The sound of gunning engines dragged him back.
The last of the Iron Warriors were disappearing into an alley. Antille was there, waving for the rest of them to hurry.
Zerberyn slammed his shoulder into the tipped truck, with his brothers’ help sending it squealing back into place in the barricade. He backed away, clapping rust from his gauntlets, and shoved Karva and Reoch after their traitor allies.
The alley was narrow and desperately dark, wide enough for an Iron Warriors Terminator, but only just. The walls were crowded with metal escape ladders that vibrated with every bass grunt from the Beast’s augmitter network. Blended waste trickled through open sewage channels, carrying nuggets of bone, the occasional finger. Moments before, Zerberyn had thought he had seen the basest point to which human by-product could be rendered. Now, crashing headlong through knotted waste sacks and refuse drums, he was rudely re-educated.
Kalkator’s vanguard had just cleared the alley when a pair of spotlights hit them from behind the row of habs. No, not spotlights.
Headlights.
There was a squeal of tyre rubber, a turbo-charged petrochem roar, and then an armoured troop truck smashed through the two Traitor Space Marines at point and straight into the wall. The lamps flickered. Masonry pattered over the crowded troop compartment. Orks in thick, spiked armour and enclosed helms fired their guns in the air, the rear wheels still revving up swirls of red dust as the fighters piled out into the alley.
Zerberyn kicked in a side door partially hidden behind a pair of bins.
‘This way!’
He ran through into what looked like a processing plant or manufactory. Karva followed, the pilot of his heavy flamer flickering blue in the utter dark like a serpent’s tongue, then Reoch, Galen and Tosque, and finally Antille, covering the rear with tight bursts of bolter fire.
There were small windows high up in the two long walls, but these had been crudely boarded up and painted over in thick, primary colours. The skylight over the centre of the manufactorum floor had been successively stained red. It was like trying to look out from inside an artery.
The veteran-brothers activated their helm lights.
The beams stabbed up into towering lines of heavy machinery, chopped through steel ladders, and dug into the dark to glint back off meat hooks and ceiling-mounted suspensor platforms. The line was still running, conveyers clattering away unidentifiable chunks of gristle and flesh into the dark.
Surrounded by horror, Zerberyn almost forgot the Iron Warriors.
Firing on full automatic now, the Traitor Space Marines retreated inside. A warrior with a tusked helm and hellishly embellished battleplate tore a frag grenade from a clutch at his belt, leaving the pin behind, and then launched it through the open door. The confined frag blast stormed both ways down the alley and blew scraps of flesh and debris into the manufactorum. At a command from Kalkator, another slammed the door while two of his brothers dragged over a pallet loader laden with drums and jammed it up against the frame.
Zerberyn quickly cast about for another way out.
‘We can carry on, further into the complex,’ said Kalkator, striding over and clearly reading his intent. One crimson lens on his helm was fractured and flickered crazily, while grey sealant gel welled up from breach points in his battleplate like a fungal infestation. The unpainted ceramite cloaking his apostate colours made him, just for a moment, appear almost noble. ‘The bunker’s entry point is not far, but we cannot fight every ork in this city to get there.’
‘Where is it?’
‘And lessen my value to you? I am too old to be a fool, little cousin.’
‘Then go,’ said Zerberyn, ejecting a spent clip from his pistol and locking home another. Not many left now. They would have to count. ‘My brothers and I will hold them here.’
He expected Kalkator to argue. A brother of the Fists Exemplar would have, for it was as deeply in their nature to be martyrs as it was to be contrary. True to his Legion’s harsh reputation however, Kalkator accepted the willing sacrifice with a nod of his horned helm and a flicker of his shattered lens.
‘Theron,’ he growled. The most elaborately armoured of the Terminators turned in answer to his name, in a shiver of razorwire and painful iconography. There was still an axe embedded in his gorget’s fibre bundles, restricting his helmet’s range of motion. There had been no time to address it. ‘You and your brothers will remain. You will follow the Fists Exemplar’s orders as though they were mine.’
Zerberyn’s eyebrow arched. Honour from an Iron Warrior? He doubted it. More likely, the Cataphractii-pattern suits would simply slow the rest of Kalkator’s force down.
‘From honour cometh iron!’ the warsmith bellowed, backing off and summoning his warriors to follow.
As the last of the Iron Warriors moved past him, Zerberyn brought his bolt pistol to cover the alley side entrance they had left behind. This is my ground, it said in his genes’ selfish voice, the voice of every Imperial Fist that had ever occupied a fort or defended a hill. I hold it. To stop running, to turn and hold: tactical necessity it may have been but that was not why it felt right.
Tosque joined him, then Reoch, Karva, Galen and Antille, pauldron to pauldron to pauldron in an unbroken circle. Corners were weaknesses. The sturdiest redoubts had none.
A scuffling came from the alley, of steel boots and bulky weapons hitting bins. Zerberyn focused his hearing to gauge their numbers, but was immediately distracted by something else. Engines. Vehicles were circling the structure, disgorging troops. Zerberyn could hear them hammering up to the walls.
‘Fists Exemplar,’ cried Zerberyn, aiming for the door behind the rough barricade. ‘The First Wall.’
A rapid beating like that from a crooked fan rotor droned overhead and the circle of Fists Exemplar was suddenly bathed in red light. Zerberyn looked up and squinted into the floodlight shafting in through the skylight. He scowled into the glare, shifting his aim upwards even as the shadows it had disgorged dropped towards the glass.
The orks were coming.
Twenty
The skylight shattered.
Zerberyn looked up, slowly, torturously, time stretching elastically into glittering stillness as his superhuman perceptions processed the sudden sensory overload. A million bladed reflections of himself looked out in all directions. Floodlights glared white, beaten into slices by the rotating wings of a hovering aircraft. He could hear the thump of its engines, suspended in time as its downwash held it in the air. Shards of glass the thickness of his hand tumbled. He saw it all. The ceiling had not been shattered evenly. Twelve discrete points of impact penetrated it, huge black-armoured bodies punching through the skylight and trailing glass like bullets fired into water. He began to shift his aim upwards, his brain gunning towards full speed.
‘—clear!’ cried a vox-fragment as glass cascaded over the manufactory floor.
Tosque and Antille pulled into the cover of an overhead crawlway. Galen hit the ground. Still tracking his aim skywards, Zerberyn dropped to his haunches and covered his head with his arms. Glass broke against his battleplate like a thousand blades. The weight of it pushed him down. His ears filled with a crystalline rush, and he could see nothing but fragmented light and edges. He glimpsed Brother Karva. The veteran was bent backwards and backing up, squaring his chest to the onslaught to shield the volatile promethium tanks on his shoulders. Zerberyn could do nothing but yell an unheard warning into his vox-bead as a shard of reinforced glass the size of a Rhino’s troop hatch came blade-down through the faceplate of the Space Marine’s helm and staked him to the ground.