The Beast Arises

She spoke, and then new light tore the night. Blinding phosphor blasts illuminated the ork positions and burned the infantry. The perfect razor yellow of eradicator beams cut in from east and west, burning through the flanks of the enemy armour. Two battlewagons disintegrated. Their blasts took out the energy cannons nearby. The destruction spread.

‘All guns target the cliff top,’ Thane ordered.

Citadel’s End, Brother Otho and the immobilised Predators fired within seconds of each other. Concussive hammer blows tore a huge chunk of the ground away. The new avalanche stole the road surface from beneath the orks. The battlefortresses ceased fire as they reversed course, backing over the retreating infantry.

The walker took another step back. This time, it was too slow. The surface of the road collapsed beneath it. The walker plunged head-first, firing one more time as it dropped. The wild shell punched another crater behind Thane.

The canyon roared and echoed as the leviathan’s fall triggered another avalanche of rock and gravel. The monster came to a stop at the base of the canyon, half-buried by the slide. Its cannon arm was immobile. The left arm waved its gigantic saw. The blade buzzed in the air, hungry for targets. The body shook with internal explosions, but still lived.

‘Finish it,’ Thane ordered.

The guns of the Fists Exemplar lowered their aim. They fired as one, a choir of rage and vengeance. They targeted the head, which protruded well beyond the rock fall. The walker’s armour could not withstand such a concentrated assault, and the head blew apart. The devastated neck opened into an abyss of darkness and monstrous engineering. An inferno billowed out of the chasm as the machinery tore itself apart. The walker shook harder and harder as something vital and tremendously powerful was breached. Thane took cover behind a boulder.

The monster’s death shattered the night of the gorge, killing the dark with burning day. It pulverised the rock that had buried the walker. Stone shards flew across the canyon with hurricane velocity. They whined over Thane’s position like a swarm of insects.

Thane rose when the glow of the blast faded. Still more of the cliff face had collapsed. There was a slope now to the north. Too steep for Citadel’s End, but not, perhaps, for the Dreadnought.

‘Venerable Brother Otho,’ Thane called.

‘I am with you, Chapter Master.’

Aloysian and the other battle-brothers who had manned the guns left the vehicles. Together with Thane, they mounted the slope. When they reached the top, they found the rest of the company already engaged. In the midst of the broken city, the Fists Exemplar hammered the front ranks of the orks while the Mechanicus attacked the flanks. The orks pulled back, infantry falling, vehicles destroyed. The battlefortresses were more powerful than any single one of the Imperial vehicles deployed on Caldera, but they were not invulnerable. A line of Kataphron Breachers closed with the fortress on the eastern side of the avenue. Their torsion cannons turned the matter of its armour against itself, three simultaneous hits tearing its flank open. Brother Scaevola launched a rocket through the gap. The battlefortress died, fire pouring from the viewing slits of its turrets.

The command network was a cacophony of voices. The heaviest ork force was before Thane, but the army was so massive it was fighting across the city. There was desperation in the communications from the Astra Militarum. The mortals were fighting building to building. They were being taken apart.

They are still serving, Thane told himself. They are slowing the enemy.

And here, now, in this sector of Laccolith, the orks were losing ground. This was no feigned retreat. The orks raged. They hurled themselves at the Imperials, but it was their turn to find themselves in the kill-zone. The street hampered the movement of their massed numbers. The fire from in front, from the sides and above broke each wave of assault.

Thane saw a real victory taking form.

And then the form changed, dissolved, became terrible. At the far end of the avenue, ork reinforcements arrived. More battlefortresses. Two walkers.

The earth shook with their approach.

Seven

Caldera — Beyond Torrens

The Thunderhawks Honour’s Spear and Triumph of Himalazia flew over the city. Koorland sat with Preco in the cockpit of Honour’s Spear. Through the viewing blocks, he had a disturbingly complete view of Laccolith’s agony. Rocket contrails, interlocking las-fire and explosions lit the night. The eroded skyline crumbled more with every second. The orks purged entrenched positions by razing entire regions. Preco avoided the walkers and the heaviest concentrations of enemy forces, and Koorland saw how much the manoeuvre cost him.

‘You believe you are abandoning your brothers,’ Koorland said.

‘I understand the importance of the mission.’