Laurentis scuttled around them on his three metal legs, ducking under flexing chains, monitoring pulse and breathing and stabbing the ork’s thick hide with digital probes for reasons of his own. The grizzled ranger, Alpha 13-Jzzal, watched the ork psyker’s occasional lunges with a dispassionate eye, motionless but for the optic pulse of the complete-wavelength scan with which he concurrently swept the room.
‘Scan complete,’ grated Alpha 13-Jzzal. The words were synthesised by a throat implant, and emerged with an artificial cadence that involved neither the movement of the ranger’s jaw nor the making of eye contact. ‘Infrared and X-ray sweeps reveal nothing in the vicinity.’ His head turned sharply towards Koorland then, faceted metal reflecting the firelight on a dozen different planes. ‘Past behaviour suggests the high likelihood of a trap.’
The same thing had occurred to Koorland, and he had decided equally quickly that it did not matter. They were committed now. There was no alternative.
Ullanor would be annihilated. Or Terra would be.
Ullanor — Gorkogrod
Shards of sharpened debris from ork fragmentation bombs scythed across Thane’s armour. Bent nails. Metal scraps. Direct hits drove shrapnel at him, hard, licked by fire. Cloudbursts clotted the sky with whizzing screws and blades, raining indiscriminately over all. The high-tempo thump of heavy guns boomed through the frag storm. Thane’s battleplate recorded hits as he advanced through the rubble: prangs, stings, chips to unpainted ceramite that brought sealant gel hissing over lodged bullets.
His umbra-pattern bolter answered back with more decisive effect. His helmet auto-senses compensated for the confusion of debris, filtering, ghostly reticules floating amongst the blizzarding buckshot. Bolter fire bracketed the faceplate ghosts one by one and blood sprayed from within them. Orks tumbled out as though pushed out in surrender, rolling with the unspent momentum of their charge, tracked by bolt and las until what lumped to a halt was an urecognisable ruin.
Thane drilled a bolt-round through a mouth that was somehow still sucking on air. The ork made a grunting sound, the subsequent detonation pasting Thane’s right greave with gore as he stepped over it.
‘Thesius, Agrippus, heavy weapons left and right.’ He pointed a gauntlet that was hatched with sealant scars towards a high, spiked tower. Burning rounds spat back and forth. He ducked instinctively from the whistle of an artillery shell. ‘Venerable Brother Otho, take a squad and help the Excoriators clear that tower. I want a corridor cleared for the Imperial Guard to follow. We are too thinly spread.’ The Earthshaker round thumped through the side wall of a building and spewed fire high back across the street. The famous aftershock rattled the entire connected superstructure.
The Excoriators had broken into the barracks blocks to the east, but had become mired in heavy urban fighting. Gun nests covering the bridgewalks and exits had them pinned in the complex’s near-side corner while hit-and-run attacks by aerially deployed ork shock troops, coordinated with armoured units on the ground, slowly ate into that slim territorial gain. But the Excoriators would hold. Venerable Brother Otho would see to it.
To north and west, the Black Templars continued to drive deep. Before passing out of vox-contact, Castellan Clermont had voxed in from a position almost three kilometres from Koorland’s teleport coordinates. Practically on the walls. But the Black Templars had been so intent on pressing forwards that entire mobs of orks had been able to slip through and assault the Fists Exemplar flank.
Thesius’ autocannon mowed them down before they could come within twenty metres. Brothers Tolemy, Preco, and Zaul moved into the kill-zone, cutting into the building fronts with precise bursts of bolter fire. None of them saw the shell before it landed. Thane did. It was unworthy of them, a lumpen metal casing for something incendiary, lobbed carelessly from a shanty block as if from a trebuchet, but it blasted a mighty hole out of the ground as well as any handcrafted munition blessed by the priests of Mars.
And just like that, the galaxy had sixty-nine Fists Exemplar.
‘There are few of us left,’ Thane had said, looking through the viewport at the dense stellar clouds of the galactic core in which the Ullanor star shone with a bright, beguiling innocence. ‘Barely enough to continue.’
Koorland had joined him. The lumen bars in the mullions accentuated the grey in his hair. ‘We are sons of Dorn, brother. We do not surrender.’ He had tapped his throat, Thane remembered, the progenoids held there, the last precious gene-seed of his Chapter. ‘That is the burden the primarch has placed on us. He knew we could shoulder it. We stand while all around us falls, and because we stand, others will stand with us.’
‘Call for Apothecary Antonius,’ yelled Thamarius, because every Fist Exemplar carried in his make-up the conceit of command.
Antonius was of the Excoriators, attached to the remnant Fists Exemplar to perform that most vital function in the absence of a surviving Apothecary of their own.
‘Press the attack,’ Thane ordered, emotionless, gunning down an ork that appeared in an unglazed window even as his brothers turned their helms to him in surprise.
They would stand while all around them fell. They wore no colours, they showed no pride, but to a transhuman man they were the truest sons of Dorn.
‘Whirlwinds!’ he shouted. ‘I want that block brought down!’
Thane could see the greater picture despite the slaughter. He knew the mathematics. The Chapter had been hit too hard, its gene-stocks depleted beyond their ability to propagate a viable genetic population. The Last Wall stood, but the Fists Exemplar were already finished.
A column of Deathwatch vehicles, scuffed paintwork revealing the bright green of the Aurora Chapter, trundled up towards the front. The rubble was causing them difficulty, the cavalcade advancing at less than walking pace behind a pair of Vindicators specially modified with urban clearance dozer blades. Both of the glacis modules were pocked by bullet holes. One of them was on fire. The desultory whistle of castellan missiles and lascannon stabs were all they could give back.
With a sonic clap and a promethium roar, an atmosphere fighter, with rippling flames chased in paint down its stub nose, dropped through the frag clouds and strafed the armour column with a linked pair of underwing quad-autocannons. High volume anti-personnel rounds spanked and rattled along armour plates, blood splashing across the turret of a Razorback as its commander vainly tried to track the jet with his pintle mount, and then in a rumble of afterburn it raced northwards into ork-held territory.
Two or three kilometres in that direction, where it had been driven to keep pace with the Black Templars advance, Thane could see the great fifteen-metre-high pyre that had been Helfyre. In the glare of that inferno, the invincible Decimus Ordinatus shimmered in a liquid caul of purples and greens, tormented from every angle by sustained fire.
As Thane watched, the Warlord raised an arm stained with pyrotechnic bruising, the diverted power causing its gatling blaster to glow like a birthing sun. The massive weapon began to spin, superfast, oddly silent against the cacophonies more immediate in Thane’s ears, and disgorged a blast of energy that carved the nearest of the offending gun towers in two. That beam of light was, in fact, a torrent of several million high-power las-beams per second, and the combined effect was devastating. The Titan dragged its arm diagonally across its body, chewing downwards through the blasted structure and overloading the shields of the pot-bellied ork gargant that had been sheltering behind it.