Maximus Thane heard the words but it took a moment to process them.
‘How?’ was all he could think to say.
‘Fortress-Monastery North pict captures record the First Captain’s victory over the invaders’ breach force,’ Zerberyn reported.
‘Yes, brother.’
‘Lord Garthas was inspecting the dead and voxing new orders for Captain Xontague and his Fists,’ the Honour Guard Space Marine said. ‘One of the savages — a boarder, a hull breacher — still breathed in the First Captain’s presence. It was alive when its injuries dictated it should not be.’
‘Continue, Brother Zerberyn.’
‘It detonated the hull-cracking breach charge it carried, taking Lord Garthas and his honour guard with it,’ the honorarius said. ‘Their plate could not protect them from such a charge. Lord Garthas was found, but the Chief Apothecary said he could not be saved.’
Thane stared bitterly out across the churning ocean of greenskin savagery that continued to roll up across the shattered void plating of the Alcazar Astra. Despite a full Eidolican night of fighting, despite the taking of life in ghastly swathes and the mettle of Dorn’s sons being put sorely to the test, the green invader came still. The attack moon had blanket-bombed the Eidolican dark side with rocks and crash transports. Hulks and landers still rocketed into the black desert-world dunes, vomiting forth alien barbarians — their brief thunderbolt transit rattling and shaking them into a bottomless fury. No matter how many enemy lives the Fists Exemplar took in the name of their dead Chapter Masters and primarch, the ork attack moon supplied more.
Master Aloysian had been as good as his word. Despite his doubts, the Master of the Forge had used his skills and prayers to bring the star fort’s only operational plasma drive to explosive life. The mighty engine column, that as one of four would have helped transport and manoeuvre the mighty Alcazar Astra in-system, blasted the fortress-monastery from its sandy foundations, turning the black desert to obsidian about it. As Master Aloysian had faithfully predicted, the star fort did not ascend. It inclined.
Rising on the Transept East engine column, everything not mag-locked to the gore-slick void plating began to slip and tumble away. Fifth Captain Tyrian watched as thousands of greenskin savages fell away from the edge of the void hull and down into the plasma-drive-roasted sands. Creatures skidded and slid towards the company’s chainblades and boltguns, allowing the Adeptus Astartes to end them with ease. With their boots firmly locked to the metal deck, Xontague, captain of the Eighth, and his company cut through the monstrosities roaring and clawing uselessly past them. Captain Kastril and his Scout Marines secured themselves to the gargoylesque architecture of Fortress-Monastery North. When the deck began to rumble and tilt, the scouts picked off beasts from the plummeting masses with their sniper rifles over the pauldrons of their Ninth Company brothers.
For Thane and the Second Company, the sea of green receded at the captain’s command. One moment Thane and Apothecary Reoch were back-to-back, carving and blasting pieces off gargantuan alien thugs; the next the deck was empty but for the dripping statues of Fists Exemplar, splattered in alien gore and mag-locked to the inclining deck. Monsters scraped, scrambled and scratched at the hull plating and each other, furious that gravity should drag them away from their quarry. Claws and weapons failed to provide purchase when sunk into the blood-smeared armour plating, and those monsters desperate and fast enough to grab something and hold on were swiftly blasted from their ledges by nearby Space Marines. As soon as the guns on the void ramparts re-established their firing protocols and the Thunderhawks assumed a similar suppression role above the helmets of the Fists Exemplar, Thane ordered Master Aloysian to gently reduce thrust and allow the plasma engine to take them back to the sands.
The strategy had succeeded. Despite shattering the fortress-monastery’s superstructure further and rending great rifts in its void plating and architecture, the star fort had been denied to the greenskin invader. Both Space Marines and deck guns were replenished with precious ammunition from the fort’s armoury vaults and for the hours of darkness that followed, the innumerable invaders were kept at murderous ballistic range. Chapter serfs returned to the ramparts with ammunition and supplies, while Apothecary Reoch took the opportunity to down the chainblade that had wreaked such horrific wounds on others and look instead to the wounds that had been visited on his brothers by the enemy.
Hours passed. About the void deck perimeter a wall of greenskin carcasses steamed. Deck ordnance and gunships thundered. Boltguns blazed. Mist-banks of gore drifted through the desert darkness. The greenskin invaders died in their droves. They kept coming, however. Something primordial and predacious drew them across the dunes to their death. Hourly their numbers were replenished by new monsters, raining down on Eidolica in a shower of wanton conquest. Hulking creatures, fresh in their bestial rage, salivating through tusk-crowded maws and fixing the growing silhouette of the Alcazar Astra with their beady eyes.
The silhouette was growing because the Fists Exemplar and Second Captain Maximus Thane — ranking officer on the void ramparts and now ranking officer aboard the star fort itself — had reached their objective. The Eidolican dawn. The razorblade sliver of Frankenthal’s Star — the system sun that had once threaten to swallow the fortress-monastery whole — was reaching over the distant western dunes.
Even with such a meagre shaft of intense light cutting across the skies, the Fists Exemplar home world was revealed. In the still air and black deserts of Eidolica, the eye travelled far. An Adeptus Astartes’ sight travelled even further. Promethium wells raged at the heavens, belching black, oily smoke skywards. Little could be seen of the Eidolican black sands about the fortress-monastery. As far as a Space Marine could see, there were monsters. A sea of alien ferocity, swamping the deserted sands with their filthy presence. The dawn light drew a conqueror’s roar from the beasts and the air trembled with their intention to bring slaughter to the star fort’s defenders.
Further to the south, across the green sea of doom, rocks and hulks streaked into the promethium fields, thudding into the sands and killing their own — only for twice the number of dead to flood from the crude transits. Between swarms of junk landers descended larger greenskin droppers and tractor-tugs, all magna-grapnels, beam-anchors and rocket engines. These ungainly transports lacked the thunderbolt impatience of other crash transits. Instead they lowered colossal engines of war to the distant planet surface. Brute representations of greenskin gods and their Beast warlord, crafted from mountains of scrap and crude engineering.
His suit’s auto-senses detected the breeze. Maximus Thane nodded to himself. The rising sun brought with it the movement of air.
‘Companies,’ Thane called across the open vox-channel. ‘Conserve ammunition. Cease fire.’
The chatter of bolter fire died on the wind, swiftly followed by the accompanying boom of Thunderhawk guns and deck ordnance. No longer held back by a wall of skull-shattering bolt-rounds, the greenskins clawed their way over their dead and thundered up the void deck to meet their enemy. Their blades glinted dully, rude and unblooded. Their weaponry crashed wildly at the defenders, showering the deck with sparks and ricochets. Their tusks parted and raucous calls of pure animal aggression built to a rising crescendo in their barrel chests. The ramparts trembled with their bootfalls.
With boltguns silent about them, the Fists Exemplar stared down their hated enemy. No gauntlet grabbed for sword or pistol. No battle-brother moved from his position on the armoured hull. The invader drew close. The wild fire from their guns drew closer. Axes, mauling blades and chain-choppers came up. The monsters dribbled like mongrels at the expectation of brutality and violence, barbarically realised. Three thunderous strides away. Two. One.