WARHAMMER 40,000

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

PROLOGUE

ASCENDING

The creature climbed the shaft of its prison. Every step of the ascent was hard-won, and the creature’s breath rattled from its lungs in a feral snarl. The sound was swallowed by the splashes and struggles of the scavengers in the depths below. It became one more echo in an eternal, reverberating song of violence.

The journey was slow. The creature didn’t care, for time had no meaning in the well. Here were only darkness, the clash of tooth and claw, and the choking embrace of water thick with the decaying remains of the fallen. The creature was one of the victors. It had beaten down its rivals, always risen to be the predator and not the prey, and now it had risen again, using the bodies of its enemies to make its way up the shaft.

It had prepared its climb with a patience that had nothing to do with enduring the passage of time.

There was no time. There were only teeth. Claws. Meat. Bone. War.

Patience was the embodiment of necessity, of survival. It fought, killed, and worked in the unending night until it was ready and, by feel alone, began its journey.

The creature’s ascent was so painstaking, so gradual, that if it had been seen, it would not have been a threat. But it was not seen. It rose, metre by metre through Stygian black. It had climbed before. It had made too many attempts to count (and counting was meaningless), and on each occasion, it had reached a bit higher before it had had to return to the roiling depths. But this time was going to be different. This time, events would begin once again. The creature would reach the top, and it would bring with it the tearing and death from below.

Black became grey. Above, a circle of dim light grew wider and brighter. The creature’s breathing grew harsher from the strain of effort and the eagerness of rage. It no longer moved solely by touch. It could see. In jerking, spasmodic movements, clumsy but inexorable, it reached the lip of the well. There it paused. It waited, quieting its breath, holding back its snarl even as its killing impulse became so powerful that its entire frame vibrated. It listened to the guards. It tracked the sound of their movements as they strolled back and forth, trading bored insults.

The moment came. Time began. The creature surged out of the well. It roared as it plunged claws into flesh, and feasted on the panic of the guards.

CHAPTER ONE

THE GRAND ILLUSION

1. Yarrick

I should have expected the Stompa would charge. There were so many things I should have expected. So much for which I will have to answer, on the day the Emperor finally releases me from my service and calls me to His Throne. Most of all, I will have to atone for the sin of underestimating the enemy. This is the very sin I condemned so freely in others, the sin that had almost doomed Armageddon. How could I have failed to heed my own warnings?

I deserve no mercy. But I won’t be alone. There is very little mercy to be granted for the errors of that day.

The clouds were low over the Ishawar Mountains. The clouds were always low on Golgotha, but tonight they had an extra weight, and pressed down on the peaks like an upended sea of tar. They heaved and bulged with the sick promise of dreadful storms. They pulsed with a red glow, and their force was coming down to crush the army of Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka from above, just as mine would on the ground.

I rode in the open turret of the command Chimera. The wind had dropped, the atmosphere holding its breath in advance of the coming storm, and my rebreather was able to keep the worst of Golgotha’s crimson dust from my lungs. We were moving into the foothills of the mountain chain. We had been pursuing the orks for days, grinding at them, pushing them deeper into the Ishawar range, into ever narrower valleys and passes. Open terrain was where their numbers, still greater than ours, could be most effectively brought to bear against our armour. So we didn’t give them a chance. We blasted through the plains and plateaux, a storm of fire and steel that never stopped, never let up. We had the greenskins in retreat. I was coming for Thraka. Years after he had profaned Armageddon, I finally had him cornered. Years of searching, years of being just a step behind him, hitting planet after planet just days after he had departed, world after world that had nothing left to devastate. But I had caught up to him. He was here, on Golgotha, leading the routed horde ahead. I knew he was.

He had to be. This was my last chance to stop him.

He. Him. Thraka had long since ceased to be an it in my mind. To reduce him would be to underestimate him, and underestimating him had one guaranteed result: doom. I had seen what he was capable of on Armageddon. I had seen what he had done since, as I followed his trail of devastation through the galaxy. It was an article of faith that the orks were unthinking brutes. It was one of the human race’s sole consolations when faced with their numbers, their strength and their endurance: at least the orks were stupid. But not Thraka. The invasion of Armageddon had not been a simple-minded affair. Some of the strategies Thraka had employed had been brilliant. Inspired. And he had made moves since then that not only might as well have been signed, they had been aimed at me, personally.

I had a nemesis. We were facing each other over a regicide board the size of the galaxy.

To admit this was disgusting. To deny it would be criminally foolish. And utterly political.

For the political mind, the years of my search had been an eternity. Attention is difficult to sustain, and easy to lose to the next new and urgent conflict. Each new emergency obliterates the memory of all others. Every year that passed without a new attack on Armageddon meant the danger was that much more remote. There were so many other urgencies of war calling. Spending time, treasury and men in the pursuit of a spent force was nonsensical.

It was perfectly true that there was no shortage of dire threats to the Imperium. I would never be so foolish as to minimise them. But it was perfectly false that Thraka was a spent force. It was suicidal to think so. He was a threat that was unlike anything else in the galaxy, and the fact that we had driven him away from Armageddon changed nothing. He had almost hammered a spike through the heart of the Imperium. That should have been reason enough to devote all necessary resources to his elimination. But what was worse, if such a thing were possible, was that if there was ever to be an ork warboss who could unite the entire barbaric species, then Thraka was that ork. As much as it disgusted me even to articulate the thought, there was a monstrous truth that had to be faced: Thraka had the potential to become the ork emperor.

That possibility should have been obvious to the greenest trooper. It probably was. But for too many in the high places, whether lords or admirals or generals, it seemed to be a possibility too awful to contemplate. Better to pretend it did not exist. Easier to believe it was impossible that the orks would ever follow a single leader, and so destroy us all. So much nicer to bury your head in the sand, and avoid all the fuss and bother of actually doing something about Thraka.

I had to fight tooth and nail for every tank, every rifle, and every man of my army, every single day since the enthusiasm for the crusade had evaporated in its second year. Somehow, I found men of will, intelligence and vision. But they weren’t enough. I also needed men of influence, and for the sake of a mission so important that no compromise should have been brooked, I had been forced to do just that. There were many – too many – colonels with me who held their ranks by the sole virtue of their noble birth. Our venture had been plagued by mistakes, accidents and idiotic judgement calls. But numbers, faith and weaponry had seen us through. Even Golgotha, which waged war against us with dust and storm as viciously as any greenskin horde, could not stop us.

Now the orks were running. Now Thraka was at bay.

Thunder, deep-throated as an earthquake, boomed in the distance ahead. The Baneblades were unleashing hell upon the orks. The flashes of their bombardment were bigger and brighter than the anger in the clouds. I wanted to be at the front with those magnificent tanks. When we had mustered on the Hadron Plateau, I had climbed on top of one of them to address the regiments. Vox-units relayed my words to the entire army, but the image I presented to all within viewing range was important, too. Throne, but I knew the importance of image. I also knew its curse and its weight. Doing what had to be done, I chose the Fortress of Arrogance as my pulpit. Even among the glories of the Baneblades, it stood out. It was a weapon of peerless art, a masterpiece of war. In keeping with its name, it disdained camouflage. Instead, it was black as the void. It was the very idea of power, summoned into material being and given metal form. It even had a true pulpit on its turret. When I stood there, I felt the strength of the tank surging through my blood. When I spoke, it was with the fire of true inspiration. I descended from the Fortress of Arrogance with a regret that bordered on bereavement.

Now I gazed with longing in the direction of the choir of tanks. But the Chimera had been outfitted for mobile command, and it was not strong enough to be at the tip of the spear. Communications on Golgotha were difficult at best, and I had to remain within the limited vox-range of as much of the force as possible. So I had to content myself with seeing the flashes of our strikes, and hearing the booming drumbeat of our advance.

I was not content. But I was satisfied. Baneblades were a rare prize, and the mere fact that we had more than one was a significant victory in itself. They more than justified every deal, compromise, and soul-wearying bargain I had made. They were turning Thraka’s army into pulp and cinder. The orks had nothing that could stand up to them. Not here, anyway. Not within useful range.

More war thunder, like an answer to the Baneblades, both larger and more distant, and this time from behind. I looked back the way we had come. Kilometres beyond the marching troops and growling vehicles, beyond the line of hills we had crossed hours before, visible only as blurred silhouettes in the grit of the Golgothan atmosphere, gods clashed. Our Titans grappled with their debased ork counterparts. The official designation of the ork machines was Gargant. The word was ugly, dismissive, and deliberately so. The Officio Strategos did not seek to dignify the enemy, nor should it have. But there was nothing to dismiss in the danger that the Gargants represented. They were colossal totemic monsters. As the Warlord-class Titans were to men – the human form rendered sublime in size and destructive power – so the Gargants were to the orks. They were tributes to the savage gods of the greenskins, towering, lumbering, barrel-shaped mountains of steel and cannon. They could have reduced all of our regiments to ash. The Titans had engaged them, and the giants had been locked in hellish stalemate for two days now. We had moved through that battlefield like a trail of ants. I had felt insignificant, my actions a trivial grace note to the awful symphony of the giants. I had been privileged to witness, once more, the struggle of myths, and had been humbled. To see the Warlords stride over our columns was to feel an awe so great, it moved many troopers to tears.

We had pushed past them. We needed momentum above all. If we could take out Thraka, the ork resistance would collapse. So we had left the god-machines behind. The fury of their war followed us, light and sound rolling over us like the death-cries of suns. But theirs was not the vital heart of the war. Their battle, in the end, was a parenthesis. Thraka was not there.

With me, backing up the Baneblades, were three regiments. Immediately behind the superheavies came the 52nd armoured regiment of Aighe Mortis. Following them, scouring the planet of any remaining xenos trace, were the 117th Armageddon mechanised infantry and the 66th Mordian infantry. Hundreds of vehicles, thousands and thousands of men, the pride of the Imperium marching with purpose and discipline, exterminating savagery with faith. They were a sight that could move a stone to song. When I close my eye, I can still see them with a clarity as sharp as pain.

The waste sickens me.

There was a tap on my lower leg. I dropped into the Chimera’s compartment. Space that would normally have held twelve troopers had been cut in half by vox-equipment and map tables. Even with the powerful units here, communications were hit-and-miss. Golgotha’s dust eroded transmissions the same way it did lungs and engines. Anything farther than a few thousand metres, perhaps a bit more with exceptional line of sight, was hopelessly unreliable. It had been necessary to establish a relay system stretching all the way back to the landing site on the Hadron Plateau. It was a precarious line, ridiculously stretched and vulnerable, but there had been no time to come up with an alternative. It was working, though. Imperfectly, but with just enough reliability to make coordination of the entire expedition possible.

‘It’s Colonel Rogge, commissar,’ vox-officer Lieutenant Beren Diethelm told me.

‘Here we go,’ Erwin Lanner, at the Chimera’s steering levers, called out.

I made sure the vox-unit wasn’t transmitting as I took it from Diethelm. ‘Sergeant,’ I told Lanner, ‘you are displaying appalling disrespect for a superior officer.’

Over the vibrating rumble of the engine, I couldn’t hear Lanner snort, but I knew he had. He was a short, squat man with arms whose strength and reach had been the doom of many an ork and unthinking sparring partner. His face was narrow, and his features had been sharp until accumulations of scar tissue had turned them into a gnarled fist. He had been with me since Armageddon, and his insubordination was matched only by his loyalty. I had never met anyone less intimidated by a commissar’s uniform. He had no reason to be. If every Guardsman were equal to Lanner in bravery, skill and faith, we would have cleansed the galaxy of our enemies centuries ago. He should have risen far beyond sergeant, but he had refused to leave my side. The idea of someone else driving my conveyance, whatever it might be, was, for him, a personal affront. He had turned down one promotion after another, and when he was not given a choice, he indulged in such egregious misbehaviour that not only did he ensure that he remained as he was, only my intervention saved him from summary execution. For my pains, my reward was a barrage of outrages too studied to be real. They were theatre for my benefit, and it was a theatre that I needed, especially since Armageddon. It was one thing to be aware of one’s own legend. Lanner made sure I didn’t believe in it.

The sergeant had no faith in Colonel Kelner Rogge. I understood. Rogge commanded a fourth regiment, the rearguard of our principle advance. The Aumet 23rd Armoured had been acquired at a price, and being saddled with the inexperienced sixth son of High Lord Gheret Rogge of Aumet was that price. Colonel Rogge had been with us a year and he had, to my pleasant surprise, acquitted himself well. Lanner remained sceptical, but I knew he would never forgive Rogge the sin of his noble blood. What even Lanner could not take from Rogge was his commitment to our cause. I had assumed, during the negotiations with the father, that the Lord of Aumet’s goal had been the prestigious placement of a son who was far enough down the line of inheritance that his loss could be risked, but whose path still had to bring honour to the family name. Within minutes of meeting the colonel, I realised that I had been wrong. He wanted to be part of my crusade as much as I needed Aumet’s tanks. Kelner Rogge believed in what we were doing. He didn’t have the experience, but he had the fire.

The rearguard mission might not have been the sort that would stoke that fire, but it minimised the risk that a novice colonel presented to the rest of the army. We had a large reserve of Leman Russ battle tanks to draw upon, and all I asked of Rogge was that he keep pace and protect our rear. Lanner, I knew, was expecting Rogge to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at the earliest opportunity. He hadn’t yet. But the sergeant’s view of things was, on a number of fronts, so close to my own that I couldn’t avoid a slight wave of apprehension as I spoke into the vox. ‘Go ahead, colonel.’

‘Commissar, I’m sorry, but we’ve run into bit of a delay.’

Those words will never leave my dreams. They announced the loss of an entire planet.

2. Rogge

‘If you can’t fix it, get it out of the way,’ Rogge told Captain Yann Kerentz. ‘Blow it up if you must.’

Kerentz blinked at the suggestion of wilfully destroying a Leman Russ. ‘It’s only the treads–’ he began.

‘Which we can hardly take the time to deal with at this moment, and certainly not in this place.’ Did the man not understand the meaning of the word ‘urgency’? The Aumet Armoured had a mission, and it was not going to be stymied by the stupid mechanical failure of a single tank. Its treads had disintegrated at the worst possible moment. It was the lead vehicle of the lead column, and the route led through a narrow canyon pass before opening up again. There was barely room for two vehicles abreast, and this one had not only stopped right in the bottleneck, it had swerved sideways. ‘The wheels can’t find any traction at all?’

Kerentz shook his head. ‘No, sir. We might be able to push it with a dozer blade–’

‘For the length of the pass?’ Rogge poured on the scorn. The defile was two kilometres long. ‘And then what? We’ll have to abandon it anyway. No. Destroy it now. I want us on the move again in five minutes.’

From the turret of his Leman Russ Vanquisher, the Condemning Voice, Rogge watched Kerentz walk back towards the front of the line of vehicles. The captain’s gait was stiff with displeasure. Rogge grimaced. It was his duty to make the hard decisions. He had made the correct one. Every second, the main body of Yarrick’s force was widening the distance between them. The commissar had been clear: the advance would not stop, not pause, not even slow. The momentum was with the humans, victory loomed, but the orks would seize on the slightest hesitation. Rogge had his mission. It was his responsibility to complete it.

So he would.

Kerentz carried out the order. There was a distant crump of the tank’s destruction. But it was ten minutes, not five, before the tanks were moving forward. Rogge cursed under his breath. He did not drop down into the turret basket. He stared into the night ahead, at the vehicle lights turned into dirty smears by the billowing dust, and tried to master his fraying temper. He didn’t want his crew to see him off his stride. All he could think about was the lost time. They would have to step up the regiment’s speed by a large measure to catch up. The thought that he would be found wanting tortured him.

There was also the terror of arriving to find the war finished. Son, his lord and father would ask, what role did you play in the Golgotha crusade? And he would answer, Father, I had a nice drive in my tank.

His face burned with the anticipation of shame. He willed the regiment forward. Forward to Yarrick, forward to triumph and the glory of Aumet and the Imperium. Forward to the proof of his worth.

The Condemning Voice emerged from the pass. Like all the regimental command vehicles, it was in the middle of the advance, so communication with the entire regiment was, if not assured, at least as solid as possible. There was still half the regiment back in the pass, and the leading units were slowing down again. Rogge pounded the roof of the turret with his fist, winced, then lowered himself into the basket. The interior of the tank was a din of engine roar and vibrating metal, but it was easier to listen to his ear-bead here than it was outside. He was about to bark for Kerentz to be put on the line when the captain addressed him first. ‘Colonel,’ Kerentz said, ‘we have just encountered a branching path going deeper into the mountains.’

‘How wide?’

‘Good for three vehicles, maybe four.’

‘Signs of activity?’

‘None, sir. But the pass makes a sharp turn. We can’t see very far down it.’

Rogge hesitated, torn between two necessities. He couldn’t protect the army group’s rear if he didn’t catch up, but he wouldn’t be doing his duty, either, if he ignored the pass. The delay in following that route, and for the Emperor knew how long… ‘All engines stop,’ he ordered. ‘I want complete silence.’

The convoy of tanks halted, coughing fumes as the engines shut down. In less than a minute, the entire regiment was motionless, and the only sound was the ticking of cooling metal.

‘Kerentz,’ Rogge voxed. ‘I want a full auspex scan, and I want you to listen. If there are greenskins up that way, we should be able to hear them.’

‘Sir, with respect, the wind and atmospheric conditions–’

‘Those are my orders, captain. Execute them.’

Rogge waited, picturing the war he was missing, willing the orks to be sensible and be off with the rest of their fellows. The more he thought about it, the more he realised he was wasting time. Even if there were a few of the beasts hiding in ambush, what could they hope to achieve? The vast bulk of their army was in pell-mell retreat.

Kerentz checked back in. ‘No readings, no sounds, colonel. But–’

‘Good.’ No orks. And even if there were, they were showing half a brain and staying put. And even, even if they were stupid and attacked, they couldn’t amount to a threat. It simply wasn’t possible. The decision was easy. There was only one to make. ‘Move on,’ he said. ‘Full speed.’ Risky, at night, but the way was clear, the rocky valleys giving them a clear shot toward the rest of the war.

