The Beast Arises

They were no more than fifteen hundred metres from the brute-shield, which could be clearly seen as a shimmering curtain cutting across the rubble-strewn ridge ahead. Picking up urgent broad-channel transmissions from the vanguard companies, Zhokuv ordered his retinue to stop.

‘What is it, dominus?’ asked Sir Valek, piloting the Knight Warden Red Warrior. He brought his machine to a halt astride the broken highway, its gatling cannon and missile launcher poised to deliver a blistering fusillade at anything approaching from the city centre.

‘Ork counter-attack, rapid advance against our positions,’ Zhokuv informed his companions, broadcasting to the magi and pilots. To the Knight Scions, he added, ‘Move forward and engage.’

‘We are tasked with your protection, dominus,’ Sir Valek protested.

Zhokuv voxed back, sending a chastisement code into the system of Valek’s Knight that marked the machine and pilot for censure at a future date. ‘The surest way to guarantee our safety is a swift end to this mounting assault.’

The Knight pilots confirmed their orders and strode ahead, weapons at the ready. Zhokuv patched his visual feeds into the data-receptors of the Red Warrior, as he had done with the scout-craft at the start of the planetary assault. He felt the limbs of the ancient war machine bunching and flexing as if they were his own, glorying in the sensation of power emanating from his reactor. Valek’s presence was like a fly on his back, barely noticed in the midst of the war machine.

Ahead, flurries of explosions lit the landscape — detonations unlike anything they had seen since landing. Coruscations of green energy flowed upwards like flames in slow motion, carrying with them avalanches of debris. It took a moment for Zhokuv to adjust to the perspective of the Knight. As he did so, calculating the range to the closest detonation, he realised that some of the lumps of debris were Kataphrons and battle tanks, tossed into the air like the toys of a petulant child.

Shapes larger than Knights bulled their way through the buildings, brushing them aside with their bulk. Small arms and heavy weapons were equally ineffective against their power fields, sparks of red against the immensity of the new war engines. Anti-tank cannons strobed las and tracers into the ruins, shredding stone and soldier with equal ease. Massive belly guns belched fire and sent tank-sized shells crashing into the waves of red-armoured skitarii falling back from the assault.

The Great Beast had finally despatched its gargants.

Zhokuv immediately transmitted a withdrawal order to the beset infantry phalanx, channelling the command via the Red Warrior to boost its reach. Needing no further encouragement, robed tech-priests, clanking cybernetica constructs and Martian soldiers broke cover and flowed back down the city-mountain in droves, but the gargants paid them little heed. They continued on, emerging from the brute-shield to take on the assembled Knight squadrons.

The fire of the macro-cannons and gatling blasters of the Knights lit the lead gargant from base to head, power fields flickering with scarlet lightning. The ork war machines returned fire, bolts of energy and ripples of shells slamming into the gleaming ion shields of the Martian walkers. Wayward las-beams and cannon strikes ripped swathes through the few buildings still standing, turning multi-storey fortifications and half-broken towers into falling rubble and billowing dust clouds.

Yet for all he strained the sensory array of the Knight Warden and scanned back and forth across the data-streams, Zhokuv could find nothing that explained the extraordinary detonations and anarchy that had heralded the counter-attack. The Red Warrior advanced another hundred metres, its guns targeting the failing energy defences of the closest gargant. The dominus spied smaller war engines rumbling and striding through the clouds of exhaust and dust that swathed the gargants.

Some were tracked or wheeled battletowers, arcs of green lightning forking from their summits. With them came more gargants, amongst their rockets and guns crane-like appendages that fired crackling emerald stars. Fronds of wreathing jade flame wrapped around Kataphrons and skitarii, dragging them into whirling maelstroms of devastating energy.

Advancing past the gargants which duelled with newly-arrived Titans, the battletowers turned their otherworldly powers upon the Knights. Against physical attacks their ion shields provided some protection, but many were struck by phantamagorical bolts that passed straight through such defences, turning armour inside out, as though invisible hands ripped them asunder from within.