A tactical squad of Excoriators advanced through the rubble, into a pall of dust that sparked with torn electrics and bolter fire. The grey ceramite block of Venerable Otho moved with them, crunching forward, figure-of-eighting spirals of fire spraying from the Dreadnought’s heavy flamer.
Thane joined the headlong rush over the shattered cityscape, unloading his bolter onto the breached section of wall, wildly skewing his accuracy ratios though he did not care. The urban terrain was post-apocalyptic: masonry in jagged lumps as though cut from passing asteroids and dropped from the sky, dismembered statues of armoured orks fifty metres high and brandishing chainaxes and heavy weapons. Vehicle wrecks, blackened, on their sides or in pieces; bunkers with smoke pouring from gun slits.
A Chimera ground over the loose earth on rattling metal treads, noisily passing Thane as he ran through a jumble of rockcrete blocks and wire. It had become separated from the rest of its armoured fist squadron by the terrain, slowed, but was steadily growling through the gears as it rumbled over the last of the major blast craters and saw open ground.
Thane turned and chased it, up a wobbling ramp of metal sheeting and onto the roof of a bunker. The Chimera was just accelerating away as Thane leapt, arms pulling on air as if to drag him forward, and thumped onto its armoured back. His boots made a hollow clang. The vehicle’s acceleration almost pitched him backwards, but he activated maglock to secure himself, swayed, then clumped forwards to grab hold of the handrail that circled the turret cupola. One-handed, he ejected the hot sickle magazine from his bolter and punched the weapon against his ammo-belt to insert a fresh one.
The Chimera gave a crunching, low-gear roar as it hit the rubbled section of wall, crashed through a metre-thick spit of standing masonry at the summit and then slewed freely, almost sideways, into the palace’s outer bailey. It trembled on its suspensors and then growled forwards in search of a site to unload. Its spotlight blinked on, a high-wattage lumen bulb spearing white light into the murk. Hull-mounted lasguns pivoted and fired. Its turret multi-laser traversed, cables swaying, and split the air with a crackling volley of beams.
Thane deactivated maglock and jumped down, crunching into gravelly ground as the Chimera reversed its tracks to pivot on the spot, spraying las-beams, and then rumble off in a new direction. He swung up his bolter and started firing.
Dust hung over everything. Spilled blocks cluttered the ground, a randomised topography of foxholes and trenches through which ork and man waged recreations of greater wars. Shield emitters, torn from the wall, struggling for function, flooded the air with sparks and fire. Landmines geysered tanks and rockcrete high into the air. Unexploded munitions went off. Distant walls, thicker, higher, more heavily defended even than those that had just been broken, echoed to the reports of gunfire.
Thane drilled an ork through the neck, splattered its blood over a rockcrete block, got another in the knee, stepped on its chest and shot a bolt between its eyes. A roar. An ork ripped through the smog, swinging an axe. Thane sided the blade on his bolter. The weapons came apart with a ring of metal, leaving shocked fingers. The ork blundered through into Thane and knocked them both to the ground. Icons flashed up minor damage; servos whirred and Thane struggled to his feet. The ork smashed into him again, but this time Thane was ready. He brought up his dented bolter and put four rounds point blank into the ork’s chest.
It exploded, wetly separating legs from head, and Thane thumped the bolter’s heavy stock, a crushed bolt-round spitting from the sickle magazine. Umbra-pattern. Practically indestructible. As close to a Chapter symbol as the Fists Exemplar came.
Armoured warriors of the Excoriators and Black Templars surged past him, war cries reverberating from helmet vox-casters. Those in ivory and red advanced into ork fire in disciplined lines like one-man tanks, laying down withering volleys as they moved. Their brothers moved in fits and bursts, pausing to hack through ork counters with gladius and power sword before dashing on.
‘All units forward!’ Thane yelled, amping his helmet’s vox-caster to maximum and striding up onto the silver-blue carcass of an Imperial Knight for a better view.
His auto-senses did their best to filter out the interference, figures emerging from the fog like black ghosts in a purgatory of grey, filled in with auspex-generated outlines that struggled to keep up. Assault Marines and Astra Militarum sappers assaulted the walls. He could see the controlled flare of jump packs, the sputter of portable shield racks, the cry and boom of ordnance pouring off the walls. Massed tanks growled together in the lee, recoil rocking them back as they slammed high-explosive shells into the base.
There was no time to regroup and adopt a more considered approach. They had pushed through the orks, yes, but they had certainly not beaten them. There were millions of fresh fighters out there, caught out of position by Thane’s flank attack, that were probably being piled into trucks and raced into new positions at the army’s rear even now. The only option was to push forward, to break the orks’ second wall before they could be smashed against it.
It was not war as the doctrines of Dorn or even Guilliman would have it, but it was exhilarating.
Everyone, Thane decided, should push forcibly against their nature at least once before the finish.
He turned to look up at the wall itself, just as a lobbed shell, trailing spurts of fire from an overpowered rocket, smashed through the top of a struggling Shadowsword tank and blew it to pieces before its main gun had a chance to fire. Black Templars wearing bulky jump packs held a beachhead on the parapet, backs forced to the rampart by several mobs of huge orks in steam-powered armour suits. As he watched, a boss ork with a shrilling buzz-saw and a pair of dribbling flamers bolted to its gauntlet chewed through a Space Marine’s right-hand jet flue and butted him off the parapet. The warrior broke on the rockcrete lumps below.
One breach was all they needed. Just one.
Sub-vocalising to his armour’s simplistic spirit he called up the army’s general channel, to coordinate some of the firepower that was labouring up towards the walls, and winced at the unexpected onslaught of orkish voices that emerged from his earpiece. Blink-scrolling through the frequencies found them all similarly blocked. Thane’s best supposition was the greenskins were using the full wavelength to coordinate their own unruly defense rather than actively blocking the Imperials’ communications. He set his vox to active scan, the exquisite properties of his Lyman’s ear allowing him to filter the overlapping noises into distinct sounds. He could not make out any specific headquarters location from background sounds, not could he understand the language, but there was one voice amongst the profusion that he knew immediately, as though a recognition marker had just flagged it up on his helm display.
It was guttural, unclean, the loudest and most strident, and also the deepest, as though delivered from a chest wider than the armoured body of a Dreadnought.
The Beast was near.
There was a loud roar of freshly gunned engines, and an exuberant hammering of gunfire that chewed into the crumpled shoulder of the Knight that Thane was standing on. Before he could think, battle-bred instincts loosed a four-round trigger-squeeze in the right direction, the bolts spanking off the snarling front radiator of a half-track laden with burly close-assault fighters. A dozen more of the ramshackle vehicles roared up behind it, packed with troops and guns, mouldings plastered with dust, powering up through a sally port under the wall that had been partially blocked with spoil and debris.
‘Ork vehicles inbound from a tunnel in grid section epsilon-nine,’ Thane voxed, jumping down from the shoulder of the Knight and pushing his bolter round its chewed-up rear plating, then returning fire. If any of his units were holding open comms under that xenos diatribe, he had no idea, or if they would be able to hear him if they were. But he had little option but to try. ‘Surrounding sections hold and counter. Repeat, hold and counter. Take that tunnel.’