The eerie quiet of the stilled regiment erupted with the battle-hungry roar of a hundred tanks. The sound echoed off the surrounding cliff faces, turning into a massive, formless din. Aumet’s sons surged forward. Rogge climbed back up through the hatch. He sat behind the turret’s heavy stubber and watched the craggy landscape roll past. He saw the break on the right, in the north cliff. His gut churned, just a little, as he passed it. It was a passage into the empty, crimson night of Golgotha, and was swallowed by darkness after a few hundred metres. He stared into it with what he felt was righteous confidence. He had made the right and only choice.

Still, as the gap fell behind, he turned and watched until it dropped out of his sight. He continued to face back until he judged that the last of the regiment had passed the defile. Then he turned to look forward again, and wish that anticipation alone could accelerate the armoured march. He should contact Yarrick, he thought. Let him know that they were coming.

The vox exploded. Reports and curses came in at such a flood over his ear-bead that meaning broke apart, becoming fragments of panic. Rogge whirled around. At first, he could see nothing wrong. The line of tanks stretched out behind him into the night. But then he heard it. He heard the enormity of his mistake. Its sound was that of a mechanised avalanche, rising above wind and engine, clutching the entire regiment in its grasp. It filled Rogge’s ears and his mind. It filled his soul. And as it hammered at his chest, drawing closer and closer, it became visible. He saw the avalanche of metal and brutes chew its way up the regiment.

As the horror drew closer, the din acquired meaning. The rampage of xenos and guns and machines sounded horribly like laughter.

CHAPTER TWO

TRAMPLED

1. Rogge

The force that stormed out of the pass and onto the Aumet regiment was no mere ambush party. It was a horde such as Rogge had never imagined. He had no idea of its full scale, but the war machines that led it would only be in the service of a full army. Brushing aside their smaller brethren, crushing any of their own infantry who didn’t move fast enough, were superheavy tanks. Battle fortresses. They were as large as the Baneblades, but were twisted, vulgar monsters. Bristling with secondary guns, they were also festooned with pipes belching oily black smoke, as if a manufactorum had turned itself into a rolling harbinger of doom.

Lumbering behind the battle fortresses came worse monsters. Stompas. Rogge had heard the designation often enough, and laughed at it every time. He had seen hololiths of the machines, and laughed then, too, at the crude design: the slapdash overlapping of the metal plates into a monstrous skirt, the redundant piling on of armament, the pitifully savage attempts at art that gave the things horned visages in the image of the greenskin gods.

He wasn’t laughing now. Though the Stompas were smaller than the Gargants, he had only seen the truly titanic machines from a distance. The Stompas were close. They were here. And there were no Titans anywhere in sight.

As the green tide clanked and roared toward him, a psychic wave of ork presence rushed ahead of it. It was overwhelming. It shut Rogge down. His limbs tingled, then went numb from anaesthetising terror. He seemed to float out of his head. He observed his reactions with a stupefied detachment. His jaw sagged open. His eyes widened. His hands hung limply at his sides. His strings were cut, and he could do nothing but watch as the greenskin wave washed over his forces. The night shook with the deep, battering rhythm of obliteration.

There was another noise, much smaller, but somehow more irritating. Rogge realised it came from his ear-bead. The vox-network was screaming. Orders to retreat collided with orders to counter-attack. He heard his name over and over again, in transmissions that were first questions, then pleas, then curses. He blinked several times, reintegrating himself. He shook away the lethargy. ‘All units,’ he began. He found the steel and determination his voice needed. He did not find the decision he needed even more. ‘All units,’ he said again, with such force that a command must surely follow.

He saw three tanks attempt a coordinated response to the nearest Stompa. They were the Extirpation, the Final Toll and the Advent of Silence. He knew the crews well. They were all far more experienced than he was. He had worried they resented his command. Now he blessed their initiative. They were still moving away from the ork forces, but had swivelled turrets to the rear. They fired in such close succession, it was as if the shells were a single blow against the greenskin machine. The Stompa rocked back a single step. Its front armour dimpled. Then it moved forward again, shaking the earth with its steps. Its left arm was a cannon, and it now spoke its fury. The shell punched through the top of the Final Toll. The interior explosion was followed by an even bigger blast as fuel and ammunition cooked off. The tank blew apart.

Even as it fired its cannon, the Stompa swung its right arm at the Extirpation. At the end of the arm was a chainfist larger than a Space Marine. It sliced into the flank of the Leman Russ. The shriek of metal cutting metal scraped the night raw and bleeding. Rogge gazed in horror, his reactions slowing to a crawl as the images of war overloaded his senses. The Stompa butchered the Extirpation as if it were a living thing. The tank shuddered and bucked as though in pain, and then the chainfist found the flesh inside. The screams of men joined the choir of tortured metal. Blood splashed out of the vehicle.

The Stompa didn’t bother with the third Leman Russ. An onrushing battle fortress had rammed it with such force, it had knocked the Advent of Silence on its side. Ork infantry swarmed over the crippled tank, bashing futilely at its armour until one of them arrived with an armour-piercing rocket.

‘All units,’ Rogge said again. His throat was dry. He was whispering. ‘All units…’ He trailed off. He had nothing to say.

It didn’t matter. There was nothing to say. The horde rolled over the regiment, crushing, annihilating, as if the Ishawar Mountains themselves were delivering the blows. Rogge pulled the vox-bead out of his ear, blotting out the cries and demands. Resistance to the orks sprang up at the company level, but it lacked coherence. Those companies were stones against the tide. They could not stop the flood. They simply survived a bit longer.

The storm surge reached Rogge. He was distantly aware that his crew was firing the Condemning Voice’s gun. He didn’t care. As a shambling monster twenty metres high loomed over him, he was granted a sliver of grace: he was too numb to feel shame.

2. Yarrick

Our advance slowed. For less than one minute, I had the luxury of believing that we had the greenskins boxed in, and that the end was on the horizon. Then vox-traffic from Rogge’s regiment turned to chaos. And then we stopped.

The vox-unit convulsed with static and cacophony. The messages, each more urgent than the others, smeared into white noise. I let Diethelm do his job, a sick certainty growing in my chest. The word from the forward regiments was easy to sort out. The orks had stopped running. At the precise moment of the vox meltdown at Rogge’s end, the orks had turned and hurled themselves back against us.

Colonel Sinburne, commanding the Mortisian 52nd, tried to sound hopeful. ‘It’s a final stand, commissar,’ he voxed. ‘They’re desperate. They know this is the end.’

‘Is it?’ I asked. I wanted the truth, not a fantasy.

‘They’re hitting us hard,’ he admitted, ‘but–’

I cut him off. ‘Listen to the foe, colonel. What do you hear?’

He came back after a few seconds with the answer I expected and dreaded. ‘They’re laughing,’ he said.

The situation to our rear took longer to establish. ‘Colonel Rogge is not answering, sir,’ Diethelm reported.

That, in itself, told me that things had gone awry. But I needed to know why and I needed to know how. ‘Then find me someone who is.’

Diethelm did. He performed well, and there were enough officers with the Aumet 23rd who knew their sacred duty. Many of them died letting us know what was happening. Their transmissions were fragments of tragedy.

‘… we don’t know if we’re retreating or counter–’

‘… multiple Stompas and battle fortresses, we can’t–’

‘Who is in command? Who is in command?’

‘There’s nothing left! Throne take that bastard! I’ll feed him his–’

I stared at the map table as Diethelm called out the updates. Like a hololith gathering dimension and resolution, the picture formed in my mind’s eye. I felt my lips pull back in a grimace as I realised how badly we had erred. The force that was tearing up the Aumet tanks was an army fully as large as the one we were chasing. Thraka had managed to keep this second deployment hidden in the mountains, secret from us. We had blundered into one of the greatest ambushes in the history of the Imperium. For all my preaching, for all that I knew better, I had underestimated Thraka. Once again, the ork had outplayed, had out-thought, we humans.

We were caught in a pincer manoeuvre. The valley in which the bulk of our forces now advanced was long and wide, but it was still a valley, with orks coming at us from both ends. Even the foothills of the Ishawar were high enough that we couldn’t go over them. We were boxed in. Thraka had done to me precisely what I had thought I was doing to him.

We had a chance only if the frontline units could bring the war to an immediate end. I could read the signs, and knew the odds were the same as my growing a new right arm, but I spoke to Sinburne all the same. ‘Colonel, do you have any expectation of being able to kill Ghazghkull Thraka in the next few minutes?’

‘With the blessing of the Emperor, there is no telling what we might–’

‘Do you even know where he is?’

‘No,’ Sinburne admitted.

I could hear how frustrated he was. He was grief-stricken at the idea of having to give up so close to the goal. But the reality was this: we had not been pursuing Thraka. He had been reeling us in. Unless Sinburne had the ork lined up within the sights of a dozen tanks, there would be no defeating him this day. ‘Disengage, colonel,’ I said.

‘Commissar,’ he began.

‘We will need you here.’

There was no response. Static scraped at my ear, formless sound shaping a bad truth. I had Diethelm search channels until he found me a tank company captain. It was Captain Hantlyn, and he rode the Baneblade Fearful Sublime. ‘Captain,’ I said, ‘you now have command of the armoured regiment.’ And I gave him the last orders any soldier wanted to hear.

There was no choice. Going forward was suicide: the chain of valleys led only to a cul-de-sac, the end-point where we thought we had cornered the orks. We had to retreat, and we had to punch our way through the second army. There was no question of hope, only of necessity.

Gather our strength, then. By now, Diethelm had all the regimental commanders on the vox. ‘This is no fighting retreat,’ I told them. ‘You are to return with all speed and prepare to re-engage at the rear.’ With the Baneblades, we might stand a chance, not of victory, but of successful retreat.

Might.

We began the murderous process of reversing the direction of an entire army. Thousands and thousands and thousands of men and vehicles, a sea of war power that would stretch to the horizon on an open plain, now had to arrest all momentum and turn back the way they had come. The perfection of discipline kept the disorder to a minimum. Unforgiving reality meant there was still plenty to go around. The worst was the vehicles. Leman Russ and Manticore, Chimera and Basilisk, they all had turning circles and little room in which to make them. Even with the priority being granted the HQ Chimera, it took us a full minute to re-orientate. Where before the Imperium’s might had flowed across Golgotha like a roaring cataract, now there was nothing but eddying molasses.

I knew that my commands had been death sentences for countless loyal Guardsmen as the greenskins pressed their advantage. I wished again to be at the front. Before, I had wanted to witness Thraka’s end. Now, I would have shared the awful moment of retreat with men who had given everything to this cause. I owed them that much.

I owed the Imperium more, though. Every human alive did. And at this juncture, my sacrifice would serve no purpose. I would be failing in my duty to serve the Emperor. The romantic gesture, then, would be nothing less than treason.

We were disciplined but slow. The orks were beings of speed. Discipline was a barely grasped concept for them. There was nothing to slow their advance except the mire of human blood beneath their feet. And so it happened. The armoured regiment had not reached the new front line yet, the rest of the army had not even begun to march in its new direction, and the ork onslaught fell on us. I had climbed through the Chimera’s hatch again, and though I was thousands of metres from the initial collision of the armies, I heard it. I felt it, too: the entire floor of the valley vibrated from the shock of the impact.

We began to move forward, and we were marching into the jaws of a meat grinder. But the choice now was to advance and die, or wait and die. We advanced, the only route of honour, and the route of our only hope.

A hope that took us through battle fortresses and Stompas. I had to stifle bitter laughter.

‘If we find Colonel Rogge,’ Lanner’s voice crackled on my ear-bead, ‘please grant me the privilege of killing him myself.’

‘That honour will be mine,’ I snapped. We needed armour to fight armour, and we had already lost the regiment that should have been, at the very least, holding back the orks long enough for the Baneblades to arrive. Mechanised infantry was nothing against what Thraka had unleashed.

And still we headed for the slaughter, picking up speed. Within minutes, I could see the shapes of our destruction. The Stompas towered over our forces. A Titan would have blasted the monstrosities back to scrap metal, but our god-machines were still distant, still caught in unwavering stalemate. And here, the Stompas were the kings of the battlefield. They were horned beasts, with pipes jutting up from their shoulders, spewing smoke. At irregular intervals, taking turns, they would shake the valley with a deafening sound, part howl, part furnace roar, part raging horn. Every time a Stompa roared, the swarming foot soldiers took up the cry and hurled themselves at us with renewed war-fever.

My Chimera reached the fullness of the chaos. The green tide lapped at the vehicle’s treads. I manned the turret’s stubber. I was an awkward gunner, with only one arm, but with the harness holding me firmly to the gun, it turned where I did, and it was impossible to miss. I pulled the trigger and scythed down the rushing beasts. My body shook with each shell, the rapidly heating gun burned my hand, the acrid stink of fyceline fumes stabbed my nostrils, and it was all good pain, honest pain, the purging hurt of war that meant my enemies were dying. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an ork boss flank the Chimera and launch himself towards the roof. A quick twitch to the right and I would have cut him in half. But suddenly that wasn’t good enough. I was thrumming with hatred for Rogge, for myself, for the orks. The xenos filth were revelling in their triumph, and I would be damned if I did not make them suffer. So I let the boss land. I unhooked myself from the harness as he took a step towards the turret. Then I jumped up from the hatch and stood on the roof, too, making myself as visible as possible. I raised my right arm, brandishing the battle claw that had been mine since Hades Hive. ‘You dare?’ I shouted. ‘Do you know who I am?’ I was Yarrick, who had sent the orks fleeing from Hades. I was Yarrick, who killed with an evil eye. And so I did.

The ruby laser from my bale eye pierced upward through the ork’s gaping maw and blew off the top of his head. The beast’s jaw sagged with idiot surprise and the body twirled heavily before toppling from the Chimera. I turned my gaze on the orks below. They knew me, and they hesitated. Lanner drove through that hesitation, crushing greenskins to paste beneath our treads. I took the stubber again while the gunner, a trooper by the name of Koben, opened up with the cannon. We blasted our way clear. We created a path to our doom.

But I would not accept that conclusion. Nor would my crew. Nor would any of the men who marched with us. We were not Space Marines. Individually, we were nothing. Collectively, we were the will of the Emperor, and His will acknowledged no obstacle. We would smash through the orks.

That is, if will alone were enough.

We closed in on the full crush of the battle, and it spread to envelop us. I was surrounded not just by the green tide, but by the rising, turbulent flood of war itself. In that vortex, organisation broke down, giving way to the random, the chance, the improvised, the chaotic and yes, sometimes, the fated. But the vortex didn’t mean the abandonment of strategy. I looked ahead, at the reality of the orks’ giant war machines, and sought my strategy, because, by the Throne, I would find one.

I saw it. The exit from the valley, the route we had to follow, lay to the east. A Stompa, striding off the pace from the others, blocked the path. Between it and the Chimera, there was a company of Basilisk mobile artillery platforms. Their earthshaker cannons might penetrate the Stompa’s armour. But they weren’t tanks. Their own armour wasn’t designed for front-line combat, and they were open-topped. I could see that their crews were trying to manoeuvre them into firing positions, dropping the cannons for short-range destruction, and the orks were hitting them hard before they could become a threat. The air was thick with rockets. Several of the vehicles were already burning wrecks. The crews of many others were being cut to pieces.

‘Make for the Basilisks,’ I told Lanner. ‘To all within reach,’ I spoke on the regimental channels, ‘protect the artillery crews. Give them the chance to save us all.’

Infantry and Chimeras converged on the Basilisks. Men ignored their own safety to gun down the orks clambering over the gun crews. But the orks were numberless, and a cannon-boasting battlewagon smashed into the fray. In the time it took our vehicle to arrive within range, the artillery company had been decimated. Vehicles, the battlewagon among them, were massive, twisted metal corpses. The shafts of the guns reached, useless and mute, for the blind heavens. Ahead of us, the men of one of the last Basilisks grappled with the orks, their doom a simple matter of seconds away.

Koben fired. The Chimera’s main gun was as nothing beside a Leman Russ’s battlecannon, but it still packed an explosive punch, and the shot was a colossal risk. He could have finished the orks’ job for them. But he placed the shell with a precision that showed there had never been a risk after all. There was a geyser of shredded greenskin bodies a few metres from the rear of the Basilisk. The orks just beyond the explosion staggered, stunned. The artillery crew pushed their besiegers back. Stubber rounds and las-fire slashed in from all sides and cut deeper into the ork assault. Then the Basilisk’s gun was trained on the Stompa.

The report was deafening. The recoil was a giant’s blow on the ground, and the Basilisk jerked back a few metres. The shell was designed to shatter bunkers. Even so, against this kind of a foe, we needed something very close to a miracle. We received one. The Emperor’s hand guided that shell. It hit the Stompa, and I blinked as day seared the night. There was a gigantic bloom of fire, as if a volcano had erupted over the battlefield. The upper half of the Stompa vanished. Chunks of metal, and some of flesh, rained down. I called for a concerted rush at the gap we had created. The order was hardly necessary. The moment of victory called all eyes and hearts. A roar of hope and faith louder than the orks’ rabid howling came from the men of Armageddon and Mordian and Aighe Mortis. With the strength of desperation and renewed purpose, we pushed the larger ork army back. We pushed through the orks. The speartip of the infantry reached the mouth of the valley.

And ran straight into a battle fortress.

The ork superheavy’s arrival had all the grotesque flair of that race. It charged in from the pass faster than any tank should move. It was as if a voidship engine had been mounted in the vehicle. Its front actually rose in the air as it crested a low rise, and didn’t descend before the fortress had raced over another several dozen metres. Men vanished beneath it and were smeared over the crude teeth of its front armour. I found myself staring straight at the mouth of its immense turret gun. The cannon dwarfed the Basilisk’s weapon, and it gave us the ork answer to our blow.

Day again, much closer. I was in the heart of day, and the boom of the cannon was so huge it seemed to issue from inside my head. The blow felt like air that had turned to granite. I was flying. The world spun. I couldn’t think. Everything was fire and wind and hammering. I hit the ground as if dropped from space.

CHAPTER THREE

ARROGANCE

1. Yarrick

Pain was a million jagged fragments. I took a breath, inhaling scorching heat and dust, and the fragments glowed red. Get up, I told myself. This is nothing. You’ve known worse. You aren’t going to let a minor irritant stand in the way of your duty. Now get up!

