The Beast Arises

‘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.