‘It has, Chapter Master,’ Kale replied, falling in beside his commander, jogging to keep up with Thane’s long strides. Laurentis clanked and clicked behind them, his head rotating rapidly from left to right and back as he took in his surroundings. ‘But I do not understand. All scans show that the defensive field is still operational. If we move into attack range the orks will open fire, but the city is still protected.’
‘Fluctuations, shipmaster,’ said Laurentis. He accelerated to come alongside the officer. The tech-priest’s head turned ninety degrees to regard Kale with his remaining eye. ‘Study of the field when the first attack occurred has revealed that in order for weapons within the city limit to open fire, the field had to drop. It is not a one-way barrier! With the damage inflicted on the orks’ capabilities, and further targeted strikes during the first window of opportunity, we have hypothesised that we can return fire within the temporal lapse of the protective layer.’
‘Return fire?’ Kale sounded dubious. ‘We have to let them shoot at us first, Chapter Master? This is an untested hypothesis?’
‘Yes,’ said Thane. They reached a conveyor port and stopped. He looked at Kale, understanding the man’s reluctance but in no mood for explanations or speeches. ‘We cannot bring the field down in its entirety but we can do a lot of damage. As well as brute-shield projection sites and weapon positions, we will destroy much of the city’s storage facilities, pipelines and energy grid. We will drive the orks out, even if it costs the fleet to do so.’
Kale said nothing else as they rode to the command bridge. He headed directly to the weapons consoles and then the vox-officers, handing over the carefully constructed attack solution prepared by Dominus Zhokuv and his best strategos. It maximised the amount of fire the ships would be able to pour down onto the city in the shortest time possible.
‘We’re ready, Chapter Master,’ announced Kale. ‘Commands have been transmitted and acknowledged.’
‘Commence the attack, shipmaster,’ Thane replied quietly.
The Alcazar Remembered powered on with the other surviving ships, a makeshift flotilla of Space Marine battle-barges and strike cruisers, Navy battleships, frigates and destroyers, Martian hemiolia and penteres. Several minutes passed before the Fists Exemplar flagship passed the invisible boundary that took them into range of the surface weapons. Another thirty seconds later and the call came from the augur array technicians.
‘Targeting signals detected, Chapter Master. Multiple surface sources.’
‘Ork void assets are incoming, Chapter Master,’ another officer reported.
‘Signal Admiral Acharya, he needs to keep those orks off our backs, whatever it takes,’ replied Thane. ‘All crew to firing stations, prepare for surface bombardment.’
He heard Kale mutter to himself as the shipmaster flexed his fingers into the sign of the aquila.
‘Emperor protect us from the schemes of tech-priests…’
Chapter Seventeen
The growl and grumble of hundreds of engines shook dust from the ruins. Exhaust fumes from the assembled tanks of the Astra Militarum swathed the rubble of Gorkogrod with an oily mist. Close to the front of the three columns of fighting vehicles — not right at the front, Field-Legatus Dorr knew well his place within the grander scheme of the plan — Dorn’s Ire rumbled forward, accompanied by Leman Russ battle tanks, Chimera transports and Demolisher siegebreakers.
The deep red livery of Martian command vehicles broke the camouflage and grey of the Astra Militarum. Through the gloom strode the remaining Knights, ion fields gleaming, the rubble shifting and shuddering under their tread.
And last came the Titans, ponderous and magnificent, dwarfing even the war machines of the Knight Houses, their lamps shining like beacons in the pre-dusk gloom. The two Warlords led, followed by the Executor, flanked by the smaller Titans moving in echelon to the right.
War-horns sounded the challenge to the orks, a wave of sound that eclipsed all others for several seconds, shattering the last pieces of glass in broken windows, causing debris dunes to shift and tremble.
Dorr, sitting in the open hatch of the main turret to watch the awesome engines, covered his ears. He marvelled that he could feel the ground shake with each tread even through the bulk and vibration of the Baneblade.
Zhokuv advanced alongside the super-heavy tank, his piston-legged battle-rig carrying him easily over the broken ground. Further into the smog the remaining infantry forged through the broken city, some twenty-two thousand Imperial Guardsmen, skitarii, Space Marines and cybernetica. Dorr could see nothing of them, but knew they were there from the murmur of Galtan and the subalterns passing updates to each other on the command deck below.
Behind and above, the last few squadrons of Valkyries and Vultures, Lightnings, Thunderhawks, Marauders and other aircraft loitered just outside the range of the anti-air weapons that ringed the central citadel.
All was poised, the giant many-limbed and multi-headed creature that was the Emperor’s war machine waiting for the moment to pounce.
‘You know, for the first time since arriving on Ullanor, I actually think I know what we’re doing,’ Dorr confessed to Zhokuv. ‘That we’re all moving towards the same purpose now.’
No answer was forthcoming from Zhokuv. The dominus’ reply was forestalled by a sudden flicker in the smog ahead. Green lightning raced across the clouds, illuminating the ruins with a jade glow. Watching this, Dorr’s heart raced. Had the tech-priests’ assertions been right?
With a last crackle of emerald fire, the brute-shield dropped.
Seconds later, before even a cry of triumph had left Dorr’s lips, the sky erupted with missiles, las and coruscating blasts of energy racing up towards the void.
‘Sound the charge!’ Dorr dropped down into the turret, slamming the hatch closed. He wriggled past the gunners and through the accessway to the command deck.
‘I’m glad I was never a tanker,’ he muttered when he emerged into the space beyond, already nearly full with staff officers.
He almost fell into his chair as the Dorn’s Ire gathered speed, the acceleration unexpected rather than rapid. The vox was alive with confirmations of the advance commencing, the voices of tank commanders and platoon officers, Titan Princeps and Knight Scions overlapping and competing. The surge of noise from the Baneblade’s engines and the feeling of motion and power filled Dorr with urgent excitement.
‘One way or another, by nightfall we’ll know,’ he told the others.
‘Know what, field-legatus?’ asked a subaltern.
‘Whether we actually have a chance at killing the Great Beast.’
Valefor and his Blood Angels formed a red tip to the spear of the Imperial attack. Through circumstance and fortune, the warriors of Baal Secundus had suffered the least in the preceding battles, though they had still lost a quarter of the Space Marines that had arrived at Ullanor six days earlier.
Sergeant Marbas had fallen the day before, leaving only Rabael and Micheleus as the surviving members of the Sanguinary Guard. Their golden armour was much battered, patched by the Chapter Techmarines with raw grey ceramite and dull metal, the fibre bundles and servos exposed in places. Along with Valefor and his guard, Blood Angels Terminator veterans led the attack into the buildings under the shadow of the fortress-palace — a force of Space Marines that would punch through the ork defenders across a narrow front and turn behind them, trapping the aliens against the following column of Space Marine and Astra Militarum tanks. Elsewhere, other Chapters were doing likewise, piercing the defending army at several points to occupy them while the biggest war machines moved on the storage sheds and weapon silos.