I staggered to my feet, squinting at the maelstrom around me. The battle fortress’s shot had blown away the central core of the Chimera and knocked the transport end over end. I had been thrown clear. The vehicle was on its back, its flanks gaping with fire, its front armour buckled and torn like tin. The Basilisk had vanished. Where it had been, there was now a field of warped and blackened sculpture. Flames guttered on all sides. Bodies of men and orks lay burned, smashed and torn. The air was still filled with the din of combat, but in this space, in the hundred or so metres in any direction, there was a pause. It was the peace of the murdered, the quiet of scorched earth. The battle fortress had come to a stop when it fired. Its turret swivelled, looking for new meat, but here and now, there were only tiny figures like me scurrying around. Nothing of interest. The engine rumbled as the gigantic tank’s attention turned to fresh killing fields.

I scrambled through the blazing hell to the Chimera. There would be nothing to salvage there but lives, and likely none of those, but I had to try. My duty, in this moment, had shrunk to the few metres around me. They were all I could reach, along with, Throne have mercy, maybe some of the men who fought by my side. As I came up to the wreck, I saw Lanner fighting his way out of the hole in the front armour. I rushed to him and pulled him out. The right side of his face was burned, and he was bleeding from a dozen wounds, but nothing was broken. He took a few steps away from the Chimera. I turned back to it.

He stopped me. ‘There’s no one else, commissar,’ he said.

I turned to face him. ‘Down!’ I yelled. Lanner dropped flat. The charging ork swung a massive chainaxe, missed, and overshot, momentum carrying the filthy xenos to me. I hit him in the face with my power claw. I punched clean through his skull.

The corpse fell. Behind it, I saw the battle fortress. It had not left. It was heading for us, gun at the ready. I remember that I wondered, sourly, why we were worth killing. Perhaps the crew had recognised me, and I was the recipient of a grotesque honour.

The turret erupted. But not because it had fired. A massive armour-piercing round had struck it. Flames shot out of the hatch, and the gun was suddenly askew. I whirled around. A shape burst through a wall of flame. It was as huge as the ork tank, its treads alone as high as a man. It was a shadow made of steel. It was death.

The Fortress of Arrogance fired again, catching the battle fortress in the flank, tearing open a gaping hole in the armour. The tank ground to a halt. Unbelievably, the turret rotated, the torqued gun aiming at the Arrogance. Even the orks weren’t stupid enough to attempt a shot, I thought, even as I realised that they were easily stubborn enough to do so. I hit the ground beside Lanner.

Time and again, I have seen ork technology that functioned for no other reason than the sheer belief of the greenskins that it would work. But even their mad confidence couldn’t overcome this basic a physical reality. I heard a muffled fffwhump, and the entire battle fortress shook with the force of the blast that was channelled back inside the tank. Then two more explosions, gigantic concussions as first ammunition, and then the engine, blew up. The pressure wave of the superheavy’s destruction pressed us hard into the red dirt.

Then we were up, sputtering, before the ringing had faded from our ears, or the dazzle of the glare from our eyes. The Fortress of Arrogance had stopped. Its hatch opened for us as we climbed up. As we did, I noticed that the Baneblade bore some wounds of battle. Its armour was gouged and scorched, and had been penetrated in at least one spot. Inside, there were more wounds. An ork shell had pierced the Arrogance’s hide and, fortunately, gone right through the other side without detonating. But it had killed the driver, and the tank’s commander, Sergeant Hanussen, had taken the controls. He relinquished them to Lanner with visible relief. Lanner was a man in love as he settled into his seat.

I turned to Hanussen. ‘How are our communications?’

‘Spotty, commissar, but workable. I have already sent out word that you are alive.’ When I nodded for him to continue, he said, ‘There are at least three more Stompas and an equal number of battle fortresses against us. Some are already in the valley, and some are still coming up the pass.’

I grunted. ‘We can’t fight them there. Too confined. We’ll have to wait for all of the primary threats to reach the valley, and try to break through. How are the other Baneblades faring?’

‘The Final Dawn is still fighting. We’ve lost the others.’

I cursed. The Fearful Sublime was gone, too, along with Captain Hantlyn. The leadership of the regiments kept being decapitated. ‘Who took command?’ I asked.

‘I did,’ said Hanussen.

And he had made it this far. ‘Good.’

‘There’s more, commissar. Colonel Helm has been trying to reach you. Something about orbital bombardment.’

I frowned. ‘What are we targeting?’

‘We aren’t the ones doing it.’

I grabbed the vox. Seconds we didn’t have were slipping away. But I put my trust in the men in the fray while I learned the broader situation. The curse of seeing the greater panorama of war is that one can never look away.

Static of one relay after another, the chain still blessedly functioning, and I was through to the Hadron Plateau and speaking to Helm. ‘What is happening, colonel?’

‘Commissar, the orks have a space hulk.’

It took an effort not to close my eye in despair. I kept my face rigid. A space hulk? When we had arrived in-system, the orks had had only a few transports at high anchor over Golgotha. We had summarily dispatched them. The orks had no forces except the surface ones, so no reinforcements, no resupply… Only they had. Thraka had a space hulk. It was one of those monstrous agglomerations of stolen and salvaged ships attached to an asteroid core that had been the primary source of troops and materiel for Thraka’s invasion of Armageddon. We had destroyed it, and so dealt a crippling blow to his power.

We’d been naïve. It seemed that we were always so when it came to that ork.

He had another. It was a chilling testament to the extent of his power and influence that he could have two such bases. And that he had managed to conceal it until now, hitting us on yet another front at the worst possible moment, was an even more frightening sign of not just strength, but skill.

Helm was still speaking. ‘The fleet is being hit hard, sir. We don’t have the ships to fight something like that. It’s also bombarding the surface, primarily the sites being contested by our Titan forces.’

‘What is your evaluation?’

‘Sir, we are losing.’

There was a charged quality to his silence as he waited for my answer. To speak so openly of defeat to a commissar was normally suicidal, and I have shot men for expressing sentiments much less definite than that. It took a brave man to be honest at such a high risk to himself. But I had asked him for the truth, and he had given it to me. Helm had proven himself an officer of integrity on Armageddon, when he had risked his military career and worse by standing against the treacherous idiocies of Governor von Strab. I appreciated that he was just as willing to tell me what I did not wish to, but absolutely must, hear.

In this case, he told me what I had already deduced. The facts were horrific in their simplicity. With a space hulk, Thraka had more than the upper hand. The outcome of this war was decided. The only question that remained was what, if anything, we could salvage. The next words I spoke tasted like ash and deadened my soul. They hurt all the more for the ultimate responsibility I bore. This was my crusade. I still did not doubt its righteousness or its vital necessity. But I had led us here, to Golgotha. It was under my command that disaster had befallen us. Whatever the role individual officers had played (and I did wonder about Rogge’s total silence), this was my war, and the hated words were mine to speak. ‘I am issuing an order for immediate evacuation. Colonel, take the men and materiel you can and abandon the Golgotha system. Do it now.’

There was a pause. In it was the weight of Helm’s despair. Then he said, ‘Commissar, the men will refuse to leave without you.’

I was simultaneously honoured, humbled and outraged by the promise of disobedience. I knew better than to bluster or threaten. The situation required a solution, not a tantrum. ‘Have any transports landed in the last few minutes?’

‘Three,’ he answered.

‘Then I was aboard one of them. I am directing the evacuation. I am departing with our heroic troops. Understood?’ There was no answer except a disbelieving silence. ‘Understood?’ I demanded.

‘Yes, commissar.’

‘Maintain the fiction as long as you can. I’m sorry, Teodor.’ I was ordering an honest man to lie. And the poor bastard was going to be stuck with the responsibility of preserving my legend longer than I would be. ‘The Emperor protects.’

‘The Emperor–’

A huge burst of static that became an unending gale. There would be no further contact with Hadron Base. Outside the Fortress of Arrogance, I heard another kind of gale build to a frenzy.

2. Helm

Teodor Helm threw down the vox-unit and ran from the communications centre of the Hadron garrison. He didn’t know if the static meant that Yarrick was dead. He had been unable to regain contact with any of the vox-relay posts. The entire network was down. Between Golgotha’s electrical storms and its dust, vox-traffic was immediate area only. The Hadron Plateau was cut off from the rest of the army.

Helm mounted the steps of the fort’s outer wall. He looked north, in the direction of the Ishawar Mountains. Even if it had been day, the chain wouldn’t have been visible from this distance, but Helm could see more than enough evidence of the unfolding disaster. Before him, at the base of the plateau, the horde had gathered. These were not orks from the Ishawar. They had been gathering for hours. Transports arrived like black hail from the space hulk, dropping down just out of range over the horizon to disgorge their war-fevered cargo. And so a third ork force had entered the war, yet another obeying the will of a single warlord. The unity was terrifying. And here was the irony: the more everything went catastrophically wrong, the more Yarrick was being proven right.

The perpetual cloud cover raged and flashed, but not all the fury was natural. There was the glow and the rumble of the transports as they cut through the overcast on their final approach. And there were the fires: streaks of flame that flashed above like wounds in the sky. The bombardment had spared the plateau so far, but the lethal rain was falling heavily in the direction of where the Titans fought their ork counterparts. The ground shook faintly from concussions hundreds of kilometres away. The orks sending death from the heavens didn’t care if their kin were vaporised. Nothing mattered but the destruction of the foe.

Then there were the traces of the other war, the one in the heavens. Sometimes there was no more than the light. Other times, the debris was large enough that it did not burn, but hit the ground with cratering force. Helm could follow this war only through the occasional, fragmented transmission. He hoped some of that wreckage was from ork ships.

But even as he watched, there in the distance, so far away that it was nothing more than a lonely, broken silhouette, and visible only because it was wreathed in the fire of its death, fell a shape that stabbed at his heart. Shattered though it was, he still recognised the lines of the ship on which he had travelled so long that it was home at least as much as Armageddon itself. No longer. The Firestorm-class frigate Harrower was making planetfall unseen and unmourned by anyone but Helm. It disappeared in the polluted night. The thunderclap of impact was muted, but it had the resonance of a single, massive beat on a funeral drum.

Helm looked back at the orks below. Hadron Base was built to withstand sieges, but no fortress could do so indefinitely, and there was no reason to make a stand. The commissar had ordered everyone here to depart. If they did not do so soon, they never would, and the defeat on Golgotha would be total.

With a curse, Helm turned away from the spectacle of loss. As he descended the staircase, he shouldered the mantle of the commander who would oversee one of the most humiliating retreats of the millennium.

3. Yarrick

There is something freeing about hopelessness. I knew that we would not live to see the dawn. So did the crew of the Fortress of Arrogance. Suddenly, there was no destination to reach, no goal to slip from our grasp. There was nothing left except the honourable death. As that certainty sank in, I saw smiles on the faces of the tank crew. I believe there was a real lightening of their spirits.

I have told myself this many times since then. It is important for my own soul that this be true.

I felt no lighter as I climbed out of the Arrogance’s hatch and took up position in its pulpit. The failure to stop Thraka would mean no peace for me as I fell to the night of the grave. Even so, I had new energy. Something very like exhilaration coursed through my blood. If death was upon me, I was going to meet it with all the fury my faith would grant me, and exult in every ork I killed between now and my last moment.

‘Warrriors of the Imperium!’ I called. I was speaking over the vox, but as the energy flowed, it seemed to me that my voice itself carried over the battlefield. ‘Tomorrow will be our day of days, for we shall have rejoined the Emperor in glory at the Golden Throne. Tonight is our night of nights, for it is now, in these very moments, that we earn the glory that will carry us to the Throne.’ I paused as ork stubber fire ricocheted off my claw. In response, I stood higher. ‘The greenskins outnumber us. They laugh that we have nowhere to go. They think they are triumphant.’ A large blast to my left: a Leman Russ torn open by multiple rocket blasts. A Hellhound avenged it by incinerating its killers. ‘Show them that they are wrong. Show them that they have nothing to celebrate. Show them that they are trapped on this planet with a foe who will never leave. Teach them what triumph really means! Become the true wrath of Golgotha!’

I could not hear the response any more than I could truly hear my own shouts. But as I could feel my exhortation in the rasp in my throat, as if it were a primordial beast’s roar, so I could feel the spirit that rose to my call from the Emperor’s legions. Locked in combat, dying and killing, they all heard my words, and they responded. For all that the valley floor was very quickly becoming a savage melee on a monumental scale, with regimental cohesion breaking down in the collision between two vast forces of war, we acted as one, striking with renewed fervour, our hearts filled with something that was at once a song of praise and a howl of undying rage.

As the Fortress of Arrogance leapt forward, I raised my claw in defiance of the ork machines that bulked in the night ahead. A Stompa and another battle fortress were barrelling forward to meet us. Their guns and ours flashed-burned the dark. At the same moment, there was a jerk as Lanner took the Arrogance through a sudden course correction. The movement was sluggish by any normal standard, but was preternaturally nimble for a Baneblade, and was just enough to spoil the orks’ aim. Their machines turned, far more slowly. Distracted by the inviting target we presented, they ignored the other cannons aimed their way. A unified barrage crippled them.

I became aware of concerted, organised movement on all sides. With the Arrogance as focus, the regiments were reforming. Our casualties were horrific. The landscape was strewn with the corpses of men and vehicles, but was also alive with an army reforging itself into a mailed fist.

‘Commissar!’ a voice called to me.

I looked down. A Steel Legion trooper was running alongside the Arrogance, so close he was a single wrong step away from being dragged under by the treads. He didn’t care, but not because he had succumbed to despair. There was a spring in his step. ‘Yes, soldier,’ I said.

‘It’s Hades Hive again, isn’t it?’

‘You were there?’

‘Yes, I was. The greenskins are in for another surprise, aren’t they? Going to rip Thraka’s head off, commissar?’

I opened my claw. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll crush it instead.’

The trooper laughed, saluted, and moved off.

Doesn’t he realise? I wondered. Of course he does. This was our final assault, and we all knew it. Every man was charging for the salvation of his soul, for the bond of comradeship, and for the glory of the Emperor of Mankind. In the hellish strobes of the stubber, las and cannon fire, the gleaming elegance of Mordian uniforms mixed with the Armageddon trench coats and the industrial-grey Mortisian fatigues. And we were all moving toward the pass.

We plunged back into the sea of orks. We punched forward, always forward, though there was nowhere to advance except deeper into the enemy’s midst. ‘Stop for nothing,’ I called down to Lanner. In answer, he drove the Baneblade even faster, crushing orks by the score. For a moment, the treads spun in the morass of corpses, and then the Arrogance roared on. I snapped my claw closed, as if tearing out the collective throat of the foe. I sent a mental challenge to Thraka. Here we are, I thought as I cut down greenskins with my bolt pistol and my eye. Do you dare face us? Do you?

The orks fell back before our fury. But only so far. They bunched up, then gathered courage as something colossal loomed out of the pass. It was a Gargant, fifty metres tall, come from the battles with our Titans.

Hanussen, who was manning the main gun, realised what its presence implied. ‘What happened to the Legio?’ he voxed.

‘That is not our concern, captain,’ I snapped. ‘Our concern is what happens to that abomination. Destroy it.’

Hanussen lined the cannon up and fired.

If the Gargant had not been fresh from another battle, our gesture would have been pointless. But I could see that it had already sustained serious damage. There was smoke pouring out of its neck, and what looked like a fault line running down the length of its frontal armour. Our shell hit at the base of the head. Hanussen must have loaded an armour-piercing round. There was no explosion, and for a moment, it seemed as if we had wasted our blow. The Gargant took one more step, then rocked forward. The head slipped from the shoulders and plummeted to the ground. The giant leaned deeper. Then gravity took over, and the slow bow became a sudden drop. The monster crashed to the ground, crushing hundreds of orks and spreading panic far beyond the immediate reach of its destruction. The superstitious dread spread before the Fortress of Arrogance too. The orks could see who rode the tank that had felled a Gargant with a single shot, and they could believe anything of me.

My bark of laughter lacerated my throat.

We surged towards the pass. We punished and slaughtered. The greater the number of orks, the greater the number of kills. The Arrogance shouted its voice of justice, and though a crew of brave and skilled men operated her, the tank felt like an extension of my will, as much a part of my body as the bale eye and power claw. The Arrogance and I were one, the iron spear-tip that was tearing open the belly of the orks.

‘Here come more playmates,’ Lanner drawled.

Emerging from the night ahead was another Stompa with a battle fortress. Was there no end to the orks’ supply of these engines? I pushed the irrelevant question away. We were committed to the pass, so we had to destroy the ork superheavies. That was all.

‘Take them!’ I cried. I was speaking to the crew of the Baneblade, but I saw the infantry around us charge the monsters, too. I thought there might even have been some uncertainty in the orks. The psychic oppression that accompanied their presence seemed lesser to me. And why not? We had felled a Gargant with a single shot. We were unstoppable.

Then something changed. Something else had entered the field. I couldn’t see what it was, but the atmosphere of the struggle gathered a new, crackling charge. The orks hurled themselves back against us. They hit with renewed will, and with something else. The panic had evaporated, replaced with orkish exuberance at its most insane. The monsters were laughing, just as I had been, but with a terrible delight. Their joy in battle and indiscriminate death had returned with a vengeance, and their laughter was undiminished whether they witnessed the bloody end of a human or an ork.

The Stompa charged. It actually charged. Fire and oily clouds pouring from its smokestacks, it pounded towards the Arrogance. The valley floor shook beneath its monstrous piston feet. It was not a creation that could move fast, nor did it now, but there was a massive build-up of momentum to its advance. ‘Captain,’ I voxed.

‘I have it, commissar,’ Hannussen replied. He fired, hitting the Stompa dead centre. But this time, the armour held, and the monster came on. It launched a rocket that struck the front of the Baneblade. Flames washed over the top, and I ducked down beneath the pulpit. Lanner didn’t slow, and the Fortress of Arrogance rushed out of the flames to meet the challenge.

Another exchange of fire, cannon against cannon this time, and impossible to miss. The armour of the behemoths buckled, but did not give way. And then there was no more time or space. It seemed to me that the totemic face of the Stompa was roaring. I was, my face almost torn wide by the adrenaline-fuelled cry. The giants slammed into each other. The impact should have shattered the world. The Arrogance’s treads rode up the Stompa’s plating. The walker brought its arms in as if to embrace the tank. The chainfist screeched against the left flank. The tip of the blade whirled teeth the size of my hand just over my head. A geyser of sparks streaked the night. On my right, the Stompa’s cannon was aimed point-blank at the join between turret and hull. ‘Burn!’ Hanussen screamed. The cannon boomed. The explosion engulfed the Arrogance and the Stompa’s arm. I was shaken like a pebble in a tin, and lost my grip on the pulpit. I slid down the length of the hull and landed on the ground, an insect to be trampled by the giants.

