It was, he realised, not a question of Broumis having to avoid the terrible masses.
The doom began in the form of a single pulse of light. A corona around the moon. The surface seemed to ripple, perception distorted by the intensity of the gravitic wave. An invisible hand grasped the rising chunk of Caldera. The rock was over twenty kilometres across, the size of a small planetoid. The grip whipped the mass away from the moon, and into the path of the Absolute Decree.
The cruiser’s orientation shifted once more. The movement was slow, minute, futile. There would be no evasion.
A mountain range smashed into the Absolute Decree. The cruiser shattered like glass. The fragments of its hull spread apart with awful grace, backlit by a billowing inferno. The warp drive erupted. Killing light filled the oculus, consuming the meteor. The shock wave travelled ahead of the hurtling fragments of ships and rock, washing over the fleets and moon. The Finality shuddered in the midst of holocaust. Rodolph saw the names of smaller ships vanish from the pict screen. After the light, darkness taking ally and foe alike.
But there were still so many orks. Even as ships collided with the wreckage of others, the armada kept attacking.
The darkness reached into the bridge of the Finality. It wrapped its fist around Rodolph’s head, squeezing, trying to force him into the night of despair and unconsciousness.
‘Keep fighting,’ he whispered. He clutched the aquila for strength. He clutched it for hope.
All he felt was cold iron.
Through the creeping dark of his pain, all he saw was the final approach of an enemy with the power of a god.
She almost didn’t see the battlewagon. A chance parting of the smoke, the luck of her glance to the east. The ork tank was some distance from her position. If not for the fires of burning vehicles, it would have been invisible in the falling night. But Imren saw it, and she saw the flash of its gun. Instinct said down. She dropped through the hatch of the Chimera.
A second later, the shell tore through the roof of the tank. It destroyed the turret. A burst of flame reached into the interior. Imren protected her head with her arms, and the sleeves of her uniform caught fire. She beat them out against the inner hull, blinked through pain and smoke. Her gunner was dead. The command table was shattered. But the Chimera was still moving.
‘Nissen!’ she called out. ‘Tell me it’s you driving!’
‘It is, general!’ Nissen shouted back from his compartment.
‘Do you still have vox capability?’ The equipment around her was ruined.
‘I do.’
‘Then you’ll relay my orders. For now, keep going.’
Imren grabbed the ragged edge of the roof and pulled herself up. She looked around at the state of the rout.
The Imperial forces were in full retreat. They had abandoned any thought of advancing. They were racing for Laccolith and the hell of urban warfare. There was no advantage to be gained, no siege to prepare, only the flight and the play for time.
This was wrong. All of it. She had come to Caldera to restore honour. She wished to repair the name of the Lucifer Blacks, guardian regiment of the heart of the Imperial Palace, battered by the eldar incursion and the brazen arrival of the ork ambassadors. Even more crucially, the pride of the Astra Militarum needed to be rebuilt after the disaster of the Proletarian Crusade. The mission to Caldera represented the first true hope for the Imperium since the start of the war.
A false hope, it now seemed. An illusion of perfect cruelty. The orks were invincible.
She looked forwards. Laccolith was somewhere ahead in the dark. It had to be close, but there was no illumination in the city. She would have little notice of its proximity until she crossed the remnants of its wall.
On all sides, the combined regiments raced through the shattered jungle. The retreat was a flight. The strategy was sound — the only course of action was to reach the urban battlefield ahead of the orks, seize it, and use the terrain to slow the enemy down. But the sense of the tactic did nothing to mitigate the humiliation. All she saw was defeat, the combined forces of the Emperor running for their lives from a triumphant, mocking foe.
The orks pressed in on either flank. The Imperials were using the cleared swathe of the jungle. The greenskins had to smash their way through the trees and dense vegetation again in an effort to keep up. They were doing well, scorching the earth with flamers, splintering trunks with the siege shields of tanks and trucks. The jungle slowed them just enough. Imren thought the strike force would reach the city in time.
Our only success will be to run from a fight, she thought.
Imren’s Chimera had been at the front of the Astra Militarum ranks during the advance. She was towards the rear during the retreat. The greater mass of infantry and vehicles streamed ahead of her. In the distance, she caught glimpses of heavy, reptilian bodies flashing in headlamp beams.
‘Nissen,’ she called. ‘What’s happening at the front?’
After a pause, the driver answered. ‘Saurian attacks, general. Packs of the beasts. They’re hitting the infantry.’
Caldera was turning on them, Imren thought. It was mocking their defeat.
Streams from the great river of the ork hordes stabbed into the ranks. The troops fought back, hitting the enemy with all the rage of savaged pride. The night around her was lit by the streaks of las and tracer fire. Three orks ran straight for the left side of the Chimera, grabbing the hull. The turret gone, Imren climbed up onto the rear portion of the roof, which had been spared the impact of the shell. She held on to a spike of twisted metal with her right hand and fired her plasma pistol into the upturned faces of the orks. She returned their snarls with her own, her hate as brutal as their joy. She burned the head off one. As it fell, it knocked one of its fellows off the hull. Both disappeared under the treads.
The third slashed at Imren with a machete. She reared back, lost her footing and fell. Her pistol clattered into the troop compartment. She kept her grip on the spike. Its jagged edges cut through the leather of her gloves. Her boots struggled to find a hold on the side of the hull.
The ork jumped on top of the Chimera. It crouched over her, grinning, its foetid breath making her eyes water. It raised the machete over its head.
Imren pulled on the spike with all her strength. She bent her arm and hauled herself up, grabbed the greenskin’s harness with her left hand, and dropped back. The sudden weight overbalanced the ork and it plunged forwards. The spike rammed through its eye and cracked out the back of its skull.
Imren climbed up the corpse. She pulled the head off the spike and pushed the body off the Chimera. She stood on the roof, her breath coming in growling heaves and looked out at the jungle, and the cauldron of struggle and flight. She saw the broken towers of Laccolith emerge from the darkness. She filled her lungs with the torrid air, with the fyceline-and-burnt-flesh stench of defeat, with all her despair and rage, and she roared.
The war answered back.
There was no line to hold in Laccolith. There was no keeping the orks out, or forcing them back. There was only the hope of bogging them down. To break up the concentration of the horde, and tangle them in the canyons of rockcrete.
A play for time. Nothing more. It wasn’t good enough. There was no end except a delay of extermination.
Koorland led the Last Wall down a narrow avenue. They had less than a minute’s lead on the orks. The artillery barrage of the city had already begun. A shell destroyed the upper portion of a hab on the right. The street filled with a cloud of powdered wall.
Marching beside him, Eternity said, ‘We can ambush them here.’