The Beast Arises

‘Then we wait to see her move,’ Vangorich said. ‘That’s where we stand.’ He turned to the narrow window of his chambers. The strong winds of the day were granting him rare glimpses of the evening sky. The ork moon was there, the executioner’s sword half-concealed by the spires of the Imperial Palace. There were also faint glints like moving stars: the larger ships of the Merchants’ Armada manoeuvring. ‘And we wait to see what Juskina Tull is about to reap for all of us.’

Twelve

Klostra — Klostra Primus colony

With a battering crash of iron and cannon and bladed siege shield, the Vindicators rolled through the wreckage of the colony. They came in the wake of the bombardment. The battle tanks were the follow-up to the Iron Warriors’ initial charge.

The charge that had already turned into a retreat.

The tanks, Kalkator vowed, would turn the tide. They had before. The Araakite Doom, the Barban Falk, the Pyres of Olympia, and the Lochos

.

They had fought on Terra, and on Sebastus IV. The blood of Loyalists had sunk into the grain of the metal and the joints of the treads. Statues lined the edges of their hulls. They were the representations of saints and generals, the Imperium’s heroes of war and of faith. Now they were defaced, broken. Heads leaned back as if to gaze in horror at the brutality of the universe. Limbs were shattered, replaced with barbed wire. They were the trophies of smashed sieges past, and the promise of fallen cities to come. Behind, the Demolisher cannons curved massive horns in the image of the Iron Warriors’ helms. The guns fired as soon as the tanks approached the remains of the wall. They were siege weapons, designed to reduce defences to lost hopes. Today, they were coming to break a siege.

That fact was an offence to Kalkator’s pride and to the proper order of things. He could not make the situation otherwise through will alone. So he would exact retribution for the insult from the bodies of the orks.

The cannon fire hit the ork advance, four shells simultaneously. The explosion was huge. Scores of the enemy vanished and the front half of one of the ork tanks disintegrated. Another kept moving, but on an erratic course, enveloped in flame. It was as if a giant scythe had culled the forward lines of the enemy infantry. The bombardment had done nothing to slow the orks, but now, for a moment, Kalkator saw a hole open up in their formation.

He and his brothers had been forced back to the ruins of Klostra Prime. The bulk of the Great Company had been using the fallen walls of the central manufactorum as a bulwark against the orks. Now they pushed forward again.

The warsmith headed for the Pyres of Olympia. As he ran, he sent a stream of bolter fire ahead. Orks fell before him, their heads bursting. A few steps from the Olympia, he slammed into a massive brute whose armour had saved it from his shells. He knocked the ork off balance and thrust his chainsword forward, plunging it between skull plate and jaw guard, grinding through the ork’s nose and then its skull and brain. He blasted another foe coming at him from the right while he withdrew the blade from the corpse, before leaping to the roof of the Olympia. Varravo and Caesax followed him. Other Iron Warriors climbed to the roof of the other tanks while the rest ran close, tearing up the infantry.

We’re trying to stop the ocean with a knife, Kalkator thought. Four Vindicators and the individual strength of the brothers of the Great Company was enough to shatter the walls of any fortress, but he had no illusions about their position now. Thousands of orks had already climbed the top of the plateau. Even if the Iron Warriors’ counter-attack repelled them, the oncoming force was many times that size. The orks had already landed an infinite infantry.

Their heavy armour on immediate approach was no match for the Vindicators, though. Kalkator wanted to cripple the ork vehicles, and perhaps buy the company time to cohere again. Recreate the wedge, drive into the ork infantry, cause damage to force a retreat.

Impossibility was irrelevant. Impossibility was the bloody constant of the Iron Warriors’ history. As ever, there was nothing to do but fight.

At least their wars were their own now, as were the spoils. And even now they weren’t cowering behind walls, hoping for the battle to pass, like the bastard sons of Dorn.

The tanks kept firing. After the first great blast, the squadron staggered the volleys, hitting the orks with a continuous string of explosions. The orks slowed, a bit. They did not stop. The tide flowed around the craters, ignoring losses, rushing to the challenge of the Vindicators.

‘All fire on the tanks,’ Kalkator voxed. ‘Base, maintain bombardment one thousand metres forward of initial target zone.’