I looked up as I staggered to the side. The blast had peeled back the Arrogance’s side armour and shredded the Stompa’s arm. Metal flaps from both war engines were tangled together, and the giants were locked in their dance of death. The Baneblade’s treads were still turning as if it were trying to force the Stompa to the ground, but the walker’s centre of gravity was so low that it couldn’t be toppled. The Arrogance’s turret was askew, the gun pointing to the clouds. The sponson-mounted lascannons and bolters had fallen silent.

Head ringing, still half-deafened from the report, I yelled Lanner’s name into my vox-bead.

‘Commissar,’ his voice came back, hoarse and strained.

‘Are all of you still alive?’ I couldn’t see how.

They weren’t. ‘Just me,’ Lanner croaked. ‘And a shot ready to go in this gun.’

The Demolisher cannon protruded from the front of the hull, and could be fired by the driver. Its muzzle was only a few metres from the Stompa. The shot would be even more insane than the one the orks had taken, and Lanner’s protection had been badly compromised. But I did not tell him to stop. I did not tell him to abandon the tank. I would not deprive him of his honour. And I would not deprive the Imperium of one more victory, however pyrrhic.

‘Glory to the Emperor,’ I said.

‘Glory to the Emperor,’ he returned, and fired the gun.

The Stompa’s chainfist broke through to the Arrogance’s munitions at the same moment.

The shockwave lifted me off my feet and hurled me end over end. I slammed into a wall of oncoming metal. I was boneless, a broken toy. As I slumped, something grabbed the bottom of my coat. I was yanked to the ground, dragged along the stony surface, and finally came to a stop in a painful, half-reclining position. I had been caught by the treads of the battle fortress. If the tank had not stopped, I would have been ground to mulch.

My vision began to grey, growing black around the edges. I blinked, keeping unconsciousness at bay. I could not move, but I could see. I saw everything. I saw that the Stompa was no more, but the majestic Fortress of Arrogance was mortally injured. It crashed back down and was silent. It was only inert metal, now.

I saw the end of our war. The soldiers fought heroically, but the end was preordained. The orks simply kept coming until they overwhelmed. Their triumphant energy turned them into an unstoppable wave. Then, finally, I saw what had changed. I saw what had entered the battlefield. It came charging through the swirling melee of combatants, knocking orks aside and splattering humans. The silhouette was so massive that for a hallucinatory moment I thought I was seeing a Dreadnought of the Adeptus Astartes. It wasn’t a Dreadnought, nor was it one of the ridiculous weaponised cans that were the orks’ debased versions of those living martyrs.

It was too big to be either.

It was an armoured shape, and it was rampage personified. It tore through the night faster than anything that big should move, leaping from cluster to cluster of struggle, annihilating Guardsmen with a massive stubber in its left hand, crushing them to nothing with an equally colossal power claw on its right. Every movement, every roar was an expression of rage, glee and messianic fervour. A terrible perfection of destruction had come among us.

Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka was here.

He was smaller than the Stompas. But his presence was so immense that he appeared to tower over the mountains themselves. I was sick to the soul at the threat he represented to the Imperium and I struggled to tear myself free. I had no leverage. I was bound fast. But I still had one weapon. What I could see, I could target and kill. ‘THRAKA!’ I howled with every ounce of strength I still possessed.

It should have been a futile gesture. He shouldn’t have been able to hear me. Not in the cacophony of massacre. But he did. I understand now that destiny decreed that he should know I was there. It seems to me, in my darker moments, that the perfect agony of the galaxy is shaped to no small degree by the crossing of our paths. So he heard, and he came pounding toward me, running faster as he recognised me, his footsteps leaving a trail of small craters behind him. Like me, he only had one natural eye, and my bionic one focused on it. He came up so quickly, I had trouble acquiring the target. I had him as he reached me. I glared at him with the hatred of complete righteousness.

Before I could fire the laser, his claw swung into my face. The blow was no more than a slap. It was like being struck with a meteor.

My last sight before oblivion was of that obscene face contorted with delight.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE WELL

1. Rogge

They didn’t kill him. They took him instead. They dragged him away, along with the other ragged survivors the orks chose to enslave rather than slaughter. He didn’t struggle. There was no point. Quite a few of the captives did. Very few of them were killed. Instead, the orks jabbed them with shock poles and hauled them onward while they were still convulsing. So Rogge did nothing. He walked where he was led. He squeezed into the suffocatingly overcrowded hold of the slave transport. Second by second, step by step, he felt the last dregs of his honour drain away. The pain of his failure was so profound, he didn’t even have the strength to howl.

When he stumbled out of the transport, into the greater hell of the space hulk, he felt that he had been reduced to a body surrounding a core of nothing. The numbness was a relief.

It didn’t last.

2. Yarrick

I woke to agony and an immediate temptation to despair. I was suspended by chains that hung from a ceiling in darkness above me. They were wrapped around my upper arms, holding them out from my body, crucifying me. The pain, like clusters of daggers stabbing my flanks, shoulders and back, was so savage that at first, I wasn’t aware of how I’d been mutilated. Then, as awareness sharpened, I felt the losses. My bale eye was gone. So was my claw.

My right arm.

I twisted in the chains, snarling, transmuting the pain into rage. I cast about with my remaining eye, taking in my surroundings as I sought what had been taken from me. I was in a large metal chamber. It was about a dozen metres on a side, and lit by flickering, dingy glow-globes along the walls. The only exit was sealed by a massive iron door. At the other end of the room was a large metal table. It was surrounded by instruments that erased the difference between surgery and torture. The light was dim, but not so dark that I couldn’t see the overlapping bloodstains on the table. The floor around it was slick with obscene debris. The stench was slaughterhouse-thick.

Beneath my feet, there was no floor. I was being dangled high over a circular shaft. It was about two metres wide, and the gaping black of great depth. Sloshing, scrabbling noises echoed up from the darkness.

There were three orks standing guard. When they saw that I was awake, one of them dragged the door open and left, sealing the chamber off again with a bang. The other two watched me closely, growling as if warning me not to try anything. Thinking clearly was difficult through the haze of pain, but I noted their wariness. I had worked hard to create a fearsome legend for myself among the orks. Here was evidence of my success. I wondered how I might use this fact.

After a few minutes, the door banged open as if a giant had kicked it. One had. Thraka strode into the chamber. He stopped at the edge of the pit. Our heads were almost level, and we exchanged a long stare. Thraka’s face was the purest essence of his benighted race. It was the monstrousness of war at its most savage – pure beast made more hideous by a crosshatching of scars. It was a leathered palimpsest of wounds. Some I had given him, and they were insignificant. The only wound that mattered was the one that had almost stopped him, but instead, following the dictates of perverse destiny, had been his making. The top of his skull was adamantium. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to the brain beneath to transform him into a prophet of orkish victory, but the claws that had operated on this ork’s mind were stained with the blood of billions.

Thraka watched me closely. He watched me quietly. He was studying me. I was suddenly drenched in a sweat that had nothing to do with physical discomfort. The only thing worse than being face-to-face with a raging, howling ork is being face-to-face with a quiet one. So many human victories have depended on the orks’ tactical simplicity. They charged until they died, and that was all. But an ork who watched and learned, planned and strategised, an ork who meditated, and kept his thoughts to himself – there could be nothing more dangerous.

Then the silence was broken, and to my eternal dishonour, it was I who broke it. ‘Filth!’ I yelled. ‘The Emperor’s wrath will blast you and all your accursed kind to the warp!’ My hatred burst the bonds of language, and in the next second I was baying an inarticulate ‘Rahhhhhh!’ at the beast. He continued to watch quietly.

The irony of that moment does not escape me.

After a few more shouts of incoherent, impotent rage, I calmed enough to speak again. ‘I will kill you,’ I hissed. ‘I make you that promise.’

No reaction. Still that unnerving studying. I didn’t know what he was looking for, or whether he saw what he wanted in my face, but he stepped back after an eternal moment. The guard who had fetched him took that gesture as permission to have at me. It laughed and gave my left arm a hard yank, almost pulling it from my shoulder. There was a blur of movement from Thraka, and he stood with the guard struggling in the grip of his claw. The ork whimpered. Its feet pedalled air. Thraka held the other ork over the pit. His eyes, one real, one a targeting bionic, never left my face. His mouth spread in a grin of predatory challenge. Then he dropped the guard.

The ork howled as it fell. The acoustics of the shaft turned its cry into a choir of hurt. The sound of impact was wet, and a long time in coming. The howl stopped.

Thraka reached above me and took the chains in his claw. He was no longer smiling. The gaze of that eye was penetrating, evaluating. There was also a complicity, which I rejected with all the hatred of my own look. He gave a slight nod. To me? I was imagining that, surely. I prayed to the God-Emperor that I was mistaken. Then I heard the deep, final chunk of the claw slamming shut and the chains parting.

The terrible pull on my upper arms ended, and with freedom came vertigo. I fell into darkness, into my final seconds and into a strange peace. There was nothing I could do. Nothing to struggle against. For the first time in my living memory, I was absolved of all responsibility. Duty ends only in death, and I had been vouchsafed a few moments to experience the release from duty. I commended my soul to the care of the Emperor, and went limp. I plunged into terrible sounds. A thick wind screamed against me. I saw nothing but the dark, and after the first second, it seemed that I was flying, not falling.

I felt the pain of unfinished tasks. I hoped for forgiveness. I thought that there were worse deaths.

I had the luxury of several long seconds to think these things. And even now, there are moments of marrow-deep exhaustion when I look back on this tiny sliver of rest with something like nostalgia before shame corrects my thinking.

It was not shame that recalled me to duty on that day. It was the brutal but non-lethal impact of my landing. I did not hit metal. I hit liquid. It hurt like being slammed into brick, and then it took me down, smothering and choking. I had been limp. Now I thrashed in the foul blackness. I had no sense of up or down, no concept of anything at all except universal pain and, overriding even that, the divine command to resume my struggle.

My agonised chest demanded I draw a breath. Filth flowed into my lungs instead. I spasmed, and I broke the surface of the stagnant water. I choked up the sludge in my lungs and flailed forward. My feet struck bottom almost right away, sliding on a slick pile that might have been stones and might have been skulls. The pile sloped up. Within a few metres, I was out of the water and crouched against the curved, slimy wall of the shaft. Breath heaving in and out of my lungs like a handful of claws, I turned around to face the darkness.

I was almost overcome by a sense of total helplessness. I was not alone in this space. I could hear large bodies struggling and splashing nearby. But I could see nothing, I had no weapons, and I had only one arm. I braced myself and waited. After a minute, my eye adjusted, and I saw that there was faint illumination coming from phosphorescent fungi on the walls. The shaft had dropped me in one end of what seemed to be a large cave. It stretched out into the deep gloom before me, twisting out of sight. There were narrow banks along the walls. I felt the surface of the wall at my back. It was porous stone, not metal. I realised where I must be: in the lower reaches of the space hulk.

The fact that I could breathe was another hint of Thraka’s enormous power. Space hulks were not uncommon among the orks. Once a Waaagh! reached a critical mass, the hulks were a favourite method of conveying war from one system to another. Many, but not all, used a planetoid as the core around which the patchwork collection of ships was assembled. This rocky core had an atmosphere in its interior. That necessitated a care and effort far beyond the norm for orks. I could feel Thraka’s presence and strength of will even down here.

The struggle I was hearing came to an end. There was a high-pitched chittering that somehow conveyed fatal agony. For a moment, there was silence. Then splashing started again, drawing nearer. A large bulk was approaching, leaving a wake behind it. I looked about me, desperate for a weapon or a means of escape. The wall was unbroken, and there were no handholds. But just to my right was the half-submerged body of the guard. The greenskin had landed on this spur of rock, and been impaled through the neck. I knelt and searched the corpse. The ork’s gun had shattered, but the brute’s blade was still in its sheath. The weapon was a crude, massive cleaver. It was an awkward weapon for a human to wield, especially one-handed. It was also a gift from the Emperor Himself.

And from no one else. No one.

I remained crouching, clutching the blade, listening to the approach of the predator. The splashing became shallow, and then there was an explosive scrabbling. I whirled, weapon extended. It met a shadow twice as thick and long as a man. The blade sank between chitinous plates. The weight of the beast knocked me against the wall. My feet lost their purchase and I slid down. The creature was propelled by dozens of tiny legs, and they clawed at me, shredding and tangling in what was left of my coat. Tusks like sickles snapped at my neck. The thing pushed its head down, trying to reach my throat, impaling itself more deeply on the cleaver. The mandibles brushed my skin. I pushed up with all my strength, my arm trembling with the effort. I cut through something important and was drenched in a flood of blood and other noxious fluids. The monster collapsed. I squirmed out from under the dead weight. I examined the creature as best I could in the dim light. It appeared to be a species of squig. It had the spines and wide jaws of those beasts, but its long, segmented body and exoskeleton owed more to the arthropod. Its tail ended in a straight stinger half the length of my leg. I could hear more of its kind not far away, and I was about to kick the corpse into the water when, on impulse, I hacked off the stinger. I turned the corpse over to its fellows and, stinger tucked under my arm, moved away from the eating frenzy.

I kept to the wall that extended up the shaft. I made sure that I wasn’t about to be attacked, and then began pounding the stinger against the wall at about knee height. The stone was weak, the stinger strong. After a few hits, the tip gouged a hole a few centimetres deep. I held the stinger in place by squeezing it with the stump of my right arm. I hammered it into the wall with the flat of the blade. I kept at it until just over half of the stinger was wedged between rock. I stood up. Holding onto the wall with my left hand, I climbed onto the stinger. The footing was treacherous, but the stinger felt solid. I stood there for five full minutes, much longer than I should have to if I attempted what I was contemplating. The stinger held. My balance felt sure enough, if I leaned against the wall, to pound in another spike.

It could be done. I could build a ladder for a one-armed man to climb. All I needed was enough stingers.

I looked up towards the invisible mouth of the well. How far was there to go? A hundred metres? More? No way of knowing. I thought about how many stingers I might need. How many of those monsters I would have to kill. How endless my escape attempt would be.

How easily I could die in the process.

I thought about all of these things. Then I stepped back down to the ground, tightened my grip on the blade, and made my way toward the thrashing movements.

I don’t know how long I was down there. In perpetual night and perpetual struggle, time was not even a concept. There were no cycles, only pauses of unpredictable length between convulsions of bloodletting. Survival necessitated absolute focus, and it wasn’t long before I was a creature of instinct and mechanical habit. I could afford no thought that might distract me. There was no space for either hope or despair. I fought, I killed, I sliced off stingers, and I built my steps. When I grew hungry, I ate the bitter, fatty meat of the creatures. It could easily have killed me, but I had no other choice. I was lucky. It kept me alive, and as rational thought shut down before animal need, I shed the pointless luxury of disgust.

I scavenged a belt from the dead guard. It was so huge, I had to cut it in half. Then I had somewhere to sheathe the cleaver, and free up my hand.

I became the most dangerous predator in that world. The squig-things were larger and stronger than I was, but they were mindless and incapable of learning. I grew adept at catching them from behind, leaping onto their heads and sinking my blade between the skull and the first segment of the armour, killing them before they could bring their stinger to bear. I killed, and killed, and killed, was wounded again and again, but was always triumphant. I like to believe that it was my faith that gave me the edge in those moments when my life teetered on a knife edge. I could barely articulate a prayer, but the knowledge of the Emperor’s protection was always there, as basic a fact of my existence as breathing.

Sleep was the risk, the enemy, and the terrifying necessity. I did what I could to protect myself. I sacrificed precious stingers by planting them in an outward facing semicircle around the base of my ladder. I scattered armour plates in loose piles beyond my rough palisade, so I might be woken by the approach of an enemy. I slept in light, broken snatches, jerking awake at the slightest sound. Sometimes there was nothing there. Sometimes there was. My body learned never to do more than doze.

More than hunger or pain, exhaustion became the rock against which my strength was eroded. But duty only ends in death. I was not dead. My duty was clear. I followed the path. I built my path. Step by step by step, hammering in one stinger at a time, rising one half-metre, then descending to kill for my construction material. The ladder rose, and it took me longer each time to climb up and down. My task became more and more difficult, dangerous and tiring the closer it came to completion.

The effort to keep going required such extreme tunnel vision that I almost didn’t notice when I was within reach of the lip of the well.

I killed the first guard with a single horizontal slash of the blade. It was no longer an awkward xenos weapon in my hand. It was my tooth, stinger and claw. It tore the ork’s throat wide open. Its head flopped backward. The ork gurgled and staggered forward, then back a step, its blood jetting over me. The beast hadn’t collapsed yet and I was already attacking its fellow. The other ork was staring at me, its jaw hanging low with incomprehension and panicked indecision. The greenskin started to respond, reaching for its own blade, but it was too late. I rammed the cleaver deep into that maw. With a crunch, the blade came out the back of its neck. The guard stumbled away, choking. It clutched at the blade, slicing its hands as it tried to pull the cleaver out of its head. The ork slumped to its knees, dark blood pouring down the length of the blade, slicking it. The guard managed to grasp the hilt and yanked with stupid strength. The ork pulled the blade out, killing itself.

I checked the guards for firearms. They had none. I picked up my blade and approached the door. I placed my ear against it, but could hear nothing on the other side. No way to know if the guards’ death cries had alerted others.

Nothing for it, then. I sheathed the cleaver, grabbed the door handle and leaned back. The door opened with a screeching grind. There was a corridor on the other side. It ran about twenty metres, and then opened into a wider space. There the light was brighter, and I squinted in pain, half-blind after so long in the darkness. There was noise ahead, a lot of it. Ork snarls, clanging, human moans. The sound of a crowd.

There were no options. There was no plan. There was nowhere else to go. I had nothing except my will, my struggle, and my Emperor.

They would suffice.

Blade out, its weight a strain to hold one-handed, I walked down the corridor and into the light. Before me was a vast open area filled with cages. The slave pens. Waiting for me, as if I were late for an appointment, stood a squad of jailers, my new chains in their hands. I launched myself at them, and I did manage to cut the hand off one of them before they subdued me.

As they dragged me off to a cage, there was a guttural laugh to my right. I knew whose laugh it was, and was sickened by the knowledge that by having survived the well, all I had done was entertain Thraka.

