Her training was in the suppression of mobs, not military combat. But she looked at the orks as a well-armed mob, and her instincts kept her alive. In their undisciplined rampage, they reminded her of rebellious underhive gangs. But much stronger.
She took a step back as her target dropped. She hunched down, using its body as a shield. The next orks rushing forward swung without looking for her. Their blades went wide. She fired up, blinding one, then caught it in the face with the maul as it fell forward, tripping over the corpse of its fellow. Another brought its cleaver in too quickly for her to dodge. She turned her body and caught the blade in her pauldron. She rammed the shock maul into the greenskin’s belly. It snarled in anger. It was too big, too powerful to stun, but it reflexively lost its grip on its blade. It reached for her throat with both hands.
She fired into its face at the same time that Sever did. She looked at the commissar just as he was struck from behind. He dropped to his knees. She fired at the ork towering over him while she lashed out blindly to either side with her shock maul, trying to stave off an ambush on herself.
There were orks on all sides. She and Sever were drowning in the green tide.
Haas’ maul struck bodies, drawing grunts. Her shots didn’t kill the ork over Sever. It was too big. But they drew its attention. It came for her, a colossus in spiked metal plate wielding a large hammer. Sever must have been hit by the most glancing of blows.
A hit from an ork behind her clipped Haas’ helmet and struck the cleaver still embedded in her shoulder’s ablative armour. The blade went deeper, drawing blood, before it fell out. She fell towards the giant, tucking herself into the tumble and rolling along the ground between the ork’s legs. She spun around and fired at its back.
The las did nothing against its armour. It turned, but then there were hands pulling her and Sever out of its path, and a storm surge of Crusaders, brandishing bayonets, crashed into the monster. It roared at them, smashed heads to pulp with its hammer, but they kept coming in endless, desperate frenzy. There were so many, they climbed over each other as they struck at the ork. Haas made it to her feet. Sever was already up, exhorting the civilians who streamed by on either side, buffeting him in their rush. She witnessed the impossible: an ork submerged by the human tide.
Dozens of Crusaders died. But they trampled the ork to death.
A group of orks came back hard, avenging their leader, and the greenskin formation was diluted still further. More platoons of Imperial Guard closed in. They turned heavy weapons on the orks. Rockets and flamers exterminated unlucky humans as well, but there were fewer greenskins, and always more humans.
We’re fighting like them, Haas realised, and that part of her mind that could still think critically was horrified that the children of the Emperor had reached this state. The rest of her met savagery with savagery, and she rejoiced to see the enemy’s advance slowed, then stopped.
Then reversed.
Haas didn’t realise, at first, that the miracle was happening. She and Sever were moving forward, acting as a coordinated pair against each foe. Forward, forward, forward, over the wreckage of the tanks, and at last it registered that they were never stepping back, and that the direction was consistent, and that they were speeding up.
The orks were retreating, and they were dying as they did so.
The Crusaders pursued. They tasted blood and victory, and the roar was unlike anything Haas had yet heard. There was all the hope and all the desperation that had fuelled the great cries of defiance on Terra. But now the enemy was before them, and the enemy was running, here, on its great machine of war that was the source of globe-spanning terror. The orks were fleeing. They could be defeated. In the name of the Emperor, they were defeated. The xenos threat that had annihilated the Imperial Fists was being routed by an army that had little more than faith and dire need behind it.
Haas joined in the shout. Her throat and her lungs were scraped raw by the air. She didn’t care. She was part of the triumph. Expelling all of the awful fear of the last days, she howled her hate and feral joy. She raced after the orks, and she was part of a massive wave of humanity so powerful it must surely sweep mountains aside.
The tiny part of her consciousness that still thought tactically wondered why the reinforcing ork army had not been larger. It wondered why it had all been infantry. It wondered why there had been no tanks, no artillery and no heavy weapons of any kind.
None of these questions mattered. Not now. Not in this moment of moments.
The orks retreated faster. They put distance between themselves and the humans. Haas was frustrated not to have more greenskin blood on her hands, but she rejoiced that the enemy was so desperate to escape.
The Crusaders were close now to the light, the glow that came from underground. At the point where the ranges met, Haas could now see that immense doors had slid apart to allow the orks to come up a ramp wide enough to accommodate a dozen tanks abreast of each other. The greenskins pounded down the steep slope, and the doors began to close. They were huge, metres thick, tall as a hab-block, but set in the ground only twenty degrees from the horizontal. With the leading edge of the human wave still several hundred metres away, they began to slide closed.
So did the mountains.
The ground beneath Haas’ feet shook, throwing her down. The grinding of a vast mechanism reached up through stone. And the mountains walked. The event was too great, too impossible, so that her mind refused for several seconds to accept what her eyes saw. The ranges moved towards each other with a metallic rumble that was the voice of an entire world. The moon was changing before her eyes.
Thousands of metres high, dozens of kilometres long, the barriers were coming together to form the last of all walls. The Crusaders had run into a trap that would kill millions at a stroke.
The race halted. The roar turned into screams. There was nowhere to run. The ships were too far. The mountain faces were sheer and high. There was time only for the fullness of terror to take hold.
‘Go!’ Sever yelled. ‘Deny them this victory!’
Only Haas heard him.
She ran for the doors. There was still an opening several metres wide. It shrank at an unhurried pace. It still might be too fast, because the shaking of the ground was so intense, she couldn’t run in a straight line.
Haas looked at nothing but her goal. The world was closing in on both sides of her. There was no sound except the apocalypse rumble of metal and stone. There was also no one in front of her. She had the lead.
She pushed all thought away. She banished hope. She ignored the pain in her lungs and her legs. She became a thing of one movement alone. If there were other runners near her, she didn’t know. They didn’t matter. Her flight mattered. The mountains mattered. Nothing else.
Adrenaline gave her wings. The limits of the human body clipped them. She was slowing down, a dozen metres from the end of the line, and the doors had almost shut. But something was happening behind her. A new sound had begun, almost as loud as the rumble. It was a sound that was wet, and cracked. The air became thick, coppery, moist.
A few more steps, her legs stumping like rotten logs. Was she still running? It seemed she was crawling. And a river of blood, foaming, torrential, rushed ahead of her. It lapped at the doors as if it would quench their thirst. The mountains were less than ten metres apart. She could see both sides in her peripheral vision. The edges of the world closed in. The entrance shrank. She wouldn’t make it. She was too far.
Grind and rumble and screams torn apart by the edges of splintering bones. The sound of an ocean snapping into shards. The blood surged. Torrent became deluge, became tidal wave. It lifted her up. She tumbled in the flow, gagging and choking. Her vision became a whirl of jagged horrors, the darkness of the blood tide giving way to the momentary sight of what lay behind, of the climbing swell of bodies rising to the heavens, millions of people fused into a mass of broken dolls. A flash of Sever disappearing beneath the blood. Up and down, over and over, tossed by the pressurised current, battered by the flotsam of bones. She lost her weapons. She tried to swim, but she was an insect in the clutches of the moon’s fist. Drowning, soul blasted by the hell-vision, she had no thoughts, no hope, no awareness at all. She had only her last instinct, the bodily drive to struggle, even when all point had been lost.