‘They will be your responsibility,’ said Koorland. ‘You will have full command of the combined fleet while ground forces deploy into the beachhead that the Deathwatch will secure. Fists Exemplar, Black Templars, Excoriators — they will be the second wave.’ He nodded to Dorr, Rawketh, and Zhokuv. ‘Adeptus Militarum and the Mechanicus war machines to follow. Meanwhile, the Deathwatch with support from the Sisters of Silence will seek out and secure corridors through which the main force can proceed to assault the palace complex.’
‘I find no fault in your courage, Koorland,’ said Asger. ‘But a bold heart notwithstanding, this plan is little different to Vulkan’s. The Deathwatch alone will not tip the scales and nor will your new weapon. Whatever the magos believes, it is a stretch to imagine one witch eliminating every ork on Ullanor.’
Koorland’s stern expression twitched as murmurs of agreement arose from the other Deathwatch sergeants and the Astra Militarum. Koorland suppressed whatever empathy he might have felt for their situation, but he did not enjoy dispatching brave men, brothers, to almost certain death. He leaned forward, silencing the hubbub with no other gesture than that.
‘None of you are wrong. Overwhelming force has not given us victory before today and it will not now. We must deliver our weapon to the place at which it will be most devastating, to the one thing that the orks cannot afford to lose.’
Extending his palm outwards he summoned the rotating hololith, the planet shrinking as it moved towards his hand. It continued to rotate, the perspective hovering above it, parts of it beginning to fall away: zooming and focusing onto the fortified palace complex that the great Vulkan had died trying to crack. It looked like a crouching idol, four hundred metres tall, slabbed into ork features with metal and stone. Those outer fortifications faded back as the image passed inside. The interior mapping was good. Ongoing in-situ scans by embedded carto-savants of the Adeptus Mechanicus during the prior invasion had seen to that. The fact that Krule had personally verified much of it was invaluable.
The hololith continued to strip away layers until what remained, still turning in time with the spin of the world, was a single, huge room. The poorly defined outline of a giant throne stood in the centre of it.
‘Now, let me tell you what I will be doing.’
Thirteen
The second invasion of Ullanor began with a sacrifice. A shower of meteors marked the offering: fireballs, some hundreds of metres across, burned through the upper atmosphere and blasted against Gorkogrod’s brute-shields in a blaze of elemental colour. Some of them were recognisable as voidship remnants. The Dark Angels cruiser, Herald of Night. The Navy frigate, Cyzicus. The Inquisitorial escort, Perseus Banshee.
Skeleton crews, crippled ships, but losses keenly felt. Sacrifices painfully offered.
But they were willing, and they had fulfilled their role.
Penitent Wrath descended hard through a web of metal plankways and scaffold-like flak-towers. Glowing crossfire stitched across her hull and over her dorsal cannon. Combat thrusters burned white from driving evasive manoeuvres through a terminal descent. A black-painted gunship of the Aurora Chapter, Lance of Ultima, lost a tail-wing to a torrent of flak and crashed through the flat, oxide-red roof of an ork block where it exploded. Another was eviscerated mid-air, spilling Space Marines and crew over the abyssal drop like chaff dropped from the belly of a fighter craft.
Like planetary reformations in miniature, segmented metal shutters were clunking up to reveal secondary firepoints, huge-barrelled guns emerging from riveted walls and scaffolds and cranking into position. The opening phase of the first invasion of Ullanor had been quiet, characterised by Imperial circumspection and orkish cunning. Not this time. The Imperium knew now what surprises the orks had in store and where they were hidden.
And the orks knew that they had no reason to hold back.
A Blood Angels gunship met a cloudburst of fragmentation rockets and auto-fire and disintegrated as though it had been driven through a wall.
With no ordinary skill on the part of Atherias, the pilot, Penitent Wrath dropped between the crisscrossing lines of fire and responded in kind. Heavy bolters strafed the gun ports, hammering on the hardened metal, lascannons punching through as the Thunderhawk pivoted around her centre and dropped landing struts. Retro-thrusters fired, scorching the metallic surface beneath and bringing the gunship shuddering to a hover.
Two metres off the ground, turbofans howling with vertical strain, her assault hatch whined open and Kjarvik Stormcrow finally felt his boots on the ground of Ullanor. He took a deep breath of the burned, carcinogenic air. He had missed the last invasion, fighting back the greenskins in the Segmentum Obscura under the Fell-Handed.
He would not be so unlucky again.
The polluted sky was ashen and thick, riven by fire. It was raining metal, crumpled casings and bits of aircraft pattering down over the circular iron platform onto which Stormcrow and his kill-team swiftly deployed. It was some kind of landing pad, large enough to accept one of the big twin-rotor ork ’copters or a supply boat. Three ramps ran off from it, only a line of barbed-wire spikes that flexed in the turbofan outwash between them and a stupefying fall. One each to left and right led down towards partially fortress-fronted shacks. The third ramp was twice as long, slightly wider, and wobbled upwards to the primary objective.
Tactica-savants had designated it a collapser beam, for reasons that Kjarvik did not need explaining. It was a lumpen bristling of defensive ironwork surmounted by a towering edifice of suspensor rods and power transfer coils. An enormous cannon, longer again than its entire housing, pointed belligerently up at the sky. Entrance was via a set of heavy red doors plastered with glyphs. A great bar had been set up across them, spiked, wired in, and sparking with alternating current.
With a burst of propellant, twin missiles shrieked from the Thunderhawk’s underwing hardpoints and blasted the door to smithereens.
Kjarvik was already sprinting for it as the gunship lifted off, a parting burst of heavy bolter fire chewing up the walls around the fort’s firing slit windows.
‘Bring them the Emperor’s wrath,’ voxed Atherias, as the Thunderhawk swung back into the web of tracers.
Kjarvik did not reply. His attention was focused on gunning down the two leather-strapped greenskins that stumbled out of the smoking ruin of their doorway.
More were pouring out of the blockhouse structures to either side and piling onto the walkways, and straight into the storm bolter and eviscerator of Phareous and Zarrael. The sounds from that direction reminded Kjarvik of lumps of gristle thrown at a wall to see what would stick.
He ignored them, dropped his shoulder, and charged through what was left of the gate.
His vision became smoke, tangled spurs and spitting flame. The roars and gunfire merged and then morphed into the pop of cooling metal. And then he was inside. Baldarich, none improved for his humbling on Plaeos, was already there, power sword flashing in the dark. Flames licked the Black Templar’s armour. Smoke coiled through Kjarvik’s beard and hair like fishbone clips. His lungs shut themselves down. His next breath drew an oxygen-poor stew of ash and explosive compounds into his multi-lung.
It was the firing chamber, directly beneath the collapser beam. Ork mechanics crowded ladders and gantries. Gretchin wielding wrenches ran at the Space Marines with hissing faces and fell to contemptuous sweeps of Baldarich’s blade.
Automatic fire from Kjarvik’s bolt pistol drilled through thick ork skulls and hunched shoulders, painting the smoke with explosive splashes of red. His aim shifted from ladder to ladder as the orks dropped down, as fast as he could think. Half-second burst and move. Howls and thunder. Half-second burst and move. The air reeked of fyceline. His ammo counter blinked a warning. He squeezed off another burst, a charging mechanic so close that its forehead almost touched the muzzle.