Will, I told myself, fighting despair. Struggle. Emperor.

They will suffice.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE SHAPE OF
REDEMPTION

1. Rogge

It took Rogge a minute to recognise the new prisoner. Like the rest of the male captives, his hair and beard were shaggy. They were an iron grey beneath the encrustation of filth, and that was unusual. Older slaves did not last long. Nor did the disabled, and this one was missing his right arm below the elbow. It was only when he saw that the man’s left eye was also gone, and what blazed in his right, that realisation dawned.

The temptation was to withdraw deeper into the cage and the anonymity of mass misery. But that was only delaying the inevitable. And it was not the path he had sworn to himself he would follow, if given the chance. So he shuffled forward. ‘Commissar?’ he said.

Yarrick turned that gaze on him. It scanned Rogge, seeing everything. Rogge knew the ork superstition about the power of Yarrick’s look. In this moment, he absolutely shared their belief. ‘Colonel,’ Yarrick acknowledged. He turned away from Rogge and moved to the bars of the cage. Rogge saw that eye flicking over the space of the slave pens. ‘Tell me what I need to know,’ he said.

Rogge swallowed. No judgement, no condemnation, no demands for an explanation. Instead, a simple request for information, spoken with the confidence of a man who had no conception of surrender. Rogge stood straighter even as he felt the temptation to weep with gratitude. He had his second chance. Redemption would be his. ‘There is no pattern to the shifts,’ he told the commissar. ‘We never know how long we will be held here. When we are taken out, we work until we drop.’

Yarrick nodded. Rogge watched him touch the bars of the cage, testing their strength. The soldering was sloppy, the construction of the cage crude, but the enclosure would have been strong enough to hold orks, let alone humans. There would be no breaking out from the cage itself.

Yarrick grunted and looked beyond the bars at the huge space of the holding pen.

‘A former cargo hold, I think,’ Rogge said. For all the encrustations of ork scaffolding, totemic sculptures and savage graffiti, the human construction of the walls and floor was still evident. They were inside a captured freighter, of that much Rogge was sure. Continual modifications by the orks had blurred the boundaries between this ship and the adjoining ones, fusing them into an indistinguishable hell of metal and refuse.

The slave cages had likely once been freight containers, and they were stacked in ziggurat formations on all sides of the hold. Ramps granted access to the upper levels. A large mustering space occupied the centre of the floor. There, slaves were gathered, organised, sorted, abused, tortured, killed. The orks didn’t allow the other slaves to clear away the dead until the bodies had piled up to the point that they were a nuisance. Rogge had seen many shifts pass with a dozen or more bodies left to be trampled into pulp. The cage he and Yarrick shared was on the floor level, and blood sometimes seeped in through the bars.

There were some yells and scuffling behind them. They turned around. A few of the prisoners were staring upward, spitting and cursing at the cage’s ceiling. Rogge pointed. ‘Cal Behriman,’ he said with all the contempt he could muster. Sitting on top of the centre of the cage was a second, smaller one. It held only one prisoner. It contained no luxuries except space. The man inside ignored the taunts. He sat, impassive, eating something rank from a metal bowl.

Yarrick was frowning. ‘Why is he isolated?’ he asked.

‘He’s our overseer,’ Rogge explained. He pointed back outside the cage, at the other small boxes scattered around the hold, all of them sitting on top of other, larger containers. ‘There’s one for every dozen or so enclosures, as far as I can tell. These orks like seeing us whipped and prodded by one of our own. The traitor is given a bit more food and space, but has to sit and hear what we think of him.’

Yarrick was shaking his head. ‘Too elaborate,’ he said.

‘Sir?’

‘By ork standards, that’s a very sophisticated bit of cruelty.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Just another example of the strength of our enemy, colonel.’

Rogge curled a lip. ‘He’s a little tyrant,’ he said. ‘A ship’s cook with dreams above his station.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I hope he enjoys his reign while it lasts.’

Yarrick said nothing in reply. He watched Behriman for a moment more before turning his attention to their fellows in the cage. ‘All the prisoners are human?’ he asked.

‘Everyone I’ve seen,’ Rogge confirmed.

‘Good.’ The commissar took a breath, and seemed to grow before Rogge’s eyes. When he spoke again, he was taller than the cage. ‘Fellow children of the Emperor,’ he began, ‘you should feel no despair. Prepare yourselves for struggle and sacrifice, but also for victory. The orks have brought us deep within the heart of their power. We should thank them for the opportunity. Let us thank them by showing them what a terrible mistake they have made.’

Rogge stared at him, dumbstruck. They had been speaking quietly, but now Yarrick was orating for the benefit of the entire hold. His voice echoed off the walls.

Orks came running.

2. Yarrick

The beating was a small price to pay. I had new bruises in the shape of boot soles on my torso, and my face was a swollen, bleeding mess. Trivial matters. Less trivial was the question of why the orks had held back. By their standards, I hadn’t been beaten – I’d been gently admonished to behave myself. Why I was not broken or dead was a disturbing question. But I could not be distracted by it. What mattered was that I had spoken, and I had been heard. I didn’t know how I was going to strike against Thraka, but strike I would. To that end, it was necessary that the slaves think of themselves not as prisoners, but as combatants. I wanted them predisposed to struggle. They should be thinking about strategy and retaliation instead of their own despair. I had no illusions. Whatever happened, it was very unlikely that any of us would be leaving the space hulk. But we could still achieve victory. The goals on Golgotha and here were the same: the end of Thraka. It didn’t matter who the prisoners were. That ork was a threat to every human life, so it was the duty of every human to fight him to the death.

I didn’t expect a mass uprising, which would be useless and suicidal. What I wanted was to see who would respond most concretely to my exhortation.

In the cage, as the hours passed, and we waited, too packed in to crouch or sit, they spoke to me, and made themselves known. They had all been part of the Golgotha Crusade, but in a variety of capacities. Lieutenant Benjamin Vale had been the pilot of the lighter Inflexible. The vessel had been captured as it left Golgotha and tried to rejoin the departing fleet. Two troopers from the Armageddon 117th, Hans Bekket and Hadrian Trower, had also survived that last flight and been taken alongside Vale. These men were soldiers. I salute their courage in stepping forward, but I would have expected nothing less.

There were two others who approached me during my first hours in the cage. I would have their valour noted. Aranaya Castel was a medicae who had been caught when Hadron Base itself was overrun. She had combat training, but had never served on the front lines. Now the orks were amusing themselves by forcing her to work in their grotesque surgeries. These were not places of healing. They were houses of pain. The orks who ruled them delighted in experimenting with scalpel and syringe, and Castel’s shifts were spent in hauling away the bloody detritus of those experiments.

Then there was Ernst Polis. He, too, had been on the base, and was a Munitorum logistician. He had no training at all, and had simply been planetside to assist the coordination of our supply lines when the disaster had struck. He was one of the most cursed men I had ever met. He had an eidetic memory, and had never experienced combat until Golgotha. Every atrocity and monstrosity he witnessed, he retained with perfect clarity. I don’t know what this balding little man had been like before his capture. I imagine a rather tiresome obsessive consumed by minutiae. Now his eidetic memory had become a curse. He was barely sane. Trauma had produced a deep autism that was the only thing keeping him alive. He held awful reality at bay by erecting a screen of itemisation. He catalogued and numbered everything he saw. It was possible to converse with him, but only just.

When, muttering and counting, he squeezed his way past the larger prisoners to tell me, eyes on the ground, that he wanted to help, I said, ‘Tell me how you can.’

‘What do you want to know? There are between twelve and fifteen orks guarding the hold at any one time, approximately a hundred prisoners to a cage, but twice as many prisoners in total than are in the hold right now because there are two shifts, and both shifts are never present at the same time, and when it is our shift we will be taken to work salvage in one of four ships in the immediate vicinity, away from this Carnack-class transport, but all salvage returns to this hub–’

He went on without taking a breath. I broke in a few times to ask about the other ships he had seen. His memory did appear to be perfect. As fractured as he was, his ability to remember anything he saw was a useful one. He had also managed to scavenge, from a captured trader’s ship, a scrap of vellum and a stylus. The orks didn’t care that he had these objects. I did. We began work on a map.

As for Rogge, I wasn’t sure. I did not know what had happened when that second ork army attacked our rearguard. Perhaps no commander would have been able to stop, or even slow, that strike. But from the look of hungry guilt that gnawed his face, I judged that he had failed his men and the rest of the crusade. He was hoping, I thought, to wipe away that guilt through redeeming action. If so, then his guilt might be useful.

I didn’t know yet if the man would be.

Three people died at Behriman’s hands during my first shift. Five the next one. Come the third, I gave serious thought to killing him. But there was no opportunity. I was always too far from him, and fell under the whip of an ork or one of the other human overseers. Those traitors, too, deserved my special hatred, but Behriman, perched above my cage, was the perpetual presence. He was also the most savage. The others did not spare the lash, but they did not kill. They left that to the orks.

Before I had a chance to close with Behriman, I no longer knew how many shifts I had worked. As in the well, time had smeared, become senseless. Our duties were salvage. It was killing work: disassembling what was indicated, hauling machines and scrap and whatever eccentric piece of material was desired in crude carts that were hard enough to push when they were empty. Whenever we left the cage, we moved through a cyclopean collage of metal fused with stone. For the most part, what I saw was a labyrinth of corridors and holds. Ragged tears in bulkheads and hulls created links where none should be. Waste, grime and orkish scrawls were the universal constant, erasing the differences between the ships. I passed through one set of corridors a half-dozen times before I noticed that the construction beneath the ork improvements was not human.

Sometimes, I would haul my load past a viewing block, and see the exterior of the space hulk. It looked like a city in earthquake. Ships of every make and size were crammed together, their sterns sunk into the planetoid. They slanted crazily this way and that. The longer they had been part of the hulk, the more they had melded into each other, losing their identities as voidships. Some structures no longer resembled vessels at all, if they ever had been. Towering over the rest of the fractured skyline was a massive shape, a broad-shouldered monstrosity that must have absorbed a dozen freighters as it thrust its way into being. The peak was in the shape of a gigantic ork skull. It gazed down upon the rest of the world with snarling satisfaction. Lights blazed perpetually inside its eyes. It was a temple to savagery.

We dragged the salvage to an enormous pit to be sorted according to whatever madness moved ork technology at any given moment. The path to the depot passed through what had once been a launch bay. Upended, all of its equipment and shuttlecraft had wound up as treacherous hills of debris on the new floor. It was here, in the space between the mounds of broken angles, that I had my opportunity.

I was about three cart-lengths away from Behriman. He was whipping an older man. The slave was younger than I was, I think, but his hair had turned the white of dirty snow. I had seen him a few times, noticed the way his shoulders sagged under invisible lead, and known that he would not last much longer. His eyes had the lifelessness of clay. Perhaps his end would be a mercy. Even so, when he stumbled, and Behriman laid into him, I let go of my cart. There were no other overseers nearby. The path took sharp corners around the heaps a half-dozen metres ahead and behind. I guessed that I had time to come up behind Behriman while he was busy and kill him before an ork saw what I was doing. In my load of salvage, I had been careful to add a large shard from a mirror that had been in the stateroom of a one-time civilian luxury yacht. I grabbed the shard and started forward.

The old man collapsed. The other slaves looked on as I closed in on Behriman. They kept dragging their carts. I was less than ten paces away. Behriman dropped the whip and crouched over the slave. He wrapped his arms around the man’s head and neck. I raised the glass. Then I heard Behriman whisper. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I heard the old captive’s response: ‘Yes.’ He spoke with relief. And gratitude.

And I think, perhaps, joy.

Behriman snapped his neck.

He straightened and turned to face me. He said nothing. He didn’t raise his whip. He waited.

I lowered my hand and returned to my cart. I began hauling it again. Behriman was already bawling invective at a slave whose pace had slackened. Behind us, an ork driver appeared, laughing as Behriman dished out encouraging blows.

At the end of a shift, exhaustion was so total that we would fall asleep as soon as we were packed back into the cage. Since we couldn’t lie down, we slept standing up, leaning against each other. This time, though, I forced myself to stay awake a little longer. I made sure I was standing directly beneath Behriman’s cage. When the rest of the prisoners were unconscious, I said, ‘What did you ask the old man?’

He didn’t answer at first. He was sprawled on his back on the mesh floor of the enclosure, and I wondered if he was asleep. He spoke after a minute. ‘I asked him if he desired the Emperor’s peace.’

‘You presume much.’

A tiny movement of his shoulders, as if he’d shrugged. ‘The man had served to the limit of his body’s strength. He was as loyal a servant of the Emperor as any decorated officer. He deserved mercy, and a moment’s dignity to compose his soul.’

‘And who are you to grant such gifts?’

‘I’m the one who is there.’

I nodded to myself. I was impressed. The man was unafraid to be completely despised in order that he might do what was necessary. He had what he saw as a sacred duty, and he was being true to it.

Here was a rare find.

‘What do you know of this sector’s layout?’ I asked. I had only seen the same narrow routes again and again.

‘Quite a bit. Why?’

‘Because I think we have bided our time long enough.’ It was time to strike.

CHAPTER SIX

DESPERATE GLORY

1. Behriman

He lay on the floor of his cage for another hour, listening to the clangs and snarls and wails that filled the air of the space hulk. He thought about the conversation he had just had with Sebastian Yarrick. He thought about how he had brutalised the bodies of others and his own spirit in the service of a greater mercy. He had carried the burden of this duty so long that he could barely remember his life before his capture. Now that weight was at last about to be lifted from his shoulders. He allowed himself a single, body-shaking sob.

2. Rogge

The commissar spoke. The prisoners listened. Rogge listened. His soul burned with purpose.

Yarrick didn’t orate as he had when he first arrived in their midst. He didn’t draw the orks’ attention. He spoke quietly, to one small group at a time, and what he said spread in whispers during the shifts until, Rogge was sure, every human in the hold knew, word for word, what the commissar had said. Yarrick spoke of war. What Rogge heard, what he was sure all heard, were words of hope. They were going to be leaving this hell. The breakout was imminent.

3. Yarrick

‘Where do we go?’ Rogge asked, his eyes bright with fervour.

‘The Inflexible,’ I answered. I gestured to Polis.

The little man nodded, and continued to nod while he spoke. ‘I have been past the Inflexible three times during the last eight shifts, during which time I walked 20,235 steps, including the return trip, which ended the shift…’ He caught himself, closing his eyes tightly with the effort. ‘The Inflexible does not appear to be significantly damaged or fused beyond basic docking apparatus to this construct.’ He clamped his mouth shut so tightly his teeth clicked, and he stopped talking. Purpose was mending him.

‘And we have our pilot,’ I said. Vale nodded.

‘What if he’s killed?’ someone asked from the deeper shadows of the cage.

‘I can fly it,’ Rogge answered.

That surprised me. He was a tanker, not Navy. ‘Since when?’ I asked.

He gave an embarrassed shrug. ‘Since home. My father’s private yacht.’

‘Hardly the same thing,’ Vale protested, offended.

‘No,’ Rogge began, ‘but the basic principles–’

‘Are sufficiently similar,’ I broke in, ending the argument. ‘A pilot is a pilot, and a ship is a ship.’ If Rogge’s privileged background proved useful, then we were the better for it. ‘At the start of the next shift,’ I said. ‘That’s when we hit them.’

There was no cycle of night and day in the hulk, just perpetual grimy twilight lit by torches, flickering glow-globes and filthy biolumes. We didn’t have the luxuries of such concepts as ‘morning’. People just rested as well as they could until it was time to work again. And no one could be said to be alone when one could barely move for the crowding. All the same, I was given a form of privacy as everyone in the cage fell into uneasy dozing. Everyone but Castel, who was still jumpy after her latest stint amidst the horrors of the ork surgeries.

‘None of us will leave this place alive,‘ she said.

‘More than likely,’ I agreed.

‘Then why give us false hope?’

‘I haven’t. I never said we would succeed in escaping. Even if we can launch the lighter, it will be recaptured or destroyed before we get far.’

‘Then why even try for it?’

‘If it becomes possible to escape, that will be the most likely means. More importantly, an operational ship could do a fair bit of damage, especially if we choose the target wisely.’

‘You have a target in mind,’ she realised.

‘The temple.’ So much work had gone into constructing that massive ork head. The structure was a symbol of power. That was where I would find Thraka.

Castel was silent for a moment. She was thinking. Finally, she said, ‘Commissar, despite what you said, you must realise that most of the people here are thinking of escape, not war.’

‘I do.’ That was regrettable, but unavoidable. What mattered was that they were stirred to action. Even if people died fighting for a selfish reason, their struggle would still be serving the greater cause. They would die with more honour than they had now. ‘What will you be thinking of?’ I asked.

‘These creatures have profaned every aspect of my calling,’ she spat. ‘I will be going to war.’

‘Then I will be honoured to fight alongside you,’ I told her. Though she had been unafraid to ask me hard questions a moment before, I felt the pride radiate from her now.

She had been praised not by a fellow prisoner, or simply a fellow human being. She had been praised by an idea, a myth called Commissar Sebastian Yarrick. Ever since the battle for Hades Hive, his legend had shadowed my every act and utterance. I was very conscious of this man’s existence, but I wasn’t sure that he and I were truly one and the same. The legend was a useful tool. He inspired men and he was feared by orks, and rightly so. But his continued existence depended on my being worthy of him.

I would do that the only way I knew how: by acting for the good of the Imperium. And I would accept the responsibility for however many deaths such action would entail.

Our shift began. We shuffled out of the cage as the returning slaves staggered in. We moved towards the main exit from the pen. It was directly across from the one by which I had first arrived. One group of prisoners edged towards the left-hand wall. There was another, smaller doorway just beyond the last of the terraced rows of cages, near the corner with the far wall. Ork guards came and went though that passage. There was also a pipe that emerged from its ceiling and ran as far as was visible down the corridor. It was an ork modification of the original structure, and like all such ork construction projects, it was sloppy, clumsy, and arrogant in its invitation to catastrophe. Promethium dripped from numerous joints and splits. Combustible pools spread on the floor.

Behriman snarled at the wayward group and whipped them. His bluff worked because his blows were real. The guards paid him no attention. He was part of the routine. They didn’t notice that he was herding his charges closer to the pipe. Leaning against the wall to the right of the doorway was a bored guard. He had his prod tucked loosely under an arm.

The prod was electrical.

I slowed my steps, braced for action.

