The Penitent Wrath levelled off as it reached the height of the fortress. A domed building hulking in the centre of the complex gave Thane the impression of a structure closed in on itself. Its nature seemed to float ambiguously between refuge and prison.
There were windows in the towers. They had all been smashed. Wedges of armourglass glinted like teeth in the red light of the sun.
Qaphsiel lowered the Thunderhawk over a gun emplacement halfway up. The platform was wide, and ran most of the length of the facade. Silent cannons waited to destroy any enemy who would dare approach Vultus. The enemy had come, though. The enemy was doing what it willed, and the guns remained silent.
Squad Gladius jumped from the gunship. The Penitent Wrath dropped back down the column, and Thane led the way at a swift march to the nearest entrance. The plasteel door had been smashed down from the inside.
The passageway beyond was dark. The fortress had no power. It was inert as dead as the rock of its walls. Aggressive life moved through the tomb, though. Brutes growled in the distance. Things smashed. But there was no gunfire. There was no battle.
‘The Sisters of Silence are not here,’ Forcas said.
‘There would be fighting,’ Wienand agreed.
‘And I would feel them,’ said Forcas. ‘I would feel the pressure of the psychical null.’
‘This is futile,’ said Warfist.
‘The cannons we passed have not been serviced for a long time,’ Abathar put in. ‘It is highly unlikely the orks have defeated the Sisters. Vultus has been abandoned. Perhaps for centuries.’
‘Our search ends here, then?’ Straton asked.
‘Perhaps not,’ said Wienand. ‘The dome on Sacratus showed us the way here. Maybe this dome has a similar message.’
The chances seemed remote to Thane. But we have to find them, he thought. Any possibility was worth exploring. ‘We make for the dome, then,’ he said. ‘Silent kills. We have not come to fight an entire ork fleet.’
Warfist growled low in his chest, the sound predatory in anticipation. He took point, lightning claws extended. The rest of Squad Gladius drew blades. Wienand took out her laspistol. ‘I’ll use it only if we are discovered,’ she said.
Veritus carried no weapon.
‘You are not very formidable, inquisitor,’ Warfist said.
‘In combat, no,’ said Veritus. ‘Nor am I a fool.’
Yet here we are, Thane thought.
They moved into the corridor. The walls were bare, the shredded remains of tapestries lying at their base. The first intersection was littered with overturned pedestals and smashed statuary. A severed head, its mouth covered by the same eagle grille as the caryatids of Sacratus, stared at the ceiling, judgement hard as the void in its blank eyes.
The route to the dome was obvious. The passageway from the gun emplacements ended at a corridor wide as an avenue. Traffic would once have moved rapidly from one end of the citadel to the other, down great halls radiating like spokes from the dome. Vehicles had come down this route very recently. The air stank of spent fuel. The walls were marred by wide scorch marks, and for as far as Thane could see in the light cast by their helms, broken statues lay on the floor.
‘The vandalism is systematic,’ Forcas said. ‘There is hatred here.’
‘The orks recognise the threat of the Sisters of Silence,’ said Veritus.
‘How?’ Wienand asked. ‘Have they encountered them before?’
‘These ork witches are powerful,’ said Forcas. ‘Perhaps, as a collective, they can sense the presence of a threat somewhere. They’re searching too. Seeking to destroy the threat, and any trace that it ever existed.’
From far down the corridor came growls and the sounds of smashing stone.
‘We will not surprise them on this route,’ Warfist said. He turned off the wide hall at the first opportunity, finding a narrow passage running parallel, and loped ahead of the rest of the squad. He had removed his helm, and he paused at intersections to sniff the air.
The further the Deathwatch went, the louder the ork din became. The sounds bounced off the stones of Vultus, redirected by the whims of the architecture.
‘Auspex?’ said Thane.
‘Unhelpful,’ Abathar replied. ‘The biomass is too large and mobile, and we do not know the floor plans of this fortress. I cannot narrow the enemy’s location and movements to specific halls.’
Warfist held up a hand. Helm lights switched off. Thane blinked through to thermal sight. Warfist was motionless.
‘Approaching,’ the Space Wolf voxed. He prowled forward, a silent giant, then turned left into another branching corridor and vanished.
Thane waited. Sounds grew sharper. Booted feet were coming closer. The snarls were close, not echoes. Metal scraped against stone. Thane’s lenses picked up heat silhouettes. Then light reappeared. A large group of orks came down the corridor at a fast march. They shouted at each other as they dragged their blades along the engravings on the walls. The lead ork wielded a jagged cleaver in each hand. The beast was large enough to gouge both walls as it ran.
‘Take them,’ said Thane.
Forcas struck first. The blow was silent. Its effect was not. The lead ork stumbled. It screamed. It dropped its weapons and clutched its head. It fell to its knees. The mob behind it milled in confusion. The agony of their leader held the greenskins’ attention. They did not shine their lights further down the corridor. They did not think to suspect an attack.
The leader’s howls became a hissing rasp, pain exceeding the body’s ability to express it. Scalding blood erupted from its eyes and ears and mouth. Crimson steam filled the hall. The chieftain’s body fell forward at the same moment that Warfist hit the orks from behind. He jabbed out with his lightning claws, stabbing through the necks of two greenskins at once. Thane heard his satisfied grunt on the vox.
Thane and Straton rushed on, Abathar and Forcas following more slowly. The orks heard the pounding of ceramite boots and finally looked up, much too late. Thane and Straton cut into the greenskins with chainswords. The snarl of the blades rattled the stones of the hall, yet it was of a kind with the howls of the orks and the roar of their weapons. The orks’ guns were still strapped to their belts. They had thought they were alone in the fortress. Thane wanted the delusion preserved for the rest of the force.
‘No firearms,’ he voxed to the squad.
‘Good,’ said Warfist.
Thane ran his blade through the chest of one ork. He yanked it from the falling corpse with such violence that the edge of the blade plunged into the shoulder of the ork to his right, severing the arm, then grinding through the beast’s spine. Straton clashed with a greenskin almost as big as the dead leader. He angled his chainsword and cut through the head of the ork’s hammer, so the xenos weapon fell into two halves, and the Ultramarine’s blade continued downward, cleaving the monster’s skull.
Abathar’s plasma cutter burned through eyes and throats, the hiss of its beam unheard in the tumult. Forcas boiled the blood of another ork. Warfist killed two more before the rest of the mob at last realised death had come for them in both directions. They lashed out, and they were strong in their rage.
The Deathwatch was precise.
Thane and Straton pressed in hard. There was no room in the narrow passage for the orks to find their footing and use their mass. They had no momentum behind their blows. An axe crashed against Thane’s helmet. His ears rang. He brought his chainsword up through the ork’s gut. The huge body shuddered. There was a second, weaker blow of the axe before it fell from dead fingers.
Squad Gladius waded deeper into the greenskins. Thane’s senses were submerged in the thick, liquid stench of gouting blood and greenskin musk. Claws and blades and tusks and straining muscle tried to fell him. He cut the tide back. He and his brothers in black forced it down. Ultramarine doggedness meshed with Space Wolf savagery, with Blood Angel precision and Dark Angel relentlessness. The machine rendered the orks to bloody meat. Thane had seen the fusion of battle philosophies on the attack moon, in the desperation of that struggle. He saw it again now, the interlacing occurring automatically, triggered by the moment of conflict. As the last of the orks fell, he began to understand why the Council felt so threatened by the Deathwatch.