The Beast Arises

Vangorich had studied all the reports the Mechanicus had made available about the resurgent orks. He had also read more than a few documents that the cult of the Omnissiah had preferred to keep to itself. One of the recurring themes of the studies, which the Mechanicus emphasised with undisguised enthusiasm, was novelty. These orks kept producing new weapons, acting in new ways. The pattern continued now. Vangorich looked at the orks before him, and felt another unwelcome shock of the new. All three were big. Two of them were a full head taller than he was. The third was half again as large. A leader and two subordinates, then. They wore thick leather, decorated with the brutal signs of the ork clans. The clothing seemed more like robes of office than armour.

What alarmed Vangorich most was not the unusual garb, though, but what the orks did not have.

They were unarmed.

Vangorich stared at this impossibility. The leader held a staff. It was three metres long, made of iron. Its girth was decorated with clusters of skulls. Some were human, others eldar, and many from species Vangorich didn’t recognise. The skulls were iron also, their jaws agape in an agony of death. Real teeth hung from a coil of wire that spiralled the length of the staff. The crown was a representation of an ork face, snarling in victory and hunger. The staff was formidable, but it was not a weapon. By the standards of what Vangorich knew about the greenskins, it was an artistic masterpiece.

The orks watched him steadily. They were calm, motionless, and so even more disturbing.

All it would take on his part was a simple gesture. He could turn his head, nod at Mercado, and the orks would be gunned down.

The consequences of that choice, he knew, would not be pleasant.

‘Follow me,’ he said to Narkissos.

The Lucifer Blacks followed. He led a dark procession to the Great Chamber. Vangorich was conscious of every heavy step of the orks behind him. Xenos boots on Terran marble beat the rhythm of the Imperium’s humiliation, and of the craven failure of the High Lords. He counted himself among the guilty. What did he have to show for his machinations? Playing host to the invader.

Narkissos walked like a man approaching his execution.

‘Tell me who they are,’ Vangorich said.

The trader whispered a terrible word. ‘Ambassadors.’

‘That isn’t possible.’

‘I know.’

So it was true, then. Vangorich felt colder inside with every passing moment.

Their arrival in the Great Chamber was greeted by a collective gasp followed by a growing murmur of rage. Udo rose from his seat. He pointed at Narkissos.

‘What have you brought into this sacred place?’ he thundered.

There was no threat in his bluster. He was an empty gesture given embodiment. Narkissos didn’t flinch. He didn’t even look at the Lord Commander. His eyes were unfocused. He was staring at something more vivid and frightening than the High Lords or the orks. A recent memory, perhaps, or a vision of the near future.

‘They’re ambassadors,’ Vangorich said, the word alien in his mouth. He mounted the dais. The orks remained where they were. Their yellow, sunken eyes watched the High Lords. ‘Are you their interpreter?’ he asked Narkissos, wondering how the man had come to know the xenos tongue.

Narkissos looked up now. He shook his head, miserable.

‘Don’t need an interpreter,’ the lead ork said. ‘We tell you how to surrender, you surrender. Easy.’

Eighteen

Terra — the Imperial Palace

The silence was as huge as the great scream had been. The scream had been the one response possible to the immensity of the moon’s arrival. The silence was the one response possible to a few simple words. The earth did not shake. Walls did not topple. Yet it seemed to Vangorich that both events occurred with every syllable that came from the ork’s mouth. Everything that the Imperium believed about the orks was wrong. The mere existence of these new orks, these ambassadors, was a blow whose implications were at least as great as the annihilation of the Proletarian Crusade. Here was proof that the military catastrophe was due to something more than brute power. The orks had numbers, and they had technology, and at least some of them had become a new thing.

Before the dreadful wonder of an ork dictating terms in fluent Gothic, what response could there be except silence? What emotion other than despair?

The ork had a name: Bezhrak. His Gothic was guttural. It sounded like the evisceration of prey. But there was no hesitation. Vangorich realised, to his horror, that Bezhrak spoke not as if he had learned the language of the Imperium, but as if it were his native tongue. The ork’s expression was uncultured, and the fact that word even occurred to Vangorich was obscene. Bezhrak spoke as if he had spawned from a deep underhive.

‘The Great Beast has you by the guts,’ he said. ‘Struggle, he’ll rip ’em out. Surrender, you get to keep ’em.’

The silence stretched on.