Behriman snapped his whip around the guard’s neck. The ork choked on his surprise. He grabbed at the coil around his throat. He dropped his prod. A slave grasped it. The man’s name was Averon, and I celebrate his memory. He lunged for the doorway and stabbed up with the prod, jabbing into one of the weak joints of the pipe. There was a flash and sizzle, and a shower of sparks.

As the fuel ignited, the pipe bent and arched like a tormented serpent. For a long second, it contained the fire within itself, but there were too many little fissures though which air and combustible met. A fountain of liquid fire burst out into the corridor. It gathered strength and momentum. It became a blinding storm that raged out of the doorway. Orks and humans scattered. Behriman sprinted to one side. The grasping flames missed him, but the rest of his group was bathed in incandescent death. They greeted their reward for their heroism with screams to haunt a guilty conscience. Most fell, writhing, but some ran. They actually sprinted as each breath sucked flame into their lungs. As I saw these martyrs rush with open arms to fall unerringly on orks, spreading the contagion of their doom to their captors, I knew that I had done the right thing. If I had in any way inspired that woman, who had become a howling, whirling torch with flames leaping three metres in height, to incinerate not one but two greenskins before she perished, then I was following the true path of my duty.

Not far down the corridor, around the first bend it must have been, the inferno found something even more nourishing than the orkish promethium. It was, as we were about to discover, an ammunition cache. It must have been large. There was a boom deep enough to shatter breastbones. The floor heaved, knocking us off our feet. The left-hand wall bulged for a moment before it peeled back, the blossoming of a steel flower. The fireball roiled out and filled the upper half of the slave pen, a sudden sun baking our flesh. Below the deep thunder of the explosions came the high-pitched shrieks of ricochets as small arms ammunition cooked off. Then came the smoke. It was oily, thick, strangling, smothering. It was a cloud of black wrapping itself around eyes dazzled by the fire. A few moments later, I heard the groaning roar of tons of metal collapsing, sealing the hole again to everything but smoke.

The slave pen was a maelstrom. There was no order, only panic mixed with rage. Humans and orks ran and fled and clashed and died. Coughing, eyes streaming, I couldn’t see more than a few bleary metres around me in the erupting, cacophonous murk. I rose to my feet. Hand over mouth, I took as deep a breath as I dared, and then, before the hack in my chest silenced me, shouted, ‘With me!’ I sensed the presence of followers as I stumbled towards the smouldering corridor. The flames were little more than fading glows in the smoky night there now. The floor was hot under the tattered soles of my boots, and I stepped on things that crunched and cracked like burnt wood, but that I knew them to be something far grimmer.

I was coughing all the time now. My chest was being scraped by burning nails, and great, wracking heaves were trying to toss my lungs up my throat. My head was being squeezed by a mailed fist. But I pushed deeper into the billowing smoke, crouching as low to the ground as possible. This was the one direction I could be reasonably certain the orks would not be going.

The corridor hit an intersection, and the left-hand passage was a ragged funnel into the devastation of the munitions depot. The fires were still fierce there. They filled the space with a pulsing, wavering red glow. The whines and reports of detonating rounds were still frequent, but I led the way in all the same. The warped floor was covered by burned things that had once been orks, but were now little more than organic shrapnel. The hold was a big one, and while to the left there was only the impassable collapse, the explosions had also blown out the decks above, so the air was a little clearer. It was like breathing inside an oven, but at least I was breathing. And I could see who had followed me.

Rogge, Castel, Bekket, Trower, Polis, Vale and Behriman. A small group, and I saw no others coming up in the corridor. Perhaps there were slaves even now storming down the other corridors. Perhaps indeed, but only in dreams. More likely, the orks were already regaining control. No matter. We who were free to act were what mattered, and I would make sure we mattered to Thraka in the most lethal ways possible.

‘Find weapons,’ I told the others. ‘There must be some that are still usable. Do it quickly.’

They did. As I scavenged for myself, I saw the group act with a directness and efficiency of purpose that would have done credit to a well-drilled infantry squad. There was something rather like joy in their determination. I have seen the phenomenon many times before. When people have been deprived of ability to act, they will respond to leadership with gratitude and vigour. To have direction becomes a form of salvation in its own right. Harness this human characteristic, and there is very little that you cannot accomplish.

The ork weapons were massive, clumsy, untrustworthy horrors. But there were stolen Imperial arms here, too. I found a laspistol and a sabre. The pistol was no storm bolter. It was here, though, so it would do. My companions also armed themselves with blades and guns. Most of them had found lasrifles, but Castel held an eviscerator. In her choice of the two-handed chainsword, I saw the final repudiation of her previous calling. The orks had turned her into a butcher. Well, I would let that be added to the greenskins’ debts. We were now a war party. My troops awaited my orders.

I thought for a moment. To venture into the corridors would be pointless. We needed another way to move through the space hulk and reach the Inflexible. I led the way through the heaps of guttering wreckage to the wall opposite the collapse. It seemed stable, though it, too, had been damaged. The metal had been punched open, but not all the way through. I looked into the wall, saw a tangle of struts and, further up, accessible though a bit of a climb, a duct. I pointed. ‘We go there,’ I said. ‘We will destroy the greenskin filth from within.’

Grand words.

And I meant them. Absolutely.

CHAPTER SEVEN

INFLEXIBLE

1. Yarrick

We became worms, tunnelling our way through the darkness of the shafts, ducts, and access hatches that linked the component ships of the space hulk. We were blind, and for the first while, we did not even have a sense of the direction of our movements. We went down blind alleys, where ventilation shafts ended against exterior hulls, and had to retrace our steps and try other routes at random until we found one that took us to a connecting breech in the vessel skins. We could hear orks on the other side of the walls wherever we went. The sounds of the pursuing greenskins chased us down the byways of our journey. Sometimes the sounds of clattering boots and shouted, alien threats were distant echoes. At other times, capture seemed imminent. But the apparent distances were all tricks of the pipes, the random vagaries of acoustic perversity. Some metal arteries down which we travelled were large enough to walk in. Most were no more than crawl spaces. After about an hour, when I judged that we had left the slave pen safely behind, and were beyond the reach of any likely pursuit, I let us travel toward a light source. We had to take stock of where we were.

The light came from a split in an elbow of the shaft down which we crawled. I put my ear to the crack. There was no sound of nearby orks. I twisted until I was lying on my back and kicked out at the split. The noise of my banging sounded huge to me, and I stopped after every half-dozen kicks to listen again. No greenskin came to investigate. Another minute of blows and the shaft parted enough for me to poke my head through. I was looking down from the ceiling of a nondescript corridor. In the direction I was facing, the passageway ended about six metres further on at a bulkhead. In the corridor’s right-hand wall I could see a viewing block.

I withdrew, kicked the opening wider, and dropped down. I asked Polis to come with me. We made our way to the viewing block. The temple dominated the scene. I watched Polis take in the angle of our perspective on that structure. His lips moved in silent calculations. His eyes glazed. After a minute, they cleared and he looked at me.

‘Do you know where we have to go?’ I asked.

He nodded. He looked faintly ridiculous, clad in his Munitorum rags and clutching his lasrifle. He was a little man playing at war, and desperately afraid of the game. But he continued to function, and when I said, ‘You’ll have to lead us,’ he nodded again. That agreement made him perhaps the bravest member of our group.

We returned to the gap in the shaft. Behriman and Bekket hauled us up. Polis took point. The nature of our journey changed. Though Polis had to pause often to get his trembling under control, he changed our wandering into an advance. We were no longer worms. We were spiders, the shafts and connections between ships the strands our web. We were tracing the links that would, I vowed, bring an end to Thraka. Three hours after Polis’s single look at the world outside our scrabbling, crawling, climbing darkness, we reached light again, and another tear in a hull. Polis squeezed to one side so I could see what waited for us.

I choked back a bark of bitter laughter. Before me, across a few hundred metres of open space, stood the Inflexible. Polis had been right: very little attached it to it other ships. It was resting on its landing gear. Rough scaffolding rose from the floor, going as high as the canopy. There didn’t seem to be anything affixed to the lighter that would stop it from taking off.

Except for one thing: the Inflexible wasn’t tied to other ships because it was inside one now. I should not have been surprised. The lighter was too small to be used as anything other than what it was. The orks were modifying the craft, making it into their own creature, and had surrounded it with slapped-together scaffolding. The space before us was another cargo hold, a vast one, kilometres high. The ceiling was invisible, and I didn’t wonder that Polis, in his state, had mistaken the darkness above for the black of the void itself. The obstacle might not be a fatal one, I thought. If the Inflexible were still armed, it might be possible to blast an escape through the hull of this freighter.

I could see a half-dozen orks at work on the Inflexible. The rest of the floor, the decking which had been a bulkhead before the ship was upended, was a scrapyard of miscellaneous construction projects in various stages of assembly and disintegration. Glow-globes, fuel drum fires and flaring welding torches illuminated another ten or twenty ships, all about the size of the lighter. Towards the far end of the hold, I could see the mangled outline of a Thunderhawk, and I shuddered at the tragedy that its presence implied. New, roughly assembled catwalks lined the walls starting about thirty metres up. They went past entrances leading elsewhere in the giant ship’s hull, but I saw no stairs down. Either the catwalks were no more than observation platforms, or they were part of a larger construction project that was abandoned out of boredom.

I pulled back inside the shaft to speak to the others. We didn’t have to worry about being overheard. We were given cover by the noise of endless perverse construction. I outlined the vessel’s situation. ‘We’re almost there,’ I then said. ‘But to reach the Inflexible, we will be exposed.’ We could minimise the risk by hugging the wall some of the way, but at the last we would have to cross open ground to the ship.

Polis trembled, but was the first to nod. The gesture might have been a nervous tick, but it made sure the others followed with alacrity. I motioned Vale forward with me. We paused at the exit from the shaft so he could get a good luck at his ship. ‘A shame we’re at the wrong end,’ he said. The engines faced us, not the cockpit.

‘Will it take off?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Its flight-worthiness doesn’t look like it’s been attacked. I can’t know until I try to leave.’ He looked around. ‘Commissar, are you sure we can get out of here at all?’

‘No. But I am sure that the attempt is necessary.’

‘I see,’ he said quietly.

I believe that he truly did see. I believe that he already knew the path that lay ahead of him.

He turned to me. ‘Commissar,’ he said, ‘with your permission, I would like to lead the way.’

‘That is your right,’ I told him. ‘You are our pilot. Yours will be the honour to take us from this place.’

We both knew that we were talking about a different sort of honour entirely. The set of his jaw was grim. His eyes were hard, sharp, edged iron that had been tempered to the strength that would sustain him in the coming minutes.

We watched the area near our refuge. The shadows were deep here, and there were no construction materials of particular interest. After several minutes, no orks had passed through. I slid out, feet-first. The drop was less than two metres, and it would be harder to climb down with one arm than simply to let myself fall. The others followed, and Vale headed off, glancing back to make sure we were staying close.

Rogge was eyeing the Inflexible with a sick intensity.

‘Something wrong, colonel?’ I asked. There was no concern in my tone.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said again, as if he hadn’t believed himself the first time.

Trower snorted. I turned my eye on him, and he cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry, commissar,’ he said.

I held his gaze a few moments more before releasing him. I would not have dissent and disrespect in our numbers. We were still soldiers of the Imperium. We would conduct ourselves as such. I expected the men under my watch to maintain the same discipline even as they arrived at the Golden Throne.

We moved in single file, hugging the wall, draped in shadow. We weren’t spotted. After a few hundred metres, Vale stopped and crouched behind a pile of scrap metal. He was staring fixedly at the Inflexible. His lips were curled in pained anger. When I saw what he was looking at, I felt an answering pang of fury. The forward half of the starboard engine, which had been hidden from our view until now, had been partially dismantled. Its casing was open, and even my untrained eye could see there were important elements missing. There was too much empty space there. But the engine had not been removed altogether. I did not want to imagine what would happen if someone attempted a take-off. I did not want to, but forced myself to do so.

And then there was a cry. It did not come from any of us, but was on our side of the hold. I looked up in time to see a figure plummeting from the catwalk above us. The ork hit the ground with a heavy, sick crunch. I heard a few braying laughs, but no other reaction from the creature’s fellows. It lay still. A weapon had fallen with it: a rifle with a long barrel. I had never heard of ork snipers – it wasn’t in their nature to fight at such uninteresting distances – but that was a weapon that could have hit targets at a considerable range.

At least as far as the catwalk to the ground.

The back of my neck tensed. I felt the phantom kiss of a round that had never been fired. We scrambled back against the wall, seeking cover in the deeper shadows. I craned my head back, peering into the flickering gloom. Through the slats of the platform, I had a vague impression of a gigantic shape moving away. Metal creaked under heavy footsteps. Then nothing more. I looked back down at the corpse of the ork. How had it fallen? I couldn’t see how even a greenskin could be that clumsy. It hadn’t been under fire. There wasn’t anything going on up there.

Somehow, the ork must have slipped. That was what I told myself, and I sensed that there was a vital imperative that I believe it. There was no other possible explanation. None that fell within any sane conception of the universe.

We waited, weapons at ready. Our position was bad. The only cover was the scrap piles, and the ones nearby were no more than chest-high. If an attack was coming, we had no time to move to better ground. Across the breadth of the giant hold, the distinctly orkish work that erased the difference between construction and demolition continued uninterrupted. We had not been spotted.

Vale had turned his attention back to the Inflexible once more. He said, ‘There are only three greenskins working on this side. Do you think you can give me cover while I board?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I did not try to talk him out of what he was planning to do. His action would, at the very least, have a strategic benefit.

Beside me, I heard Rogge gasp.

2. Rogge

Vale was mad, and Yarrick was worse. The revelation was painful, terrifying, and unavoidable.

When the state of the Inflexible had become clear, Rogge had felt the cancerous grasp of despair. The ship was supposed to have been his means of salvation. In co-piloting the craft, he would strike back at the orks, restore his honour, and leave this terrible place. But the lighter had been mutilated by the enemy. There was no hope here, and so there was no hope anywhere. What could Yarrick’s little band accomplish beyond distinctly messy suicide? Rogge had thought the renewal of honour needed the commissar’s respect. But the high regard of a madman was worthless. Vale was about to march to his death, and Yarrick was going to help.

Rogge remembered his offer to co-pilot, and feared that he was about to receive his orders. Yarrick didn’t glance his way. He and Vale spoke quietly, as if what was about to happen was a rational, strategic operation. Rogge looked back and forth between the two men and the wounded ship. He saw nothing but madness, and the worst of it was not what was going to happen when Vale went running off to meet the orks on his own, but why he was about to throw his life away. Vale was going to die because of Yarrick.

Rogge felt as if a blindfold had been torn from his eyes. He had been as dazzled by the commissar’s reputation and force of personality as everyone else. But now he could see the man for what he was: a tyrant who played lethal games with the lives of others because he had the power to do so. On Golgotha, he had sacrificed a magnificent army to his obsessive pride. Now he was repeating the pattern. How many prisoners had died in that little uprising? And where would that one-armed, one-eyed monster of war take them now? How would he choose to feast on the deaths of his new followers?

He won’t feast on mine. But on the heels of that thought came another: What do I do now? He had nowhere to go. He took in the faces of his other companions, and their unthinking commitment to Yarrick’s leadership. There was no help or sense to be found there.

Yarrick spoke to the entire group. His voice was low, and would be inaudible only a few metres away, but it filled Rogge’s consciousness as utterly as if blasted from banks of vox-casters. Yarrick’s face was half-hidden by months’ growth of hair and beard. Hunger had made it gaunter than ever. Bruises and wounds bit into its flesh, and the eyelid over the empty socket did not close all the way, revealing a slit of darkness. Yarrick’s was a face of weathered crags, a map of decades of war in all its forms – glorious, brutal, desperate, triumphant, annihilating. It was, Rogge thought, a face that no longer knew anything but war. Rogge flashed on his memories of luxury and pleasure back on Aumet. Some were still quite recent, fresh enough to inspire the hope that they might not be the last of their kind.

But though Rogge stared at Yarrick and feared him, that voice and the fire that fed it were mesmerising. Yarrick said, ‘We will strike here, and we will hurt the greenskins.’ And Rogge felt a dangerous excitement in his chest. Yarrick said, ‘While the orks struggle with this wound, we will take the battle to the heart of this abomination, and they will fear us before they die.’ And Rogge felt a sense of mission flare.

Then he remembered how that mission must surely end, and regained his senses. There was no way off the space hulk. The only true mission was to stay alive from one moment to the next.

Yarrick turned to Polis. ‘Can you guide us to the temple?’ Polis nodded, rapid bobs like a rodent. His lips were moving in an unending, inaudible commentary, but his eyes were clear, shining with deadly fervour. To Vale, Yarrick said, ‘How long once you’re aboard before you can take off?’ He spoke, Rogge thought, as if the lighter really would be able to fly.

‘Not long,’ Vale answered. ‘How much time do you need to get clear?’

‘Polis?’ Yarrick asked.

The Munitorum gnome scanned the wall behind them. He pointed to an opening about a hundred metres on. Unlike the one from which they had emerged, this was not a tear in the skin of the vessel. It was an actual doorway, now tilted on its side. ‘There,’ Polis muttered. ‘There.’ He cleared his throat, his lips moving all the time. ‘A good start, good start, find the vectors from there, yes yes, kill the temple, twenty metres to Inflexible, three visible enemy, disassembled engine cowling a product of Armageddon manufactorum Megiddo III…’ His muttering faded back into mouthed silence.

He’s getting worse, Rogge thought. The extended journey through the walls, with no greenskin encounters, had calmed him. But since that ork had fallen, his incessant cataloguing had started up again. He wasn’t trembling, but his eyes had the shine of the Yarrick fever.

‘Understood,’ Vale said.

You understand nothing, Rogge thought. Mad. Mad. All of you.

And he had no choice but to follow for now.

Still crouching behind the pile of discarded metal, Vale faced Yarrick and made the sign of the aquila. Yarrick returned a one-handed version. That was all. There were no further words exchanged. Rogge felt the blood drain from his face at the matter-of-fact manner with which Vale accepted his imminent death, and the ease with which Yarrick sent him to it.

Vale leaped over the cover and sprinted toward the Inflexible. Yarrick trained his pistol on the orks. The others raised their firearms and took aim. ‘Wait,’ Yarrick said.

They held their fire.

