The Beast Arises

Rapid strike vessels, cruisers and battle-barges pierced the Ullanor system, a slashing sabre to open up the orks’ defences and leave the xenos unable to counter the more ponderous but powerful blows of the Imperial Navy, Adeptus Mechanicus and Astra Militarum.

Guided by the most able Navigators of the Navis Nobilite, the ships of the Space Marines convened within days of each other, despite the usual vagaries of the warp and the ever-present ork psychic disturbance that had come to be known as the green roar. Auspex arrays scoured the system for all signs of the enemy. Weapon decks and gun turrets were poised to unleash incredible firepower. The vessels of the Space Marines pushed hard from their translation points around the perimeter of the Ullanor system.

The outer system was an anarchic tempest of asteroids, lost moons, nebulous vapour clouds and wayward comets, thrown into terrible storms by the orbits of three super gas giants. Within this navigational horror lurked relative normality. There were eight more planets, three of them lethal gas worlds, though three inner micro-planets and a frozen Terra-sized globe showed signs of low level habitation. The fourth out from the red star was the only major populated sphere — Ullanor Prime.

There were also orks. Many, many orks.

The Ullanor system was awash with starships, an armada of vessels coursing to or from the ork world in the inner system. Ships of all descriptions plied the routes from the safe translation zone far from Ullanor’s star. Alien-built freighters with ramshackle hulls encased in shimmering fields moved alongside stolen cargo haulers with sputtering void shields, bearing the insignia of Imperial merchant houses defaced by orkish glyphs. A score of warships lost against the green menace had been taken, their crippled hulls pressed into service as bulk carriers: flight decks and gun bays stripped, the weapons stolen to bolster the armaments of the escorts.

The Reprisal was the first to lie alongside one of these. A force of Dark Angels Terminators teleported across, led by Grand Master Sachael.

The heavily armoured elite of the Deathwing company faced nothing more threatening than a few dozen orks — brutish overseers that had enslaved the crew of the ship, no match for the First Company of the Dark Angels. Searching through the ship for any surviving foes, Sachael was disgusted by what they found.

The orks had shown little regard for their captives, content to give them the bare minimum of food, water and heat. The air was freezing, the rag-clad slaves close to exhaustion and death from exposure. Many hundreds had not survived, their bodies left where they had fallen, some cleared away into the disused ammunition magazines and food storage halls. Vermin and insects were everywhere, fungal growths from ork spores lying in a patina across metal bulkheads and plasteel decking.

Interviewing the captives revealed that the vessel had been overrun when the orks had invaded the Trolgeth System. Nobody knew the fate of the freshly raised regiment of several thousand soldiers IG-8112 had been carrying, except that they had been taken from the ship on ork transports in orbit over Ullanor. Since then the vessel had been making supply runs, though to and from which systems and with what cargo the battered crew remained ignorant of.

‘They drove us, saviour, drove us something wicked,’ one emaciated soul told the Grand Master, emerging from the darkness of a sub-hold, blinking in the lamplight from Sachael’s Tactical Dreadnought armour. His pallid skin was broken by sores and whip marks, bruised and grazed along the spine and shoulders where he had carried heavy loads. ‘Killed the officers first. Ate them, right in front of us. Raw and bloody, it was.’

‘They came for us, they came for us!’ squealed another unfortunate. He fell to the floor at the Grand Master’s feet, pawing at the armoured boots, drooling and wild-eyed. ‘They came for us!’

Two more moved forward and dragged him back, flinching as if expecting blows to rain down on them.

‘No Geller fields, saviour, you see?’ explained the first man. ‘They got a shield, of a sort. It softens the voices, dulls the dreams. But it don’t take them away. Not proper. Three trips we made, away and back and away again. Six journeys through the warp. More killed ’emselves than died from lack of nourishment, I reckon. Or killed others… We had to… They needed stopping.’

His gaze was haunted and he glanced down at his dirty hands. Sachael understood the meaning.

‘You gave them the Emperor’s mercy and saved the lives of your companions. There is no shame in that.’

‘Emperor defend us, that’s the truth,’ said another of the internees.

‘Is we safe?’ A woman draped in the remains of an old grain sack tottered out from the crowd. ‘Is we safe yet?’

‘More ships are coming,’ Sachael assured them. ‘The Imperial Navy. They’ll send over new officers to take you away from here.’