‘Chapter Master.’ Orgos made a line for him from Tyrant, where he had been coordinating with air support. ‘Payload is signalling. They are ready to—’
There was a crack, and the Space Marine fell with a slugger round still embedded in the side of his helm. Issachar snarled and stepped over him.
He had lost too many brothers to be moved by one more.
Incus Maximal — Mons Primus
Check 5, 2021:58:15
Urquidex nipped in smartly behind the ork’s back and stabbed it in the side of the neck with a hypodermic. It roared, and instinctively tried to bite off his hand, but it was still groggy and snapped a few centimetres shy of his hastily withdrawn digitools. The storm troopers braced. There had been no way to drill for the actual detonation. All they had to go on was the Dzelenic IV recording and they looked duly terrified.
The ork psyker was growing increasingly lucid. With a furious bellow, it dragged on the chain around its muscular right arm and pulled the storm trooper holding on to it off his feet. He slid along the floor on his chest carapace and the ork stamped on his head.
‘Throne!’
The storm trooper escort detail cried out in alarm. One drew a laspistol and had singed the ork’s chest before Urquidex shouted for him to stop. The ork pounded on its chest with its free arm and grabbed hold of the chains around its left arm and its neck.
With a crack of energy discharge, the Sister of Silence severed its arm just below the shoulder. She regarded Urquidex frostily as the psyker howled. Gore turned the edge of her power blade a fizzing purple. Taking advantage of the ork’s momentary distraction, the storm troopers unclasped the chains from their carapace and started to wind them through the data-pews either side of the aisle.
Meanwhile, squads alpha through delta were firing blindly into the roiling smoke.
The Doom Eagle, Vega, fell out of the smog and hit the floor with an ork on top of him. The troopers tattooed it with las as it smashed the back of the Space Marine’s helmet into the floor. From somewhere, Urquidex could hear the cry of a wolf, the powered whine of a Techmarine’s servo-harness.
Good. The harder they attacked, the stronger the psychic field would become.
The more devastating the explosion.
The ork psyker hollered and struggled around towards the Sister of Silence, the source of all its pain.
‘Now!’ shouted Urquidex, but the Sister was already vanishing into the smoke. Her high gorget hid her mouth, but from the movement of her skin and the shape of her eyes, Urquidex was certain that she smiled.
The effect of her departure on the psyker was profound.
The ork’s eyes took on a glassy inner light. Its shoulders tensed and bulged with swollen musculature. Urquidex had no equipment for the measurement of the uncanny, but he could feel the force that built inside of its skull. It was the pressure in the air that grew in the wake of a storm. The creak of a dam.
The diagnostiad had theorised, on forensic analysis of the Dzelenic IV recording, that the surge of energy that followed a psychically neutered ork psyker being suddenly exposed to a large group of its kin would have catastrophic results.
The storm troopers felt it coming in the rattling of their chains. They abandoned them and started to run. The ork was free, but it made no move to join the fight. It clapped its remaining hand to its face as if to contain the swelling of its head. Bolts of energy spat from its nose, mouth, ears. The flesh of its forehead stretched as its cranium pushed through. Its skull creaked, split, and then burst open, spraying Urquidex and the fleeing storm troopers with brain matter and whizzing bone.
The shockwave hit Urquidex like a force stave and flung him back, up the aisle, and into the wall with a wetly organic crack. A numbing flash of excruciation centred somewhere around his upper spine, and he flopped to the floor minus the use of his limbs. His digitools gave a peripheral nervous twitch.
Courtesy of a massive opiate dump from his cortical implants he remained conscious, and quite by chance in a position that faced down the aisle.
The detonated psyker somehow still stood, wobbling on the spot, blood firing upwards in spurts from its splayed-open neck. The corpses of the escort squad lay in a psychic blast crater of tangled data-pews.
Vega was dead too, insofar as it was possible to make that determination. Urquidex had just noticed him when the ork that straddled him gave a jerk and violently evacuated the contents of its brainpan over a wide area of floor.
The ork slumped over the Space Marine and Urquidex smiled weakly. A string of wet detonations and splashes of red ran through the smoke. The psychic shock chained through the orks. Heads exploded. Inhuman souls blasted from hulking bodies. An ork mechanic staggered across the aisle, headless, guided on by his mega-armoured suit, and crashed through a stained glass window. Acid snow billowed through, pinching out the blooms of promethium fire that rose from the plummeting ork’s flamers. Through the open window, Urquidex heard something explode. A suddenly untended incendiary, perhaps? Or did the battle for Hyboriax Primus continue?
Inside the Apse Mechanicus, however, the silence was devastating. Urquidex heard a last bolt-casing tinkle to the ground. Colonel Rothi’s vox-set crackled with distant chatter. Icegrip clumped through the ruddy smoke and sniffed the air in search of more foes, and then gave a lopsided grin.
There were none.
Incus Maximal — orbital
Check 5, 2022:01:11
The rare strain of unfettered emotion swept the turreted command stations of Alcazar Remembered. Communications, auspectoriae, drive; men and women in glittering void suits rose from their fortress chairs, beating hands together and cheering. Even the cherubiam serfs in their null-shielded podia had fallen, if not quiet, then helplessly in with the general wave of elation. For once in their servile existences, the focus of their songs was not the warp-soothing verses of the Librarius, but the images and accompanying screed that scrolled across the main viewer.
‘Massive ork casualties,’ reported Kale, doing his best to keep his tone level and failing. A smile tugged at the corners of his lips and his hands were clasped a little more tightly than usual behind his back. ‘Early estimates from ground forces put their losses in the tens of thousands.’
Another wild cheer broke out. Even the old shipmaster allowed himself a smile. Koorland suppressed the desire to join the celebrations, or relax, and sat forward.
They had won nothing yet.
‘Details, magos.’
‘Noospheric interlink to Magos Urquidex’s data tether established,’ reported Laurentis, tinnily, unmoved by the exuberance of the tacticae staff around him, or by the serf who dropped onto her knees to throw a hug around his boxy chassis. ‘Stand by.’
The magos scuttled around the strategium desk, which had been modified to his own specifications. Twitching implementer rods projected a functional noosphere. A control board packed with dials hung lopsided from one end by a bundle of fibre-optics, and pinged with periodic sampling of said noosphere. Other parts did things that Koorland could not imagine, all under continuous manipulation by Laurentis’ mechadendrites.
‘My colleague reports partial success. Satisfactory. Reports of fighting in Hyboriax. Uplink from the Excoriators and other ground forces remains patchy, but it would appear that the blast effect was restricted to the Mons Primus and its immediate surrounds.’
Koorland glanced over to Thane. ‘Orbital facilties?’
‘Terminator squads heavily engaged, brother. No effect that I can tell.’