3. Vale

He had been freed. He had been given the gift of knowing his destiny and final duty. His captivity was over. His mission was glory and flame. His heart leapt, so consumed with violent joy that his body could barely contain it. His limbs were infused with an energy that he hadn’t felt since the forced landing. He wondered that his feet touched the floor of the hold at all. He was flying. Suddenly there was wind. There had to be. He could feel it whipping past his face as he bore down on the orks and the ship. The greenskins weren’t aware of his approach. He almost laughed. The eye of the Emperor was upon him as he ran towards his apotheosis, and it rendered him unstoppable. He could tear the orks apart with his hands, but the Emperor’s fire was coming for them.

One of the orks spotted him and shouted. The others turned and reached for their weapons. Now Vale did laugh.

At his back, his allies opened fire. One ork dropped, his throat torn out by a well-placed round. The other two shot back, yelling as they did so. Vale saw another ork round the nose of the Inflexible at a run. He crashed to the ground, head blown apart.

Something brutally hard, round and burning cold slammed into Vale’s left thigh. He glared in outrage at the ork who had shot him. His leg lost its strength. His sprint broke down into a hopping limp. Fractal pain shook his frame, radiating out from the wound. The final metres to the lighter stretched. He clenched his teeth and hauled the dead leg forward. When he put weight on it, the world flared white. He bit his tongue, and blood poured down his chin.

Three more steps. The other two orks died. There were many more coming. The hold was in uproar. Orks were firing at the Inflexible, at Yarrick’s position, at Vale. The shots were still scattered. There were still precious seconds before the orks made their numbers felt.

He reached the Inflexible. The canopy was open. He hauled himself up the ladder left by the orks and kicked it away as he dropped himself into the cockpit. A few seconds more, and the canopy lowered as he powered up. He killed the fuel line to the starboard engine. Not yet, he thought. The port engine whined with pent-up rage. He checked the weapons. Still present, still active.

The pain in his leg had numbed. Something worse than pain spread from the wound: a lethargic, creeping darkness. ‘Not yet,’ Vale muttered, tongue thick, breath hissing. He looked to port. The others had left their cover and were running for the opening in the wall.

The darkness spread down his arms to his hands and fingers, leeching strength and dexterity. His vision dulled to a grainy, grey tunnel. No more time. Now, he thought. His hands did nothing. Night was falling behind his eyes. He found a last cry. ‘Now!’ he howled, and hands responded.

The Inflexible lurched forwards. Vale changed the vector of the thrust. Now he let promethium flood into the starboard engine.

No more darkness. Only light and heat and pain, and seconds of the most awful, sublime joy he had ever known.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE RUN

1. Yarrick

A phoenix rose behind us. It shrieked justice at the heavens as it filled the hold with the hell of its birth.

We had barely reached the opening when the Inflexible began its final strike. I paused as the others ran down the narrow, upended corridor. I looked back to bear witness to Vale’s sacrifice. The lighter lifted off the ground, climbing vertically. It kept climbing even as it burst into flame. At the same moment, its lascannon fired and its Hellfury missiles launched. The air of the hold was redolent with spent fuel and carelessly spilled flammable materials. The missiles slammed into other ships. The Inflexible spun wildly in the air, still firing the lascannon as it transformed into a fireball. It hung in the air another few seconds before it smashed into the deck. It crushed. It incinerated. Fire rushed through the space of the hold with the roar of a hurricane. It drowned out the screams of the burning orks. It grew into a towering wave of fire, and now I ran.

There was a wind in the corridor as air was sucked into the inferno. I had almost left it too late. Heat followed at my heels, carrying the promise of burning death. The passageway ended at a T intersection. I broke left. Behind me, there was a roaring, as if one of the Inflexible’s engines had entered the corridor. Just ahead, the others waited for me on the other side of a bulkhead. I leapt through. Trower and Bekket slid a steel door shut. With the ship’s new orientation, they had to lift it up rather than pull to the side, but they managed to close and latch the heavy steel before the flames reached it. The barrier became warm to the touch within seconds, and we moved on quickly.

Polis led the way again. I was relying heavily on the little man, and he was rewarding my trust. He was a prodigy. Given time, luck and room for error, we would eventually have found our way to the temple without his help. It was so huge, it was the one destination on the space hulk that could always be found. But we would not have made such good time, and in such relative safety. His fear was a boon. At the slightest noise, some of which only he could hear, he would change route. Whether all of the threats we avoided were real or not, he was keeping us out of unnecessary engagements, saving our striking power for when we reached our goal. His sense of direction was uncanny. Wherever possible, he took us out of the corridors and into the networks of ventilation shafts, crawl spaces, access hatchways, and all the myriad byways of a voidship’s circulatory system. No matter how many times the path twisted, no matter how many branches we took, he always knew where we were. We made good progress. Whenever we passed a viewing block, I saw that we were drawing closer.

We were very close, and crawling through the abandoned guts of a freighter. We were slick with grease, feeling our way through the dark over coiled pipes, fragmented gears that could slice off a finger if touched too suddenly, and funnels like cathedral bells. ‘We need to reach the top,’ I whispered to Polis. ‘Can you get us there?’

‘No,’ he said, then repeated himself, becoming his own stuttering echo: ‘Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-no. No connecting structures, commissar. It’s isolated.’ His muttering moved off-subject and rasped against the blind metal shapes.

‘Then how do the orks have access?’

‘Below.’ Echo: ‘B’low-b’low-b’low.’

I realised that we had been crawling along a downward slope. After another few minutes, the iron beneath my hand gave way to cold stone. For the space of a twitch, I was back in the well. But there was no water, and gradually the slope levelled off. Then we could stand, and the way ahead of us was showing grey. There was a light source not too far away.

We were in a tunnel beneath the surface of the planetoid. Once more, I was astounded by the discipline necessary to have orks take the trouble to create a stable, breathable atmosphere down here. I would have thought they lacked the patience to pull off such a feat of engineering. You also never imagined being outmanoeuvred on the battlefield, I thought.

The tunnel was part of a network of intersecting caves. We were moving through a high-ceilinged warren, one that would take orks quickly from one sector of the space hulk to another. Now it would deliver us into the heart of the construct. There were no more shafts or crawl spaces for us. We had to travel the same routes as the orks, and every second increased our risk of being discovered. So we ran. We ran to keep ahead of our luck, and we ran to fulfil our duty.

We were fast, but our luck still caught us. We flew across an intersection. Trower, who was bringing up the rear, shouted a warning at the same moment as the greenskins snarled and started firing. We ran harder, and Polis tried to shake the pursuit by taking what seemed like random choices at the next few junctions. It wasn’t enough. I could hear the pounding of boots coming closer, the sound bouncing off the stone like hammer blows.

We went around a sharp bend to the left, and I paused. ‘They must be stopped,’ I said. ‘Slowed, at the very least.’ They would catch us in the next minute, otherwise, and if they didn’t, their uproar would draw other patrols down on our heads.

Bekket turned back to the bend and crouched. Trower joined him. He remained standing. He would shoot over Bekket’s head, and they could provide each other with some degree of covering fire. ‘We thank you for the honour, commissar,’ Bekket said.

‘You will be remembered,’ I promised them.

The rest of us ran on. Behind us, I heard gunfire. First the isolated reports of Bekket and Trower’s guns, then the rain of counter-fire from the orks. The two men wouldn’t last long, but every moment they gained us was precious. The echoes turned their shouts of defiance into the battle-cry of a regiment. Their screams, when they came a couple of minutes later, were even greater.

Polis had taken us through several more tunnel crossings by then. Trower and Bekket had played their part. So, by the Emperor’s grace, would we all.

2. Rogge

He had abandoned them. Not a blink, not a pause, just a quick commending of their souls to the Emperor, and then off. Rogge fought the urge to vomit. His skin was prickling with fear and horror. He didn’t know who held the greater terror for him now, between Yarrick and the orks. They were almost the same thing, just machines of senseless death. He ran with the rest of the party because he was caught in Yarrick’s undertow, and there were no other options open to him.

No options yet. For the first time, the idea of surrender occurred to him. The orks had kept him alive once. They might do so again. They would be short a few slaves. The idea didn’t horrify him the way it should have, the way it once would have, before he had seen the truth of Sebastian Yarrick. There was no honour in following a madman, or dishonour in turning his face from him.

There was no dishonour in staying alive.

But the madness still held him as they ran through the warren of stone. The walls were damp and cold. Some of the tunnels were natural formations, while many more bore signs of having been hewn by the slaves. Here and there were the bones of captives who had been left to rot where they fell, their remains gradually trodden to dust. Enough traces remained to show there had been men here, men who had been forced to give up their lives for glory of the ork warlord. More glory. More senselessness.

Thraka and Yarrick deserve each other, Rogge thought.

The tunnel they took now ran straight and up. They had left the sounds of the greenskin patrol behind, but there were other noises ahead. Polis slowed, and whispered something to Yarrick. The commissar nodded. While Polis huddled close to Castel, Yarrick and Behriman took the lead. None of them glanced his way, and Rogge felt warring impulses of relief and resentment. He fought them both down and moved up to learn the worst.

The tunnel sloped up sharply for the last few metres, ending in a jumble of boulders at the entrance to a large, echoing cave. Rogge had to crawl his way forward. Polis was curled up a length back from the opening, keeping within the comfort of full shadow. His eyes glittered with terror, but he still clutched his gun, and he was still looking ahead, waiting to be given his orders of martyrdom. Yarrick, Behriman and Castel were crouched behind the last line of boulders. As Rogge joined them, Castel gave him a look. Her contempt was clear and cold and precise. How does she know? he thought. And then: Know what? There’s nothing to know. He looked away, suddenly finding it quite easy to stare straight ahead, and learn his fate.

The cavern was a natural one. It extended about a hundred metres to the left, right and forward of the entrance. The ceiling was invisible in the gloom, but Rogge guessed it must have been at least twenty metres up. Off to the right, a smaller tunnel dropped into darkness. There was a large squad of orks milling about, guarding the far wall. This one was not stone. It was metal. It was part of one of the hulls used in the construction of the temple. There was an entrance here, and it wasn’t original to the ship, nor was it an improvised breach. It was an actual gate, festooned with crude ork faces, jaws agape in roars or laughter.

After a minute’s observation, Yarrick and his two acolytes pulled back to where Polis hid. Rogge followed, dreading what was about to be decided.

‘Can we fight them?’ Castel whispered.

Yarrick shook his head. ‘Too many.’

Behriman said, ‘We need to draw some of them off.’

Yarrick nodded slowly. He almost seemed reluctant. ‘You realise…’ he began.

‘Of course I do.’

Polis uncurled with a snap. He sat bolt upright, staring at Yarrick and Behriman. His lips moved, shaping the cascade of silent words. He arrested them long enough to speak. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My mission is accomplished. I am expendable.’ And then he was up and scrambling over the boulders.

Castel stood up a mere beat behind him. ‘Commissar,’ she said, ‘make them suffer dearly.’

‘I swear it,’ he answered.

She took off after Polis.

Drawn to the spectacle of mad self-sacrifice, Rogge moved forward behind Yarrick and Behriman. They paused at the entrance to the cavern. Rogge saw everything. He saw the insanity of blind faith. Polis ran through the cavern, shouting its dimensions and numbering the days of his captivity. He fired his gun, but hit nothing. He did draw the orks’ attention. They didn’t react at first, staring dumfounded at the lunatic human. Polis was halfway across the cavern toward the other tunnel before one of them moved. While its kin laughed, the greenskin came up behind Polis. It had its cleaver drawn. It hauled its arm back.

It didn’t land the blow. Castel sprinted over the space between them. With a rasping ‘Hhhhaahhhh’ of hatred, her arms straining, she swung the snarling eviscerator into the back of the ork’s neck. It was a good blow, one born of rage, a repayment for all the atrocities she had been forced to witness aboard the space hulk. The chainsword sank in almost to the width of the blade. The ork collapsed, its spine severed, blood spraying over Castel, slicking the floor of the cavern. The medic, triumphant in her butchery, jumped over the corpse and caught up with Polis.

The laughter stopped. The orks yelled, and all but a handful took off after the two humans. They were a mob of muscle and aggression, coming to rend their prey into shreds. Castel and Polis had a lead measured in seconds. They didn’t pause, didn’t fire again. Their last mission consisted in nothing more now than staying alive long enough to be a useful distraction. They disappeared down the tunnel. Polis’s litany was multiplied by echoes, merging with the snarls of the orks. The sounds of the pursuit receded, plunging into darkness and silence. Rogge didn’t hear a scream.

Yarrick and Behriman exchanged a look, then readied their weapons. There were only four orks left guarding the gate. Yarrick turned his gaze on Rogge.

The silence from the other tunnel wrapped a frozen grip around his soul. There had been no ending, no final agony, only the drop into the unknown. A terrible vision unfolded before him, a vision of an endless flight through the undermaze of the planetoid, with nothing to anticipate except the delayed, raging inevitable. The image was a nightmare whose waking was worse, and Rogge wanted no part of it.

He ran. He ran back down the way they had come. He ran towards the certainty of capture. He ran from the judgement of Yarrick.

He ran towards surrender.

CHAPTER NINE

CRUCIBLE

1. Yarrick

And then we were two. A mutilated old man and a cook. Behriman and I grinned at each other. I was as aware of our absurdity as he was, and he knew our strength like I did. I don’t think either of us had expected Rogge to be true to his oath. I wasn’t surprised when he ran, but I was still angered. Betrayal and cowardice should always be met with immediate, unalterable justice. Rogge had confirmed my worst suspicions about what had gone wrong on Golgotha. That we had been outmanoeuvred by Thraka was still my failing to expiate, but more might have been saved if not for Rogge, a link weak with the rust of selfishness. If there hadn’t been the mission before me, I would have tracked the colonel down and put a bullet in the back of his head. I found satisfaction in the certain knowledge that he was running to a fate far less merciful than the worst I could do to him.

We were the stronger for his absence. We could have used the fire of Castel, Bekket and Trower, but we still had the synchrony of warriors focused on a single task. Our goal awaited, and there were only four orks standing in our way. I was still grinning as I took aim from behind the boulder. I was eager for what was coming. I heard Behriman snort, unable to hold back violent mirth.

I squeezed off three shots from the laspistol. My target jerked twice, hit in the neck and chest, and then a third time as the centre of his face imploded. I jumped out of cover and ran forward as Behriman fired behind me. He had a rifle. It had a lot more punch, and needed it. His target was the leader, a massive brute made bigger yet by the spiked plates of his armour. A fanged metal jaw protected his neck and lower face. Behriman’s first shot glanced off the jaw as I closed with the nearest greenskin. He did better with the rest of his salvo. The second shot took out the ork’s left eye. The monster roared agony and rage. The slug had to have penetrated his brain, but he wasn’t dead. He struck without sight or thought, his gigantic axe decapitating the ork in front of him. I dropped to a crouch, and my opponent’s blade swished the air just over my head. I fired up, draining the rest of the power pack. The greenskin’s chin and nose exploded. Blood showered down on me as the ork rocked back and forth on his heels before toppling over on his back.

There was only the leader still moving. He was an automaton, whirling and slashing at nothing with every random step. I scrambled back, out of the way. It took Behriman another seven well-placed shots to drop him.

The battle had taken seconds. No alarm had been raised. Shots being fired were too mundane an occurrence in ork life to draw attention. The rest of the squad hadn’t returned from chasing Castel and Polis. I muttered a prayer under my breath for the medic and the clerk. I stopped to loot the nearest ork corpse of ammunition. Behriman joined me and did the same. We found a few power packs that fit our weapons. We found long-handled grenades. Then we turned to the gate. Its mechanism was basic. It was an effective barrier only if it had guards to back it up. Otherwise, it might as well have been nothing more than a morbid bit of sculpture.

We opened the gate. We entered the temple.

Here I am, Thraka, I thought. Are you still enjoying this?

We walked down a long, straight, low-ceilinged corridor. Behriman and I both had to hunch down to avoid banging our heads. It must have been an infuriating passageway for orks. After about fifty metres, it opened up onto the central shaft of the temple. The space was circular, about fifty metres in diameter, and many times that in height. A central column ran an iron elevator car up and down. Spiralling up the walls was a rough metal staircase. It had no railing. It was no more than an endless series of metal planks welded to the wall. There were no exits off the shaft. Stairs and elevators went from the ground to the distant ceiling with no interruptions.

The elevators were in use, but there were no orks on the stairs.

‘Well?’ Behriman asked.

‘To the top,’ I said. ‘If he’s here, he’ll be there.’

We ran to the wall. We began to climb the stairs that would take us to the heart of power.

2. Rogge

He didn’t run long. He fled for about a minute, taking tunnels at random. He was not being tracked by their earlier pursuers. He knew that much. He didn’t hear anything in front of him. So when he ran into the patrol, he was more surprised than they were. He had intended to present his rifle to the first ork he encountered, and so signal his submission to slavery. Instead, dumb instinct betrayed him, and he raised the gun, finger on its awkwardly placed trigger.

The lead ork batted the rifle out of his hands, and backhanded him on the return swing. His left cheekbone and nose shattered. The pain filled his eyes with a sudden nova. He fell into darkness with something very like relief.

The greenskins denied him the refuge of oblivion. Rough shaking woke him. His head jerked back and forth so hard it felt like his spine was going to snap. He howled, and the shaking stopped. He fell to the ground. The jar of impact rattled the length of his frame. He looked around, blinking rapidly. He was still beneath the surface of the planetoid, still in the warren of tunnels. The space was an intersection of several passages. It wasn’t as large as the cavern before the temple, but it was big enough to contain the monsters that towered over him. They were laughing at him. Tears of hopeless frustration sprang to his eyes. He couldn’t even succeed at surrender. They were going to kill him now.

Only they didn’t. The ork who had been holding him looked back over its shoulder. It grunted, the noise sounding to Rogge like a mixture of religious fear and religious joy. From behind his captors came booming, metal-on-stone footsteps. Something was coming that could crush worlds beneath its tread. The other orks parted, making a wide berth for the being that strode forward. Rogge whimpered as Thraka, bent forward to fit in the tunnels, loomed over him. The ork prophet leaned down. Thraka eyed him dismissively, then began to turn away.

He was going to leave. Suddenly, Rogge feared Thraka’s departure more than his presence. If he was beneath Thraka’s notice, he wouldn’t be worth sparing. ‘Wait!’ Rogge cried.

