‘Artillery,’ Captain Berengard called out to his First Company veterans as big guns and mortars within the fortress walls began hurling explosive shells into the air.
Thane frowned. The orks knew where the Imperial Fists were heading. As he had drawn the xenos in to kill them earlier, now the orks were doing the same — inviting the Space Marines along the path of least resistance, straight into annihilation.
He had not brought the Imperial Fists this far to be caught in the jaws of an alien trap. He wasn’t going to be outflanked and blasted to oblivion within striking distance of the palace walls. The Beast was attempting to hit the Space Marines from both sides and from above. Thane thought on the jumping bikes, the rotor-bladed junkers, the orks flooding the wasteland from the subterranean tunnels running out from the palace. There was something else. The enemy had further doom to visit upon the Imperial Fists.
‘Fifth Company, hold!’ Thane roared across the vox. ‘Gortez, halt your advance!’
It was too late. The first of the captain’s bikers had been storming towards the palace walls, intent on reconnoitring the fortifications before the arrival of the Chapter. Several Imperial Fists bikes and their riders rocketed up into the air in an explosion of grit and flame.
‘Bright skies,’ Thane swore, the Eidolican oath rising unbidden to his lips. The mines had not even been particularly well hidden, as Gortez had confirmed moments later. Spiked like fat sea-urchins, they had been buried in shallow earth waiting for an enemy to wander into the field. Perhaps they had been put in place after the initial attacks on the palace. Perhaps entire precincts were booby-trapped. Thane had no way to know if the entire palace was surrounded by minefields, but he did not have time to test such a theory. He needed to get his Imperial Fists inside to do the job they had come to Ullanor to do. Slay the Beast.
As artillery landed indiscriminately across the plain, emerging orks were thrown into the air in blossoming balls of flame. They seemed not to care how many of their own they lost, as long as their fire found Space Marines. A shell dropped among Captain Uzziah’s Fourth Company, blasting four Space Marines to bloody pieces and knocking the rest of the company to the ground in a storm of shrapnel.
‘Zoldt,’ Thane called angrily. ‘Get me Captain Decarion — now.’
‘Yes, Chapter Master.’
Thane pointed up at the Stormtalon gunships hovering noisily above the companies with their missile launchers armed. Rotating his armoured finger around and then jabbing it at the ork aircraft, the Chapter Master watched the gunships leave their companies and peel off to meet the approaching junkers in the air. They were overtaken by Thunderhawks painted in midnight black. Hellstrike missiles streaked away from the wings of the Deathwatch gunships, blasting apart ork bike formations and gun buggies. Heavy bolter fire from the Thunderhawks’ flanks tore up the smouldering wasteland, ripping through heavily armoured warriors emerging from hatches in the ground. As the gunships circled the battlefield, rearguard squads of Deathwatch Space Marines ran up behind the Imperial Fists formations.
‘We have your back, brothers,’ a Fenrisian voice barked across the vox. A voice Thane recognised as belonging to Kjarvik Stormcrow, whose Deathwatch squad had been instrumental in securing two of the ork psykers for use in the attack.
‘Land Raiders,’ Thane voxed, ‘you are authorised to offer suppression fire. Companies Oberon and Valdanor to support. Captain Storn, your Devastators front and centre. All other companies, keep up the pace.’
‘The Phalanx for you, Chapter Master,’ Epistolary Zoldt told him.
‘Decarion, are you on station?’ Thane demanded.
‘My lord, we’ve had some complications,’ Captain Decarion confessed. Over the channel Thane could hear the sound of combat shotguns.
‘The Phalanx has been boarded?’ Thane asked, his voice edged with concern. He saw the helms of other Imperial Fists turn at the prospect. ‘Status, captain!’
‘The Phalanx has sustained damage, Chapter Master,’ Decarion told him, ‘but is still operational. The orks are throwing everything at us. Literally: they’re using their star forts and gun platforms to make suicide runs at the fortress-monastery as they orbit. While our turrets and cannons kept boarding capsules and ramming ships at bay, we were struck by an orbital shipyard and the alien craft being assembled within. As we became tangled in the scaffolding, orks from the vessel flooded the perimeter decks.’
‘Captain,’ Thane said. ‘The Imperial Fists need the Phalanx. We need her lances for an orbital strike. We need her bombardment cannons to break the palace open. Do whatever you must, but we need the Phalanx back on station and we need it now.’
‘Understood, my lord,’ Captain Decarion voxed back.
Above the advancing Imperial Fists the gunships strafed left and right, their assault cannons blazing. Enemy aircraft laden with fat ordnance banked this way and that, their own blasting weaponry raining empty shells down on the desolation below. Cutting through the light armour of the flyers with their forward guns, the Space Marine gunships finished the craft with precision marksmanship. Rockets tore away from the Stormtalons as they expertly flew through serrated rotor blades and heavy gunfire. Several aircraft detonated, a larger fireball following almost immediately afterwards as their ordnance exploded also. Others peeled off, streaming black smoke from their workings and compartments, before plummeting into the ground to create flaming craters.
As the Chapter advanced towards Gorkogrod, Thane knew they were running out of room to manoeuvre. With ork artillery dropping from the sky and the minefields before them, it would only be a matter of time before the ork forces moved up behind to cut them off from the rest of the advancing Deathwatch under Watch Commander Warfist, and the surviving portions of Attack Group Thoosa. Looking up, Thane saw the sky briefly lit up by a flare in the pin-pricked darkness of the void.
‘Zoldt?’ the Chapter Master called.
‘Reports confirm it to be the Lex Immaculata, fleet carrier,’ the Epistolary told him moments later. ‘A hit upon her engine column at point-blank range.’
Thane thought about the swarming havoc of the space battle raging above their heads. With vessels all but smashing into one another in the confines of orbit, he doubted whether much of the gunnery was anything other than point-blank.
A wild round ricocheted off his pauldron, from a mob of armoured orks throwing their monstrous forms at the Chapter flanks. Imperial Fists from the Third and Seventh Companies had climbed up onto the Land Raiders to offer a bolt-storm in support of the tanks’ flamestorm cannons. As the rolling Land Raiders presented a curtain of fiery doom to the attacking orks, turning towering monsters into thrashing infernos of skin-melting agony, the riding Space Marines fired through the flames and into the creatures beyond. A chance artillery impact turned two of the Land Raiders into infernos of their own, blasting the fiery wrecks from the ground to land on their roofs and sides. Imperial Fists ran in to assist their brothers but both the crews and the Space Marines firing from the roofs were beyond help.
‘Fifth Company, withdraw,’ Thane commanded as Captain Storn’s Devastator squads ran up through the ranks of the Imperial Fists. As Gortez and his men rode back to the Chapter, Storn’s Space Marines took position in their stead with their heavy weapons. As buggies and greenskins on warbikes rode at the Imperial Fists the Ninth Company opened fire. Missiles streaked off into buggies, blasting them apart. Heavy plasma guns sent orbs of superheated gas straight through the engine columns of vehicles, causing them to roll to a steaming stop, while heavy bolters carved furrows across the orks, tearing their ragged bodies from seats and saddles. Lascannons cut surging warbikes in half, while those that did make it through the storm of destruction were turned into a smeared fusion of flesh and metal by the blast of multi-meltas.