Tychor ran at his Chapter Master, the standard bearer hitting Thane’s Terminator plate with the powered force of his own suit. Thane was knocked back as a piece of ork artillery hit the Imperial Fists’ front ranks. High Chaplain Bachorath stumbled on his pistons and hydraulics. The bodies of Sisters of Silence were flung into the air in their slender bronze plate and flaming cloaks. The ork psykers went wild, tearing at their chains and the remaining Sisters. Chief Apothecary Delgado ran in, his bone-white plate smeared with soot. A second shell, following the first on its random trajectory, came down, blasting Delgado back off his feet. Several First Company veterans had parts of their Terminator plate sheared from their bodies, while Berengard’s second, Sergeant Eckhart, became an armoured silhouette writhing in flame. Brother Alverez, the Second Company’s Apothecary, ran over to check on Delgado but the Chief Apothecary was dead, his body a shattered mess.
For a moment, a terrible dread crept into Thane’s heart. That he had doomed them all with such a bold strategy, this strike straight to the heart of the greenskin empire. That the Imperial Fists would be lost… again.
‘Zoldt,’ Thane roared. ‘Call it in to Captain Decarion. Lance strikes. Full spread. I want a path cleared to the target and then I want every piece of ordnance — every warhead on board the Phalanx — dropped on the outer wall of the palace. Do you hear me?’
‘Affirmative, Chapter Master,’ the Epistolary said, staggering away from the remains of a Land Raider that an ork bombard had just turned into a flaming wreck.
‘We have reached the edge of the minefield, Chapter Master,’ Captain Storn reported as his heavy weapons Space Marines jogged to a halt.
‘All stop and close in,’ Thane ordered, prompting their perimeter of Land Raiders to crunch to a standstill. Track to track, the tanks put a wall of armour between their brothers on foot and the orks pouring from dusty hatches situated in the desolation around the minefield.
‘Brother Stormcrow,’ Thane called across the vox.
‘How can the Deathwatch aid you, Chapter Master?’ Kjarvik Stormcrow called back.
‘The mighty Phalanx will pound the palace, but the fortifications are triple-shielded in places.’
‘Our Thunderhawks report large generator structures further along the palace wall perimeter,’ the Fenrisian reported. ‘Leave it to us.’
Thane looked behind him as Deathwatch squads peeled off across the smouldering wasteland, protected by black Thunderhawks making strafing runs along their position. About the Imperial Fists formations, hulking orks in heavy armour advanced behind shields the size of bulkheads. Behind, more greenskins — drunk on battle and the prospect of tearing Space Marines apart — sprayed the Land Raiders with a stream of slugs from their outlandish guns. Crude rockets spiralled through the night air, sometimes wheeling off into the sky and sometimes juddering the tanks with their armour-cracking impact.
‘Captain Uzziah, split the Fourth by squads to support the Third and Seventh on the Land Raiders,’ Thane commanded. ‘Chaplain Ishcarion, have your Assault Marines cut down anything that gets through our perimeter.’
Behind him, Thane could hear Gortez and Brondal’s companies fiercely ensuring that the Chapter wasn’t cut from the rest of Attack Group Thoosa. Land Raiders nearby suddenly rocked as muscle-bound orks slammed into them with their shoulders. While the tanks’ flamestorm cannons turned huge swathes of the foe to ash and charred bone, the orks’ numbers were such that many inevitably got through. Captain Valdanor and his Imperial Fists blasted heads and horned helms from shoulders as the orks tried to break the perimeter. Space Marines from the Fourth Company, running up to join Valdanor on the Land Raiders, hammered those that got through on their approach, with Chaplain Ishcarion’s Assault squads carving up what was left with the sweep and thrash of chainblades. Another wild shell landed on the right flank, bouncing several tanks on their tracks.
Circled by angry bikes and buggies, the Imperial Fists were holding their own against the hulking orks pouring from the subterranean hatches. Blocked from advancing by the minefield, the sons of Dorn simply had to suffer the destruction raining down on them from the palace artillery. With battle-brothers blasted apart and Land Raiders turning into storms of shrapnel and flame, Thane peered down the flank of the palace wall. Deathwatch Thunderhawks were being blown out of the sky by ork macrocannons. Those gunships that did manage to fire off their lascannons and bombardment cannons sent blasts into the giga-generators powering the palace’s overlapping fields.
‘Phalanx!’ Thane yelled into his vox, as the perimeter fields began to collapse. ‘I need that—’
And everything turned to blinding light. Imperial Fists in their armoured suits became scorched silhouettes and orks melted away in the stunning blaze. As Thane’s eyes and auto-senses adapted, he saw lance beams searing down from the sky and striking the palace wall. Somehow Decarion had managed to hold off the boarding orks and get the fortress-monastery back on station above the palace of the Beast.
The world rocked beneath the Chapter Master’s boots. In blasting a breach into the fortified rock and armour plating of the unshielded palace wall, the Phalanx’s lances had super-heated the ground of the perimeter. The field of mines before the wall was detonating in a chain reaction, shattering the wall’s foundations and causing sections of it to topple. Vanguard Imperial Fists attempted to retreat but were blasted off their feet by the force of the rippling detonations. Space Marines in Centurion suits were knocked down while Land Raiders closest to the minefield were rolled onto their backs by the blasts.
Charging orks were turned to ash on the wind. One moment they were ferocious alien predators, behemoths of fang and muscle — the next they were gone, scoured from existence. Those monsters not caught in the apocalyptic blaze were blasted aside by the shockwave of the lance strikes. They crashed into the sides of the Land Raiders with bone-shattering force. Space Marine bikes were knocked over, Land Speeders spun and bobbed in the air and Imperial Fists slid from the roofs of tanks, knocked off by the backwash of heat.
Thane felt the quake of explosions beneath his armoured boots. The Chapter Master steadied Tychor, who was desperately trying to put out flames that were swirling about the battle standard. The air about them was thick with smoke. Space Marines emerged from cover like soot-caked revenants. Thane was about to issue an order when another apocalyptic boom erupted about the Imperial Fists. This time it emanated from below the ground. Something had detonated in the tunnels beneath them, those same tunnels the armoured orks had emerged from to flank their attackers. The palace and surrounding precincts were so bewildering in their architecture and monstrous in function that the rippling explosions could have originated from anything: subterranean promethium depots, ammunition dumps or even the trapped gases of an overloaded waste system.
But it made no difference either way. With nowhere for the power of the explosion to go, it ripped up through the ground, spouting streams of flame. Thane felt the ground give way beneath him and then he was falling amongst tonnes of rubble, everything ablaze with the blinding light of venting flame, deafened by the ear-splitting rumble of the world breaking up about him. Finally there was stillness, dust and darkness.