The Beast Arises

Three more ork tanks were gutted. The first of the Battlewagons to reach Klostra Prime had traded thicker armour for speed, and the Vindicators’ cannons could take down walls wider than the tanks themselves. The Battlewagons were big, but they crumpled and burned when the Demolisher shells hit them. The ork vehicles had numbers, though. Line after line of them mounted the slope to the colony. They fired back. High explosives flared against the siege shields. Three of the Battlewagons trained their guns on the Lochos. Two died trying, but the third flanked the Lochos and gutted it.

Over the vox, Derruo snarled in agony. Kalkator glanced back. Two other battle-brothers had been blown apart, but Derruo, his armour scorched black, his left leg dragging, was still in the fight.

The Olympia

was out in front now. Behind it, the Araakite Doom avenged the Lochos with a shot that hit the ork tank’s fuel reserves at almost point-blank range. The warmth of the fire washed over the squadron.

Kalkator cursed as a shell clipped the top of the siege shield. He leaned forward into the wash of the explosion. It took out the ork that had just vaulted up from the front of the tank. More of the brutes followed. Kalkator, Varravo and Caesax moved forward on the roof. They turned their chainswords on the orks who made it past the Pyres of Olympia’s sponson bolters. The tank’s horns were magma cutters, taking down still more of the foe. The ground was littered with bisected corpses.

And the orks kept coming.

‘What do they want with the place?’ Varravo voxed. ‘There’s nothing left.’

‘They want us,’ said Kalkator. Whatever other designs the orks might have for Klostra, their targets now were the Iron Warriors. Perhaps the planet had some other value. If it did, that was secondary to the promise of war. Kalkator had used the mortal colonists as loyal bait. He wondered now if the orks hadn’t done the same to him, luring the company in with the illusion that there was a possible strategy here.

To the north, the great artillery explosions continued. A curtain of smoke, flame and raining debris rose between the Iron Warriors and the approaching body of the ork host. The Great Company and its Vindicators advanced further into the flesh and over the machinery of the enemy. They were almost at the base of the wall now.

‘Warsmith,’ voxed Occillax, piloting the Olympia

, ‘do we descend the slope?’

Kalkator never answered. His command was interrupted by a rolling wave of sound, the thunder of a mountain cracking in half. He looked back. In the distance, in the direction of the base, a volcanic glow lit the deep twilight that passed for day on Klostra. The rumble had a rhythm. Streaks of light cut through black clouds towards the glow. An orbital bombardment.

‘Klostra Base, report,’ Kalkator voxed. He called three more times, as he looked away and kept killing orks. Silence from the base.

And silence from the guns.

The artillery barrage ended. Occillax halted the Pyres of Olympia

. The curtain faded. The wrecking yard of ork vehicles appeared and so did the forces that were coming on, the ones untouched by the Iron Warriors cannons.

Four super-heavies. Tanks twice the size of the Vindicators, their guns with bores as wide as Demolishers, but the length of autocannons. As if they had been waiting for their proper introduction, they opened fire now.

They had the rate of autocannons, too.

And as the boom of greenskin ordnance battered the plateau of Klostra Primus, greater silhouettes yet loomed behind the battle fortresses. Colossi, three of them, greenskin idols fifty metres tall. They rocked side to side as they marched over machine and kin, a manufactorum’s worth of smoke belching from the chimneys rising from their backs. Flame gouted from their jaws. Their eyes were energy weapon turrets, blazing red lightning. The right arm of each terminated in a hand whose fingers were linked cannons, four strong. The left arm of one was a hammer the size of a tank. The second had a chainblade fifteen metres long. The third wielded a claw that could tear the hills apart.

Beneath the roars of the engines, the beat of the cannons and the tectonic rumble of the orbital strikes, Kalkator heard another sound. It would have been inaudible if it hadn’t come from a hundred thousand ork throats in unison.

‘They’re laughing at us,’ said Caesax.