though the banners of the Jupiter Storm, Granite Myrmidons, Orion Watch, Auroran Rifles and the Eagles of Nazca were raised high, and the uniforms of each regiment were beyond counting, the vast majority of those uniforms were worn by civilians. Most of the heavy armour had been captured. All the senior officers had been aboard the big ships. There was no one ranking higher than captain on the ground.
At least they’d been able to establish vox-communication with each other even as they were landing. And the broad lines of the strategy had been established before the Armada had left Terra. There had been enough guidance to make the target clear. The deployment itself had to be simple. There was little to be done with the civilians except to send them marching in the right direction with instructions to shoot the enemy.
A squadron of ork bombers roared overhead. It did not attack. Neither had the few others that had overflown the landing site during the last few hours.
‘What are they doing?’ Gattan wondered aloud.
‘Reconnaissance,’ Fernau answered.
‘Unusual restraint. We’re a very big target.’
‘Too big. Nothing flights of that size can take on.’
‘So where are the others?’
Fernau shrugged. ‘Not here, so no help to them. They’re making more mistakes. Giving us a chance to move against them.’
Maybe. In the end, the truth didn’t matter. There was only one course of action open.
Its engine growling, a Chimera pulled up beside the Militant Fire. Gattan clasped forearms with Fernau. ‘For Terra and the Emperor,’ he said.
‘For Terra and the Emperor.’
Gattan climbed down onto the roof of his command vehicle. Another rumbled up behind it to collect Fernau.
The march began. The heavy armour that had reached the star fortress led the way. Over a hundred Leman Russ battle tanks in all their variants, and half that number of Chimeras and Hellhounds formed something too wide to be called a wedge. They were an advancing wall. The surface of the moon vibrated with the force of their passing. Behind them came the foot soldiers of the Proletarian Crusade. Slowly at first, but then with mounting momentum, the immense army advanced on the gates to the enemy stronghold.
Haas was in the leading elements of the attack, moving at a forced march speed behind the armour. She could see nothing ahead of her except iron and blue-black exhaust. Her ears rang with the roar of engines, but the guns were silent for now. The orks had not yet attacked.
She looked up into the sky. The Crusade was on the night side of the planetoid. She could see Terra, large in its shining majesty, small in its vulnerability. That was what she had come here to protect. As long as she could see Terra, she wouldn’t mind dying in this place. The ork moon had besieged the consciousness of every soul on Terra for weeks. Now the orks were the ones besieged. That in itself was a victory. We’ve come this far, Haas thought, and you failed to stop us. You’ll fail again.
Though her lungs laboured, her strides became stronger. She moved faster. She felt the hand of the Emperor at her back, and she gave thanks.
Though it was night, the visibility on the surface of the moon was high. To the reflected light from Terra was added a glow from the mountain ranges. They were lined with what looked like veins of molten lava. A wash of red reached across the plain.
The mountains jutted like a monster’s teeth from the plain. There were no foothills, no rise of the land, no transition at all between a featureless level and the brutal vertical. The peaks could not be climbed. They were an absolute barrier. The valley between the mountain chains narrowed quickly, and Haas was close enough to the western range to see the welds on them, the seams between an infinity of overlapping metal plates, as if the orks had begun constructing a ship’s hull and been unable to stop. The jagged, crooked, intersecting streams of light were not lava. They looked even more like blood flowing just beneath the iron flesh. The mix of the geological, the artificial and the organic was unnerving.