The gatling blaster gave out with a sputter of light and a spent whir of barrels as the remains of the gun tower crumbled down over the bright yellow body of the unshielded gargant. The ork machine drove through it, a lunatic grin in brilliant yellow over its crude orkish face. Behind it came several more. Decimus Ordinatus shook the earth with a backward step.
‘After today there might be no children of Dorn,’ Thane had said. Not in argument, but the words needed to be said. They were greater than him.
‘No wall stands forever, brother, but I think that our father’s legacy was always about more than us. If Vulkan taught me anything it was to have faith. Humanity will prevail as it always has. It is for those like us to ensure that it is so.’
Thane cursed on the Eidolican day as something unseen but earth-shakingly massive impacted somewhere in the conurbation, near enough to rattle his boots against the ground. He dropped to one knee in a crater and unloaded his magazine, speaking evenly and calmly into his helmet vox.
‘This is Force Commander Thane to all units still receiving — consolidate at the second marker and await—’
A rocket screamed across from a tower block and struck the lead Vindicator side-on between the dozer blade and the track. The explosion flipped it over, with fingers of flame and nails of smoke, onto its back, smashing through the glacis armour of the vehicle behind.
‘—Brother Agrippus!’ Thane finished, debris raining down.
His battle-brother tracked the aim of his heavy bolter round to the right and speared the crude rocket’s winding smoke tail with bunker-busting incendiary rounds. Thane saw a burly ork with a flared missile tube under one arm running window to window. Behind Thane’s back, the rest of the Aurora Chapter’s armour column snarled up into a congested huddle of vehicles behind the stricken Vindicator. Angry shouts and engine growls. The ork shooter crashed through a side wall and into an alley just as Agrippus’ heavy bolter tore up the last window in the row. It dropped, hanging onto its missile tube as though it doubled as a jump pack, and thumped two-footed onto the rear-axle suspension of a waiting truck. Wood and metal shards sprayed over the vehicle as it roared into a wheelspin and rattled off between the blocks, bolt-rounds spanking from its rear fender.
Thane’s Lyman’s ear tuned to the sounds of ork vehicles: fighters being picked up and redeployed, unhappy about it by the tone of their xenos grunts, but obedient to their leaders. He mentally reconfigured his mindmap of the battlefield. The orks were refocusing their forces along a narrower front, digging in somewhere just ahead of the Black Templars advance.
‘They are withdrawing.’
‘An unlikely but predicted variable,’ said Brother Kahagnis. ‘Substitute strategem is staged advance, pull Black Templars back and extend flanks with Astra Militarum units. Draw the orks onto us again.’
Thane took a moment to consider, to elevate his mind above the anarchy of the battlefield, to perceive in it the connections of cause and effect as every Fists Exemplar initiate was taught. Every possibility was considered. Every variable already had a strategy in place to counter it.
There had been no regicide sets on Eidolica, and no one would ever challenge a Fist Exemplar to a game of strategy.
These orks had shown a fondness for feints and counters.
Perhaps it was time to show them something they did not expect.
‘Vulkan had faith in you, brother,’ Thane had answered.
‘He had faith in us all.’ Koorland had turned from the window then, and lain a gauntleted hand on Thane’s shoulder. Half his face was dark, shielded from the viewport’s lumen bars like a planet’s night side. ‘As do I. We fight to the last. We are the ultimate realisation of the hopes of mankind, and by our virtues do we hold humanity’s leaders to account. In heart and mind, we never waver.’ He released his grip and appeared to sigh though made no sound. ‘The real work begins tomorrow and the day after. We will rebuild the Imperium, brother. If one day the Khan or the Raven should be found as Vulkan was, if the Emperor should awake, then I would have the Imperium that they find be one of glory and not despair. I would make our father proud.’
‘Pull back the Black Templars. But then throw everything onto the Excoriators’ flank. Even the reserves.’
‘That is not the correct strategem for this set of conditions,’ Kahagnis argued.
Thane’s expression was immobile as rock as he regarded the spires and gun turrets of the idolatrous palace complex, still several kilometres away. The orks knew that Koorland was inside and somehow, though he had not yet worked the problem through that far, his and Koorland’s roles of lure and trap had become reversed. Were it in his nature to do so, he might have smiled.
‘The objective is the same, brother,’ said Thane.
Kill the Beast.
It did not matter who did it, and Thane had no intention of becoming the last son of Dorn.
Ullanor — Gorkogrod, inner palace
The ogryn, Brokk, punched the locked door. Ripples of blue-green force spilled outward from the giant abhuman’s grinding knuckles and the force field cloaking the door gave an ozone sputter. The ogryn’s muscles bulged as he tried to force it. Sweat soaked his khaki vest. After a few seconds of straining, the ogryn withdrew his hand and shook out his seared knuckles, dog tags and chains clinking against the spit-polished campaign medals sewn into his jacket breast. Laurentis’ plasma cutters had failed to make a mark either. So had Asger’s lightning claws.
To look at the door was to look at something clearly ork. The metal was thick, and clamped in the middle by a meaty lock in the shape of a bull-horned greenskin. The black and white diagonal stripes were garishly done, the brush strokes occasionally veering off the line to create a weird, kaleidoscopic pattern. The doors, however, were well balanced on their runners. The join was perfectly centred. And then there was the force field.
Laurentis lifted an extensor that emerged from his robes on an articulated limb and tapped on the door at various points, like a medic manoeuvring his stethoscope as he palpated a patient’s chest. Small flowerings of counter-force rippled from around his bladed metal probe.
‘Supposition: a nanolayer force field, similar in concept to the adamantine surface layer of Thunderhawk or Land Raider armour.’ He tapped it again and watched the spread of colours. ‘Fascinating.’
‘Can it be broken?’ asked Koorland.
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘Can you break it?’
‘Oh. I think not. Not without further investigation.’
Koorland nodded in acceptance — though his helm, bonded to his plastron and pauldrons, did not translate it well — and turned ponderously around.
The corridor was of the same unidentifiable metal as the door, super-resistant, unmarked by the scrape of a lightning claw or the frustrated discharge of a commissar’s plasma pistol, but minus the paintwork or the energy field. It was remarkably clean. There was no light source that any of them could detect and there was no sign of external power generation. Every surface just seemed to glow with a soft, bluish light. Embossed plates and glyphs marked junctions and doorways.
Kavalanera and her sisters filled the corridor with raised swords, a shield of exquisite war-plate and power-edged blades between Laurentis and Alpha 13-Jzzal and the servitor-restrained ork psyker. Asger held the rear. The second ogryn and Commissar Goss stood at one of the junctions. This door was unshielded and Bohemond was already on the other side with Kill-Team Stalker.
Koorland glanced again at the cartolith. His current location was identified by a small pulsing icon, buried deep in a labyrinthine subterranean structure that more nearly resembled the root system of a tooth, than anything obviously palatial. Passageways spread out from his position like capillaries. It looked like they were in the midsection of a raised structure, one of several fortified edifices that ringed the Beast’s throne room. His best guess put them a hundred metres or so above it and about twice that horizontally.