Thane’s plate was telling him something alarming about the hulk’s colossal embrace and its effect on the suit’s integrity. He could hear the creak of ceramite about him and the strain of servos. Above him the monster’s elephantine skull belted out a roar of triumph, something to enrage the sea of green about it to savage jubilation, before it acted upon its intention to crush the Adeptus Astartes like a cheap alloy can.
Thane felt the monster tense further. His auto-senses registered a rapid descent, and before he knew it he was back on the hull of the Alcazar Astra. The creature had released him, and the captain was free. Descending further to one ceramite knee, Thane turned in the gore, his boltgun ready to blast a crater in the gargantuan thing.
He found that the giant greenskin’s legs had been taken out from under it. The creature had nothing below its knees and had fallen down onto the bloody stumps. As it toppled forwards onto all fours, Thane saw Apothecary Reoch standing behind the beast. Reoch had been responsible for the sweeping amputation. His armour was dripping with blood, but his chainsword gleamed like a surgical tool. The Apothecary stomped forwards, hacking down on the maimed creature, executing precision strikes like a living autopsy on the beast-ork. It roared its rage and frustration briefly before the Apothecary worked his way up to the fang-mangled skull of the thing and took it off at the neck.
‘Back!’ Maximus Thane bawled as he slid back around on his knee. Behind him he found the wall of green once more. ‘Back… Back…Back!’ he called, his commands accompanied by single bolt-rounds of persuasion. One by one, the rushing oncomers dropped before the weapon’s fury.
A Thunderhawk swooped above them, hammering into the masses with its heavy bolters. The gunship cut a path of mulched ork-flesh through the enemy lines, taking with it the next few beasts in line for Thane’s vengeance. The Thunderhawks were doing what they always did: performing admirably. They were inflicting horrific casualties on the invasion host, but the impact of their bloody work was neither seen nor felt by the battle-brothers on the ground. The orks weren’t impressed by the gunships or their death-delivering ordnance. The roar of the Mars-pattern engines and the punishment of their heavy guns and cannons drove the monsters into fits of exultant rage. As a homogenous war host, the ork invaders resembled some kind of mythical beast. Where one creature fell, two others would charge from the throngs in its place.
Standing once more, Thane felt his power pack brush against the Apothecary’s. The pair fought back to back — Reoch opening up monsters with precision and Thane finding his way to single-shot kills with his brutal bolter fire.
‘Mortalities?’ Thane called across the helmet vox.
‘Fourteen that have been relayed to my suit,’ Reoch replied, gunning his chainsword in neat arcs.
‘I thought worse than that.’
‘You’re relieved by the number,’ the Apothecary said. ‘You shouldn’t be. Do the arithmetic: we won’t see the dawn.’
Ducking beneath the irresistible orbit of a crude hammer, Thane slammed his boltgun into the wielder’s gut. Pushing against the creature with his suit-augmented might, the Fists Exemplar Space Marine made a little space between himself and the alien. Not much. There were a thousand other monsters behind it howling for their transhuman blood. It had, however, created enough of a gap to bring up the boltgun and blast several ragged holes into the greenskin’s chest. The ork fell back into the roaring green masses.
‘Well, the good news,’ Reoch told him, ‘is that our losses are fewer than on the other transepts. Hieronimax is down a quarter strength. Xontague nearly a half.’
‘Holy Throne…’ Thane hissed. Then, ‘Reloading!’
Reoch stretched himself to keep the beasts from his captain. Driving the chainsword through one monster, he reverse-gunned the weapon and sawed it through the limbs of two other unfortunates. Then once again the hammer came at them. The monster swinging it was back, despite having a bolt-blasted ribcage. The heavy metal weapon came over the ork’s howling head and straight down at the Space Marines. Moving aside and away from one another, Thane and Reoch allowed the head of the weapon to smash into the void hull, where the captain fancied it might have even dented the armour plating. The Apothecary put a boot on the hammer and proceeded to saw through the weapon’s reinforced shaft.
‘The head,’ Reoch suggested.
Thane nodded. The thing’s ugly features were staring at the deck, its eyes following the hammer and the mess the monster had hoped it would make of the Adeptus Astartes. Priming the boltgun, Thane stared down his sights before blasting the ork up under its chin and through the back of its skull. This time the beast fell away for good.
With their attention on the hammer-wielding savage, the captain and Apothecary had allowed the crushing swarms of orks to crowd them once more. Thane’s disciplined bolt blasts were now at almost point-blank range. Reoch had little space to conduct his surgical dismemberments and was forced to snatch one of his bolt pistols from a thigh holster and show off his own close-quarter marksmanship.
A heavy axe, cut brutally from a single piece of vessel hull-decking, found Thane momentarily wanting. It smashed the captain to one side, breaching the plate of his pauldron and sending one of his bolt-rounds wide. It took a second or so for Thane to recover but by then both axe-swinger and bolt-survivor were upon him, the creatures hacking away at the captain’s honourable plate. The monsters roared. Thane roared back, throwing himself at the gigantic specimens. Grabbing one of the beasts by a shoulder-spike, he buried the muzzle of his boltgun in the ork’s pot-bellied abdomen. Blasting several rounds into the greenskin’s gut, he allowed the alien to fall, clutching at its ruined midriff with its claws. Almost immediately, Thane brought the boltgun up and blasted through the throat of the second. It dropped to reveal the partially obscured shape of a larger monster behind.
‘This isn’t working,’ Thane said across the vox.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Reoch replied, sweeping his chainsword about him in tight arcs of flesh-carving efficiency.
‘Oratorium,’ Thane switched channel, ‘this is Second Captain Thane, Transept West.’
‘Yes, captain,’ a voice returned. It didn’t belong to the First Captain.
‘Where’s Garthas?’
Thane brought down the hulking ork before him. It took three bolts, which was more ammunition than he had budgeted for the task. He helm-butted a smaller warrior-wretch and smashed in the skull of a third with the clutched gauntlet-grip of his boltgun. Alien brains speckled his plate.
‘We suffered a breach, captain,’ the oratorium replied. ‘Fortress-Monastery North. Captain Hieronimax is down. The First Captain went to repel the breach force with the Chapter Master’s honour guard and support the Ninth.’
‘Sounds like Garthas,’ Reoch added across a private channel, with simultaneous hints of derision and respect.
‘To whom do I speak?’ Thane said.
Another greenskin died. Then another. And another.
‘Brother Zerberyn, captain.’
Thane recognised the name. A member of Alameda’s honour guard. The warriors fighting at the First Captain’s side, Fortress Monastery North.
‘Are you injured, honoured brother?’
‘At Fortunata, captain,’ Zerberyn replied.
‘Brother,’ Thane said, ‘we are hard pressed to gain any ground here. The void ramparts are swarming with greenskins. Can Captain Tyrian spare brothers for a front-line repulsion? We have to push these savages back into range of our weapons. Then we might be able to hold them there.’
‘Negative, captain,’ Zerberyn said. ‘The First Captain’s orders were very specific. All companies to hold their own fronts. He did not want resulting strategic weaknesses to lead to breach actions.’