Caldera destroyed its children, but it did so without malice. It was violently alive, and to die in its embrace was no tragedy. It was the basic reality of the world.
What advanced towards the settlement of Torrens was also violently alive. There were even sounds carried over the wind to Becker that resembled joy. It was a joy alien to Caldera and to humans. It was the joy of destruction. There was malice out there.
Approaching fast.
Torrens was a mining settlement built into the rocky western slope of a basalt plateau. At the base of the slope was jungle that stretched to the west almost as far as the capital, Laccolith. Much of Caldera was blasted rock, but here, after it had been destroyed before the coming of Imperial colonists a millennium ago, the jungle had returned, the ground fertilised by the ash from the twin volcanic peaks to the north that marked the beginning of the Ascia Rift valley.
Torrens was walled, its plasteel barrier more substantial than any of its housing. The fortifications kept the violent fauna of Caldera at bay. They would do nothing against the life that roared towards Torrens now.
The orks flattened the jungle in their advance. Their huge tanks and towering walkers smashed through trees, and behind them came the infantry. The beasts covered so vast an area that they must have numbered in the tens of thousands. The flames from the exhausts of their machines illuminated the undulations of an enormous mass. A flood of destructive muscle, come to butcher and burn.
There were still lights on in Laccolith. Becker could see the glow of the city at the horizon. It was dirty with smoke. The vox-transmissions from the capital were sporadic and filled with terror, but at least they were a sign of life. The greenskins had not razed the city and killed everyone there. Not yet. He didn’t understand why that was. What could have pulled the orks away from their prize? Not the trivial presence of Torrens.
Boredom? Becker wondered. Laccolith’s population was in the millions. Total eradication would slow the orks’ march of conquest.
The guess was a weak one. And what did it matter? The orks were coming here. Torrens would not delay them at all. It would afford the horde a diversion. An amusement.
Becker looked to his left and right. The entire length of the wall was lined with miners. Hundreds of them, every able-bodied member of every clan. There were plenty of lasrifles to go around. Caldera’s indigenous life forms mandated vigilance and armament. There were two autocannon turrets, one at each end of the west wall. The citizens of Torrens would stitch the jungle with las and shells. As long as Becker kept his gaze on his comrades, he could believe in their strength. But when he looked west again, the futility of their show of determination sank in.
‘How long do you think we can hold them off?’ Karla asked.
Becker shrugged. ‘What’s your guess?’
‘Until they kill us.’
‘Sounds right.’
‘Maybe they won’t notice us,’ Heinz Wenlandt said. He stood on the other side of Karla, a tense shadow. He was over forty, like her, but sounded twenty years younger. Not in a good way.
Karla snorted. ‘Dreamer.’
‘Why?’ Wenlandt begged. ‘We’re not in their path to anywhere.’
‘Neither is the jungle,’ Karla said.
‘We are their path,’ said Becker.
The orks proved him right a few moments later. Even though the wall was still beyond the range of their rifles, the infantry started shooting. Then the tanks and huge walkers opened fire. Their cannon shells streaked for Torrens, slashing the night with trails of flame. Becker’s shoulders hunched as the destruction shrieked out of the darkness. Shells hit the fortifications. Others arced further and landed in Torrens itself.
In the second before the blasts, Becker shouted and pulled the trigger of his lasrifle. He had no targets. He had only the will to fight before he died. Then the plasteel beneath his feet shook. The air filled with flame. The central portion of the wall exploded, a storm of wreckage punching backwards through the colony. More shells blew away chunks of the upper portion of the ramparts. The ork volley hammered the barrier to a slumping ruin.
Becker coughed, eyes and throat stinging with smoke. The skin of his neck felt baked from the proximity of the fireballs. The parapet sloped sharply to his right and he held on to one of the outward-curving spikes of the crenellations to keep from falling. Between the concussions of the shells came the screams of the wounded. Many more were already dead. But the rest were fighting. The citizens of Torrens clung to the parapet, clambered over still-settling wreckage, and rushed forwards to the battered wall to lash the enemy with bursts of las. Karla was still at his side, burning through her gun’s power pack, her temple bleeding from a glancing hit by shrapnel. Wenlandt was pale, shaking, his face sheened with sweat and fear, but he was shooting too.
We’re still fighting, Becker thought. Even less than a minute into the battle, that felt like a victory. They would fight until extinction. He would die clutching that pride.
The orks streamed from the jungle. At their head were troops on bikes and in trucks. Freed of the trees, the vehicles raced over the gentle slope of scree towards the rise of the wall. Their engines screamed their hunger. Filthy smoke billowed in the night. Blinding headlamps jerked up and down as the speeding machines bounced over rocks. Dazzled, Becker could not guess at the numbers, but the roar was deafening. The infantry ran close behind, and the heavy armour continued its bombardment.
The green tide was almost on Torrens. Becker fired, knowing he could not miss, and knowing his courage had no effect. At least the struggle left no room for grief.
And then the lead truck exploded. The fireball caught bikers, turning them into rolling, out-of-control torches. They careened into other vehicles. Another truck blew up, close by but not involved in the mounting collision. A bike rose suddenly and hurtled through the air. It crashed into more riders.
The ork advance stumbled. The flames grew higher. Silhouetted by the fire was a towering armoured figure wielding a gigantic hammer. He swung it into the grille of an oncoming truck, and the front of the vehicle crumpled as if it had slammed into a mountainside. The truck flipped end-over-end, flattening bikers and its own occupants when it crashed back to earth. The ork infantry swarmed the warrior. He obliterated them, each of his blows as devastating as an artillery shell. Ork chieftains larger than the warrior went down as quickly as their underlings.
With a great, sweeping attack, the warrior hacked a clearing through the foe. For a moment he stood alone, surrounded by corpses and wreckage, framed by fire. Becker saw him more clearly: the huge reptilian skull on his shoulder-plate, the obsidian skin and the profile of unyielding nobility.
The warrior spoke, and his voice boomed over the barbaric snarls of the greenskin war machine. ‘Children of Caldera! You fight with spirit! Fight on, and know you do not fight alone!’
In the next moment, the heavy shelling shifted its target from Torrens and fell on the lower slope. The warrior vanished. The ground became a single explosion, an eruption that went on and on until Becker’s ears were bleeding. One of the ork walkers, a twenty-metre-tall monster of shambling metal plates and weapons, its head a maw of jagged savagery, towered over the blasts and fed them with an unceasing stream of cannon fire, destroying hundreds of greenskins in the attempt to kill the single defender.
Becker’s heart clenched, hope extinguished just as it flared. But he didn’t let up with his rifle, shooting into the fire, and then into the smoke as the barrage finally ended. The warrior had won Torrens a few more seconds of existence, and he was grateful for that. He obeyed the hero’s last command. He fought on.