The Beast Arises

Kaplin swallowed and hurriedly picked his way through the debris to the main drive station. It took him a moment to interpret the unfamiliar read-outs. ‘Partial thrusters only.’

Magneric’s mind retreated to the cold space, that particular aggregation of cyborganic interfaces where his sarcophagus’ inscrutable machine-spirit met the quiet luminosity of his own immortal soul. The place where the Emperor breathed His will into his interred remains and gave them not just life, but spirit.

‘It will suffice. Set a collison course for the ork carrier and fire thrusters.’

‘Sir?’

‘Are my speakers impaired?’

‘No, venerable lord,’ Kaplin answered crisply, setting down his shotgun to prod the new coordinates into the unfamiliar set of controls. An urgently blinking light back at the communications station caught his eye. He leaned across. ‘It’s the Palimodes again, I think.’

‘Ignore it. Forwards. Always forwards. Let the fireball destroy us all!’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Then—’

Magneric turned back to the blast doors.

He could hear weapons fire. Not the dispersive blooms of the armsmen’s shotguns, nor the explosive noise-makers of the orks. It was the focused double-blasts of mass-reactive rounds.

Space Marines.

With a pneumatic hiss the blast doors slid open. The ten-centimetre-thick insulated barrier removed, the frozen air filled with the roar of bolter fire. Two Black Templars, firing from the hip, were covering each other’s withdrawal down the long corridor towards the command deck. At the far end, a mob of orks in neat black-and-white checked plate and horned helms advanced behind a bank of massive shields fitted with eye slits and what looked like heavy flamers.

The auto-defence turrets were dead.

The Space Marines’ shots blazed across the rank of shields. There was a deep-chested huck, like a cleared throat, and a launched grenade flew over the shield wall and went off under the Black Templar currently providing overwatch. The explosion peeled away his power armour and slammed him, broken, into the bulkhead. His comrade was thrown flat, but immediately pulled himself up on his elbows to rake the shield line on full-auto. The orks pushed on, impervious to anything lighter than a heavy bolter.

Their slow advance revealed, squatting on the deck behind them, an abhorrence almost reminiscent of a orkish tech-priest. Except that was impossible.

The orks had always possessed a native affinity for low technology, but nothing as specialised as this. The alien adept sat within a hulking ring of bodyguards, beside a maintenance hatch that it had clearly just blasted open using the plasma cutter grafted to its left arm. The panel’s internal controls were connected to a slate-like device in the ork’s hands and by a set of jump leads to the enormous power pack on its back. But even that abomination lost all power to offend beside the giant standing over it as a man would stand beside a dog.

Its brute size and vibrating, piston-driven fighting suit were impressive, but what struck Magneric at once was the realisation that the white and black plates bolted on as a dermal layer were ceramite. It was Adeptus Astartes power armour. Crusade Armour. Mark II. Magneric recognised the colours and the emblem that stamped them, though he doubted whether anyone who had not lived through those times now would.

White and black. Like the orks in the command deck. Like these orks here. Likely, it was the progenitor design, a scheme that the orks had come to associate with power and strength.

Luna Wolves.

Magneric could think of only one world upon which an ork could have come upon so infamous a relic.

With a battle cry last heard in the flesh at the gates of Holy Terra booming from his speakers, Magneric stamped forward, blocking the blast doors with his armoured bulk.

‘I am Magneric of the Black Templars. I denied the Palace of my God to His wayward sons. I deny it to you, xenos.’

A torrent of assault cannon fire chewed across the orks’ shields and drove them back.

‘Magneric denies you! Kaplin! Fire thrusters!’

Eight

Vandis

Gloriously unrefined firepower unfolded about Alcazar Remembered like butterfly wings, carving open ork ships, murdering their shields and leaving them to perish in her wake in puffs of fire. She had the look of an angel, but she was a gladiator. The void was her arena. The frigates Chastened and Unbroken were the first to shoot through in her wake. Explosions lit the debris field; lance beams and fighter contrails, shield flares and shelling.

The orks’ mass carrier pivoted its main gun.

It was a huge bronzed barrel the length of a capital ship, fed with masses of brightening plasma coils and finned by that sail-like radiator array. With a flash of energised plasma it fired.