The Beast Arises

Zerberyn raised his hammer high, mentally dialling his gorget vox-booster to maximum. Iron Warriors and Fists Exemplar together. They had held long enough.

‘Fall back. Everyone. Back to the gunship.’

A feral roar threatened to drown him out, and he looked back to the breached wall. An ork of truly monstrous scale, dark skin powdered with gold, crashed through the breached wall recently vacated by the dreadnought. Its muscular frame was bolted into an electric-shock yellow fighting suit half again Zerberyn’s size. Pistons wheezed. Valves screeched. Black smoke pumped the air. At first glance it was a typical ork build. Closer inspection, however, revealed a powered suit of surpassing artisanship. The plates were glossy and smooth, lines straight, edges perfect. Alternating power fields surrounded the ork with a sharp ozone burn. It flexed the arm-width digits of a three-clawed power fist, auto-loaders churning ammo belts through a massive ten-barrelled combi-weapon.

‘You die. Now.’

Its bastardised Low Gothic was kicked out of its chest, like air from a dead man’s lungs, and Zerberyn was too stunned to respond.

It had spoken. Orks did not speak.

It started to run, beating aside a steel drum that then punched straight through a support stanchion and brought an empty section of crawlway crashing down. Zerberyn ran to meet it. The ground between them trembled. He drew back his thunder hammer and roared his hatred.

They clashed like bolt-rounds hitting each other in mid-air.

Zerberyn’s thunder hammer came down on the ork’s thigh brace. The local power field blew out and the metal squealed under the stress. The ork steam-rollered through him, snatching him up in its power claw and driving him through the light metal casing of a machine stack.

With a roar like laughter, the ork dragged him from the wreckage and swung him about as though he were promethium jelly on the monster’s claws.

Even for his transhuman physiology, the g-force was tremendous. Black spots appeared in front of his eyes. He unloaded his pistol into the ork’s upper torso power field until the hammer struck an empty chamber. He had no more. Screaming, he hawked up acid from his Betcher’s gland and spat it into the ork’s face. Green smoke sizzled from its jaw, but it did not feel it.

The ork tightened its grip. The power fist’s disruption field burned off his armour layer by layer. Ceramite creaked, crunched, split. He may have screamed again. He was no longer sure. He lashed out with his thunder hammer.

He did not know what it hit, but it hit something.

The ork bellowed in pain, and the next he knew he was flying with all the power of that immense battlesuit behind him.

He passed through something metal-lined and hollow, hit the ground in a mangle of limbs and bounced once, twice, then skidded. His battleplate tore up sparks from the ferrocrete surface. He slammed up against a wall and flopped down. He saw Reoch, Antille and a number of helmed Scions, but the anonymously-armoured humans swam together.

Then the ten-centimetre-thick plasteel doors that he had just slid though clamped onto his trailing greave.

‘Reverse it,’ growled Reoch.

‘I’m trying!’ came Antille’s voice.

Zerberyn grunted, willing his mind to stop spinning, and pulled on his trapped leg. It did not move. Dirty smoke was beginning to pour out of the door’s pneumatics.

From the other side of the door, there was a bellow of fury. The ground began to shake as something massive took a run-up. Reoch inserted the fierce muzzle of his Umbra-pattern pistol into the gap between the doors. The Apothecary fired on full-auto, bolt pistol beating against the metal frames like a hammer drill.

The doors continued to try and close.

Zerberyn gave one last roar, then spasmed back to the floor in agony as the heavy plasteel cracked bonded ceramite and armaplas like steel pliers on a nut, and snapped his strengthened tibia roughly in two. His genhanced neurochemistry prevented the pain from disabling him, but it was still as close to intolerable as he had ever known. His conscious brain protectively shut itself down for a moment, his twin hearts racing to pump an endorphin rush of pain-suppressing hormones into his bloodstream.

The doors stalled about half a leg-width apart.

Zerberyn looked up, saw the sheathed chainsword hanging from Major Bryce’s hip.

The Scion read his look, unhitching the blade and thumbing the power. Adamantium teeth revved hungrily.

‘Forgive me, lord.’

‘Hurry up and do it.’

Bryce hacked down. Zerberyn roared as the motored blade ate through armour and flesh and from there into bone. Arterial spray turned his battleplate red. Chipped bone rattled everyone’s armour, flying through a pall of bitter ceramite dust. Vibrations tore through his bones. Tears welled up in the Scion’s eyes. The dust.

The human lacked the strength to finish it.

With a growl, Reoch pulled the man aside and stamped down on the back of the chainsword, driving it through Zerberyn’s leg until it stalled in the ferrocrete.