Dorn himself could not have done better.
‘A frontal assault is still foolhardy and predictable,’ Thane had argued. Watch Commander Warfist, he recalled, had nodded sagely, prompting several others around the conference table to do likewise. ‘It was tried once and it failed.’
‘Foolhardy and predictable is what the orks have come to expect from the Imperium,’ Koorland had answered, with that strained but confident smile that he wore now most days. He had grown into his crown. Sometimes, he seemed to forget that he wore it at all. ‘Let them see again what they expect to see.’
‘To the palace!’
Thane stood and waved the massed army forward, just as a massive explosion blew out the back wall of a structure that butted onto the airbase.
A spiked grinder wheel appeared through the dust, followed in a rattling of tracks and loose bolts by a super-heavy ork battlefortress. Battlecannons mounted on rotable turrets belched smoke while orks manning pintle-mounted machine guns on its rampart-like upper sections exchanged fire with what must have been the Deathwatch kill-teams deployed ahead to secure the flanks. Their fire discipline took out a few machine-gunners and was successfully holding up the vehicle’s infantry support, but it would take more than a smattering of lascannons and multi-meltas to put a terminal stop to a monstrosity on that scale.
‘For the Emperor!’ Thane bellowed as the first Chimeras rumbled into range. Koorland called the men Ullanor Veterans. They proudly called themselves the Ullanor First. Thane called them Ullanor survivors. They looked afraid.
They did not look afraid enough.
‘I need you to lead the assault, brother,’ Koorland had said to him, after Asger and the others had left and they were just brothers, alone, at his table. ‘Our success rests on my survival, and my survival rests on yours.’ He had put his hand on Thane’s shoulder and squeezed. Not hard. Enough to bid a brother farewell. ‘I would rely on none but a true son of Dorn to survive long enough.’
Ullanor — orbital
Koorland backed ponderously into the teleportation slot. It probably did not matter which way he faced once the teleport cycle was under way, but he wanted to be in a position to monitor his squad and in Terminator armour he was too bulky to turn around once inside.
Fidus Bellator was a relic of antiquity, the first of the Indomitus suits fashioned in the closing years of the Heresy War, a gift from the Black Templars to the last of the Imperial Fists. His field of view was narrower than he was accustomed to from wearing power armour, mobility around the neck sacrified in favour of massive protection over that area and the shoulders. What he could see, however, was virtually enhanced by the armour’s adaptive auspex, augmented with outlines and false contrast, every movement of his eyes tracked by icons, brackets and informative screed.
Power was at maximum. Armour integrity was at maximum. The ammunition count to his integrated storm bolter was at maximum.
In their own two alcoves, back-lit by the slow-powering blue hum of the slot’s dematerialisers, Bohemond and Asger were similarly, though less magnificently, clad in Tactical Dreadnought plate.
Asger’s was draped in a snowy white pelt, ritually scratched with kill tallies and symbols of luck and warding. His armour was fitted with a back banner pole from which the Wolf Lord would have flown his personal heraldry, but from which the Watch Commander had hung a swatch of plain black cloth. He wore a pair of lightning claws. Bohemond’s black plate was immaculately picked out in silver, hung with prayer strips and lengths of pure white fabric bearing the Sigismund cross. Hailing from a martial tradition with a common root to Koorland’s own, he was similarly armed with storm bolter and power sword, the peerless Sword of Sigismund already free of its scabbard.
Those two needed little reassurance from him.
The two ogryns, Olug and Brokk, however, had filled the confines of the teleportation chamber with their panicked odour. For all their fearsome, greater-than-human appearance, the pair had been close to a full-blown panic attack until Commissar Heliad Goss, formerly of the Minglor XVII ogryn auxilia, had been found from amongst the Ullanor Veterans billeted aboard Alcazar Remembered and at the last minute reassigned to Koorland’s force. He was in the slot between them, reciting children’s prayers from memory, interspersed with simple words of encouragement. They were still sweating, but were not about to rip through the conduits for a way out which was a marked improvement.
In the remaining six slots, Krule and the Space Marines of Kill-Team Stalker prepared themselves for teleport in whatever manner brought them comfort.
Alcazar Remembered had two teleportation decks. The chamber itself might have been cramped, wall space bulked with slots for twelve Terminators, the floor a trip hazard of power cabling and hoses, but the technology was astonishly power-hungry and demanded the sacrifice of an entire deck to its generators. Kavalanera’s squad was in the other chamber. They were the ones that could not be risked. And due to the inevitable shipwide systems drain that followed a teleportation cycle, Koorland and his squad would be on their own for several minutes at least.
Krule looked up from his prayers. ‘Answer me honestly, Space Marine. Are you afraid?’
‘You do not refer to the orks, do you?’ said Asger.
The Assassin was quiet a moment. ‘No.’
‘Fear was purged from our hearts with the making of the blessed primarch,’ said Bohemond.
‘Indeed,’ said Koorland as the energy brackets running through the alcoves built to lumen-strip brightness, the hum becoming equivalent in volume to what one might experience by passing the bulkhead onto main drive. There was a tremor in the walls. ‘And yet, I am terrified every time.’
For some reason, the Assassin seemed comforted by his admission.
‘Coordinates locked. Systems charged.’ Shipmaster Kale’s voice echoed through the chamber’s augmitters, like a stone dropping deep, deep down a bottomless well. ‘We will be powerless for up to half an hour, but Issachar has the orbital defences well engaged, and surface scans indicate that the Deathwatch have been successful in eliminating the ground-based weaponry targeting our orbit. Bulwark and Faceless Warrior will escort us in. We are ready up here, lord.’
Koorland closed his eyes and muttered an invocation to the Emperor’s protection.
But he did not hesitate.
He could already picture in his mind the throne room of the Great Beast that Krule had described to him.
‘Commence.’
Fourteen
Teleportation was an experience that Koorland counted, his own near death on Ardamantua and subsequent bloody resurrection very much included, as one of rare horror.
Every atom in his body felt as if it had been electrified, charge repulsion baring his basic substance to the warp, then the quarks and gluons that constituted those creaking atoms, separating, separating, until he was a physical thing only in the abstract. He was atomic spaces, constrained only by the memory of nuclear cohesion. He was a nebula cloud, spread across the infinite, haunted by the unbearable thought of one day collapsing to form a star.
Then movement. But without body. It felt like his soul was forced through an electrostatic mesh. Like gruel being strained through muslin, but the substance was what was caught in the membrane, and he was the discoloured diluent that trickled through. From that weak suffusion of molecular memory and psychic tangling, there came a reformation.