Then came the second wave — orks whose gunfortresses and battlewagons turned out to be no better adapted to the environment than Rothenberg’s own division. With both ork and Imperial armour intermittently stuck in the heavy metal mire, mud-thrashing tanks became small islands from which Guardsmen and greenskins exchanged vicious fire. Like a honey trap, the thunder of Imperial cannons drew creatures on foot and within the patchwork plating of battlewagons for kilometres around, turning the engagement into an ever bigger mess.
Magos Reductor Ohmnix was having better fortune in a range of volcanic mountains just to the north. The nest of peaks reached up from the lands beyond the Beast’s palace. They had been fortified to form a surface-to-orbit macrocannon emplacement and a line of surrounding strongholds, whose artillery sat in installations carved in the mountainsides. As well as being military fortresses, the strongholds stained the sky with black smoke belched from workshops and weapons factories, the orks’ colossal forges utilising the magma chambers of the surrounding volcanoes.
Magos Ohmnix’s initial assessment had told him that the embedded fortresses would require days to take, even with the small contingent of self-propelled artillery, bombards and siege mortars under his command. Fortunately for the tech-priest, the impact of one of the asteroids had initiated a chain reaction of volcanic eruptions that flooded the interior chambers of the mountains with lava. With hundreds of thousands of orks already fleeing the stronghold, the magos reductor used his monstrous artillery on the mountainsides. Thousands of tonnes of dislodged rock and debris crashed down the slope breaking and burying the escaping orks. Deploying skitarii rangers aboard Mechanicus Valkyries, Ohmnix had his cybernetic soldiers pick off the hundreds of hardy greenskin survivors that had escaped the disaster.
As Grimaldi, Ohmnix and Rothenberg attempted to get footholds in the area about the asteroid impact sites, they were followed down by the meagre stream of reinforcement ships sent by Dominus Zhokuv and Admiral Napier. Colossal drop-ships carrying Astra Militarum regiments, skitarii macroclades, and remnant armour formations belonging to both negotiated the storm of atmospheric gun platforms, ork attack ships, grapplers and fat cruise missiles launched from ground silos on the planet’s surface. Legio Cybernetica ark freighters, transporting maniples of battle-automata, and mass conveyors ran the gauntlet of crash-capsules and ramming craft as they attempted to get their precious few ancient and honoured god-machines down to the landing site intact. Even faithships carrying the ravening militia armies of the Ecclesiarchy attempted to run the ork blockade, alongside the sleek Temple craft of the Officio Assassinum that were used to a more clandestine insertion.
As Zoldt’s blizzard of reports came in, it became clear to Thane just how far the odds were stacked against them on Ullanor. Drop-ships carrying surviving regiments of Guardsmen were being blasted out of the sky by rocket silos. Hastily refitted Imperial battle cruisers were tumbling from orbit aflame. The attack groups had managed to carve out landing sites in the swarming multitudes of the Beast’s continental hordes, but an entire planet was coming down on them. While the remaining carriers and ark freighters continued to send drop-ships and landers with small regiments and skitarii half-legions, they could not match the reinforcements summoned by the Beast on his own world. Tribes of nomadic ork warriors mounted on bikes and wartracks. Cavalcades of tanks and battlefortresses under the command of the Beast’s most monstrous chieftains. Millions upon millions of ork warriors, summoned from every foetid corner of Ullanor, drawn to the battle and their Beast by the apocalyptic arrival of humanity on their soil.
As the sun lowered on the horizon, a hazy orb that smeared the sky with blood and dust, the central stronghold of the Beast’s palace could be made out. It was a towering, ugly silhouette of jagged irregularity — serrated battlements, armoured towers, the barrels of vast superguns and alien architectural bombast. Its construction was both martial and monstrous, boasting exotic surface — to-orbit weaponry, massive gargant assembly workshops and tribal sub-citadels.
As the sunlight disappeared, the flashes of the space battle above became clear. The darkening firmament became a rune-bank blinking with alerts and warning lamps. However bad it was on the surface, it would be worse in the void. The system was choked with attack ships, crash-capsules and hulks. Ork boarders filled derelict craft to the rivets and orbited Ullanor, waiting for the call to war. While the Imperial Fists were the sword thrusting for the Beast’s alien heart, the Navy battle cruisers and Mechanicus arkships were the shield, with the mighty Phalanx weathering the worst of the punishment.
As Navy Lightnings shrieked overhead and battle-scarred Marauder aircraft tore through the sky in dog fights with enemy flyers, flaming ork attack ships tumbled out of the benighted heavens. Blasted to wrecks in the disciplined broadsides of grand cruisers and smashed aside by the fortress-monastery, vessels plummeted broken-backed and glowing with the heat of re-entry. They struck the blasted lands of Ullanor, creating fountains of rock and wreckage that rocketed skyward. A colossal derelict plunged spectacularly down through the heavens, breaking in half after some kind of brutal ramming action. Zoldt informed his Chapter Master with heavy heart that the wreck was the venerable Mars-class battle cruiser Tyrant’s Light. Hitting the surface of Ullanor, the flaming remains of the majestic vessel rolled across the path of the Chapter, forcing Captain Gortez to recall bikes and Land Speeders that had streaked ahead of the advancing column of Imperial Fists.
The battle-brothers of the Second Company trudged on in their Centurion suits, followed by veterans in Tactical Dreadnought armour. The companies of the Imperial Fists marched to war, flanked by rumbling Land Raiders. Before them the palace-fortress grew — a jagged monstrosity of a fortification, all towers, ugly stone and thick armour plating. The stronghold was an architectural abomination, smothered in overlapping energy shielding and protective fields. In some places the monstrous fortification was unshielded and open to the sky. In others it benefited from triple shielding, able to resist the most determined of attacks. While the broken corpses and shattered structures smouldering beneath their boots were testament to the destructive power of the asteroid’s impact, the Beast’s fortress seemed to have weathered the worst of the devastation.
‘Captain Gortez, Chapter Master,’ the vox chirped.
‘Proceed, captain.’
‘Third wave enemy forces,’ the former Crimson Fist reported, ‘leaving the palace.’
‘Form up,’ Thane ordered, waving the tank column on.
It did not take Thane long to see the reinforcements. A coordinated attack. It made sense. The Beast would rather his forces face the Imperial Fists outside of Gorkogrod’s walls than within them and indeed he had designed his palace this way, so that the progress of any invaders might be frustrated by enormous barriers cutting the continental palace into numerous kill-zones. Warbikes and gun-mounting buggies leapt the fortress’ jagged walls in a constant stream of outriders, no doubt intended to flank the approaching Imperial Fists. Ork aircraft borne on sets of serrated rotor blades took to the air from the palace compounds, the chug of their engines and beat of their blades echoing across the desolation. Each carried beneath it a huge piece of ordnance, almost too heavy for the craft to get off the ground. Meanwhile, on the smoking wasteland about them, hatches set within rocky bunkers began to open, pushing aside smouldering wreckage and baked earth. Hulking orks dressed in heavy armour and bearing brute cybernetics and monstrous weaponry began to pour from the hatches.