‘The strange thing,’ Krule appeared by Koorland’s pauldron and gestured to the open door, ‘is that that’s the more direct route.’
‘The palace itself is movable. Are you certain?’
‘I wouldn’t open my mouth otherwise.’
‘A trap,’ Alpha 13-Jzzal said again, a vox-loop growl.
Koorland wondered if Rogal Dorn had smiled when he had first set foot on Sebastus IV. ‘Of course it is a trap.’
‘If I might propose a theory?’ Laurentis scuttled around from the locked and shielded door to face Koorland, audio receivers extending from his cranial structure as if, in some remotely human way, to present himself fully at the Space Marine’s disposal.
‘I remember a time when you would not have cared to ask first,’ said Koorland.
‘I have, on occasion, been made aware that my hypotheses are not at all times relevant or welcome.’
‘They are today, my friend. Speak.’
Laurentis blinked and lowered his eyeball, a gesture of humble gratitude. ‘The sole purpose of our mission is the assassination of the Beast, correct?’
Koorland nodded.
‘To eliminate the one target that the enemy cannot afford to lose,’ Laurentis quoted, in paraphrase, then prodded Fidus Bellator’s huge pectoral aquila with a manipulator claw. ‘It occurs to me that the Beast could have had a similar thought.’
‘The mission is compromised,’ said Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘You have been lured here.’
Koorland regarded the cyborgised warrior sternly. The skitarius knew, because Koorland had shared the data himself, of the calculus-logi’s latest prognoses. Terra had been calculated to collapse in a matter of weeks. The most optimistic upper limit of statistical deviation had the greater Imperium continuing as a unified entity for only another few months at best. These facts were no secret. Let the ugly face of failure inspire the mortals to sacrifice all, as Thane and the Last Wall did mere kilometres away.
‘It changes nothing.’
‘We should at least contact Thane or Issachar,’ said Krule. ‘Or both. If you’re right then vox-silence is clearly unnecessary.’
‘Impossible,’ came Bohemond’s voice-amplified reply from the adjoining corridor. The Black Templar clumped back into view, bulging armour plates blued by the odd, rinsing light. ‘External vox is being blocked. Did Koorland not tell you?’
Krule puffed out his cheeks. ‘Then I suppose I’m with that.’ He jabbed his head sideways towards Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘I’ve been this way before without losing outside contact. It has to be deliberate.’
‘I assume then that your opinion is the same,’ said Bohemond.
Krule’s expression was stony. His eyes widened slightly and the whites began to turn red. Without appearing to move, his musculature noticeably swelled under his synskin bodyglove. Chronaxic implants, Koorland reasoned, threat responsive, doping the Assassin’s already enhanced physiognomy with a sharp increase in metabolism. Krule grinned like a snake.
‘We came all this way. I brought all my favourite knives.’
‘Kill ork fur Empror,’ rumbled Olug, slowly.
Koorland felt his heart warm with gratitude.
‘Signal on my auspex,’ growled Asger, suddenly. ‘Fifty metres. That way.’ He pointed one set of lightning claws down the corridor. Kavalanera and her sisters made ready with a swift rustle of oiled plates. ‘Closing with some haste.’
‘How many?’ said Koorland.
‘Enough for me.’
‘It seems that the auspex is working after all,’ said Laurentis, happily.
‘Ave bloody Omnissiah,’ muttered Krule.
‘Praise Him,’ Laurentis agreed.
‘Break through them,’ suggested Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘While we are still capable of salvaging the weapon. There is no way of ascertaining from here whether this route to the throne room will not be similarly warded.’
But somehow, Koorland knew that it would not be. The Emperor lit the galaxy through the Astronomican: was it not then possible that He watched over His children in spirit?
‘Krule, Tyris, you have point. Bohemond, with them. Asger, you know what to do if the orks catch up.’ The Wolf Lord flexed his lightning claws eloquently. ‘Goss, covering fire. Lady Brassanas, Laurentis — you’re with me.’
Fifteen
The Fists Exemplar, and those of the VII Legion that were their genetic forebears, had fought in some of the Imperium’s defining battles. They had defended Terra from the Arch-Enemy, fought in the Consus Drift campaigns. Oriax Dantalion himself had been at the primarch’s side through the slaughter of the Iron Cage. But Maximus Thane doubted that so much honour had ever been earned by so few as during the second battle for Ullanor.
He wondered if enough of them would be alive at the finish for their exploits to be remembered half as long as those names of legend.
It had been Assault Marines of the Seventh Company, in concert with their brothers of the Black Templars, that had taken the fight to the primary fortress blocking the palace’s eastern aspect and broken it open. It had been bike squads led by Forgemaster Aloysian that had led the Aurora Chapter tanks through the orks’ minefield and allowed them to crack the greenskins’ defensive lines of trenches and bunkers. When an armoured witch-tower, wreathed in green lightning and trundling forward on massive tracks, had delivered the deathblow on Decimus Ordinatus and turned its psychic fire upon the Deathwatch vehicles, it had been Brother-Sergeant Aquino of the Second who had led the kill-squad of Sisters of Silence to nullify it from within.
The galaxy would never again know his like.
As for Thane himself, he was too humble to keep a personal tally, but his helm display recorded it for him: three hundred and eighteen kills for three hundred and nineteen rounds expended. It had been him to lead the sortie that crippled the orks’ flak guns, and him that then called down the finishing blow.
The Icarus supercarrier, several kilometres of runstrip mounted over many windswept tiers upon two sets of awesome tracks, had been held in reserve with the Field-Legatus’ Leviathan and escort. Scant minutes after Thane’s voxed authorisation, dozens of low-flying Marauder bombers and Vulture gunships had turned what remained of the palace approach to ash and glass, dust under a Space Marine’s boot.
There had been nothing left but a handful of survivors, crawling cockroach-like in the rubble of apocalypse, to prevent the hundred and twelve Demolisher siege tanks of the Ullanor Veterans forming up into one long, slowly advancing firing line and opening up against the palace’s outer wall with the full fury of mankind.
The orks’ fortification was staggeringly vast. Superhard metals plated its sloped face. Energy fields flickered in ugly opposition to the shells and explosions that broke along its length. Fixed gun turrets raked the ground, even as shield overloads drove cracks through ablative plating and exposed bare rockcrete to the massed gunnery of the Astra Militarum. The wall crumbled.
Maximus Thane was the first to cheer.
Everything started to move forwards. On first impression it was as though the planet’s artificial tectonics were undergoing one of their gross scale rearrangements, but the sky was still, the ground was still, it was everything else that was moving. Every man, every vehicle was suddenly rushing towards the breach in the wall as though the planet was a voidship and they had just punched a hole in their own hull. Those that had been closest to the breach were the first to enter; no deeper thought went into it than that. They were the orks now.