He was dully aware of the low-calibre hits stinging his armour. System alerts rather than true pain. His adrenal glands were working too hard to let him feel that. His multi-lung had taken over long ago, pumping furiously to purge the acidity from his muscles.
The orks had taken his world from him: he would rather be damned than let the orks take this one too. But, using his battle instinct and survival, he allowed himself to consider that there might be no victory. The orks were too overwhelming, too powerful, their advantages too great even for the Adeptus Astartes to overcome.
A massive fireball rippled over the ruptured skylight.
A burst of fire from a quad-linked heavy bolter cut in from a high angle with a sound like a loose chain being mechanically spun around a crank. The ork’s ’copter peeled open and finally exploded, showering the packed melee with metallic debris. The dull grey wedge of a Thunderhawk gunship banked right and over to skirt the fireball, then descended hard towards the skylight with autocannon fire from some neighbouring building lighting its aerofoil.
Zerberyn’s vox-bead crackled.
‘Leonis, First Captain, piloting Penitence. We picked up something you left behind.’
Gold icons blinked into being on Zerberyn’s visor display as Sergeant Columba led the charge down the Thunderhawk’s troop hatch. The veteran jumped, landing two-footed in a howl of suspensors with his chainsword buried deep into an ork’s shoulder and spraying the contents of its chest over his plastron. He pivoted on the spot. A kick delivered on the underside of his boot sent a fighter in black-and-white jags cannoning through two more. Donbuss, Borhune, Nalis and Tarsus thumped down around him, a hail of hellgun fire clearing space for them to work.
Militarum Tempestus Scions pounded along the upper level catwalks, coming down roof access ladders, pumping round after round of hot-shot las into the charging greenskins. Firing on the move with a hellpistol in each hand, Major Bryce took his own advice, cutting through the Bloody Axes and their human line troops. The expression twisting his burned face was wrathful. Zerberyn understood the man all too well.
Brother Donbuss’ heavy bolter spoke with fury. Not having witnessed what Zerberyn had a moment before, the veteran-brother identified the most prominent threat and opened up on the dreadnought. The air became thunder. Shell casings showered the ground with gold. The ork walker’s void shield rippled and flared, massive force and equally massive counterforce waging full-spectrum warfare across its cylindrical frame. The dreadnought abandoned the Terminators and came about.
It extended its saw arm and, with a sound like a long tube swallowing a grenade, launched a pair of sizzling stick bombs towards Columba’s combat squad.
Donbuss took both blasts full in the chest. His plastron held together but crumpled badly, sealant gel and hypercoagulants mingling in the ruptures. The impact savaged his faceplate, tearing his helm half away. The force lifted him up and slammed him into a machinery stack. The rest of the combat squad were peeled apart and thrown to the ground like toys.
Inarticulate savagery raging from its speakers, the dreadnought stamped about and smashed a Terminator across the manufactorum with a swing of its wrecker arm. The Iron Warrior crashed through the opposite wall. Loosened masonry tumbled in, a pyre licked with promethium flames.
Zerberyn cursed. An ork covered in snake tattoos went down with a headshot. Throat punch. Headbutt. Hammer shock blasted a hole. He strode into it, his armour coated with copper glaze, following his own tracer of automatic fire.
A thick-shouldered ork in Bloody Axe colours shrugged off the bolter fire and ignited the jump pack strapped to its back. It rocketed into the air on an arc of flaming liquid propellant, and landed on a catwalk. The platform juddered under the sudden impact. Tempestus Scions fell away, firing point-blank. The ork laughed it off and set to with its powered axe.
The Scions’ wargear was impressive, but it was not power armour. They were good, but they were not Space Marines.
A second ork, and then a third, fired up jump packs to get in amongst the Scions. Bryce’s increasingly hoarse orders got lost amongst the screams, the crack of bone and power discharge. Several of the armoured troopers broke and risked the four-metre drop to take their chances on the ground.
It was no better.
The surviving Terminators had hurt the dreadnought. It flailed, tangling its arms in chain pulls and surrounding itself with a swinging flock of lift cradles and pallets, crying molten iron. A Terminator stove in the dreadnought’s mid-section with a blow from his power fist. Even as he tore the crackling gauntlet free, an ork grappled him from behind. The brute dug its claws into the gorget softseals and hauled back on the Iron Warrior’s helmet. Fire sprayed from his gauntlet-mount as he was drawn down and under.
Brother Galen traversed back out of the melee, slumped, riding the juddering conveyer deeper into the manufactory like a corpse into the crematoria. Reoch was crouched over him. His binoptics were a fell green in the fyceline haze, his bolt pistol an unwavering source of white light.
From above, the roar of the Thunderhawk’s turbofans momentarily muted the din. Glass fragments and shell casings blew out in ripples, tied to the cycling of its engine fans as it pulled away. A squadron of single-prop biplanes buzzed after it with flak spitting from their painted muzzles.
Zerberyn raised his hammer high, mentally dialling his gorget vox-booster to maximum. Iron Warriors and Fists Exemplar together. They had held long enough.
‘Fall back. Everyone. Back to the gunship.’
A feral roar threatened to drown him out, and he looked back to the breached wall. An ork of truly monstrous scale, dark skin powdered with gold, crashed through the breached wall recently vacated by the dreadnought. Its muscular frame was bolted into an electric-shock yellow fighting suit half again Zerberyn’s size. Pistons wheezed. Valves screeched. Black smoke pumped the air. At first glance it was a typical ork build. Closer inspection, however, revealed a powered suit of surpassing artisanship. The plates were glossy and smooth, lines straight, edges perfect. Alternating power fields surrounded the ork with a sharp ozone burn. It flexed the arm-width digits of a three-clawed power fist, auto-loaders churning ammo belts through a massive ten-barrelled combi-weapon.
‘You die. Now.’
Its bastardised Low Gothic was kicked out of its chest, like air from a dead man’s lungs, and Zerberyn was too stunned to respond.
It had spoken. Orks did not speak.
It started to run, beating aside a steel drum that then punched straight through a support stanchion and brought an empty section of crawlway crashing down. Zerberyn ran to meet it. The ground between them trembled. He drew back his thunder hammer and roared his hatred.
They clashed like bolt-rounds hitting each other in mid-air.
Zerberyn’s thunder hammer came down on the ork’s thigh brace. The local power field blew out and the metal squealed under the stress. The ork steam-rollered through him, snatching him up in its power claw and driving him through the light metal casing of a machine stack.
With a roar like laughter, the ork dragged him from the wreckage and swung him about as though he were promethium jelly on the monster’s claws.
Even for his transhuman physiology, the g-force was tremendous. Black spots appeared in front of his eyes. He unloaded his pistol into the ork’s upper torso power field until the hammer struck an empty chamber. He had no more. Screaming, he hawked up acid from his Betcher’s gland and spat it into the ork’s face. Green smoke sizzled from its jaw, but it did not feel it.
The ork tightened its grip. The power fist’s disruption field burned off his armour layer by layer. Ceramite creaked, crunched, split. He may have screamed again. He was no longer sure. He lashed out with his thunder hammer.