The Beast Arises

An axe split Franzek’s head like a gourd before the dazed man even realised he was in danger. Seated beside him, Merrel punched his belt release buckle and rose, drawing his sidearm. A thunderblast from a brick-like stubber dropped him back down, printing the ruined contents of his chest over the console. The ork belted its pistol, hauled Merrel’s remains from the station and, leaving its axe where it was buried in Franzek’s head, stabbed a wedge-like device with a blinking base into the unit. The surviving screens immediately went haywire. Cecillia was ripped, chair fittings and all, from the main drive station and hurled screaming across the chamber. Her body broke so hard against the stainless steel aquila mounted over the prow in place of a viewscreen that she put a dent in its wing. Flinching from the meat-slap sound, Kaplin screamed a homily ad-libbed with wild obscenities and nonsense as he backed up the steps. He pumped his shotgun, spitting out a pair of spent casings, and then fired, whizzing the air with shrapnel and exploding a lumen fitting in the ceiling.

They were outmuscled, outgunned. The bondsmen of the Black Templars had never been so outclassed.

Venerable Magneric advanced at a measured pace, stitching the air with short, ultra-precise bursts of assault cannon fire. He shredded an ork in identical, almost uniform checker-pattern body armour with a point-three-second salvo, then pivoted, tracked, locked — and fired. A point-seven-second burst chewed through armour and skin and riddled the main drive terminal with bone.

With an implosive clap of displacement, an ork teleported directly into his path.

Magneric did not know what manner of thoughts filled the mind of an ork. Words? Images? A deep, ancestral dream of destruction and slaughter? He had never considered it. He regretted that failing now, for whatever the creature had expected to encounter when it had stepped into its ship’s teleportation portal, a Black Templars Dreadnought in the throes of battle rage had not been one of them.

The expression on its beast face was beyond price.

Magneric’s power fist punched into the ork’s chest and lifted it from the deck like an eel on a spear. Concentric rings of adamantium teeth spun in opposing directions like propellers, blending the ork in its entirety and spraying its vaporised remains.

The remaining orks took cover in pits and behind bulkheads, and fired back with noisy bursts of stubber-fire.

Keeping low, Kaplin ran to Merrel’s blood-sprayed terminal and took cover behind the dead bondsman’s chair. He tugged at the blinking spike that the ork had left embedded in it. He could not move it a millimetre.

‘Some kind of denial shunt,’ he yelled, ducking onto his haunches behind Merrel’s chair as bullets flew overhead. ‘It’s opened the outer doors to the flight bays and disengaged the cohesion fields.’

Torpedoes. Assault boats. Teleport commandos. An assault on all fronts, coordinated, and with overwhelming force. Magneric despised his enemy enough to be impressed.

Obsidian Sky

was not like the ships of his former VII Legion brothers. A vessel like the Fists Exemplar flagship was a mobile fortress, constructed for the projection of force and the holding of territory. Obsidian Sky was not built to be defended. She was a blade, a tool of incision and conquest.

Stubber-rounds spanking off his metal skin, Magneric launched a full spread of grenades from his power fist’s underslung launchers. Primed for airburst, the withering frag-storm blew the orks’ improvised shelter open. The survivors, black-and-white bodyplate glittering with fragmentation shards, he mowed down with an almost hot-blooded relish.

It was moments like these when it still felt good to be alive.

His assault cannon wound down with a squeal, nitrogen condensate hissing to vapour on contact.

‘Um.’ Kaplin stared mutely at the console beside his. ‘Shipmaster Attonax of the Palimodes has been trying to raise us, Dreadnought-Marshal. They… express their intent to depart with the Fists Exemplar.’

Pistons in the back of Magneric’s legs retracted with a hydraulic wheeze, and tilted him back to face the ceiling. What remained of his flesh body after the fall of Tranquility Wall floated in an amniotic sac deep within the metal behemoth that interred him. For centuries, fury alone had driven him on. It was a living thing, that fury, in a way that he no longer was, pure and unsullied. Immortal. Others granted the highest honour of service beyond death required prolonged periods of rest between deployments, but not him. His rage denied him. He had retained his rank. He had retained his name. His fury too had a name: Kalkator. But now it seemed that it had no further to take him.

‘You seek to escape me at the last, Kalkator? By the Emperor’s decree, never! As we agreed, traitor, we escape together or we die together.’

His chassis pivoted towards Kaplin. ‘Status of engines?’ he demanded.