‘We already have breach actions,’ Thane snapped back. As the captain spoke, the killing continued.
‘And we cannot afford another,’ Zerberyn said. ‘I’m sorry, sir. These are the First Captain’s orders. I would no more countermand them than your own.’
‘What about the guns?’ Apothecary Reoch barked, slashing back the beasts with one hand, while plugging charging green swine in the face with the bolt pistol clutched furiously in his other.
‘The rampart guns are silent,’ Thane relayed. Indeed, the mega-bolters and gatling-blaster emplacements had smoked to a stop some time before. Their absence had been keenly felt by the Fists Exemplar on the West Transept.
‘Master Aloysian ordered the weapons to cease firing, sir,’ Zerberyn reported. ‘The Master of the Forge observed protocols recognising that fighting on the ramparts had become a close-quarters engagement. The guns were silenced in order that no battle-brothers be harmed by the star fort’s weaponry.’
‘We’ll risk it,’ Reoch growled.
‘Return the guns to operation,’ Thane commanded.
‘The Master’s orders, sir,’ Zerberyn replied. ‘His protocols won’t allow it.’
‘Are we to die out here by regulation and protocol?’ Thane called back. ‘Patch me through to Master Aloysian.’
‘As you wish, captain.’
‘I fear he enjoyed that,’ Reoch said of the officious Zerberyn.
Thane had other problems. His boltgun was empty. Like many of his brother Fists, he would need resupplying, and soon. There was no time for such expediency, however. Swamped by greenskins clambering over the corpses of their barbarian kin, Thane had used the final few rounds of the sickle magazine to take the momentum out of a rabid charge mounted by a suicidal throng of alien monstrosities. He didn’t even have the precious moments it would take to recover his final clip, mag-locked to the rear of his belt. The mob of orks surrounding the captain were met with thrashing elbows and the stamp of armoured boots. Ducking instruments of bludgeoning improvisation and allowing the broad blades of crude machetes to glance off his pauldrons, Thane tried to give back as much savagery and violence as was being collectively bestowed on him.
‘Master Aloysian?’
‘Yes, second captain,’ the Master of the Forge returned. Thane tried to imagine the Techmarine in the generatorium, at the head of an army of drone-brained servitors, a perpetual scowl buried in the white of his beard.
‘Master, I need the rampart guns to visit Dorn’s ire on the enemy once more,’ Thane put to him. The captain brought down a beast with a power-armoured sweep of one leg before stamping down on the throat of the prone creature with the sole of his boot. It took several determined stomps to crush down through the gristle and iron-hard muscle of the greenskin’s neck.
‘Impossible, captain,’ Aloysian told him.
‘That’s not acceptable, Master Aloysian. I don’t care for the letter of your protocols: we need those guns.’
‘Their protocols are runic,’ Aloysian called back. ‘They will not compromise their own observances. And those observances exist to preserve life.’
‘Life is not being preserved out here, Master Aloysian, I can assure you of that.’
‘Captain,’ the Techmarine returned, ‘I can’t do anything for you. Each holy weapon would need catechising by hand. Besides, I’ve sent the gun crews to Fortress Monastery North to establish barricades and corridor emplacements.’
‘What can the generatorium do for us?’ Thane asked bitterly. ‘The enemy is upon us as a relentless force. Our weapons run dry and battle-brothers are dying in their droves.’
‘Little, captain,’ Aloysian said with regret. ‘Once the Alcazar Astra was an instrument of preservation. A great weapon among the stars. Now, the fort is an instrument to be preserved. An objective to be garrisoned and guarded. As a fortress-home, it serves with honour. But great weapon of the void it is no more.’
Thane dwelled on the forge master’s words. He thought on the Alcazar Astra restored to her former glory, her great engines turning her graceful bulk to present her batteries of void cannon to the armada junkships of the alien invader. He momentarily lived the pure obliteration the star fort could visit on hulks and landers packed to their rattletrap airlocks with hulking greenskins. Invaders it would take hours to meat-grind through in the ramparts could be void-scorched in moments in orbit.
Thane’s fantasy had cost him. A towering brute of a greenskin — repugnant, even by the standards of its breed — battered two ork bully-boys aside to get to the captain. It swung a length of sharpened girder in its hulking claws like a broadsword. The irresistible path of the heavy blade swooped underneath Thane’s elbow and smashed the captain to one side, cleaving the ceramite of his torso into crumpled plating. Auto-senses within his helm went wild. The girder-blade came down at Thane from above. It didn’t have the same orbital force as the first blow but all the captain had to offer in defence was his forearm plate, his empty boltgun still held tightly in his gauntlets. Slicing into the plate of the defending arm, the monstrous ork cut down at the captain as he knelt on one armoured knee.
The Apothecary’s gleaming chainblade was suddenly between them. The glint of its monomolecular teeth seemed to grab the beast’s attention. It swung the girder-blade at Reoch, the Apothecary defending as elegantly as a battle-brother might against such force and ferocity. Slicing and lopping at each other — the savage not seeming to notice the bite of the chainsword’s tip — the pair clashed blades. Holding the chainsword out in front of him, Reoch gunned it to a screeching blur.
Sparks showered the pair. The girder must have been made of some reinforced alloy, something scavenged by the creature from a crashed vessel. The chainblade was struggling against the material, and the ork used the difficulty to put its full weight behind the crude edge. The brute pushed with all its savage might, sending Reoch tumbling back into a knot of smaller creatures.
By the time it returned its barbaric attentions to Thane, the captain was back on his feet. The girder-blade came up. The tusked maw snarled. A battle-brother was suddenly there to defend his captain, his boltgun blazing, but the monster absently cleaved the Space Marine in two.
‘Captain!’ a second Fist Exemplar called. His weapon was spent also, and he cut deep into the creature’s green flesh with a gladius blade. The colossal ork’s arm shot out and grabbed the Space Marine by the helmet. His entire head was lost in the thing’s claw. The battle-brother dropped both empty boltgun and sword. His limbs thrashed furiously as the monstrous ork crushed his helm and tossed his armoured body out into the killing fields of its kin.
The beast was back on Thane in an instant. Its mongrel weapon rose. Thane brought up his boltgun. The length of the weapon was all he had to put between him and the sword’s mangling impact, but the captain suddenly jabbed the boltgun forwards, smashing into the greenskin’s tusk-crowded jaws with the empty sickle-clip. Thumbing the ejection stud, Thane retracted the boltgun, leaving the magazine embedded in the beast’s fractured face.
The broadsword came down. Thane stepped aside, and drew back his right gauntlet. Leaning into the servo-supported punch, Maximus Thane slammed his fist into the clip, hammering it into the monster’s skull. The girder-blade rang to the deck first, followed swiftly by the small green mountain of the ork’s corpse.
Snatching his remaining magazine from his belt and slamming it home, Thane blasted several greenskin savages clear of the struggling Apothecary. The remaining beasts fell to a three-hundred-and-sixty degree spin that Reoch accomplished with his chainsword, aided by the slick of gore on the void hull surface.