The Beast Arises

The force of the venting pulled at Lanser like chains. Blood burst from his nose and ears. The door was halfway down. He pushed against the hurricane of decompression. He gripped the side of the doorway and lunged forward, shoving against struggling backs. The man in front of him fell. He banged into Lanser as the wind took him back. Lanser clutched the doorway harder. The yank tried to dislocate his arm.

The door was less than two metres from being closed. The roar became a desperate, whistling shriek. Lanser ducked low and hauled himself around the corner, into the corridor. He slammed the top of his head against the descending barrier and collapsed against the wall. The door closed, trapping a handful of Crusaders beneath it. The wind’s shriek continued a few seconds longer as flesh and bone held back heavy steel for a moment more. Then the pressure of the mechanism and the weight of the door won, severing and crushing.

The wind died. Lungs rasping, Lanser stood. He moved forward to take the lead of the column of Crusaders who had managed to reach the corridor. He pushed past perhaps three hundred civilians before he reached Bessler and Parten’s squads. They were the only Myrmidons who had made it.

‘Doesn’t make sense,’ Parten said. She wiped a smear of blood from her upper lip. ‘Why go to the trouble of peeling the ship open? Why not just torpedo it if they’re not going to board?’

‘Because it amuses them?’ Bessler suggested.

Lanser shook his head. ‘I’ve never known greenskins to entertain themselves by taking a slower approach to violence.’ He shouted for silence. The sobs of the civilians quieted enough for him to hear what he had feared: more of the vibrating grind coming from elsewhere in the ship. ‘They are boarding,’ he said. ‘That was a decapitation move. They took out most of the opposition we could muster at a stroke.’

‘Which means they knew what they were doing,’ Parten said, awed.

‘I’m not interested in what they planned,’ said Lanser before Parten could continue. The implications of orks taking the time to attack a ship based on its layout and probable complement of defenders did not need airing. That talk would not help with what needed to be done, and would change nothing.

So what do we do? He thought of the Expanse of Destiny’s other cargo bays, holding tens of thousands more Crusaders. They orks had likely vented them too. ‘We stick to the interior passageways,’ he said. ‘Make for the bridge. If they are boarding, that’s where we’ll have to hold them.’

He looked back at the civilians. Many still looked determined. All were terrified. The dream of the Crusade had soured.

‘You wanted to fight the greenskins?’ Lanser shouted to them. ‘You’re lucky. You’re getting the chance early. Let’s go tear them apart.’

He led the charge aft, towards the ship’s superstructure. Parten and Bessler’s troops shouted defiance, spreading the will to fight. And in the tighter confines of the corridors, three hundred souls became a crowd, a force, a surging wall of anger looking for an enemy to kill.

Deeper in the ship, the vibrations of the breaching faded. It became possible to pretend that nothing was happening. Lanser sensed the confidence of the Crusaders build still more.

Two-thirds of the way to the bridge, they found the enemy. About twenty orks burst out of a side passage linking to one of the smaller cargo holds. Lanser had no chance to give orders. He and the Myrmidons dropped into crouches and started firing at the intersection ahead. The first ranks of the civilians fired too. There was no discipline to the volleys of las, but there was no way to miss, either. Orks went down. The humans cheered triumph and rage, loud enough to shake the walls of the passageway.

The orks didn’t return fire. They barrelled down the hall towards the Crusaders. A few more fell. Then Lanser drew his sword and ran forward. He couldn’t let the orks steal the momentum. The Crusaders charged with him.

The two forces collided. The humans had the numbers. The orks had the physical strength. The battle became a melee, a riot of blades and blood. The Crusaders’ arsenal was basic: lasguns and bayonets. Few had any armour. The orks all carried guns, but waded in with their own blades.

Lanser had fought the greenskins before. He was used to seeing their huge machetes and axes, but he had never felt his own weapons outclassed by the brutes’ armament. The weapons these orks wielded, and the forms of armour they wore, were as massive as ever, but it seemed that their exuberant brutality was the product of skill rather than crude overcompensation. Imperial blades dulled and bent against orkish plate. Imperial bodies came apart beneath orkish blows.