The Beast Arises

Bezhrak looked around the Great Chamber. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘Give up or die. Choose.’

The silence broke. The tiers erupted with screams, curses, wails of defiance and wails of despair. There were prayers to the God-Emperor, and there were what sounded to Vangorich like treasonous pleas for mercy directed at the orks. He tuned out the wider Senatorum. He was surrounded by enough idiocy on the High Lords’ dais.

Mesring turned on Tull. ‘What have you done?’ he screamed at her. ‘You have brought sacrilege into our midst. Holy Terra is defiled!’

‘I didn’t hear you voicing doubts earlier,’ she retorted. She had regained some of her fire. She was in Mesring’s face, giving no quarter, and standing with her back to the orks, as if she could erase the reality of their presence in a contest of rage with the Ecclesiarch.

Ekharth, Gibran, Sark and Anwar surrounded Verreault.

‘Why are you silent?’ Gibran asked, his voice rasping with hysteria. ‘Give the orders! Kill the abominations!’

‘The Lucifer Blacks outnumber them!’ Sark sounded no better. ‘They aren’t armed!’

‘And what does that tell you?’ said Verreault.

That they’re throwing our civilisation in our face, Vangorich thought. The self-inflicted moral wound the Imperium would suffer if it acted with less sophistication than orks would be a septic one.

The Master of the Astronomican was not worried about such concerns. ‘Kill them!’ Sark screamed. ‘Kill them!

’

Bezhrak grinned at him. ‘Bad plan, little bug.’

Sark paled. He sank back to his seat, trembling.

The Lucifer Blacks’ rifles were still trained on the orks. The troopers’ faces were strained masks of hatred. They did not fire. Verreault held up a hand, ensuring they did not.

‘If we kill them, we sign our death warrants,’ he said.

Udo sought refuge in bluster.

‘We will not surrender!’ he shouted at Bezhrak. ‘We will annihilate your foul race. You have sealed your doom by coming here. You have…’ he trailed off, seeking a greater curse. ‘You will regret…’ he began again, and stopped again, held by Bezhrak’s gaze. ‘I won’t!’ he yelled. ‘We won’t! You can’t ever!’ He descended into an incoherence of defiance. He was pathetic, Vangorich thought. Before long, he wouldn’t even be howling words.

Kubik had advanced to the edge of the dais and was walking back and forth in front of the orks. He leaned forward, his telescopic vision lenses extending towards the trio. He was speaking quickly to himself. Vangorich doubted the Fabricator General experienced emotion in a recognisable sense. But there was something very like excitement in the flood of auto-dictation and binary. ‘Not a clan. Specialised evolution is a defining characteristic of the Veridi giganticus. An ambassador class? An ambassador species? That might be closer. Yes, yes. Not learned behaviour. Diplomatic skills as genetic trait? Unprecedented. Specimen collection will be needed. And the potential. If the Veridi are capable of this form of development, mutations on command, the possibilities are—’

‘Where are your loyalties, priest of Mars?’ Veritus asked.

Kubik’s neck twitched. He waved a multi-jointed hand, brushing away the irritation of the inquisitor’s voice. He chattered in cant, already lost again in his speculations.

‘Enough, then,’ Veritus said. ‘Bear witness, Father of Mankind,’ he called out. ‘I have tried. But they leave me no choice.’ He stepped down from the dais. In his power armour, he was almost as wide as Bezhrak’s attendants. He brushed past the orks and began the long walk out of the Great Chamber.

Vangorich watched him go. When he dropped his eyes from Veritus’ retreating figure, he met Bezhrak’s gaze. There he saw something that chilled him even more than the ork’s use of Gothic: contempt. The two smaller orks were amused. They were grinning their disdain for the shrieking puppets on the dais. Bezhrak wasn’t smiling. Vangorich didn’t trust his ability to read ork physiognomy. He didn’t want to trust it. He wanted to be wrong. Because Bezhrak’s contempt appeared to be mixed with pity, and if that were true, what then?

What then?

Bezhrak raised his staff and brought it down against the marble floor. The reverberation was the toll of war. It brought a momentary silence to the dais. The High Lords faced the reality of their disgusted foe.

‘Useless,’ Bezhrak said. ‘Worse than snotlings.’ He looked at his fellows. ‘No reasoning with humans. Break ’em, kill ’em, eat ’em. That’s good. Don’t try to make ’em think. Can’t be done.’ He shrugged. He turned back to the High Lords. ‘Want to die, then? Last chance.’

The Twelve said nothing. Vangorich opened his mouth, and found he also had nothing to say. He had almost responded to an impulse to save face before the orks, and acting on that impulse would have been its own shame. And Udo was right, in his idiot blathering. There would be no surrender. There could be no negotiation. Before the ork that spoke, there could be no words.