Koorland held his sword aloft and shouted, cheers beginning to spread through the Great Chamber and into the antechamber beyond as the reality of what the lords had just witnessed or heard sank in.
‘The next time an ork sets foot in this chamber, it will be met by the Last Wall!’
The chamber buzzed with new excitement. Koorland’s twin hearts were thumping.
The fightback began now.
Nineteen
The locomotive rattled along the damaged track, steadily slowing as it curved towards Princus Praxa.
The ork pressed up against the inside of the carriage window squeaked slowly down until Zerberyn arrested it with a firm hand to the back of its neck. A buckled sleeper jarred the carriage and touched acid to the raw tendons in his arm. These orks had been allowed to grow large, as great perhaps as those fought by the primarchs on Ullanor, and the continual buffeting made it feel heavier. With a grunt, he drew the brute back into place just as an ork sentry post flashed across the window.
Scrap metal, painted red. Belt-fed combi-weapons in huge, gauntleted hands. Then columns, bullet-chewed ferrocrete blinking past as the locomotive passed under the terminus’ flat roof. Sunlight receded, replaced by spotty lumens and the drum fires scattered over the platforms and access ramps.
Gangs of gretchin and the occasional leather-clad ork were busily loading and unloading. Zerberyn expected to see human slaves performing the greenskins’ labour, but what few humans he saw were in chained lines being fed out of dusty locomotives and into corrals. Moving in the opposite direction were big industrial storage drums, light weaponry and vehicles, and agricultural machinery. Orks in rugged yellow battlesuits showing off sneering moon glyphs oversaw the import and export with a brutish efficiency that any crude hierarchy would recognise. In another setting, Zerberyn might have been watching Administratum troopers extorting a local militia. Some kind of lumpen, enamelled currency changed hands.
The march of columns slowed as the locomotive squealed towards an empty platform.
A ten-strong mob of orks in thick red bodyplate followed the engine in, streaming down a frozen escalator from a pedestrian flyover. Some kind of boss, broader than the rest by half a metre and as dark as a Predator’s treads, waved a clenched fist for them to spread out and they did. At a barked command, two pairs clattered forwards to cover each of the carriage doors. Half of the mob hung back on overwatch.
It was organised. Professional. Not at all like orks.
Zerberyn drew his bolt pistol carefully. Columba and the rest of Veteran Squad Anatoq prepared themselves, keeping hold of the orks they hid behind with elbows, shoulders, whatever was practical.
The Tempestus Scions crammed into the vestibule and underseat areas out of sight, calmly activated their weapons’ visual augmenter beams, flexing fingers, rolling shoulders, working space enough for each man to move when the moment came. The rising hum of hot-shot packs resonated through the carriage’s metal fittings. Major Bryce angled up the reflective edge of his slate monitorum to the window and grimaced.
‘Bloody Axes,’ he hissed. ‘That’s what we call them, for the symbol on their armour. Always kill them first.’
‘Noted,’ said Zerberyn, disengaging his bolt pistol from its mag-holster.
The locomotive heaved onto its brakes and then cried shrilly to a halt. The Bloody Axes came running in, two by two. Zerberyn checked the countdown timer he had programmed into his helm display. It was locked on 00:00 and had been for half a second.
‘Brother Donbuss, are you sure that the greenskin munitions you recovered were—’
A second sun rose over the pasture desert, white and furious, light burning up the track like a runaway train. Bryce grunted and slid back under the window, but Zerberyn’s auto-senses protectively filmed over a split second ahead of time. He saw the orks on the platform turn in surprise towards the thermonuclear explosion on the horizon, then clutch their eyes and stagger out of their ordered overwatch formation.
‘Now!’
Zerberyn yanked the release cord.
The doors shuddered apart, far enough for him to force his right arm through to the pauldron and open fire. A single mass-reactive explosion ripped the shoulder from a bellowing Bloody Axe. He tracked left, fired again as its fellow brought up its gun blind, and dropped it with a spitting rupture in its chest.
At the same time, Scions in full omnishield glare protection popped the roof escape hatches, swinging up plasma weaponry and hot-shot volleyguns and raking the platform with fire.
Zerberyn got his fingers between his pauldron plate and the doors and pushed them open. He jumped two-footed onto the platform, cracking into it. A Bloody Axe flailed for him with eyes closed. A headshot exploded it, just as the window behind him shattered.
Arriving at his own decision to move now rather than wait for his captain, Columba simply fired through the window on full-auto. Propellant trails criss-crossed the platform. Mass-reactive kill-shots painted it red. With their lighter profiles, the Scions climbed easily though the broken frames. Bryce was first onto the platform, emptying a charge cell into the Bloody Axe boss’ body armour, and then scrambling behind a pillar as the blinded ork let rip with a racketing burst of fire.
Kalkator executed the creature with a single bolt-round between the shoulder blades.
The warsmith stood on the platform by the doors of the rear carriage. He threw a mock salute. The orks at that end of the platform were dead. Traitor Space Marines were disembarking to take up firing positions over the shredded remains while, in a gnarl of corrupted motors, the three Terminators formed up into a line, a wall, and advanced on the steps up to the flyover. The escalator was a natural choke point and, drawn by the gunfire, orks were already piling bodies and heavy guns up behind the bent crush barrier at the top.
Tactical Dreadnought plate had been built to withstand the worst a hostile galaxy could give out.
It withstood this.
‘Major,’ Zerberyn boomed over the screams and thunder of abused plasteel. ‘Do you know where my cousin is leading us?’
‘Yes, lord — streetside access.’
Zerberyn looked around quickly. The station was a maze of platforms, overpasses and panting locomotives that echoed with bestial shouts and weapons flare. Engines thundered through, not frequently, but at a speed and irregularity that made the tracks a genuine hazard, even for a Space Marine.
‘Do you know an alternate route?’
‘I do, lord.’
‘Then take it. We will force the direct route. Columba, take a five-man combat squad, go with him.’
With a metallic growl, the veteran-sergeant jumped into the tracks in the direction that Bryce and the Tempestus Scions were moving. Donbuss, Borhune, Nalis and Tarsus fell in with him, squeezing off controlled bursts at the orks on the far side whenever the locomotives screeching between them left space for a shot. Zerberyn turned to the Iron Warriors.
The Terminators walked into a gauntlet of missiles, bombs and explosive rounds like a vehicle’s dozer blade churning up a minefield. Kalkator and the Traitor Space Marines moved up behind them, taking snapshots over the massive head and shoulder armour of their Cataphractii brothers.
Zerberyn accorded their efficiency a grudging admiration.
Goaded beyond their febrile discipline, the orks poured over the crush barriers with a roar. Bodies exploded, ripped apart by mass-reactive rounds. The muzzle flashes of rapid-firing combi-bolters strobed in the narrow space. Beasts howled. Piped laughter boomed from helmet speakers.