Phareous’ knife flashed from behind his shield. A dead ork draped over it and blocked his storm bolter. Sommer skipped back. An ork lunged for her with an axe and fell on its face. Kjarvik stamped on its head. Tusks snapped against metal. His power fist ripped the arm off another and blood sprayed the walkspace. Rós danced across him, spun, blade a blur, and opened an ork from throat to middle with a sizzling back-slash. Bohr stamped into view like walker support. A scream of his servo-arm and an ork was rammed head-first into the bulkhead. Blood erupted from its back and splattered across the opposite wall.
And always, high-calibre auto-fire banged the walls.
Kjarvik marked the set of overflow pipes stood behind heavy metal jackets along the wall leading up to the machine-gunner’s nest. He raked his claws down the face of an ork, and pounced for it. Auto-fire chased him as he leapt, one to the next, slugs spanking off the thick metal. A lucky shot — or an unlucky one, Kjarvik was unsure of the difference — penetrated, and a jet of hyper-pressurised water punched an ork into the far wall, hard enough to sever threads. Phareous, Sommer and Bohr drove the orks left on their side of the torrent mercilessly into the water, like routed enemies into the sea.
From the last jacket in line, Kjarvik tossed a grenade into the nest and leapt.
The fragmentation blast ripped the crude barricade open. Bits of smoking metal rattled back up the walkspace like the cast of a rune-priest’s mystic bones. Kjarvik flung his gauntlet clawtips over the lip of the companionway above. With a snarled breath, he pulled himself up and rolled onto one knee.
Baldarich and Zarrael were already there, having risen by another route. The state of their armour and of the floor around them was testament to their bloody progress. The two Space Marines battled back-to-back within a maelstrom of massively muscular ork fighters. The Black Templar’s greatsword moved with the lightness of a knife. Severed hands and bits of tusk flew from its edge, as if to kiss his power armour in a final show of respect. Zarrael meanwhile had his boot on the chest of a brutally sized ork whose crooked moon tattoos and rumbling megaplate marked it as a boss. It was on its knees, hollering, the Flesh Tearer’s eviscerator ripping out its neck and painting it unevenly across the companionway. Another ork barrelled towards the Space Marine’s right, looking to blindside him on the side opposite his buried weapon. Zarrael turned, face unhelmed, the sneering red gaze of an angel, and launched a hissing gob of Betchers’ acid that dropped the brute at a full twenty strides.
If the fight had been related to Kjarvik with the skilled words of another, then the tale would have been one to inspire. Two warriors, champions of distant Chapters, side-by-side and slaying the Emperor’s foes by the legion. But he was witnessing it for himself, and had not the skjald’s skill to overlook the clear disdain in which each warrior held the other.
They did not have their backs turned out of necessity. It was preference.
‘I think you have their attention!’ The bark of Kjarvik’s bolt pistol announced his arrival to the fray. The orks did not last long after that.
They ran towards another big mob that was already retreating, hemmed into a deep column by the narrow walkspace, blockish stubbers up, moving towards a set of heavy-duty plasteel floodgates. Baldarich and Zarrael shrugged off the fire, hacking into the rearguard with a psychotic zeal, each more alike the other than not.
And men called the Vlka Fenryka wild.
‘More are coming.’ Kjarvik broke off the pursuit and took cover behind a dented piston block that seemed to be part of the floodgate mechanism. Baldarich and Zarrael just kept on killing. ‘We wait for the others. We attack as one!’
Orks in clanking war-plate piled through the floodgates to shore up the retreating mob, which in turn spread out into the cover of rusty toolbins and the thick buttress struts that leaned diagonally up into the section wall. Kjarvik shifted his aim upwards as a score of greenskins, their thickly muscled torsos wrapped in ammo belts, clattered across the upper walkways.
For some reason they did not fire.
They chanted — ‘Gork! Mork! Gork! Mork!’ — and mashed the barrels of their guns on the handrail in time to the foot-pound of ork warriors below. They got louder. The stamping grew faster. ‘Gorkamorkagorkamorka!’ Kjarvik could no longer tell individual orks apart. A weight dragged on his skull, as if the ork knucklebones braided through his hair felt the same primal call. His gums ached as though some reality-bending force drew on his teeth.
With a thump of metal, the roadway bridge trembled.
An oil-skinned, web-clawed monster of horrific size slither-crawled through the floodgates. Its passage bent them outward so completely that Kjarvik doubted they would ever shut again. It was the size of a Baneblade, mocking its rattling escort of garishly painted armoured walkers with their ill-made irrelevance. Serried rows of teeth gleamed a smudgy, reflected green from within a huge, half-moon slash of mouth. Rubbery gills fluttered behind armoured flaps. Two rows of uneven spines ran down its dark, blubbery back. With a bone-capped boot planted against a spike from either row, an ork clad in a studded leather harness of monstrous size and wielding a trident-stave coiled with spitting copper wires waved about in a trance.
Its harness was painted with weird, swirled lines, and its face and hands were tattooed with branching continuations of the uncanny design. At a growled utterance, a wind blew, causing its dangling piercings to twist like wraiths on a pyre. The gantry between Kjarvik and his two brothers buckled, bent, boiling seawater spraying through the fissure. The amphibious beast dug its claws into the tortured metal and gave a wet, cavernous roar. Green energies lanced through the spiked collar bolted over its neck and spat back out like living spikes.
Kjarvik bared his fangs.
Maleficar.
He was the Stormcrow, all right. The unlucky one. He could always rely on it.
Five
Tyris emerged from the loading breach of the voidstorm cannon and dropped into a soundless crouch. His landing trembled out through the metal gangway. The Sister of Silence — she had not yielded her name, and Tyris had not asked for it — squatted with her back to an equipment drum. Her blade was unpowered. She raised a finger to the concealing gorget above her mouth.
The voidstorm cannon was a relic of the Fists Exemplar’s past, a legacy of Alcazar Astra’s ownership of the Rubicante Flux stars. It was a ship-killer, its wide bore one of the few access points large enough for a jump pack-equipped Space Marine. It was a squeeze even so and Tyris felt no shame in leaving the nimbler mortal to scout ahead.
With excruciating stealth, he moved.
He could feel the Sister’s eyes on him, assessing his abilities against hers, as he unwound a strip of guncloth from a kit pouch, wrapped it round the barrel of his stalker bolter and rested the weapon on the gangway’s iron handrail. He almost let out a relieved breath at the woman’s faint nod of approval.
The Raven would have been proud.
In the vast hangar below, greenskin mechanics and slave-workers crawled over bomber jets with massively oversized engines and bulbous weapons pods. There was room enough there to muster a Chapter of old, cradle-space for two-score of gunships. That space was mostly filled with tin-walled tool sheds, tent hovels in which squabbling gretchin seemed to live cheek by jowl. Rubbish was piled high. Food rotted where it lay. Promethium fuel dribbled from half-empty drums.
A big ork moved amongst the aircraft, inspecting a fuselage here, booting a laggardly gretchin there. It was garbed in a cloak of tinkling chimes and wore torcs of polished bone clapped over its muscular forearms. A spectactularly horned skull enclosed its head. It danced a little as it walked, sprinkling Eidolican promethium sand over the parked engines from a rod-like aspergillum as if in blessing. The psyker. A mob of ten burly orks strapped up with shotguns and bludgeons and slabs of armour followed close behind. Every so often, one wandered off to administer a private kicking wherever their brutal code deemed it justified.