The ork couldn’t have understood Gothic, Rogge thought. But he seemed to recognise desperation. Thraka turned around. Rogge was abruptly conscious of the silence of the orks. That such a thing was even possible terrified him. He found himself thinking in a new way about the warlord. The idea at the forefront of his mind was propitiation. He was face to face with a terrible god, and he was desperate to give the deity what he wanted.

What did Thraka want?

‘Yarrick!’ Rogge gasped. ‘I can give you Yarrick! I know where he is!’

Thraka continued to regard him. The hideous face, that primitive savagery made more brutal by adamantium skull, didn’t alter its expression. Thraka was waiting.

How do I make you understand? Rogge thought. He stood and pointed down the tunnel that his instinct chose to believe was the way back to the temple. ‘Yarrick,’ he kept saying. Did the orks even know the commissar’s name? Rogge tucked his right arm in and flapped his elbow. Thraka let out a short bark of amusement. A mountain laughed. Rogge quailed. He fell to his knees. Thraka’s troops followed the cue of their ruler and fell about with cruel guffaws. But Thraka only laughed the once. His single real eye looked in the direction Rogge was pointing. Yes, Rogge thought. Yes, that’s right. You know what I’m trying to tell you. I can take you to Yarrick. Let me show you the way. He forgot, in his need, that he didn’t know where he was.

Thraka’s gaze returned to Rogge. The ork’s jaw split into a smile, the kind of smile that accompanies the torching of solar systems. Rogge did his best to return it. Thraka delighted in his effort, and the ork’s grin grew wider yet. The monster nodded, once, and then turned to speak to one of his underlings. Thraka’s voice rumbled and sawed at Rogge’s ears. The ork language could only have been produced by throats gargling glass, rage and broken bones. Rogge had no idea what was being said, but he heard a pattern of syllables repeat a few times. It sounded like ‘Grotsnik.’ Rogge hoped this was a good thing.

His answer wasn’t long in coming. After a minute, a different ork battered his way to the front. Anyone who didn’t move from his path quickly enough was sent flying by his grotesquely huge power claw. His presumption of superiority ended only when he drew abreast of Thraka. He abased himself before his lord, and growled something interrogative. It occurred to Rogge that the word he had heard was a name. His hopes frayed.

Thraka pointed at him. Rogge now saw the massive syringes that Grotsnik kept stored in bandoliers and in his flesh itself. He saw the scars and the sutures. He remembered Castel’s stories of ork surgeries, and of the vanished line between experimentation and torture. He took a step backward.

Thraka reached out with his claw. He picked Rogge up by his arms. The colonel whimpered as he felt his shoulders dislocate. Thraka tossed him into the arms of Grotsnik. The ork medic laughed. Rogge began to scream.

For all the terror he had experienced, it was a fact that Rogge had never screamed before. Now, he would never stop.

3. Yarrick

I don’t know if I can say that we were lucky. I don’t know if I can say that luck ever had any role in the Golgotha catastrophe. I can see too much destiny at work in the events of those days. There was also too much will. I will not blaspheme and pretend to know the Emperor’s, but mine and Thraka’s decided much, and destroyed more.

So I don’t know if Behriman and I were lucky or cursed. But we were better than halfway up the height of the temple’s central shaft before the klaxons started. We had done well to make it this far without incident. But we were both winded. My legs were heavy with pain. Even in the dimness of the shaft, I could see Behriman’s face looking pale and shiny with exhaustion. But then the warning sounded – a brain-shredding, metallic roar that rattled in the chest. Seconds later, orks streamed in through the ground floor entrance. While most of them pounded up the stairs after us, a small group waited for the elevator. Within seconds, there were over a hundred greenskins in pursuit, and the Emperor knew how many in the upper levels of the temple, alerted now and waiting for the mad little humans to show themselves. We had no hope. None at all.

The feeling was oddly liberating. It gave free rein to our determination. Behriman’s face hardened with a cold exhilaration. I know what he felt, because the same dark fire suffused my being. We ran. Adrenaline from some hidden reserve coursed through my veins. I pushed through pain, exhaustion, and the impossibility of what we were attempting. We had no chance of breaking through to kill Thraka even if he was somewhere above us. But we would try, and we would fight. I knew my duty to my Emperor and to my species. There was no price too high to be paid, by me or by anyone within my reach, in the execution of that duty. To know this, as I did, was to render irrelevant such concepts as hope and probability. The way forward was clear. That was enough.

Up, faster somehow, but the goal stubbornly refusing to come any closer. The orks shot at us, but they were running as they fired. The distance was still too great. The rounds whined against the metal wall and left us untouched. But now the elevator was rising. It would reach us in less than a minute. If it could be brought to a halt, the greenskins inside would be within a few metres of us. Their fire would rip us to pieces.

I shoved my pistol into my belt and grabbed a grenade. I kept climbing, taking every granted second to take another step up. Behriman followed my lead. He didn’t wait for the elevator cage to arrive. He tossed his grenade behind us. The explosive flew in a fine, long arc. It exploded as it hit the stairs, blowing open a gap several metres across. ‘The xenos filth are adaptable,’ he wheezed between ragged breaths. ‘Let’s see them grow wings.’

I grunted approval, but didn’t answer. He was younger, had more breath to spare. He was also more right than he knew. The orks were adaptable. They wouldn’t learn to fly, but they would find some way over the gap.

But maybe not before it was too late.

My eyes flicked back and forth between the rising cage and the stairs before me. If I tripped, I would fall, and if I fell, it would be off the stairs and into the void. I had already experienced the death comfort of a great plunge. I had no need of its touch a second time. I maintained the careful rhythm of my climb. I defied the exhaustion of my ageing flesh. I moved up and up. I let the cage rise closer. I waited as it began to slow and the orks fired through the bars. I waited as Behriman cursed and we both crouched and ducked. The rounds were a hard danger now. But still I climbed. Still I waited.

The elevator cage stopped. Its door opened. The cluster of ork guns looked close enough to touch. I gave them the grenade. I threw it to the back of the cage.

The orks in the front had time to squeeze their triggers once before they realised what I had done. Behriman gave a liquid curse as a round tore through his cheek. It spun him round and he crashed against the wall. He stumbled, sagged, but did not collapse, and did not stop moving. The burn of a shell slashed at my scalp. I took pride in the pain. I kept moving.

Movement, too, in the cage. The movement of panic. Orks jumped, some trying to reach the staircase that was close, but not that close, some forgetting they were well over a hundred metres up and simply jumping from one death to another. Then the grenade went off. It blasted the cage away from its pillar. The metal crate shot forward, smashed into the staircase, and fell. It turned end over end, banging against the wall, smearing some orks and dragging others off their perches. The shaft echoed with the crash of the tumbling cage and the howls of the plunging orks. The elevator hit the ground floor with a satisfying impact.

The howls grew louder, now the rage of the frustrated horde. Gunfire sought us, an insect swarm of rounds blackening the air. Sheer volume overcame inaccuracy. If I still had a right arm, I would have lost it again. A shot exploded off a step as I brought my foot down. I stumbled, lost my footing. I threw my weight to the left, and slammed against the wall instead of hurtling into space. The instinct was to curl into a ball, to be the smaller target. The instinct was as cowardly as it was wrong. I dismissed it and started moving again. Neither Behriman nor I could run anymore. My legs were columns of lead. They felt as useless as the twisted wreck of the elevator column. I moved them by will alone. I was in the well again, rising endlessly through a nimbus of pain and exhaustion. It would have been easy to fall into a numbness, to keep going by detaching myself from my agonised flesh. But I had to remain alert, had to be ready to counter the next threat.

Below us, the orks raged, their anger louder than the report of their guns. Behriman used two more grenades, destroying more of the stairs behind us. The orks were hauling lengths of scrap metal from the destroyed elevator and were using that to cross the first of the gaps, but the process was eating up time. We were pulling ahead.

I looked up for the first time in a century. The stairs ended at a landing. We were there. A few more steps, and the climbing would end. Relief turned into a last shot of strength to my legs, and I started running again.

The rocket hit the wall just beneath the landing. It tore the world apart. I was flying, eyes filled with light, ears stuffed with sound, mind battered empty of anything except a furious denial. I would not surrender to such a perversity. I reached my arm into the heart of the dragon’s breath that enveloped me. I closed my fist, expecting nothing but fire, air and defeat. I found metal. I gripped with the ferocity of rage. The blast washed over me, the jaws of the dragon clamping down hard on my bones. Then the dragon departed, leaving behind pain and, with the return of conscious thought, despair.

I was holding on to a strut sticking out from the damaged landing. The stairs beneath me had vanished. The explosion had pushed me out, and I was dangling off the projecting lip of the landing. There was nothing below but the long fall and final rest.

And Behriman had caught my leg.

He was heavy. But perhaps, despite the added strain, he would be the salvation of us both. ‘Climb up,’ I rasped through clenched teeth. If he could use me to reach the platform, then haul me up after him…

Behriman tried. But as soon as he moved, we started to swing, and my grip slipped. He stopped. His features seemed to relax. His gaze shone with gratitude. ‘We’ve taught them a thing or two,’ he said. ‘Commissar, will you finish the lesson?’

‘I swear I will.’

He nodded, satisfied. He let go, spreading his arms wide to embrace his flight. He smiled as he dropped into freedom.

I looked away from his fall. I focused all of my attention on my goal. I shut out the din of the orks, the whine of the stray rounds, the possibility of another rocket. I confronted the hopeless. I had only the fading strength of my one arm. There was no purchase for my legs. There was nothing for the stump of my right arm to lean on and give me purchase. I squeezed tighter on the strut, imagined my fist as welded to the metal. It could not let go, but by the grace of the Emperor. I did not just tell myself this. I knew this. And when I knew it, I began to lift.

One arm for the weight of a battered old man. The pain exploded from my shoulder and upper arm. I could not acknowledge it. I believed only in the simple fact that I could lift this one object. If I did so, I would not fail my Emperor. Desperation can grant miraculous strength, and I was well beyond desperation. I become nothing but will. My arm was folded now, and my head and upper chest were above the lip of the platform. I rocked forward before I could think of the risk. My chin smacked metal. My stump shoved against it, giving me that tiny bit more momentum. My fist turned around the strut, and my grip was suddenly something that could be broken. I pushed down, gasping agony. My strength fled, but not before I straightened my arm, propelling myself forward. I cried out as I let go. Gravity tugged at me. It failed. From the waist up, I was lying on the platform. I rested for a moment, then squirmed and scrabbled until I had pulled myself up the rest of the way.

My body cried out for sleep. I stood up, wavering. I staggered forward. The landing had been buckled by the explosion, and the door wrenched partly out of its frame. I could, I thought, just squeeze through the gap. I reached for my pistol. It was gone, lost in the rocket strike.

‘The Emperor protects,’ I whispered. ‘The Emperor provides.’ I had faith that He would. It was all that I had left, and it was enough. I leaned into the door, pushing the space between it and the wall open a few more centimetres. I crawled through.

Thraka was not waiting for me on the other side. No orks were. The room was large, but not as huge as the grandiose exterior had suggested. I was at the very peak of the temple. I had expected a shrine to the savage greenskin gods, perhaps some mark of Thraka’s command. Instead, I found command of a much more practical kind. I was in the control centre for the space hulk. I was surrounded by the ork version of consoles. They were massive, and risibly simple by human standards. Each console featured only a single button: huge, red, central. In the middle of the floor, a block of stone served as a dais. It was wide enough and massive enough to support the monstrosity of Thraka. He would stand there, I thought, and give his orders, which would be carried out from these consoles. No one was here now because the space hulk was not on the move. The tedium of remaining at an inactive station would have been beyond comprehension to the ork mind.

I was alone, but would not be for long. Between grenades and rocket, the way up to the nerve centre had been destroyed. But the temple was a fusion of ships, and thus a honeycomb of passageways. I could hear the orks forging a new path. The wall to my right reverberated with the shrieking of tearing metal and the crump of explosive charges. They would be here soon. What I would do, I had to do now.

One side of the chamber was given over to enormous windows. They were the eyes of the ork idol that glared over the wreckage-scape of the space hulk. As I thought about how the construct travelled, and what damage I might do here, I noticed for the first time what nestled between the clusters of upended ships: engines. Huge ones. None from anything smaller than a cruiser. Some belonged to ships that had been grafted nose-first to the planetoid. Others had been dismounted from their original vessel. They were all lower than the surrounding structures. I looked at the scattered disposition of colossal motive power, put it together with the consoles, and understood how the space hulk navigated: one button per engine, each engine propelling the hulk in a different direction. Simple to the point of imbecilic, too crude for any precision, but the orks had no need for precision.

The wall shrieked. The orks were on the other side. I heard the sound of chainaxe teeth grinding into metal. Behriman, Castel, Polis, Bekket, Trower, Vale: their sacrifices had purchased a few seconds. I owed them the honour of using that time well. I ran from console to console, slamming my fist down on all the buttons. I would destroy Thraka with his own weapon.

One after another, the engines blazed to life. Immense forces strained against each other. As the first punctures appeared in the wall, the shaking began. It was as if the space hulk were being hit by an earthquake, one that would not stop, and just kept building in strength. Thraka’s base became a perpetual collision between voidships. Stolen fusion reactors lit up the night of the void. Forces beyond the tectonic buckled and twisted the space hulk. Plumes of stolen promethium shot up from the multiplying breaches in the fuel lines.

The shaking grew stronger yet. It knocked me off my feet, and I crawled to the windows to look upon my work. The construct was starting to break up. Ship hulls wrenched free of their foundations. Some fell, crushing smaller structures, setting off more explosions, gouging open deeper wounds. Others were blasted away from the main body, re-launched into the void by a force more powerful than the construct’s artificial gravity. Twisting, rattling, whiplashing, the world was tearing itself apart with thunder and flame, and it was glorious.

There was an eruption at the base of the temple. A tower of flame roared skyward, all-consuming, all-purifying. The world beyond the windows disappeared in a glare of incandescent red. The structure groaned, dying, and it lurched to one side, as though trying to walk. The floor heaved.

The wall came down all at once, and the orks stormed in. But they were too late. I saw Thraka pound forward, trampling his minions. Then the floor heaved again, split, and collapsed. I fell, slipping from Thraka’s grasp as he lunged for me. I plunged into a chaos of flame and tumbling metal. In the last moment before I was battered into darkness, I saw Thraka, above, in the exploding ruin of his domain. He was roaring, arms raised high. He was raging, I thought.

But he looked exultant.

EPILOGUE

THE VALEDICTION

I woke, and I was complete. I knew, before I opened my eye, that what had been taken from me was mine again. My right arm felt heavy, lethal. I looked. My claw was there, as it should be. There was no power flowing to it, nor was there to my bale eye. Still, their presence was reassurance enough.

But how had I been rescued?

I sat up, taking in my surroundings. I was lying on an operating table filthy with blood and reeking with the stench of a thousand atrocities. I was in a medicae bay, but the tools that I saw would have horrified the most fanatical chirurgeon.

I had not been rescued. I was still on the space hulk. My claw and eye had been reattached. Correctly. The two realities were incompatible at so fundamental a level that their co-existence made my skin crawl.

I swung my legs over the edge of the table and stood. My injuries had blended into a general wash of pain. Nothing was broken, though. I was intact. I could walk. I approached the door.

It opened. I stopped. Beyond it, orks lined both sides of the corridor. They had been watching for me. The moment I appeared, they roared their approval. They did not attack. They simply stood, clashed guns against blades, and hooted brute enthusiasm. I had been subjected to too many celebratory parades on Armageddon not to recognise one when it confronted me. I went numb from the unreality before me. I stepped forward, though. I had no choice.

I walked. It was the most obscene victory march of my life. I moved through corridor, hold and bay, and the massed ranks of the greenskins hailed my passage. I saw the evidence of the destruction I had caused around every bend. Scorch marks, patched ruptures, buckled flooring, collapsed ceilings. But it hadn’t been enough. Not nearly enough. Only enough for this… this…

I was living an event that had no name.

At length, I arrived at a launch bay. There was a ship on the pad before the door. It was human, a small in-system shuttle. It was not built for long voyages. No matter, as long as its vox-system was still operative.

I knew that it would be.

Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka awaited me beside the ship’s access ramp. I did not let my confusion or the sense that I had slipped into an endless waking nightmare slow my stride. I did not hesitate as I strode towards the monster. I stopped before him. I met his gaze with all the cold hatred of my soul. He radiated delight. Then he leaned forward, a colossus of armour and bestial strength. Our faces were mere centimetres apart.

My soul bears many scars from the days and months of my defeat and captivity. But there is one memory that, above all others, haunts me. By day, it is a goad to action. By night, it murders sleep. It lives with me always, the proof that there could hardly be a more terrible threat to the Imperium than this ork.

Thraka spoke to me.

Not in orkish. Not even in Low Gothic.

In High Gothic.

‘A great fight,’ he said. He extended a huge, clawed finger and tapped me once on the chest. ‘My best enemy.’ He stepped aside and gestured to the ramp. ‘Go to Armageddon,’ he said. ‘Make ready for the greatest fight.’

I entered the ship, my being marked by words whose full measure of horror lay not in their content, but in the fact of their existence. I stumbled to the cockpit, and discovered that I had a pilot.

It was Rogge. His mouth was parted in a scream, but there was no sound. He had no vocal cords any longer. There was very little of his body recognisable. He had been opened up, reorganised, fused with the ship’s control and guidance systems. He had been transformed into a fully aware servitor. I promised myself he would be one forever.

‘Take us out of here,’ I ordered.

The rumble of the ship’s engines powering up was drowned by the even greater roar of the orks. I knew that roar for what it was: the promise of war beyond description. In silence, I made the orks a promise of my own. They were letting me go because I had lived up to my legend. I would do more than that when they came again to Armageddon. Legend would clash with legend, and I would bring them more than war. I would bring them more than apocalypse.

I would bring them extinction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Since his Black Library debut in Hammer and Bolter, David Annandale has written a plethora of works set in the 41st Millennium, including the Space Marine Battles novel The Death of Antagonis and the novella Yarrick: Chains of Golgotha. By day, he lectures at a Canadian university on subjects ranging from English literature to video games. He lives with his wife and family and a daemon in the shape of a cat.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

© Games Workshop Limited 2013. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration by Phrolian Gardner

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ISBN 978-1-78251-005-5

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