The Beast Arises

The starboard-facing oculus flashed as three ork ships opened fire on a small yacht. The ship could only carry five passengers, but even its owner had stepped forward to play a part in the great adventure. It was the first ship to die, its cargo the first casualties. It was too small, Narkissos thought. It wasn’t worth boarding. So the orks cleared it out of the way.

‘If we’re boarded…’ Rallis began. He hesitated.

‘What are you asking?’ Narkissos could guess.

‘We’re faster than the conveyor. I can take us all the way in. It will be quick.’

‘No,’ said Kondos. ‘We fight.’

‘Until they take the bridge,’ Narkissos said. He was already choosing his preferred defeat.

The hull of the Expanse of Destiny was shaking. Colonel Erich Lanser knew the sound. Breach points. He looked at his command: multiple squads of his Granite Myrmidons surrounded by a sea of volunteers. The civilians were holding weapons. At least there was that. But they were also terrified. The Crusade of their imaginations had not encompassed the possibility of fighting orks before reaching the moon.

‘Rifles forward!’ He stood on a raised level at the rear of the cargo bay, where he could be heard and seen. The vibration of the hull grew worse, but he couldn’t tell where the break would come. ‘There are thousands of us. Nothing can get in without being shot!’

He wasn’t lying. What he didn’t say was how little that might matter. Sergeants Bessler and Parten, closest to his position, gave him significant grins. They knew. The irony was, the regiment’s last action had been against the greenskins. It had been just another suppression exercise on the Eastern Fringe, and it was the Myrmidons who had been boarding the orks, taking apart a ramshackle raiding fleet. The fight had been one-sided. Just like this one.

There was no strategy possible. There had been no time to train the civilians in much beyond how to pull a trigger. So be it. The principle, after all, was to overwhelm the orks with numbers. They could do that here too. How many troops could the orks send in at one time?

The sound of the attack became a monstrous grinding. The ork ships were using something with a blade to cut through the Expanse of Destiny’s shell. The noise filled the cargo bay. Lanser felt the blood drain from his face. He wasn’t just hearing the vibration of attacks all along the hull. Many of them were on this section alone.

Too close together for even the most reckless boarding parties. They couldn’t know if there were bulkheads sealing off one breach from another.

But if they didn’t care…

The orks weren’t breaching this section of the hull. They were removing it.

Lanser whirled. He ran to the rear wall, to the central interior bay door. He slammed his palm against its controls. The door groaned upwards.

‘Out!’ Lanser shouted. ‘Now!’

The grinding scream of tearing metal drowned him out. Bessler and Parten saw him, though, and pushed the troops and volunteers near them towards the exit. Movement in the right direction began, sluggish, far too slow, then picking up speed as more people saw him gesture, and saw the beginnings of flight.

The terror-stricken noise of the assault spurred them on.

The corridor on the other side of the door was wide, large enough for the servitor-operated loaders to travel to and from the bays. The crowd ran past Lanser in a steady stream, the bottleneck minimal.

Too little, he knew. Much, much too late.

Hundreds had reached the corridor. There were thousands still in the hold. The civilians were panicking now. Nearest the outer hull, Lanser could see Myrmidons still holding position, still training their guns in the enemy’s direction. The gestures were symbolic. There would be nothing to shoot. There would be no evacuation for them, either. There wasn’t time. So they stood their ground, choosing honour over pointless flight. Some looked back at Lanser over the vast space of the hold. He saluted them.

A monstrous serpent hissed.

Lanser hit the controls again and threw himself into the crush out of the bay. A great wind began to blow in from the corridor. The grind reached a peak of agony. Then there was a pop that was larger than sound. Almost half the bay’s wall vanished. Slabs of the ship’s hull spun away. The atmosphere blasted out into the void. It scooped up the Crusaders in the hold and scattered them into the great and cold nothing. Two ork fighters hung in the opening. Articulated arms extended from their noses, wielding circular saws four metres in diameter. They were spinning, but the grind was gone. There was only the blank roar of the wind.