Bad luck. He activated his power fist.
There was a clang of metal on metal, and Kjarvik glanced sideways to see Bohr beside him. The Iron Hand had planted his staff into the ground as if to make of himself a tripod and deploy the full arsenal of his servo-harness. Kjarvik made a laughing sound in the back of his throat as bolt-rounds, hell-beams, plasma ejectiles and raging gouts of flame finished off what he had not been able to. The burn painted the Iron Father a harsh white, steeping the cavities of his complicated bionics in shadow as though the ancient veteran could smile again.
‘Firepower,’ he grunted, his harness winding down, gun barrels spinning off heat. ‘It is always the solution.’
Kjarvik afforded his brother-in-black an elaborate bow. The sounds of chain weaponry and bloodcurdling shrieks delivered in an angel’s voice filtered in from the outside, and vox-chatter from his open channel scratched out of his gorget bead. Landers reported the safe arrival and deployment of ground troops. Deathwatch sergeants requested Sister or armour support, called in air strikes, and reported neutralised objectives with coupled requests for redeployment.
‘We are being made to look slow,’ Kjarvik hissed as Bohr hefted his staff and clumped heavily towards the base of the weapon’s generatorum housing. The Iron Father placed the charges: melta bombs, just like before.
Kjarvik was backing up, voxing in a demand for extraction.
Bohr nodded as he strode towards him. ‘On to the next.’
The brute-shield over Gorkogrod had failed.
Maximus Thane thudded down the landing ramp of his heavy transport, leading out seventy-three Fists Exemplar of the Sixth, Seventh, and his own Second. Company structures had largely disintegrated, and yet the last seventy-three clung to that final emblem of their identity as though it were more precious than the gene-seed of Dorn that each warrior carried inside. From the ramp’s clanging metal to solid tarmac, the Fists Exemplar poured out into the orks’ guns, merging with similar debarkments of Excoriators and Black Templars.
Valkyrie and Vendetta sorties had cleared a landing zone from a previously identified sector of relatively high topological stability. The orks had used it as an airbase, comprising several score parallel runways from which they had quickly been able to establish aerial supremacy over the battle for the nearby palace supercomplex. Not this time. This time, the orks’ fighter and bomber wings were charred wrecks on the runway or smouldering still in their hangars. Thick coils of ugly black smoke choked the sky. It was a churn of black over black, pulsed with thumping volleys from the landers’ flare cannons.
In anticipation of the Deathwatch’s success, the Adeptus Astartes drop-ships had wasted no time in setting down. The bulk Astra Militarum landers were still up there however, crisscrossing trails of flak and duelling aircraft lighting up the next wave of transports.
In howls of descent thrusters the heavy landers crunched down on top of stricken aircraft. Locking clamps blew, ramps slammed into the ground, and from container after container, mortal troops emerged with a collective roar that stirred mankind’s spirit to war.
In such moments, Thane could see why some of his brothers saw the guiding hand of divinity behind His great crusade.
Scores of regiments from worlds Thane would never know, united only by the common misfortune of having served in the last Ullanor campaign, moved up behind the Space Marine vanguard. They were slower, but numerous. Thane’s suit auspex could only provide an estimate, but it was a big one — close to a hundred thousand men, give or take. Sentinel walkers strode ahead, combing the bordering structures with multi-laser fire, accompanied by Imperial Knights. The Astra Militarum regiments were joined by skitarii cohorts, servitor mobile weapons platforms and Legio Cybernetica support, emerging from their gothic transorbitals without the cry of their base human counterparts but with a group precision that was, in its ordered refutation of the chaos of the battlefield, just as affirming. A fleet of supertransports brought down heavier Martian engines.
Baneblades pushed through the aircraft wreckage. Shadowswords powered their infamously slow-charging main guns. The last survivors of Legio Ultima, the mighty Warlord Decimus Ordinatus and her escort — a battered Warhound called Helfyre, bathed in purple static emitted by its intermittent void bank — made the ground shake as they advanced into Gorkogrod.
Before the Great Waaagh of the Beast had begun, Thane would have called this army the greatest he had ever seen, a force fit for the command of a warmaster, or perhaps, in extremis, the lord of a great Chapter such as Odaenathus or Sachael. A lot could change in one year. It was astonishing to think that it was only that long ago that he had been pushing traitor remnants deeper into the Rubicante Flux, no more to his flag than a handful of ships and a hundred warriors.
A lot had changed, and this world had changed it. Thane had been in Vulkan’s vanguard ahead of a force not in the ten of thousands but closer to the millions. A transhuman could not hear his own voice for the thunder of tanks, and the march of whole Legios of Titans had made the horizon itself seem to move.
Ahead of him now was a heavy articulated truck, with giant exhaust stacks and spiked wheels in the orkish preference. It was bent inwards at the coupler to form a ‘v’ shape, and incoming fire was spanking off the metal sides. Thane waved his command squad into cover. Brothers Kahagnis and Abbas moved to bull bar and rear fender respectively and laid down fire for the Black Templars and Excoriators that continued to pound past. Thesius pulled himself up onto the driver’s cabin, turned as Thamarius threw up his battle-brother’s autocannon, then got down to one knee and blazed over the charging Space Marines.
‘To the palace. Fast and hard!’
Thane thumped into the side of the truck’s trailer section without slowing down, so hard it lifted half an inch off its nearside wheels. He turned his back against it, auto-senses taking in the mass of Astra Militarum and mechanised support pushing up to secure the Space Marines’ gains. He switched to long-range vox.
‘Issachar, this is Thane. Estimate ninety per cent of forces landed. Advancing towards the palace on primary schedule.’ Static hissed across the channel. A Valkyrie gunship jetted overhead. ‘Issachar!’
The Valkyrie’s tail-wing seemed to pop. Promethium smoke spewed out of it as it dropped, corkscrewing over and over before disintegrating on impact with the ground without even so much as an explosion. A rust-coloured ork jet blasted through the smoke cloud, wings wobbling as it banked and strafed across the Black Templars advance with twin hails of high-powered shot.
‘Issachar!’
He gave up. He looked at the sky. The fleet must still be too far out, hence the lack of drop pod reinforcement. Fitting one boot between the solid rubber tyre and the hellishly scratched mud guard, he climbed up onto the vehicle’s slug-holed rear container. Keeping low, he looked across the field of wreckage and blast craters, auto-senses crowding his helm display with threat markers and tactical screed.
Gun emplacements in the control towers. Orks in heavy battlegear mustering behind pre-prepared chokepoints. Fast attack vehicles closing in. The ground between the outermost runway and the access roads was a killing field, and the Space Marines were breaking down into combat squads to maximise their use of cover. The palace was fifteen kilometres due north, a gauntlet of bunkers, tank traps and enfilading fire zones.