The Chapter Master’s hearts beat hard at the sight. The Imperial Fists had levelled a small corner of the Beast’s empire, a vast, walled precinct of his continental palace. The monster would not stand for that. He would do what the Imperials had done when the ork fleets and attack moons had left worlds burning in their wake — he would send his best.
And like the Imperial Fists, like the Space Marines of the Deathwatch and mighty Vulkan himself, its best would die. Spilling from surrounding strongholds and the fortress-palace of Gorkogrod itself, the green hordes aimed to close the gap — to flood the devastated landing zone with firepower, muscle and savagery. Gunfortresses and scrap-tanks would ride roughshod over the interlopers. Bombers would obliterate the crash site. The gargant, both an effigy to savage gods and a palace sentinel, had been despatched to crush them.
Thane didn’t have the time or manpower to stop such apocalyptic weapons of destruction. He could not allow drop-ships, conveyors and their precious cargo of fighting souls to be swallowed up by the green maelstrom. The Chapter Master had established a toe-hold right in the middle of the Beast’s barbarian empire. He would not lose it to a counter-insurgency, not even an attack of such overwhelming strength that it swept in towards them like a natural force.
All about him, Thane knew that the Imperial Fists were seeing what he was seeing.
‘And here you wait,’ High Chaplain Bachorath’s voice crackled from his vox-casters, the scorn in his tone like a cutting edge.
‘Did you used to favour the sparring cages, High Chaplain?’ Thane asked.
‘I did,’ the Chaplain-Dreadnought told him, unsure as to whether the new Chapter Master was levelling some kind of insult at him. ‘And if I were to favour them now, I would be able to tear the cage — bars, opponent and all — out of the auditorium.’
‘I don’t doubt it, Venerable Chaplain,’ the Chapter Master said. ‘Brothers of my ilk favoured fist over blade.’
‘The pugilist’s path,’ Bachorath said. ‘I, too, have broken my honoured brothers’ heads in my day.’
‘Then you know,’ Thane said, ‘that the knock-out blow is often struck out of opportunity. Opportunity created by an intentional opening. An invitation that cannot be resisted. You put your opponent where you want him — in the devastating path of your fist.’
‘That is as may be,’ the High Chaplain said, his vox-hailed words echoing about the shattered remains of 44 Thoosa, ‘but my auto-senses tell me that we are standing upon a multitude of paths and on all of them we are the ones about to be devastated.’
‘Just be ready to do the Emperor’s work,’ Thane told the Chaplain. ‘Brother Zoldt, how far out are the drop-ships?’
‘Two minutes, Chapter Master,’ the Epistolary told him across the vox-channel.
‘And, at present speed, how long until the enemy vanguard reach our position?’
‘The same.’
Thane stood and waited. The dust and smoke began to thin. The strips of molten rock bubbled and spat, and the roar of the enemy grew louder about them. The titanic steps of the gargant. The coughing and rumbling of monstrous engines. Savage battle cries. Soon the silhouettes of the ork hordes could be made out in the haze. Hulking chieftains towered over their followers, bellowing their alien rage and shooting into the sky with belt-fed weaponry. Bikes screamed ahead. Gunfortresses fired their mighty cannons blind. The sky was filled with the drone of closing aircraft. The cave entrance that the Imperial Fists had blasted in their asteroid transport was cast into the shadow of the great gargant. Shells, from both the titanic walker and the ork armour, smashed into the side of 44 Thoosa. Grit and shattered rock rained from the impacts down onto the Imperial Fists, drumming off their plate.
‘Chapter Master, I must insist…’ High Chaplain Bachorath said, his words bouncing around the mountainous exterior of the asteroid.
‘Hold position,’ Thane ordered across the vox. Gunship-deposited Land Raiders idled. The powerful engines of Space Marine bikes chugged. Stormtalon gunships swooped in, the launchers of their missiles aimed over the ranks of Imperial Fists. Company by company, they held position about the broad cave entrance, their boltguns, pistols and heavy weapons aimed at the oncoming storm of green flesh and carnage.
‘My lord, that gargant…’ Tychor said, but Thane ignored the standard bearer. He could hear the flap of the Chapter battle standard in the backwash of the gunship engines.
‘Drop-ships and conveyors on final approach,’ Epistolary Zoldt reported. Above, beyond the drone of approaching bombers and the roar of his own gunships, the Chapter Master could hear the descent engines of the gigantic drop-ships, each carrying Astra Militarum regiments and macroclades of skitarii soldiers. Beyond them he could make out the even deeper rumble of mass conveyors bringing down the god-machines of the Adeptus Titanicus.
‘We must attack,’ High Chaplain Bachorath insisted with a growl of his automotive engines.
‘Hold,’ Thane said. He licked his lips. The enemy were everywhere. He could hear the roars of monsters astride warbikes and the crash of gunfire coming into range. The ground before the Imperial Fists ranks erupted in sparks, showering stone and the splatter of molten rock.
‘My lord?’ Emmerich Berengard said, even the grizzled Templar stirred to question his Chapter Master’s orders and sanity. Thane nodded. He had drawn the enemy in. It was time to deliver the killing strike.
‘Lady Brassanas,’ Thane said. ‘Our foe is in range and in great number. Now is the time, Sister. Do what our bolts and blades cannot.’
Thane looked back grimly at Tychor and Berengard, while the High Chaplain’s autoloaders primed with a sequence of clunks that seemed to underscore his doubts. Brassanas led her Sisters of Silence out from under the shadow of the asteroid. Picking their path carefully through the channels of molten rock, they heaved along the monstrous ork psyker until they were clear of the Imperial Fists. At Brassanas’ sign, the Sisters backed from the creature in a crescent. Letting the chains run to their full length, they secured the creature to a mangled girder. The monster became the nexus of a blaze of ethereal power. Bolts of psychic rage snapped between it and the rocky floor, searing with growing intensity.
As the Silent Sisters moved away, back to the safety of the waiting Imperial Fists, the psyker became a dazzling nova of otherworldly energy, spidery arcs sizzling about it. It tried to lunge free of its restraints to no avail.
Thane looked back and forth between the blinding light of the ork psyker and the rabid advance of the alien hordes. His plate’s systems registered the first slugs of the ork vanguard plucking at his Terminator armour. Dathan Tychor held the Chapter standard high and took his position with the honour guard around his Chapter Master. The barrels of High Chaplain Bachorath’s assault cannons whirred to life, in readiness for the storm to come. Chainswords growled in unison amongst the battle-brothers of the Eighth Company. Across the Chapter, missiles primed in their launchers. Multi-meltas and plasma guns hissed to readiness. Heavy bolters and boltguns cleared with a thunk. First rounds were loaded into breeches. Barrels were aimed. Ceramite fingertips rested on triggers.
‘Now, damn it…’ Thane growled. The words were almost a plea.
Suddenly the intensifying lightstorm about the psyker died. Thane felt his stomach flip with the backwash of otherworldly emptiness. With tens of thousands of orks converging on the impact site, their mere presence feeding the psykers with ethereal power, the ork prisoner had become a weapon of mass destruction. Without the intensity of the nullifying field about it, the colossal psychic energies building within the creature blasted the monster’s head from its shoulders in a fountain of gore.
And then followed the ugly heads of the closing attackers. The crazed warrior orks on the front line died in droves even as they charged at the Imperial Fists with reckless bloodlust, their boots hammering on several steps more as their bodies crumbled and their heads disappeared in blasts of blood and brain. As ork carcasses crashed down into the dirt, green ethereal energies crackled from the stumps of the necks and briefly across their bodies before dying away.