The Ultramarine set off the charges. The blasts brought down shrieking machinery and slabs of metal. They crushed flesh. Abathar disappeared under tonnes of burning wreckage with the horde.
The deck tilted thirty degrees. It threw Forcas, Thane and Warfist against the outside wall. Straton grabbed a spur of rubble, kept his feet and hauled. Metal shifted. The centre of the rubble glowed white. It trembled, then began to collapse from the heat of the plasma cutter. Abathar reared out of the mass. His left arm hung limp, but he punched at his prison with servo-arm and axe.
The deck rocked back, then to the sides. The rotation grew more violent. The spin gathered momentum. The columns had become a blinding mass of self-destruction, and still they spun and spun and spun. The flames were everywhere. There would be no salvation for the Titan. Soon there would none for the Deathwatch either.
‘Qaphsiel,’ Thane voxed. ‘We need extraction. Make for the crown of the Titan.’
‘Understood.’
Warfist went through the hatch first. He hacked at the shielding with his power claws, carving a path up. Forcas sagged against Thane, but he had ceased snarling, and he reached out and grabbed the sides of the hatch. A cloud of fire swept over them. Blinded, Thane felt Forcas begin to pull, and he added his strength to the Blood Angel’s, guiding him into the air.
‘Straton,’ he voxed. ‘Abathar.’ He looked back, but he could no longer see them. The control chamber was darkness and flame and heaving movement.
‘We are here,’ Straton answered. ‘We are following.’
Thane climbed outside. Fire erupted from the eyes of the Titan. Above him, Warfist was helping Forcas towards the crown. Thane waited until he saw Straton emerge from flame and smoke, then Abathar behind him. Then he climbed.
The mind of the Titan was dying, and its body responded with ever greater violence. The massive cannons were still firing, but the Titan’s arms were caught in a pendulum motion, the swings growing longer and more wild. The monster’s gait was a drunken, turning sway. It was a mountain falling into a dance of death.
Squad Gladius clung to the skull in storm. The Penitent Wrath skimmed the top of the Titan. Qaphsiel flew the gunship in tight circles as the Space Marines reached the peak. Warfist jumped through the side door as the Thunderhawk went by. He reached down for Forcas on the next pass. Thane held the psyker up. He was barely responsive.
‘Raise your arms, brother,’ Thane said. ‘Raise them in triumph.’
Something in Forcas heard. He obeyed. Warfist grasped his forearms and hauled him aboard. Thane and Straton followed when Qaphsiel brought the gunship around again.
One more pass now. One more brother. Thane and Straton crouched at the door to aid Abathar. The Techmarine flexed his knees and began his leap.
Metal buckled. The crown of the Titan collapsed into the vortex. Shields turned to jagged teeth. Abathar fell into the gnashing metal.
He stretched his servo-arm up as he plummeted. Thane seized the claw. The imploding skull dragged Abathar down and sought to pull Thane from the gunship. Straton clasped the arm and they both pulled.
Thane felt the jaws crush something human. The disintegration of bone shook through Abathar’s frame and into Thane’s arms. ‘We have you, brother!’ he yelled in defiance of the dying beast.
Then they did have him. They pulled him free. They dragged him aboard.
His right leg was gone below the thigh.
The Thunderhawk pulled away from the Titan. The monster was out of control now. It staggered through the mass of the ork army, crushing infantry beneath it. Its arms were a monstrous flailing, and the devastation of its guns spread across the battlefield, punching new craters in the ground as well as the mountainside. The ork invasion force turned on its own weapon. The caldera became a battlefield, a cauldron of explosives as the orks struggled against the awful power of their technology gone mad.
The Penitent Wrath flew towards the fortress.
Forcas was unconscious. Warfist and Straton wrestled him into a grav-harness. Abathar was awake. His blood slicked the deck, but his Larraman cells had already slowed the flow, coagulation building a scab over the stump. The femoral artery had pinched itself closed. Thane helped the Techmarine to a bench, then turned to Veritus. The inquisitor had been sitting silently in the troop hold. ‘Well?’ he asked.
Veritus shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘The enemy is distracted,’ said Warfist. ‘If they’re going to break out…’ He stopped. ‘What is that?’ he said.
Thane joined him at the viewing block. The mountain just below the base of the fortress was moving. ‘A gate,’ he said. A seam of light appeared in the darkness. Walls of rock rumbled apart, revealing a vehicle bay beyond. Silver illumination bathed the cliff face. Three armoured vehicles advanced from the depths of the bay. ‘Rhinos,’ Thane said.
‘How do they expect to reach the ground?’ Warfist demanded. ‘That’s a sheer—’ He stopped.
Thane’s eyes widened.
‘If those are Rhinos,’ Warfist said, ‘why are they flying?’
Engine exhausts burned red on the flanks and undersides of the Rhinos. The vehicles streaked down the mountainside, then levelled off as they approached the ground. The squadron flew over the orks, storm bolters cutting a swath of fire through them. Thane witnessed impossible, awe-inspiring technology, and it was Imperial.
Exulting, he said, ‘They are flying because they are transporting myths.’
Epilogue
Koorland listened to the silence. It was stronger than ever. It strode above the celebrations. Its weight gathered second by second, and he knew its cause.
From the base of a staircase wide enough for thousands but forbidden to all but a few, he gazed at the towering door of the Sanctum Imperialis. He would never see what lay beyond. That was perhaps as it should be. The sublime was not for his eyes. He had not earned the right. The women who had entered a short while ago had that right. The staircase was not forbidden to them, nor was this door. There were other entrances to the Sanctum, but they were for those who would never come out again. The warriors who had climbed this staircase would also descend it.
‘Did you speak to them?’ he asked Thane.
‘Very little. They were disinclined to speak to anyone except Inquisitor Wienand.’
‘I see.’ He pushed aside thoughts for now of the power play Wienand might be preparing.
Inside the Sanctum, fifty women were passing before the Golden Throne, renewing their vows to the Emperor, and swearing themselves to eternal silence. Theirs was the quiet he was hearing. It was not a silence for which he could take credit or blame. It was not his burden, or his sacrifice, or his honour.
He gave thanks for it, though. He did not expect this silence to banish the others. Their weights would remain with him. But it might bring about yet another. Through it, the Beast would at last cease to roar.
David Guymer
The Last son of Dorn
‘All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it.’
One
Kjarvik Stormcrow stood in the gunship’s open hatch. One armoured boot was on the lowering assault ramp, the extended hydraulics gripped in one wolf-clawed gauntlet. The braid of heavy ork knucklebones strung through his long forelock drummed wildly on his shoulder. His pelt whipped about behind him. The unfamiliar salts of an alien sea filled his nose and mouth. Before him was grey ocean, as far as his prodigiously enhanced senses and stupefying altitude could show it. Massive waves were capped with oily pollution and stuck through with scrap metal. It made them frothy and barbed, like watching the hreindýr herds on their winter exodus across the fjords.