The Beast Arises

She almost didn’t see the battlewagon. A chance parting of the smoke, the luck of her glance to the east. The ork tank was some distance from her position. If not for the fires of burning vehicles, it would have been invisible in the falling night. But Imren saw it, and she saw the flash of its gun. Instinct said down. She dropped through the hatch of the Chimera.

A second later, the shell tore through the roof of the tank. It destroyed the turret. A burst of flame reached into the interior. Imren protected her head with her arms, and the sleeves of her uniform caught fire. She beat them out against the inner hull, blinked through pain and smoke. Her gunner was dead. The command table was shattered. But the Chimera was still moving.

‘Nissen!’ she called out. ‘Tell me it’s you driving!’

‘It is, general!’ Nissen shouted back from his compartment.

‘Do you still have vox capability?’ The equipment around her was ruined.

‘I do.’

‘Then you’ll relay my orders. For now, keep going.’

Imren grabbed the ragged edge of the roof and pulled herself up. She looked around at the state of the rout.

The Imperial forces were in full retreat. They had abandoned any thought of advancing. They were racing for Laccolith and the hell of urban warfare. There was no advantage to be gained, no siege to prepare, only the flight and the play for time.

This was wrong. All of it. She had come to Caldera to restore honour. She wished to repair the name of the Lucifer Blacks, guardian regiment of the heart of the Imperial Palace, battered by the eldar incursion and the brazen arrival of the ork ambassadors. Even more crucially, the pride of the Astra Militarum needed to be rebuilt after the disaster of the Proletarian Crusade. The mission to Caldera represented the first true hope for the Imperium since the start of the war.

A false hope, it now seemed. An illusion of perfect cruelty. The orks were invincible.

She looked forwards. Laccolith was somewhere ahead in the dark. It had to be close, but there was no illumination in the city. She would have little notice of its proximity until she crossed the remnants of its wall.

On all sides, the combined regiments raced through the shattered jungle. The retreat was a flight. The strategy was sound — the only course of action was to reach the urban battlefield ahead of the orks, seize it, and use the terrain to slow the enemy down. But the sense of the tactic did nothing to mitigate the humiliation. All she saw was defeat, the combined forces of the Emperor running for their lives from a triumphant, mocking foe.

The orks pressed in on either flank. The Imperials were using the cleared swathe of the jungle. The greenskins had to smash their way through the trees and dense vegetation again in an effort to keep up. They were doing well, scorching the earth with flamers, splintering trunks with the siege shields of tanks and trucks. The jungle slowed them just enough. Imren thought the strike force would reach the city in time.

Our only success will be to run from a fight, she thought.

Imren’s Chimera had been at the front of the Astra Militarum ranks during the advance. She was towards the rear during the retreat. The greater mass of infantry and vehicles streamed ahead of her. In the distance, she caught glimpses of heavy, reptilian bodies flashing in headlamp beams.

‘Nissen,’ she called. ‘What’s happening at the front?’

After a pause, the driver answered. ‘Saurian attacks, general. Packs of the beasts. They’re hitting the infantry.’

Caldera was turning on them, Imren thought. It was mocking their defeat.

Streams from the great river of the ork hordes stabbed into the ranks. The troops fought back, hitting the enemy with all the rage of savaged pride. The night around her was lit by the streaks of las and tracer fire. Three orks ran straight for the left side of the Chimera, grabbing the hull. The turret gone, Imren climbed up onto the rear portion of the roof, which had been spared the impact of the shell. She held on to a spike of twisted metal with her right hand and fired her plasma pistol into the upturned faces of the orks. She returned their snarls with her own, her hate as brutal as their joy. She burned the head off one. As it fell, it knocked one of its fellows off the hull. Both disappeared under the treads.

The third slashed at Imren with a machete. She reared back, lost her footing and fell. Her pistol clattered into the troop compartment. She kept her grip on the spike. Its jagged edges cut through the leather of her gloves. Her boots struggled to find a hold on the side of the hull.

The ork jumped on top of the Chimera. It crouched over her, grinning, its foetid breath making her eyes water. It raised the machete over its head.