The Beast Arises

The light at the juncture of the mountain chains grew brighter. Then the clamour began. From the centre of the light came the orks. They began as a boiling disturbance in the distance. The threat gathered definition. Within minutes, Gattan could make out the figures of individual orks. Coming up the middle of the infantry were Battlewagons. As far as Gattan could tell, the human tanks outnumbered the ork vehicles. In spite of himself, he grinned in anticipation.

Closer. The mountain chains were only a kilometre apart now. The yowling celebration of the greenskins competed with the war chants of the Astra Militarum and the shouted prayers of the civilians. Gattan tried to guess the size of the ork army. Thousands, he thought. It seemed a much smaller force than the human one. The Crusaders were a solid wall across the entire width of the plain. The orks were in a narrower formation.

Closer.

‘Fire!’ Gattan ordered, and the other captains echoed his command.

The Leman Russ cannons opened up. A wide cluster of blasts chewed up the ork advance. The barrage battered one of the lead Battlewagons to scrap. There was a strange cleanness to the explosions. Fireballs hurled chunks of bodies skyward, but there was no dust, no rocky debris. The shells left the surface of the moon unscarred.

The orks rushed on, unfazed by their losses.

The snarls and the prayers and the chants and the cannon fire and the pounding of running feet were all one, a giant, indistinguishable cacophony of war. The gap between the two armies shrank to nothing.

Impact.

The orks hit the wall of the Imperial armour. They broke against it like foam on rocks. Gattan felt the Chimera jolt as it ran over greenskin bodies. The Hellhounds sent out a torrent of flame over the enemy. For several seconds, the mechanised Imperial advance achieved a total purge. But the orks kept coming. Faster brutes and stronger ones pushed through the spaces between the vehicles and fell on the human infantry. Gattan manned the heavy bolter, gunning down as many as he could. He couldn’t get them all. Over the sound of the guns, he heard the rising wave of screams and snarls as the melee began.

Human and ork tanks fired at each other at point-blank range. Every shot hit. The vehicles of both forces disintegrated in flames and tearing metal, their deaths savaging nearby infantry. The losses mounted, but the greater human numbers made the difference. The advance slowed, but it did not stop.

‘Faster!’ Gattan ordered. ‘Get us through!’ The Chimera’s armour wasn’t as thick as a Leman Russ’. It had already taken one hit that would have incinerated Gattan if he hadn’t ducked down the hatch the second before the shell struck. He was back up again the next instant, making himself visible to both orks and humans. Let one fear him, he thought, and the other take heart from his defiance.

Forward still, with more and more of the ork Battlewagons down. Gattan could see past them to the open gate itself. Then a huge shape emerged from the entrance. His eyes widened. ‘Hard right!’ he yelled. ‘Evasive—’

He couldn’t hear his words as the enormous gun of the ork battle fortress roared. The shell blew up a Hellhound close to Gattan’s left. He turned his head away from the heat of the flames as the vehicle’s ignited promethium reserves splashed outward, immolating human and ork alike.

The new ork tank was immense, four times the size of any other vehicle on the field. Its main gun looked like it belonged on a cruiser. The ork foot soldiers hooted their derision at the humans as they swarmed past their monster. The battle fortress moved forward slowly. Each shot was a high-explosive bomb, and each killed another Imperial tank. The few that missed made huge craters of human flesh in the infantry.

‘Surround it!’ said Gattan. ‘All vehicles concentrate fire on this target!’

Clicks of acknowledgement on the vox, and Gattan had a moment to wonder when the overall leadership of the attack had fallen to him. Then there were no thoughts but the destruction of the monster. Leman Russ, Hellhound and Chimera encircled the battle fortress. Its gigantic turret moved with a sluggish laziness and picked them off one at a time. Their shells were pinpricks against its armour.

Gattan prayed that the accumulation of pinpricks would be enough.

The turret gradually moved his way. The Chimera kept circling, but the gun moved closer, each terrible blast consigning more of Terra’s regiments to oblivion. Fernau’s curses were cut off by a vox-squeal as his Chimera vanished.

But the miracle happened. Gattan saw cracks appear in the battle fortress’ flanks. The fissures glowed red, then orange, then white. Even as he shouted to keep firing, that they were besting the monster, a terrible thought came to him.

He realised that this was too easy.

He realised too late.

The battle fortress exploded.