The Beast Arises

Antille hefted his boltgun to cover Reoch while Zerberyn slowly backed up, laying down fire to enable Tosque and Columba to break away and withdraw. A resounding clang pulled Zerberyn’s attention back towards Reoch and Antille.

A ventilator grille banged against the wall and a double-jointed runt of a creature, the serf caste called gretchin, slid on its backside out of the shaft. There, it freed up the stubber in its lap and let rip on full-auto. Ricochets sprang between Reoch and Antille’s heavy battleplate, but the runt’s aim was not nearly so discriminate. The bullet spray perforated the stall partition and several men and women took hits. They mewled like stricken animals, unable even to fall over as they died.

Zerberyn dragged the creature out by the head and crushed its skull with a mild application of force.

Reoch, a bald, plump female over one pauldron and a male over the other, indicated that he was ready.

Columba and Tosque joined them, the latter raking what was left of the second level with suppressive fire while the sergeant, grey plate a gory black, squeezed off snapshots at anything that so much as threatened to be green.

The four Space Marines formed a closed cage around the Apothecary, the orks hurling themselves against the wall made by the sons of Dorn and finding it unbreakable.

‘Out,’ Zerberyn yelled over the doubled thunder of bolter fire, anchoring the retreat as, one by one, his brothers followed Reoch out.

Exiting one firestorm, and entering another.

Fifteen

Prax

Orks crowded the agri-plex’s windows and chutes, pumping the loading yard between the buildings with high-calibre shot. Crude rocket-propelled grenades screamed through the air like kamikaze bombers and blew great spumes of earth from the road. Zerberyn and his brothers gathered around Reoch and his charges and returned fire, picking their targets, always retreating towards the landing zone. An off-spherical grenade crashed through the corrugated roof of one of the cattle sheds and gutted it with fire. Zerberyn raised his arm against the pelting shrapnel and tried to instil some sense into what had happened to his battlefield.

The fighting was too intense and widespread to be the work of his squad alone, and if the Iron Warriors had entered the field then he would surely know about it.

He could see Brother Tarsus. The veteran was firing from behind the thick metal legs of the water tank, minimising himself as a visible target. Brother Donbuss and his heavy bolter, meanwhile, were still watching over the landing zone, outdoing the orks’ combined firepower both for sheer destructiveness and for noise. The belt-fed torrent of high-explosive anti-personnel rounds left twisted metal and pulverised plate wherever the orks sought to establish a firebase.

Karva announced his presence some distance to the right amongst the slurry tanks with the mighty whoomph of his heavy flamer. An expanding mushroom of promethium wash sent burning debris pattering onto the surrounding roofs like hailstones. Glottal shouts and more crude gunfire answered back. Staccato bursts. So far, so well enough within the mission schematic that Zerberyn had established during descent. At the same time as those flames were dying back however, a flurry of las supercharged to the red end of the energy spectrum spat between various silos, and even from the dust desert that surrounded the oasis of rusted tin and steel.

There was movement beneath the wind turbines.

Human troopers in moulded black carapace and dust-bowl fatigues were hurrying towards the main structure, providing rolling overwatch. Another two squads, twenty men and support weaponry, advanced more deliberately through the silos, flushing out lone orks and gretchin workers ahead of them with grenades and disciplined volleys of hot-shot. Zerberyn had seen skitarii units move like that. One will, one intent. For what looked like unaugmented human soldiers, their unit discipline was exemplary.

A mechanised growl pulled Zerberyn’s attention to the ramshackle ork tractor in the machine shed that he had marked on his initial approach.

With a trembling of its rust-brown frame, it powered back out of the shed at speed. It lurched into a handbrake spin, flat tyres skidding up dust, tarpaulin roof ballooning, then jumped forwards. There was an ork at the wheel, a dark-skinned patriarch with a leather eye patch and a massive jaw, firing one-handed out of the driver’s side window with a twin-linked stubber. A gang of squealing gretchin packed the rear container, holding on to the metal sides or to the single ladder that ran up the back, and blazed wildly in all directions. A bullet punched a trooper from his feet, reflex pulling a wild burst of las skyward as he fell. His squadmates spread out into the thin cover of the various silos and raked the careening vehicle with las-fire.