The Beast Arises

Fernau thought so. Gattan was uneasy. There were enough companies of Astra Militarum left for some kind of coordination, but the losses had been great. Though the banners of the Jupiter Storm, Granite Myrmidons, Orion Watch, Auroran Rifles and the Eagles of Nazca were raised high, and the uniforms of each regiment were beyond counting, the vast majority of those uniforms were worn by civilians. Most of the heavy armour had been captured. All the senior officers had been aboard the big ships. There was no one ranking higher than captain on the ground.

At least they’d been able to establish vox-communication with each other even as they were landing. And the broad lines of the strategy had been established before the Armada had left Terra. There had been enough guidance to make the target clear. The deployment itself had to be simple. There was little to be done with the civilians except to send them marching in the right direction with instructions to shoot the enemy.

A squadron of ork bombers roared overhead. It did not attack. Neither had the few others that had overflown the landing site during the last few hours.

‘What are they doing?’ Gattan wondered aloud.

‘Reconnaissance,’ Fernau answered.

‘Unusual restraint. We’re a very big target.’

‘Too big. Nothing flights of that size can take on.’

‘So where are the others?’

Fernau shrugged. ‘Not here, so no help to them. They’re making more mistakes. Giving us a chance to move against them.’

Maybe. In the end, the truth didn’t matter. There was only one course of action open.

Its engine growling, a Chimera pulled up beside the Militant Fire. Gattan clasped forearms with Fernau. ‘For Terra and the Emperor,’ he said.

‘For Terra and the Emperor.’

Gattan climbed down onto the roof of his command vehicle. Another rumbled up behind it to collect Fernau.

The march began. The heavy armour that had reached the star fortress led the way. Over a hundred Leman Russ battle tanks in all their variants, and half that number of Chimeras and Hellhounds formed something too wide to be called a wedge. They were an advancing wall. The surface of the moon vibrated with the force of their passing. Behind them came the foot soldiers of the Proletarian Crusade. Slowly at first, but then with mounting momentum, the immense army advanced on the gates to the enemy stronghold.

Haas was in the leading elements of the attack, moving at a forced march speed behind the armour. She could see nothing ahead of her except iron and blue-black exhaust. Her ears rang with the roar of engines, but the guns were silent for now. The orks had not yet attacked.

She looked up into the sky. The Crusade was on the night side of the planetoid. She could see Terra, large in its shining majesty, small in its vulnerability. That was what she had come here to protect. As long as she could see Terra, she wouldn’t mind dying in this place. The ork moon had besieged the consciousness of every soul on Terra for weeks. Now the orks were the ones besieged. That in itself was a victory. We’ve come this far, Haas thought, and you failed to stop us. You’ll fail again.

Though her lungs laboured, her strides became stronger. She moved faster. She felt the hand of the Emperor at her back, and she gave thanks.

Though it was night, the visibility on the surface of the moon was high. To the reflected light from Terra was added a glow from the mountain ranges. They were lined with what looked like veins of molten lava. A wash of red reached across the plain.

The mountains jutted like a monster’s teeth from the plain. There were no foothills, no rise of the land, no transition at all between a featureless level and the brutal vertical. The peaks could not be climbed. They were an absolute barrier. The valley between the mountain chains narrowed quickly, and Haas was close enough to the western range to see the welds on them, the seams between an infinity of overlapping metal plates, as if the orks had begun constructing a ship’s hull and been unable to stop. The jagged, crooked, intersecting streams of light were not lava. They looked even more like blood flowing just beneath the iron flesh. The mix of the geological, the artificial and the organic was unnerving.

An hour into the march, a glow appeared in the distance, where the mountain chains met. It was a false sunrise in the eternal night. The light was a sullen red with irregular pulses of green.

‘We have a target!’ The voice over the vox-casters was Gattan’s. Haas could just see him, two vehicles ahead, riding high in the open hatch of the Chimera.

The march became a charge. Haas began to run. They had overwhelmed the orks this far. They would do it again.

‘They’re going to open the gate,’ Gattan voxed his fellow captains.

‘Good,’ said Fernau.