The engines powered up anew. The deck began to vibrate once more as the strike cruiser began its turn. The view in the oculus shifted with majestic slowness. The blunt-prowed, brutal predators closed, their fire crossing paths with that of the Blood Angels. A cross-hatching of destruction lit the void.
‘The greenskins might repair that moon,’ Marbas said.
‘They might,’ Valefor agreed. ‘I know we stand a chance of destroying it, brother-sergeant. I also know the price we would pay.’
Ork shells pounded the starboard hull. A void shield collapsed.
‘Launch bay five destroyed,’ a servitor intoned.
The screen on Valefor’s right began to list casualty reports.
Marbas joined Valefor beside the pulpit. ‘We are paying a price now.’
‘I have no doubt we will pay more. Our duty is to reach Terra. Our sacrifices must be to that purpose. Sanguinius made his ultimate sacrifice there. Our duty and our tribute call us there in turn.’
The Sanguinem Ignis gathered momentum. Valefor eyed the pict screens. He felt the fires racing down the corridors as if his own veins were burning. We do not end here, he thought. Not here, in the void between systems, cut down by a wounded enemy, in an encounter with no strategic meaning.
Sacrifice must have meaning. Hope for more was a luxury the Blood Angels had banished long ago. But they would not accept less.
The oculus image adjusted as the Sanguinem Ignis turned its back on its pursuers. Its torpedoes punched through the prow of the lead cruiser. The massive head of the beast appeared to swallow the explosions. Metal swelled, and chain reaction blasts burst through plate dozens of metres thick. The front half of the ork vessel became a volcanic eruption. Its engines drove it onwards into its own conflagration. A roiling comet of plate and incandescent gas rushed forwards, as if it would catch the Blood Angels in its expanding death. The other cruisers sailed through the lethal corona. The smaller, lighter ships sped past the behemoths and raced ahead of the Sanguinem Ignis.
‘Forward perspective,’ Valefor ordered.
The oculus blinked, accepting the feed from the bow of the ship. The greenskins were establishing a cordon. Individually, the ships were no match for the Sanguinem Ignis. Together, they were a formidable barrier. Their guns unleashed a storm of fire. Brilliant, murderous day came to the void. The Blood Angels answered with a frontal bombardment. Ork ships were vaporised.
More replaced them.
The Sanguinem Ignis picked up speed. Guns firing on all sides, it plunged into the gauntlet.
The city was slag. It had once covered half the surface of the moon, a hundred million citizens working the forges of its manufactoria. They were dead now. Habs and industry were gone. There was only an iron cemetery, a field of twisted wreckage and molten shapes that stretched to the horizon. The forms were the death of metal. The ground crunched and rang beneath Asger Warfist’s steps. All was black, except for the grey rain of ash from the sky.
The northern half of Fabrikk was destroyed. There was nothing left here to fight over. But there had never been anything the orks wanted from the start. They had come to destroy. They had come to take the moon.
‘Is this what victory looks like?’ Hakon Icegrip asked the Wolf Lord.
‘I don’t care what it looks like. I care that the enemy never sees it.’
The war had shattered Fabrikk. It was barely more than a ruin orbiting its gas giant. There were still some viable settlements near the southern pole, but their output would never be more than a shadow of what had once been. It would take very little for what small population remained to abandon the moon.
They would not, though. Even if it took force, they would remain. Fabrikk’s true value was not the weapons and vehicles it produced, but its location. It was one of the systems ringing the Eye of Terror, a strategic base that could never fall from the Imperium’s grasp.
The Space Wolves would not allow it.
Asger brought his packs to a slag heap that had once been the lead manufactorium of Fabrikk. They could hear the tramp of feet and the rumble of ork vehicles on the other side. The hunt was almost over.
‘For Russ!’ Asger shouted.
‘For the Wolftime!’ the packs answered.
They stormed over the rise. They descended on the ork horde, and they were fury and claw. They were the wind of Fenris, slashing into the ork flanks. To the south, the gunship attack continued, driving the orks forwards. To the north, Predator cannons held them back. And now Asger cut the enemy in half.
The struggle had worn both forces down to ragged cores of rage. The attack moon in the region was two systems over, the target of multiple Great Companies. The invaders of Fabrikk had left the moon and come in a fleet of cruisers. Their numbers were huge, but they were not unlimited. The orks and the Space Wolves had pummelled each other with orbital bombardments. The front lines had raged back and forth over Fabrikk, until there was nothing left of the city and the forges. All that remained was the battered armies. And now it was time for one of them to be exterminated.
The orks welcomed the Wolves. The two forces clashed as if this was their first encounter. Savagery met savagery. Asger fired bursts from his bolt pistol in a wide arc as he charged, punching through plate and muscle, crippling and maiming the brutes closing with him. He followed up with the wolf claw on his right fist, slashing throats, disembowelling. The orks pressed in harder, trampling over the bodies of their dead. They were all massive, blunt weapons of muscle and bone. The entire campaign had been against these orks, the largest Asger had ever encountered. Many of them dwarfed him. None were faster. He equalled them in ferocity and surpassed them in hate.
At his sides, Grey Hunters tore into the xenos. Bolter and blade, bolter and blade, the alternating swipes of massive paws. The Space Wolves ripped apart the ork force. The greenskins turned inwards. They rushed to impale themselves on the claws of Asger’s attack.
The numbers and the size of the orks worked against them. Everywhere the Space Wolves fired, there was a target. The greenskins could not offer massed fire in return without decimating their own ranks. As the packs tore deeper and deeper into the phalanx, the outermost ork chieftains brought heavy weapons to bear regardless of the cost and the battlefield exploded. Asger moved through fountains of flame and shrapnel and bodies in fragments. He roared, charging faster through the enemy. Directions ceased to have meaning. There was only eruption and blood. He knew the pack moved with him. Information about lost brothers flashed before his retinal lenses. The acknowledgement of loss would come later. For now the deaths were a goad.
Fire in the air. Fire in Asger’s blood. He was a blur in armour. He was a maddened beast. His lips were pulled back, his teeth bared for the taste of the blood of prey. He smelled it through the filter of his battle-helm’s grille. He smelled butchery.
‘Yes, Brother Hakon!’ he yelled over the vox. ‘This is what victory looks like!’
More fire, cleansing, liquid flame, pouring over the orks. The Space Wolves maintained close formation, tightening it when they took casualties. They were a cohesive blade in the maelstrom of violence. Overhead, the gunships closed in, cannons raking the ground. Asger abandoned himself to the kill, his world reduced to the roar of engines, the smoke of burning flesh and vehicles, the crimson spray of severed arteries.
It ended. The blood ceased to spurt. The smoke began to clear. Thunderhawks came in for a landing, and their engines cut out. Asger stood with his brothers on a field that was as dead as it had been before the battle. When he walked, he stepped on bone as well as slag. Torn flesh was draped over the jagged stumps of foundations.