The Beast Arises

They encountered a storm of Imperial torpedoes launched in the wake of the nova cannon. The fleet from Terra formed a wide spear tip, leading with the Alcazar and the grand cruisers. The Mechanicus vessels spread out on either side. Lance and cannon fire streaked towards the orks. Even clustered, they covered a wider area. But the line had thinned.

The two forces closed, running into the teeth of each other’s weapons. Evasion was pointless. There was only the hope of shields standing up long enough for the spear to punch through the wave.

A massive ork battleship angled in on a direct collision course with the Alcazar. Its prow was a battering ram a thousand metres wide and three times as long. The Absolute Decree and the Finality joined their fire to the battle-barge’s. Lance fire, rockets and torpedoes struck the ram. The accumulated blasts wrapped the battleship in flame. It came on, now on course for a head-to-head collision with the Alcazar. The three great ships hit it with a fury that could turn hive cities into craters. The ram was solid metal, as dense as a single ingot.

Four Mechanicus vessels, faster but more lightly armoured, pulled ahead of the body of the fleet, flanking the ork ship. Batteries of eradicator beams sheared into the sides of the prow where it fused with the ram.

The barrage of the Imperial ships heated the ram red.

Escorting Brute ram ships, tiny beside the battleship, flew into the Mechanicus vessels. Ork and Imperial ships disappeared, their explosions washing over the leviathan.

Seconds before the collision, the centre of the ram turned white and split. Explosions rocked the battleships further to stern. The entire vessel seemed to swell before Koorland’s eyes, as if it were a monster taking a breath before consuming its prey.

The intake of breath never ended. The ship continued to expand, driven apart by the internal pressure. Incandescence outlined gigantic plates. The battleship turned into a dying roar of flame, and the Alcazar Remembered plunged into the furnace of its death. The oculus showed nothing but the inferno of an erupting, disintegrating war machine.

The battle-barge emerged. Before it now were only smaller enemy ships, which fell before the Alcazar’s withering fire. On the sides, the movements of the remaining ork ships became disordered as they tried to manoeuvre for a counter-attack. The vessels changed direction without coordination. There were collisions. Imperial broadsides punished the orks further. The fleet maintained formation, its salvoes a continuous, disciplined wave of devastation, radiating outwards. The greenskin vessels, already damaged by the nova cannon, came apart.

The armada disintegrated. It became small packs of minor predators.

‘The main body of the enemy is responding,’ said Thane.

Koorland checked the hololithic display. The lines of projected trajectories were reaching out from the position of the attack moon. Estimated velocities and points of intersection floated next to each line, adjusting every few seconds as new readings came in.

‘They won’t abandon the moon completely,’ said Koorland.

‘They won’t have to.’ The estimated number of ships kept climbing. Already the fleet was almost the size of the one the Imperial ships had decimated.

Koorland compared the estimated time of arrival of the enemy against the time to launch point. The difference was just enough. The Imperial forces would make planetfall before the void war was re-engaged. ‘All landing ships stand by,’ he said. He looked at Thane. ‘Vulkan awaits us.’

The spear had punctured the wave.

Five

Caldera — Laccolith

The city had suffered catastrophic damage. Many of its towers had fallen. Others canted, ready to topple, or leaned against smaller buildings. A pall of smoke hung over Laccolith. Entire districts had been gutted by flame. Rocket and artillery craters marked the city with the footsteps of monsters. The outer walls had been annihilated. Their traces remained as heaps of rubble dotting Laccolith’s perimeter. There was nothing shielding the city from the jungle, and saurian predators roamed the streets.

But the city was more than a shell. Koorland was amazed by what he found. There was still a population prepared to fight. The people had not been enslaved or exterminated to the last soul. They emerged as the Imperial forces established their staging ground in the eastern sector of the city.

The space port was a ruin. The control tower had taken a direct hit from an orbital strike, and where it had stood was the centre of a deep crater which occupied almost a third of the port’s area. A small fleet of lighters had been reduced to blackened, twisted corpses. The rockcrete landing zone was pitted with shell impacts and strewn with wreckage, but it had also been built to withstand the tectonic violence of the world. It was still a large, open, relatively level area. It would serve.