The main armoured elements of the Excoriators were already engaged in support of the rapid forward advance. Vox-chatter from the various squad and company-level channels spoke over one another into his helmet feed. His Lyman’s ear could pluck one from the chaos without difficulty.
‘Hab-block clear. moving on—’
‘Ork vehicles flanking via tau processional—’
‘Entering Hyboriax Primus. Heavy fire—’
Issachar could see the mons temple through the bruised swirl of snow. It had suffered damage concomitant with massive orbital bombardment, but the fortified edifice still stood, some of the damaged wings reconstructed in less than sympathetic fashion. Cannon platforms and bright red runway strips for the take-off and landing of the orks’ big, multipurpose fighter-bombers spidered out from the cracked minaret, like tentacles emerging from a black-veined egg sac.
It was there that the ork forces would be concentrated.
Issachar raised his fist and a pair of serfs in ivory and red habits hoisted the Escharan standard from a crossbar above his personal Land Raider, Tyrant.
‘Inquisition forces to hold. All other units advance on my command.’
Nine
Acid snow was already beginning to pile up around the Thunderhawk. Urquidex hoped to take that as a positive sign, meaning that they planned to return for it. The gunship continued to disappear as he was hustled away from it, and that was when he realised. It had been expended to bring them down and was now being abandoned so as not to double the risk of discovery with a second flight. The ubiquitous Thunderhawk was the cheap, standard template design workhorse of the Adeptus Astartes, as easily thrown to the ice in the name of necessity as any organic servant of Him on Terra.
The air temperature was beyond freezing, and yet the snow burned where it touched bare skin. He pulled up his hood. Storm troopers in glassy black carapace and cold-weather survival gear crunched through the snow; two dozen of them together hauled the truculent ork by its chains. Steam billowed from its mouth and icicles of saliva bearded its jaw. The Sisters surrounded them like a warding hex, power blades spitting in the falling snow, causing the brute to snap and lunge and claw at its temples only for the chains around its wrist to yank taut and bring half a dozenstorm troopers skidding towards it.
The Space Marines of Kill-Team Stalker, Urquidex could no longer see. They had pushed well ahead and the sub-zero conditions had frozen his optics on near-view.
The landing pad projected from the upper bulge of the Mons Primus. It led onto a long ambulatory with great arched windows, detailed in brass, alternating from one side to the other. They ran down it, the drugged ork determining their pace. Snow swept in through the left-hand windows. They had previously been glazed by a conversion field that would have converted the impact of each flake of snow into glorious, eclectic light. Urquidex could see the emitters. They were unpowered now, several of the arches cracked. The siege-savants of Incus Maximal had authorised the destruction of the planetary capital in a bid to stem the ork advance onto the planet’s last Mechanicus enclaves. There had been no time to complete the sacrilege. The wreckage of the Ark ship Contrivenant still drifted in orbit.
The view from the left now was frozen, and dark because of it. Flickering exchanges of fire lit the silhouettes of forge basilicae, as if in crude mea culpa for the destruction of the conversion field. The traces of explosions went largely unremarked: a wink of light there, the dim rumble of a collapsing superstructure there.
By the time Urquidex saw the doors at the end of the ambulatory, the Thunderhawk was just another lump, indistinguishable from any of the forgotten lumps around it. Urquidex’s digitools twitched through a signum-code rendition of the Last Rites.
Hakon and Numines held the doors as Tyris, Vega and Gadreel surged through.
The ambulatory led to a covered chamber, and the first greenskins that Urquidex had seen alive.
There were six of them, gathered around a metal barrel of cleansing spirit with the lid torn off, sitting on sturdy tables as if they were benches. Their necks were as thick as iron hawsers. Their biceps were the size of promethium drums. Urquidex was wholly unprepared for their brute immensity. The intense fungal stench overpowered even the astringent chemicals.
A volley of silenced bolt-rounds dropped them before any of them could so much as grunt and Tyris and Vega powered through, smashing the tables aside to make way. Urquidex followed in behind the storm troopers and Sisters and looked around while his optics warmed through.
It was a narthex. Here was where pilgrims would congregate to wait, pray and suffer the requisite physical deprivation to earn the Omnissiah’s admission to the temple proper. The columns were bronze. The floor and ceiling were ribbed and the walls were decked with cabling. Pistons glided in and out of their sleeves, but they were without function, symbolic of the perpetuity of the Machine-God’s power. The distant pops of gunfire echoed through the chamber.
Tyris voxed a whispered ‘all clear’. The other Space Marines started after him with a startling lack of sound.
Urquidex pointed the way, bypassing the ascensor, to the penitent stairs at the far end of the hallway, doubting for a moment that he had seen the orks alive at all.
Just six corpses. No different to the tens of thousands shipped to Mars for dissection.
The penitent stairs led to a corridor, its walls adorned with tablet slabs stating the Universal Laws, and then on to another set of stairs. The metal newel rattled loosely as the Deathwatch powered ahead. Urquidex was only halfway up and feeling the lactate burn in his limbs when the roar of bolter fire carried down.
A dozen orks were dead and sprayed roughly over the atrium’s cuneiformed bronze walls when Urquidex stumbled onto the scene, but twice that number were still fighting.
They were machine-ork perversions, xenotech abominations of an engineer class. Slug bullets sprayed from crane-limbed servo-harnesses. Plasma blasts ripped craters out of the walls. Vega dropped to one knee behind a devotional font and disgorged a jet of flaming promethium from his bolter’s combi-attachment. An ork engineer wheezed through the flames, shuddering armour harness alight. It didn’t seem to notice. A multi-barrelled volleycannon attached to its fighting suit with swaying ammo belts began to whine, then to howl, and the font disintegrated. Vega and Numines went down. Icegrip took a glancing hit to the pauldron just as he was swinging up his frost blade. Tyris’ return fire spanked off the ork’s armour like rain hitting a drum.
Urquidex had just starting screaming, metal splinters from the destroyed font lodged in the organic attachers of his eye, when he felt Alpha 13-Jzzal’s cyborgised frame slam him against the wall. The skitarius grunted as bullets riddled his titanium exoskeleton. A squad of storm troopers formed up behind him and opened fire. Las-fire stitched the atrium, brutally impressive as a laser display and as wasted as one on the thick skulls of the orks.
The boss ork shrugged off the troopers’ attentions, beat one in half with a twist of its power claw, then lost the arm to the downward stroke of a Sister’s blade. She withdrew a step, pivoted on her toes, and with terrifying grace, backhanded the ork’s head from its shoulders. Her sister stood protectively over Urquidex and the growling ork psyker as the third took the fight to the orks. Tyris, Gadreel and Icegrip fought hard to match her battle-grace.