The break in the influx of fresh combatants allowed Koorland to push onto the turn of the stair. Bohemond blink-sent a greeting rune to his helm display. Two walking tanks side-by-side, with relic blade and storm bolter they drove the orks back, round the turn and onto the final flight. Beyond Lady Brassanas, Koorland saw the doors.
They were large, but by the standards of neither human nor ork were they worthy of a centre of power. They were plain metal, unadorned except for a few furtively scratched glyphs in the frame. A service entrance, for gretchin and slaves.
For humans.
Koorland wondered if it was some kind of symbolism as much as its own desire for this confrontation that had led the Beast to direct them along this route. Conquest had never been enough, or the hives of Terra would have been aflame long ago. It was holy war. It wanted mankind’s capitulation, its humiliation. Vulkan had explained to him that when dealing with orks all things came down to dominance. The primarch had also repeatedly impressed on him the need to have faith, in himself, in his brothers, in the spirit of man.
‘For Dorn. For Vulkan. For the Golden Throne of Terra!’
Freed from the immediate fighting, the two ogryns opened up on the uncertain orks. Commissar Goss seared them with bolts of plasma, and Alpha 13-Jzzal joined him with raking volleys of his heavier plasma caliver.
‘Protect yourself, sister,’ yelled Tyris, as he pulled a clutch of frag grenades from his hip holster. Gadreel and the rest of Kill-Team Stalker did likewise, and Kavalanera plunged her sword into an ork’s chest and then ducked beneath it as it fell.
The air became metal. The frag blasts were too minor a flurry to inflict anything more than irritation on such armoured behemoths but iron shards were as pernicious as sand and, propelled with force, would work their way into anywhere. They got into eyes, into ammo slits, points of weakness that the orks could have protected, had function been as important to them as effect.
Humanity was not the only race with weaknesses.
Koorland raised his sword as an icon of man, as Asger and Bohemond pushed past and battered open the doors.
Into the chamber of the Beast.
Ullanor — Gorkogrod, inner palace
Penitent Wrath looped over the palace rooftops like a seabird with wings full of winter gale. She swung slowly on her axis, round and round, torn electrics spitting from the hole that gaped in her wing, coming in by some miracle on one turbofan and descent thrusters.
The section of roof high above the throne room of the Beast was flat as a frozen lake, spiralling in panorama across Kjarvik’s view. One black gunship was already down and unloaded, warriors in grey and in ivory and red spreading from it like cracks in the ice. Another burned up in the sky as it flew over, wreckage dropping over the spiked parapet in a death spiral. His vision swung from metal roof to cloudy sky and back again, both the same ruddy umber, fire and ash, one a beaten reflection of the other.
Kjarvik held onto the assault ramp’s hydraulic supports as centrifugal force tried to throw him out. He looked down. He felt no nausea or disorientation. His physiology was immune to that.
‘It is not going to get any closer,’ said Baldarich.
Kjarvik released his boot maglocks with a snarl. There was no need to jump. The gunship’s spin flung him out from the ramp, arms beating at the air like his namesake crow.
The gunship groaned as its back end swung away and its nose came back around. Kjarvik could see Atherias and Bohr through the armourglass, locked into restraint harnesses, fighting with the guide sticks. Penitent Wrath whipped around on its sole functioning turbofan and swept further out. Metres from the rooftop. Centimetres from the edge. Kjarvik twisted bodily, and smacked face-first into the roof. He rolled sideways a way, bled off his momentum, and came up on all fours with the exception of the one hand that hovered over his mag-holster. The sheet metal gave a crumping wobble where his weight had depressed it. His long hair and pelt whipped about in the high-altitude wind.
He sniffed. Dead orks. Engine oil. Burning.
A massive thump rumpled through the metal as Zarrael impacted like a drop pod without retros. The Flesh Tearer crunched two-footed into the roof, right boot breaking through to the greave. Actuators and suspensors responded after a second’s delay, dispersed the impact throughout his armour, plate to plate, servos whirring like dynamos as he violently kicked his leg free. Phareous hit a moment later, a few metres off, then Baldarich, coming in on the tips of his toes with a swordsman’s poise.
Penitent Wrath convulsed as her rear end swept over the parapet, attitude control jets burning blue to white, hot enough to hold her shuddering in place while two dozen Inquisitorial storm troopers poured out. They held a perimeter with lasguns aimed up and out as Inquisitor Wienand and her bodyguard, Raznick, hurriedly dropped out after them. Raznick supported Urquidex under one arm even as he marked threat angles with his laspistol.
The last few storm troopers were following up at the end of the ramp when the Thunderhawk’s last turbofan blew out. The engine housing vomited oily yellow flames and rotor shards, and the unresisted control thrusters suddenly hammered the gunship sideways.
Men fell, screaming, rolled across the roof like bones tossed from a cup or flailed over the edge. Others were thrown back into the troop bay or hung onto the now upside-down ramp by the fingers. Shorn of any uplift, Penitent Wrath crashed into the roof, bowing it permanently, and shrieked back on thrusters until it crashed into the soaring stretch of curtain wall that rose from that side.
Kjarvik had memorised the cartoliths, as they all had. If they were accurate and he remembered truthfully, then this was the south face of the palace’s innermost defences, an iron ring of brute firepower and hypertechnology that defended the Beast’s throne room against attack from the ground and from the air.
Penitent Wrath’s machine-spirit finally expired and she fell quiet. Steam rose from the tracked tears she had left in the roof. Smoke gouted from her blasted engine.
Phareous lowered his shield and ran for the downed gunship, voxing Atherias and Bohr. A few greenskins littered his path but their threads had been well cut and hard, mown down by the Thunderhawks’ anti-personnel guns or dispatched by the sons of Dorn.
‘We have located an access ramp down into the palace, and from there, with luck, to the throne room of the Beast.’ Maximus Thane’s war-plate boosted his voice over the thunder of flak guns and the shrapnel rain. Kjarvik knew of him from the Deathwatch’s very first missions. He was good. He spoke plainly. Kjarvik respected him enormously, and he was not alone in doing so.
Half a dozen Fists Exemplar and an Apothecary of the Excoriators followed Thane from his Thunderhawk, Zarrael and even Baldarich falling in behind the Chapter Master as he neared.
‘How far?’ asked Kjarvik.
Thane shrugged, a whine of servos. ‘Less than two hundred metres.’ He pointed over the fortress wall, the guns still spitting fire and energy bolts at the Deathwatch gunships trying to land closer. ‘Koorland’s teleport coordinates are just on the other side of that.’
‘Does his teleport homer still signal?’
‘I cannot raise the fleet to find out.’
‘On the bright side, the Beast will be distracted by Koorland and—’ Kjarvik waved a gauntlet vaguely in the direction that most of the muted booms were coming from ‘—and whoever it is now in charge down there. He will not be expecting us.’
As he spoke, another black gunship set down on landing struts, and another, just as a hellstrike missile from a third whistled through the air and obliterated a gun-nest, crowning the main source of flak with fire and scattering the neighbouring roofs with debris. More Deathwatch deployed from their open assault ramps: black-armoured, elite, packing combi-weapons and wargear for any occasion. He recognised several of the sergeants from the mission briefing.