The harder we hit them…
If only Koorland knew how to hit them.
Tyris flicked his bolter’s shot selector to automatic. It felt like time. Orks were flooding down the stairs from the galleries, through arches flanked by sentinel gargants, and into the throne room in their hundreds. He raked one stair, picking his shots still even as his trigger finger kicked them out faster than a mortal man could follow. One ork dropped with a bolt through the mouth, mass-reactive explosion blasting its skull back out through its visor, but the rest of the clip clanged off thick armour and rippling force fields. The Beast aside, they were the biggest greenskins he had ever seen. He reloaded.
‘Simmias, Straton — cover left. Gadreel — forward. Icegrip, with me.’
The warriors of Stalker were a firebase, a wall of bolter fire, but the orks were too big and too well armoured to be held at bay.
Kavalanera and her sisters sallied and drew back, fighting like warrior angels to defend the ork psyker. Tyris had known they could fight, but finally unleashed they were magnificent. They killed like bolts from the heavens, righteous judgement withdrawn the instant it was delivered to leave the orks railing at smoke or left for another ephemeral hand to strike down. Watching Kavalanera herself was like watching the armoured avatar of silent death, summoned forth for one final battle in the Emperor’s name. The enormous servitors did not fight, and for that reason the orks had not thought to attack them yet. They were like stakes in the ground. Laurentis hid behind one, lashing out with a converted power emitter, arcs of current that the rampaging greenskins did not even feel.
At the door, the fight had never stopped.
Commissar Goss’ chainsword banged furiously against an ork’s armour, adamantium teeth fighting for purchase like a man running on ice. He foamed at the mouth, cap on the floor somewhere, grey hair streaming wild as he discharged his plasma pistol into the ork’s chest. It ignored the shot, hacked off the commissar’s arm with its own whining axe-blade, then delivered a boot to the chest that broke the man and heaped him on the ground three metres back. Olug bellowed fury and mashed the butt of his ripper gun through the ork’s face. Brokk held the door single-handedly, wrestling with a mega-armoured ork almost his size. The strain on both faces was incredible. Even over the chaos of melee, Tyris could hear matched sinews creak.
Alpha 13-Jzzal cooly raked the ork mobs with plasma until an axe smashed through the back of his exo-skull. The skitarii ranger dropped with an electrical shiver and then self-destructed, an ultra-near-range implosion from a subdermal melta device taking out his killer’s arm. Asger finished the ork with a decapitating sweep. His lightning claws crackled and spat.
The Wolf Lord’s howl echoed from the rapidly emptying galleries.
It was drowned out by the rumble of engines.
The great gargants standing sentinel around the throne dais revved to full power. Exhaust stacks belched black smoke. Not, Tyris suspected, because the orks lacked the technological capability to engineer something cleaner, but because they enjoyed the sense of power that only a rumbling engine gave. With a discordant blast of war-horns, the war machines started haphazardly forward.
‘Now?’ Tyris voxed, though he doubted Koorland was in a position to respond.
Koorland pushed himself fully upright, back to the wall, as the Beast thudded towards him and swung. Koorland dropped heavily to one knee. The mace blew the wall apart. Vibrations drove deep cracks as high up as the gallery above his head. It swayed alarmingly as several brackets popped their bolts.
He stabbed at the Beast’s belly. It did not even bother to block. The power field nullified the sword’s disruption field, and the blade skittered harmlessly over riveted plates. The Beast used its wrist-battery like knuckle dusters — two-tonne knuckle dusters, worn by a giant. The blow hammered so hard into Koorland’s faceplate that it fried the shock circuits and smacked his head back into the padding. He crunched into the wall. The rim of the helmet bit through the gorget softseals. Atmosphere hissed in and Koorland’s visually augmented array went black.
On the second effort, he managed to tear the helm from the mangled gorget, then gave a deep roar of defiance as the Beast’s knee crushed into his plastron.
Fidus Bellator cracked like a block of stone struck along a plane of weakness. The breath was forced from his chest, his multi-lung supplying his physiology with oxygen in its absence. Systems alerts, mechanical and biological, blurted from mangled audio sounders in his gorget rim. The Beast ground him under its knee.
Koorland gritted his teeth, partially buried in rubble, and calmly ejected his storm bolter’s empty magazine. The Beast levelled its whirring wrist-battery. Not ten centimetres from Koorland’s face. He did not blink.
‘I defy you to my dying breath. Mankind defies you.’
A shriek of punctured metal startled him, expecting instant death as he was, and the dark blade of a power sword sheared through the giant ork’s thigh plate from behind. Koorland laughed then.
The Sword of Sigismund.
The Black Templar’s armour was cracked up the middle, marked by a jagged line of raw ceramite where it had been sealed. Sparks trailed from an exposed power cable near his elbow. He turned a twist on his relic blade and pulled it back. Blood sprayed. The Beast arched its back and howled in pain. It lashed back with its vibro-mace, but the surprise of being injured threw it off and it failed to account for the fact that the High Marshal stood barely in line with its hips. The weapon sailed over Bohemond’s helmet, but the Beast’s knuckles nevertheless caught him a glancing blow that stunned his systems and crashed him to the floor. Blood from what must have been a severed artery in the Beast’s thigh continued to spurt across Koorland’s body.
Koorland felt the pressure on his chest ease as the Beast drew in its wounded leg.
He stepped out of the wall. Half fell. Damaged sections of armour powered down as he stood, the tremendous drag of his Terminator plate like pushing against a moon. He slotted a fresh sickle magazine into his empty storm bolter. Dragonfire rounds. The nearest to hand.
He looked up at the Beast with eyes that swam in and out of focus.
The harder we hit them, the stronger the psychic field grows.
‘For Vulkan,’ he rasped, then opened a channel to Kavalanera. ‘Now.’
The Sister acknowledged with a click.
‘I will relish this moment forever, Beast.’
With Kavalanera leading, the Sisters broke from combat. It was there that Koorland saw the problem they had failed to foresee. The Sisters of Silence were mobbed in close combat by scores of the Beast’s bulkiest elites. Exquisitely as the women fought, as hard as Tyris and Stalker fought to pull them out, they simply could not bring the armoured hulks down fast enough to escape. Even so, Koorland felt a buzz of escalating force that tightened the skin of his forehead.
To Koorland’s astonishment, the staggered withdrawal actually appeared to be a boon in disguise. The psyker was absorbing power slowly, soaking in far more than it could have had it all come down on it in a rush. Its eyes rolled back. Its lids juddered as though electric current was being run though its chains. Froth boiled from its locked jaw. Veins bulged up from its body and turned a mouldy black as it seized uselessly in its restraints.
Clutching its head, the Beast turned round on its good leg.
With a grunt it raised its wrist-battery and fired.
The torrent of bullets and las and weird gravitic blasts mowed through two of the servitors and half a dozen ork elites. Suddenly released, the ork psyker flopped about on the floor like a suffocating fish. The bullet storm howled towards the seizing psyker and would have shredded it had Drevina not thrown herself into its path at the final second. She danced for a moment, then her ravaged body fell on top of the ork’s and the barrage swept on. It took another crimson-armoured Sister in the knee and dropped her. She did not break her vows even to cry out.