The Beast Arises

Tunnel vision. He saw mountains, and he tuned out their constructed nature. He looked for a plain. He clutched the dream of victory. It held reality at bay.

Fuelled by the dream, followed by hundreds more dreaming vessels, the Militant Fire brought Juskina Tull’s vision to the orks.

Sixteen

The ork moon

The moon had an atmosphere. The air was foul, ashy, reeking of burning gases and the effluvium of xenos industry. It was thin. When the Militant Fire’s cargo door opened, Haas felt the immediate urge to gasp. Yet the air was breathable, and no worse than the more toxic hives of Terra, except for the stench of the inhuman. The smell was acrid, a mixture of filthy industry and the foul organic. Though it was dry, it had the cloying grip of high humidity. Above all, it was an odour that she had never encountered before, and she bristled, a hunted animal reacting to the approach of the predator. The air had a taste, too. Haas wanted to spit. Her mouth was full of iron, promethium and rotten blood.

The wind had a hollow, rasping sound, a snarl echoing through organ pipes.

An atmosphere. The orks had given their artificial planetoid a surface atmosphere. There was no reason for them to do so. The outside of the star fortress showed no sign of life. The greenskins had performed a gigantic technological feat, it seemed, simply because they could. That excess of power was daunting.

The surface visible from the ship was pockmarked rock, with no dust. The patchwork quality of the planetoid extended even to what had appeared from orbit to be natural formations. The orks had done more than carve an existing moon into the canyons and mountain ranges that suited them or raise barriers thousands of metres high and hundreds of kilometres long. Haas had the disturbing impression that they had assembled the fortress out of the pieces of other moons. They had created a world out of nothing.

How can we defeat an enemy that powerful?

Through their mistakes.

Kord refused to disembark. He hung back at the rear as the civilians and Imperial Guard descended the ramp. He walked slowly, and when he reached the door, he stopped.

‘What are you doing?’ Haas demanded. She had joined him for the landing out of consideration of their partnership on Terra, but her patience was exhausted. The man who had talked up the Crusade had become a shameful specimen.

Kord stared at the expanse of the ork moon before them. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Get down or I’ll shoot you myself.’

‘No,’ said a third voice. ‘You will not.’

She turned around. The last of the Astra Militarum contingents to disembark were the Jupiter Storm. Commissar Sever had come up behind them. ‘You are under military command now,’ he said. ‘That decision is not yours.’

‘I understand,’ Haas said. She stepped to one side.

Sever regarded Kord with a cold, absolute contempt. ‘Disembark,’ he said.

Kord spread his hands, pleading. ‘I—’ he began.

Sever pulled his bolt pistol out of its holster and shot Kord in the left eye. The Arbitrator’s skull exploded. Blood splashed Haas’ armour.

Sever turned to her.

‘Thank you, commissar,’ Haas said, ‘for preserving the honour of the Adeptus Arbites.’

She followed the Jupiter Storm out of the Militant Fire

.

‘They got greedy,’ said Captain Fernau of the Orion Watch. ‘They made a mistake.’ His laugh was relieved. ‘So they can make mistakes.’

Gattan grunted. He wanted to believe Fernau. He didn’t dare. He had to take the realities of the battlefield as they unfolded, not as he would wish them to be. ‘We’ll see,’ he said.

Fernau took in the deployment with a wide sweep of his arm. ‘We are seeing.’

They were standing on the upper hull of the Militant Fire. They had a view of the plain where the ships had come down, and of the mustering of the army.

The plain was fifty kilometres wide, bracketed by mountain chains that lost height as they converged to the south. That meeting point, fifteen kilometres away, was the target. During the descent, several ships had observed what looked like a massive gate closing. The Crusade needed a way inside the fortress, and the plain’s size and proximity to the goal made it a suitable starting point.

Maybe Fernau was right, Gattan thought. The orks had taken many of the larger ships, but they had not sent out anything close to enough fighters to stop the Armada. Hundreds more vessels had made it through. By lighter, by shuttle, and by ships that would never take off again, legions of Crusaders had put boots to soil. Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and now millions. Gattan had never been part of an operation on this scale. A sea of warriors hungry for greenskin blood stretching back as far as he could see on land flat as sheet metal. The sight made the toll the orks had exacted seem insignificant. This was a triumph. Wasn’t it?