The Beast Arises

The orks, as Major Bryce had explained it, utilised the substation’s communication nets to complement their own orbital operations.

Zerberyn could have inferred that much for himself from the sheer concentration of firepower that the orks had embedded there in its defence.

Pot-bellied howitzers thrust out of sandbagged redoubts. For such large, crude-looking artillery pieces they had a tremendous rate of fire, thumping out explosive shells and sending up rockets of dusty topsoil amidst the Fists Exemplar advance. Machine cannons screamed as they ripped up new trenchlines.

Scrap metal drizzled over Zerberyn’s armour. Dust clogged the glowing lenses of his helm.

The bombardment was a variable that, having already plotted the optimal angle of attack at the onset, he could no longer influence and so spared no further thought to.

A combat squad comprising one-half of Veteran Squad Anatoq moved with him over the broken ground in a line, their even spacing the resultant practical of Brother Donbuss’ best theoretical of the howitzer shells’ blast radius. The five Space Marines were flickering gold auspex traces in Zerberyn’s faceplate display, periodically broken up by dust diffraction and blast compression fronts. They fired sporadically, conserving ammunition, the soundless flashes of muzzle-flare in the cacophony primarily to give the orks something to aim at other than the true source of the attack.

With their genhanced low-light vision and complementary auspex overlays bolstering their awareness, the Fists Exemplar guided the lighter Tempestus Scions in. Patched in to the humans’ platoon frequency, Zerberyn listened in on their chatter as he picked a path through the stick bombs, tube-charges and tripwires that his auto-senses’ threat-recogition protocols called out from the general detritus.

Even had these men been Space Marines, Zerberyn would have been impressed by their vox-discipline. There was none of the braggadocio and backchat that he was accustomed to hearing on mortal units’ channels. Just target advisories, calm requests for recharge packs or medicae assistance, and mapping updates that were followed immediately and without question. Zerberyn had not yet seen the Scions truly tested, but if they achieved nothing else today then they had already accomplished a feat that was practically unheard of.

They had impressed an Exemplar.

‘Unidentified heat source on your eleven,’ voxed one, their system clear as a bell.

The heat source saw Zerberyn the moment that Zerberyn saw it, and fired a moment later. A Devil Dog flame tank, hull down and scarred enough by battle-damage to justify Zerberyn’s initial appraisal that it had been derelict. An ork in an ill-fitting flak jacket and a red bandana lifted its head above the hatch and shouted.

He would submit himself for proper penance when the battle was done.

A melta beam lanced from its turret gun in a howl of deconstituted atmosphere and passed a foot over Zerberyn’s shoulder, incinerating half of the following Scions in an instant. Heat washed over him. He hit the ground, rolling into the cover formed by the scrap and craters surrounding the substation as the tank’s glacis-mounted heavy bolter opened up.

‘Mine, cousin.’

An Iron Warriors Terminator strode directly into the firing line. His monstrous battleplate soaked up the glacis-mount’s magazine as mass-reactive rounds from his own combi-bolter spanked across the Devil Dog’s gunner slit. A disruption field thrummed into life around the clenched fingers of his power fist as the Cataphractii disappeared again into the fog of war.

‘Tarsus, Galen — pincer left,’ voxed Zerberyn, rising and clapping dust from his bolt pistol. ‘Tosque, Nalis, Borhune: right.’

His squad knew their duties, but it always paid to keep their wiser-than-thou individualism in check.

‘Jaskólska,’ he went on, switching to the Scions’ channel, addressing the female trooper he had spoken with briefly at the agri-plex. ‘We have you covered.’

‘Our gratitude, lord captain.’

The surviving Scions, no grief, no complaint, took off at a full sprint. They were bug-eyed by the full covering and rebreather apparatus of their omnishield helms. The greenish glow of visual augmenter beams from their hellgun scopes webbed the air like a haywired security grid.

Zerberyn followed, finding the troopers spread out in a semicircular firebase formation, Sergeant Jaskólska and the unit sapper in the process of mag-locking the final melta bombs to the substation’s Dreadnought-sized main doors.

‘Clear!’ yelled the sapper with considerable, long pent-up satisfaction, and then activated the det-charges via his slate monitorum.

White fire rolled out from the doors with a searing roar. Zerberyn felt a passing discomfort in his eyes before his auto-senses adapted to the supernova glare and filtered out the more damaging wavelengths. He was stepping into the breach with weapons ready while the Scions still had their arms over their helms’ visors.