The effect of the Silent Sisters’ retreat became clearer as the forward ranks of orks stopped shooting. They dropped their weapons and clutched their heads and tusks. A bestial shriek arose from each before their heads started exploding, shooting gore into the skies of Ullanor. As a red mist descended upon the greenskin hordes, the forward ranks collapsed. The cacophony of gunfire began to die away. The headless corpses of ork riders fell from careering warbikes. The cannons of battlefortresses fell silent before the tanks drifted into their own allies. Ploughing through mobs of armoured greenskins, the vehicles mulched orks in their tracks and smashed into each other, resulting in spectacular explosions and a storm of shrapnel.
The surviving orks and their hulking chieftains were at first unperturbed by their falling comrades. It was normal for ork vanguard troops to fall before enemy gunfire. The following warriors barged past crashing corpses to get to the front line, where their savage gunfire or barbed bladework might find an enemy. Instead they found a furious bolt-storm of nearly a thousand Imperial Fists unleashing their blessed weaponry. Missile launchers streaked destruction into the oncoming hordes while the assault cannons of Stormtalon gunships chewed through the thinning enemy ranks.
Before long the ork army had stopped in its tracks. The air was heavy with gore and the ground carpeted with alien corpses. Battlewagons slid down into bubbling hollows of molten rock, melting in the magma, their headless crews still slumped inside. Above the Imperial Fists, the great gargant had frozen. Its colossal workings moaned, the mournful drone of metal upon metal and frozen hydraulics echoing about 44 Thoosa. The mighty vehicle tottered. Gravity and the weight of its monstrous weaponry was dragging it over. Without living crew to correct the war machine’s fall, the towering effigy of alien ingenuity went over on its side. The titanic walker shattered as it hit the ground, pulverising greenskin bodies and filling the sky with an excruciating boom whose echoes seemed to hang in the air.
With the gargant toppled and the field of battle a bloody haze of ork bodies, Thane heard the drop-ships and conveyors of the fleet descend. The landing zone was easy to find, painted red in the gore of warrior foes for kilometres about the crashed asteroid. Silent slaughter greeted the landing gears of the mighty drop-ships. Wreathed in steam and venting gases, the colossal Astra Militarum and skitarii transports sat upon the bloody ground as following craft, including the huge orbital conveyors of the Adeptus Titanicus, made their final approach. Moments later, Navy strike fighters screamed across the sky, banking and circling the carnage surrounding 44 Thoosa.
The Imperial Fists stood there amongst the death and destruction, their guns heavy with bolts unfired and their plate pristine. As the noble yellow of their armour and idling vehicles misted red with the drifting blood of the battlefield, the remaining Sisters of Silence left the asteroid with the two surviving ork psykers chained between them.
Stepping forward through the ranks of his honour guard and from beneath the standard, Chapter Master Thane stood next to High Chaplain Bachorath. Beyond, through the thinning dust and the blood-stained skies, he could see the distant fortress-palace of the Beast. The vast, jagged monstrosity of stone and metal plating appeared to have suffered some superficial structural damage as a result of the asteroid’s impact. Gorkogrod still stood, however: its colossal architecture, reinforced walls and fat citadels still towering above the clanlands and desolation of Ullanor.
Thane smacked a clenched black power fist against the Chaplain-Dreadnought’s thick plate.
‘Now we attack,’ Thane told him.
The Chapter Master began to issue orders to his captains and companies across the vox. ‘Bikes and Land Speeders to reconnoitre ahead of the main force. Land Raider columns to take position along our flanks. We move as a Chapter. We move as one. Companies, form up. Captain Karlito, your Second Company Centurions are to take vanguard and set the pace. Captain Brondal,’ Thane said, ‘the rearguard belongs to the Sixth. You are to have the Chapter’s back.’
‘As ever we shall, Chapter Master,’ Mace Brondal returned.
‘Lady Brassanas, look to your prisoners,’ Thane said. ‘They travel under the Chapter’s protection until their talents are ready to be deployed.’
‘The plan, Chapter Master?’ First Captain Berengard said, hefting his mighty blade.
‘Is simple,’ Thane said. ‘We are the bolt discharged from the gun — direct and unstoppable. We punch through the alien host, puncturing plate, rupturing flesh and breaking bone.’ He looked up at the shapes of black Thunderhawks dropping down out of the sky. ‘The Deathwatch will eradicate any orks that try to close the gap behind us. The Guardsmen and Adeptus Mechanicus will clear anything that remains. Like the bolt, the Adeptus Astartes will fly straight and true. Our target is the Great Beast of Ullanor, and let no wall, weapon or creature stand in our path. For we are the Imperial Fists — the living weapons of the Emperor.’
It was a glorious sight to behold. Near one thousand sons of Rogal Dorn, marching to war. With Karlito’s Centurions setting the steady pace, company upon company held stalwart formation behind. Land Raiders rumbled beside the Imperial Fists, mulching through the bodies of headless orks and barging derelict battlewagons aside. Captain Gortez rode ahead with the Land Speeders and heavy-set bikes of the Fifth Company, while Brondal’s Tactical squads covered the Chapter’s rear. All the while the gun-laden towers and jagged walls of Gorkogrod rose before the Imperial Fists.
As Thane trudged through the sea of bodies and the burning rubble left behind by the city-levelling power of the asteroid impact, Epistolary Zoldt kept him apprised of the status of the various forces attacking Ullanor. The Titans of the Legio Decimata were raining destruction down upon the precincts near 44 Thoosa’s impact site, levelling cannon-bristling fortresses, monstrous factories and the shanty workshops that belched smoke in between. Princeps Senioris Grimaldi had managed to field his Titans from mass conveyors and bulk landers that were swiftly overrun by greenskin hordes. At the price of an entire legion of skitarii soldiers and combat-servitor ship sentinels, the god-machines Deus Domitor, Divinitata Excelsii and Imperator Ultimatum were allowed their freedom. Although denied the ritual observances that usually heralded the awakening of their machine-spirits, the annihilation on offer in the palace precincts was enough to satisfy them. With the Deus Domitor damaged by enemy bombing runs and the wild strikes of ork artillery pieces, Grimaldi awaited drop-ships carrying what remained of the 201st Zenobian Regiment of Foot, in the hope that the Guardsmen and those that followed could establish a foothold in the apocalyptic wasteland left behind by his Titans and retake the landers.
Lord Marshal Rothenberg, meanwhile, had managed to unload his armour in the devastation following one of the cataclysmic asteroid strikes, but the terrain in which he had put down was difficult. Leman Russ variants, heavy battle tanks and Baneblades from patchwork contingents of the Delphriq Cataphracts, the 1st Gorgonian Ironclads, the Nymnal Adamaticlax and Brontaghast IVth Armoured had all deployed together to punch through the ork hordes and their inferior battlefortresses. Progress was slow, however, as the tanks became bogged down in the extensive delta system of a heavily polluted river that had run through the devastated precinct. The river was choked with fungus and ork bodies from the asteroid impact, and the going was made worse by the toxic sludge from a vast factory complex further upstream. The delta turned to blood, mud and mulch beneath the tracks of Rothenberg’s armour, forcing the lord marshal to deploy the remnants of the 39th Lundran Indentured — the only infantry regiment currently at his disposal — in helping to dig out sinking Leman Russ battle tanks.