‘Destroy it!’ Zerberyn ordered. He dodged a rain of gears heavy enough to crush a mortal. ‘Tear this structure down!’ He threw krak grenades at the base of the nearest scaffolding. Up close, the strength of the construction was clear. The girders were all at least a quarter of a metre thick. It was the obscene power of the cannons and their recoil that subjected them to such inconceivable stress. Ahead and behind Zerberyn, his brothers used more krak grenades and melta bombs.
The explosives went off within seconds of each other. A score of detonations turned the anchor points along a long section of the starboard base to liquid. The blasts melted through the bases of four supports rising from the bottom deck, and their collapse triggered a chain reaction. The tangle of metal web fell. Cables snapped and catwalks whipped away from bulkheads. Orks were crushed beneath thousands of tonnes of falling iron. The interior of the battleship echoed and rang with the avalanche of metal and the howls of the dying. The flow of ammunition for the entire section ended. The guns would soon fall silent.
Zerberyn led the charge towards the bow. The Fists Exemplar alternated between firing into the gunnery compartments in the starboard bulkhead and triggering further collapses of the scaffold. They had left the boarding torpedoes hundreds of metres behind before the orks mounted a true counter-attack.
They came from the upper cannon emplacements to starboard, and from all levels to port, pouring out of hatches and tunnels. The furious green tide flooded the gallery.
‘Keep advancing!’ Zerberyn ordered. ‘We’ll kill the guns, then finish off the crew.’
Squad formation tightened. The Fists Exemplar became their name. They were a fist of ceramite, a fist over a hundred battle-brothers strong, a fist that punched through the enemy, leaving blood and flame in its wake. The density of bolter fire was ferocious. On the flanks, flamers washed jets of ignited promethium over the greenskins. Zerberyn inhaled the smell of burning xenos flesh even through his rebreather. The pungent stench crumbled beneath the purging burn of fuel.
The orks shot and slashed at the formation. Their own crowd worked against them. They cut each other down with their own guns. They could not bring their mass to bear unless they isolated battle-brothers. The fist kept advancing, killing orks with every step. It was a long, slow, inexorable blow. The greenskins threw themselves against the formation and died.
‘They are doing our work for us!’ Mandek voxed.
He sounded energised by the combat. Zerberyn glanced back. Mandek was close to his position, flamer reducing the enemy to ash. He fought with exuberance, and that was the battle-brother Zerberyn knew — the firebrand on the battlefield, not the worried soul he had seen on the bridge of the Dantalion.
‘Then we should make them work harder yet,’ Zerberyn said.
The leading edge of the fist formation threw more krak grenades ahead. They melted flesh as well as iron, and the collapse of the scaffold web spread.
Ten metres from the end of the gallery, after the last of the cannon enclaves, there was a large door in the starboard bulkhead. Zerberyn had just passed it when it blew open. Three monstrous orks stormed out. As big as Dreadnoughts, they were clad in armour that mirrored that of their vessel. They were huge, massively shielded. Two of them wielded what appeared to be power chainfists and claws large enough to peel open the hull of a Land Raider. They flanked the third, who had a flamer nozzle on either arm. It bellowed in eager rage and bathed the Fists Exemplar in fire.
The assault was a flaming deluge that swept over the formation. The temperature inside Zerberyn’s armour rocketed and fire covered his helmet. He could see nothing except the burning red. He fired towards the position of the orks, shooting blind, as did all his brothers for many rows of the formation.
‘Rush them!’ Zerberyn ordered. The flamer would be useless to the ork at point-blank range.
He ran to his right, still firing, still blinded by the unending stream of liquid flame. He could hear the roars of the giant orks over the din of battle, and that was enough of a guide. He pulled out his chainsword, revved its engine and thrust the whirring blade forward.
He collided with a moving wall. The impact stopped both him and the wall. The wall growled. It hit him from the side with something massive. He flew back and to his right, landing in a heap of fallen iron, outside the wash of the flamer, and he could see again.
The ork’s flamers launched the promethium with a pressure as high as the volume was enormous. It enveloped most of the Fists Exemplar’s formation. The fist had changed direction, had lost some of its coherence, and the flanking orks were smashing into it with their massive power limbs. The flamer ork turned off its weapon as the flaming mass it had created closed in to grapple with it. The greenskin attacked with piston-driven arms. It hands were strong enough on their own to rip a man in half.
Zerberyn was at the edge of the formation. Smaller orks surrounded him. He kept his back to the wreckage and climbed a few steps, gaining elevation. He severed arms and heads with his chainsword, holding back the tide while he looked for the opportunity to take down the giants.
He climbed another step. An ork leapt for him, arms outstretched to pull him back down into the greenskin cauldron. Zerberyn slammed the hilt of his chainsword onto the ork’s skull. He shoved its head down with such force that the beast impaled its throat on a spur of shattered girder. The ork twitched and writhed, helplessly pinned. Its blood poured down the jutting metal angles.
The flames were dying down, and the Fists Exemplar could see again. Bolter shells blasted away chunks of ork armour, but the giants had not slowed at all. Dead battle-brothers, bodies crushed and dismembered, lay at their feet. The flamer ork lunged down and seized a Space Marine. It lifted him clear of the formation.
It held Mandek. His left arm was pinned by the ork’s grip but his right was free, and he thrust his chainsword through the ork’s jaws. The beast uttered a choking shriek, tightening its grip convulsively. The sword cut through its throat. Mandek strained and hauled the blade to his right. The upper half of the ork’s head slid to the ground.
The body twisted to Mandek’s left as it began to fall.
Zerberyn had a clear shot at the fuel tanks on its back. He sent a full burst of shells into their centre. His brothers nearest the ork stepped back as the tanks exploded. The blast stunned the other two orks. The flash was dazzling, but Zerberyn’s auto-lenses flickered over his eyes, blocking the glare. Now he and his brothers had a few seconds of advantage where they could see and the greenskins could not.
A huge gout of flame erupted over one of the giants. The inferno flowed through every chink in its armour. The ork became a screaming, towering torch, flailing its arms, as blind as its foe had been moments before. The Fists Exemplar surged forward again, pressing their advantage.
The monster began to go down under the concerted assault.
The body of the flamer ork was still standing, like a monstrous idol that refused to topple. And it still held Mandek in its death grip.
Zerberyn leapt off the rubble. He smashed and cut his way through the stunned enemy, rejoining the formation. He skirted the edge of the fist, wielding his chainsword like a scythe, parting muscle and tendons. Orks fell before him, but he was wading in a muck of grasping limbs and blades. Too slow, too slow, he thought.
The seconds fell away, sluggish and fatal.
Mandek was cutting through the dead ork’s armoured limb. His chainblade sent out showers of sparks.
Too slow, too slow.
Behind Mandek, the third monster reached out with a claw. It hammered its power fist on the deck. Battle-brothers threw themselves out of its path. The blow was so powerful the deck rippled like water. Zerberyn stumbled as the surface beneath his boots dropped and jerked.