The last engineer had backed itself into a corner. It took a short burst of bolt-rounds to the gut, which then erupted from its back and painted a streak on the wall as it slid down it. Vega rose, clutching his hip, liquid sealant bubbling up from the rents in his armour.
‘I can continue,’ he rasped.
Numines didn’t rise. Gadreel crouched over him for a second, fingers to his throat, and spoke a prayer to honour the Fist Exemplar’s lost gene-seed. Tyris was already thumping towards the great set of double doors that the orks had been guarding. There was no stealth now.
The stylised plasteel was no match for the Space Marine’s powered strength and he shouldered the doors apart without breaking stride. In fact he was still speeding up, bolter up and firing again before the doors had slammed back into the walls. Vega, Icegrip and, a moment later, Gadreel walked into the return fire without the slightest hesitation.
Urquidex was awed. Here was the Omnissiah’s glory, expressed through biological perfection and the genetic mastery of the God-Emperor of Man.
‘Squads alpha and beta, left and right,’ roared Colonel Rothi as men surged forward, and held a hand to Urquidex to indicate that he should remain exactly where he was. ‘Delta on me, cover the payload, go.’
The Apse Mechanicus was a technological marvel in copper, polished mica, and gold, crosshatched by gunfire and smoke. At a prosaic level it resembled a temple of the Creed, but the pillars that upheld the vaulted ceiling were not monofunction stone, but great pipes that trembled musically with the Omnissiah’s breath. The Machine-God Himself was represented in sanctified metal at the end of the nave. It was more than just a statue. Its miraculous mechanics had breathed Motive Force into the lights, the energy fields, and provided Hyboriax its heat. It ran still, its isolation splendid, but its outward connectors had been hacked out of the walls. A necklace of human ribs hung from its cog-toothed neck. A crown of bent metal sat crooked on its head.
Squads alpha and beta lacerated the defiled space with las-beams. Orks built like armoured walkers turned around as though unexpectedly spat upon. A missile screwed across the nave from a crude shoulder-mounted launcher and wasted two men to armaplas scraps and flesh lather. Alpha 13-Jzzal’s caliver deoxygenated the air with rippling volleys of superheated plasma that left two orks as molten husks. Overheat runes glowed a dangerous amber as the weapon steamed off into the cold. Rothi roared. The troopers focused their fire, and twenty-plus convergent beams managed finally to punch one of the xenos brutes down.
Luckily for the mortals, the Space Marines had the orks’ attention.
Tyris advanced at speed towards the right transept, going column to column. Controlled bursts punched the orks cleanly down as they moved towards him. Wild returns ripped open the ornate pipes, mangled them as though grenades had blown them apart from the inside. Vega meanwhile advanced slowly down the centre, his limp growing more pronounced with every step. Heavy gunfire slugging his battleplate, he dropped to one knee and rolled a grenade down the aisle between two blocks of plug-in banks.
It burst into a thick pall of smoke. Tyris disappeared but for the muffled sound of him. Vega became a ghost. Urquidex could barely make out the silent Sisters beside him. Without his optics he doubted they could see him as well, but they appeared as unflustered by their sudden blindness as they were by everything else.
‘The weapon must be deployed as close to the centre as is possible,’ said Urquidex. ‘If the test is to yield meaningful data then it must be done properly.’ He looked back. Rothi was there. He had one hand pressed to his ear, the other cupped over his mouth.
‘Lord Issachar, come in. Lord Issachar—’
One of the storm troopers left dragging the payload cursed as it began to pull back against them.
‘It needs another dose!’
‘No,’ Urquidex replied. Xenos species reacted unpredictably to human pharmacopoeia. Even sub-breeds could show eccentricities of response. He began to see why Kubik had recommended him for this mission. Few if any knew as much about Veridi genetics as he did. ‘It must be as conscious as possible. I don’t know how the somnambulum might interfere with its psychic powers.’
‘Then release it now!’ yelled the storm trooper. The ork was small relative to others of its species, but more than equal to the five men left holding it. The soldier’s arms were wound through the chain and his feet braced, but he and his comrade beside him were being drawn back regardless.
‘Here, then,’ said Urquidex, and signalled as much to the one Sister of Silence still beside him. She took a step back.
He took a deep breath.
Fortunate that he was in a house of the Omnissiah.
He wanted his prayers heard.
Ten
The Land Raider’s glacis ramp crashed down into the rubble. Issachar was first out, shredding an ork in thick red body plate with a burst of bolter fire. Another ork pushed through the girdering that had fallen across a window. He bracketed it with bolter fire until it dropped. Something pulled the blocking metal aside and lobbed in a grenade. The frag burst shook floor and ceiling, but Issachar barely felt it. Space Marines encased in wounded artificer armour and draped in scripture stomped towards windows and doors, weapons blazing.
The Land Raider had ridden through the tin wall and disgorged Issachar’s honour guard directly into a manufactorum complex attached to Hyboriax Primus. It was a shell, but it was cover and provided firing lines over the primus road and from the back onto the ork bikers flanking on secundus.
The big doors onto primus came down on their acid-corroded hinges, an ork walker bulldozing through and walking into the atmosphere-sear of Tyrant’s sponson lascannons. The smoking can spouted fire and crashed to the floor. Ork warriors poured in behind the wreck, bellowing and hooting and firing wildly into the air. Tyrant raked them with its glacis heavy bolters, body parts slapping into puddles of their own liquefied tissue. High-yield mass-reactives perforated the walker’s gouting shell with hollow thunks and exploded, showering the orks still behind it with boiling shrapnel. Even the tank’s commander popped the cupola hatch and added to the outpouring of firepower with its pintle-mounted storm bolter.
The honour guard were still laying down thinning fire from the windows, leaving it to Issachar to deal with the xenos inroad in person.
He crushed an ork’s spine with a blow from his power axe. Filled another with a close-range volley that tore it apart. An ork almost twice his size waded through the Land Raider’s bullet storm. It had a crossed axe branded on a box-magazine of a jaw, a lumpen bionic wedged into the crease of one eye. It barged him sideways and they grappled, servos whining, gears clunking.
He was Chapter Master of the Excoriators. He had served Katafalque as First Captain for a century. He had fought the enemies of mankind for nearly seven hundred years, and the Astronomican would cease to shine before he would fall at the hands of an ork.
He spat Betchers’ acid on its chest-plate, then slammed his forehead through the dissolving metal. The ork roared, in surprise, not pain, and released its grip on his power axe enough for him to molecularly disrupt the brute’s skull with force fit to topple a wall.
Chapter vox chattered in his ear the whole time, telling him exactly where and how badly they were being beaten.
‘Order all forces back to the secondary extraction zone,’ he voxed, calmly, bolt pistol eviscerating the next monster to test its luck against his fury and lose. ‘I will not sacrifice what little we have left for a test.’