The Beast Arises

‘Pull back,’ Thane ordered. ‘Out of the rift. Suppressive fire on any enemy who follow.’ He tried to raise Imren, and this time she answered. ‘General,’ he said. ‘There is no more time.’

‘I agree, Chapter Master.’ She sounded injured. ‘There is no time. We will hold the enemy. Preserve our memory on Terra.’

Thane grimaced at the scale of the sacrifice. ‘It will be celebrated,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’ She signed off.

The Predators had ceased firing. They had shattered the land, and the walkers could not move forward without stepping into depressions that would overbalance them. The tanks now moved upslope. The pass between the volcanoes seemed desperately narrow from Thane’s position. The peaks thundered, and the clouds around them turned crimson. The eruptions had begun.

The Fists Exemplar charged between the walkers. The ork machines fired their cannons, and fired again, but the tremors were too powerful. The shells went wild, striking cliffs and mountainsides. The western walker lurched. Internal blasts beat against its interior. Thane and Aloysian stood between the two beasts until the rest of the company had passed through, then they followed. The wounded walker tried to walk. The tremors, broken land and the damage made the error a fatal one.

The walker began to fall towards its mate.

Titanic metal walls closed together over Thane’s head. A war mountain fell upon another. The monsters collided. Their limbs entangled. With grinding blasts aloft, Titan fused with Titan.

Thane and Aloysian passed from beneath their shadow, racing over the bucking, groaning earth for the waiting Rhino. The transport ground forward as the hatch slammed shut. Thane climbed through the roof turret to look back. He saw the final act of desperation, anger and madness. He saw the great cannons fire again.

The guns had no valid targets. They were aimed downward and too close to each other. The walker to the west blew up the lower reaches of the other’s armour. The eastern one created a new crater before both colossi. It turned into a widening chasm. The walkers fell forward, lodging in the gap, riven by blasts. The guns, their barrels now aiming beneath the surface, boomed again, but this time Thane knew he was hearing the start of a chain reaction, the weaponry of the monsters consuming itself in uncontrolled detonations. The walkers turned into metal volcanoes, a blazing wall of ruin across the southern access to the Ascia Rift, containing orks and humans alike inside the doomed installation.

The Thunderhawks kept pace with the convoy of Predators and Rhinos overhead. Their guns were silent. Their role now was to rescue battle-brothers from any vehicles that fell into the multiplying fissures.

The tremors shook the Rhino. Thane held tight to the turret to avoid being thrown free. On either side, the mountains raged. Rockslides roared down the faces. Lava followed, blood drawn from the night. Behind, in the pass, he watched the ork structures waver and fall, collapsing in a growing sea of flame.

And then came the immense crack of terminal rending. It was a sharp retort, but so deep and vast it drowned all other sound of war and destruction. It was the sound of the Ascia Rift opening wide its maw.

A terrible dawn broke, incandescent red, the sun rising from the centre of the canyon.

The rift parted. The great wound began in the centre. Metres wide, then tens of metres, then hundreds. It swallowed the ruins of the command nexus. It stretched its reach, longer and longer, expanding to half the length of the canyon. From it came the lava in a tide, a flood, a wall. A sea of molten rock rose to fill the rift.

It rose to swallow armies.

Imren saw it, and she smiled. She stood on her Chimera, bleeding out from a gut shot. Nissen was dead, burned when an ork rocket took out the treads and front of the hull. She was dying, but she was standing, and she was firing her plasma pistol at the enemy, and she had lived to see the victory. And so she smiled.

The victory was staggering to behold. She and her troops would become part of a legend, and that was glorious. Her soul was staggered by the sight. A lava wall thirty metres high swept toward her, and the sight was greater in her perception than the devouring heat that came before it. The orks in their tens of thousands, their tanks and their transports, their weapons and all their works disappeared in the wall. They were silhouettes of defeat, of fleeing despair, and then they were gone.

The wave was almost upon her. It took her troops. The heat set her hair alight. The light of the world’s anger blinded her. And there was pain. Inconceivable pain.

But greater than everything was the victory. Her troops celebrated as they died, and her final thoughts were of exultation.

A worthy end.

Honour is restored.