ONE
FORTUNA MINOR, NORTHERN CONTINENT
SEGMENTUM TEMPESTUS
GORROLIS SUB-SYSTEM
The saviour pod slammed into the earth in a spray of dirt and scorched grass, scattering ground-dwelling leporidae back to their burrows in skittering streams as the metal shell bounced clear of its crater. It came to rest with a groan of tortured metal and a fading whine of impotent retro-thrusters.
One of the more curious leporidae, an inquisitive young female, was the first to emerge. It inched forward on long-fingered limbs, snuffling at the air through its octet of furry nostrils as it approached the pod. It fled back to its sanctuary as a glowing orange hole exploded in the pod’s hatch, and was hidden back out of sight when the panel was kicked clear by a leather-booted foot.
A lone human emerged from the pod’s interior with a long white pistol grasped in one gloved hand, coughing his way clear of the actinic haze of smoke that rose from the crash site. His dark eyes took in his surroundings quickly, from the bare dirt of the saviour pod’s impact crater to the meandering wound it had cut into the earth as it came to rest.
The Lord Solar, Arcadian Leontus, stepped down from his fire-scarred transport onto the surface of Fortuna Minor and cast his cold gaze skyward.
Leontus had landed on a high plain of rolling grasses burned a muted yellow by the sun, the open land dappled with patches of shade cast by lazy clouds that drifted across the endless sky. The hills behind him swept up towards a mountain in the distance, a craggy spear of rock that was capped with an unbroken blanket of snow. It could have been serenity itself, were it not for the massacre that painted the vista below in shades of black and red.
Trails of billowing black smoke wove their devastating tapestry across the sky, winding from burning Imperial troop landers as they careened to earth as blazing meteors. Ork aircraft tore at them like pack predators even as they slammed into the warring hordes below, eradicating both black-armoured Goffs and bare-skinned savage orks alike in geysers of fire and churned earth. It was enough to tear the creatures’ attention away from their enthusiastic slaughter of their own kind, and the xenos’ battle-lust found new targets in the humans arriving in their midst.
Entire wings of Imperial Lightning fighters were swarmed as they fought to defend the fat-bellied landers, but were themselves brought down by scarlet jets that chased their kills all the way to their flaming demise on the endless grasslands below. Several of the ork pilots were so embroiled in the chase that they slammed into the earth beside their victims, refusing to pull out of their dives until their stores of ammunition were spent.
But for each ork craft that was picked off in the swirling dogfights or by the xenos’ lack of a self-preservation instinct, still more flew in from the ork-held space port to the south-west, tearing through the Imperial lines to maul the landers with predatory tenacity. Each lander carried hundreds of Astra Militarum troops, if not thousands, and Leontus’ mind unconsciously estimated the losses as the doomed vessels ploughed into the earth in mushrooms of promethium flame.
Those Guardsmen that did escape the burning wreckages were set upon by a screaming green tide of orks, who seemed oblivious to the flaming comets that killed them in their hundreds with every impact. Pockets of Imperial resistance fought for survival where they could, but each was slowly overrun by the weight of numbers or by red-daubed vehicles that ploughed through humans and their drivers’ own kind with sickening speed.
Leontus activated his helm’s vox and listened to the grim chorus playing out across every frequency, each desperate voice begging for direction that might bring order to the disarray. He considered adding his own voice to it, as if his resonant tones might somehow provide a melody for the others to follow back into harmony and perhaps victory.
He killed the vox and cut short the last words of an unknown pilot, ending the doomed woman’s prayer before its final affirmation. His voice would change nothing and so did not belong on the already overcrowded vox-channels. Instead, he simply watched and momentarily embraced his isolation.
In the decades that he had commanded the armies of the Segmentum Solar, Leontus had never experienced the scale of defeat that was unfolding before his eyes. He felt the weight of those years bearing down upon him like a physical force, held at bay by a cold, insidious anger that grew with each passing moment. The plan had failed, that much was obvious. There was no hiding from that fact on the bare plains of Fortuna Minor – his political officers wouldn’t be able to spin this massacre into a daring victory, nor would the annals of history look upon it as anything but a contemptuous failure. The price of that failure was thousands of lives that he was powerless to save in that moment.
He looked to the skies again with a prayer on his lips, hoping against hope that his last order had been heard and obeyed before his Aquila lander had been shot from the sky and he’d been forced into the saviour pod. His shoulders sagged with relief as he picked out the dark spots on the very edge of the upper atmosphere – Imperial landing craft abandoning their descent and returning to the embattled fleet in orbit before they came within range of the ork flyers. His instructions to call off the attack had been heard, and he thanked the God-Emperor for His mercy.
With the flow of burning landers staunched, he turned his attention to more immediate concerns. It would only be a matter of time before his forces on the plains below were destroyed. Any survivors would make for the defensible high ground offered by the mountain
if they had any sense; it was likely that there would be topography there that was more favourable to a man on foot. It certainly couldn’t be any worse than the bare ground where he stood.
With the clamour of battle echoing to him over the low hills, Arcadian Leontus turned from the massacre and made towards the mountain.
‘Form up on me! Riders, to me!’
Belgutei let loose a cry of frustration as yet another of his riders was dragged from the saddle by the ork horde, their screams of fear and pain cut short by the hammering blows of brutally primitive clubs and blades. He lashed out at a leering ork face as it came within range of his power sword, the blow driven as much by frustration and anger as by experience. The xenos fell back in a spray of ichor, the body spasming grotesquely as its head bounced away across the bloody ground. Each moment was a maelstrom of snarling mouths beneath hate-filled red eyes, bloodied weapons and screeching horses. Everywhere he looked there were xenos braying for his blood, each hammering heartbeat drawing him closer to the moment he was overwhelmed.
Belgutei wheeled his mount around in tight arcs, driving back attackers that seemed to come from everywhere all at once. He was lost on a roiling sea of green flesh, cast adrift from his riders as they fought their own battles like rocks standing firm against a raging tempest. The occasional whip-crack of las-fire cut through the guttural chorus of screaming xenos, punctuated by the rattling bark of their rudimentary solid-shot weapons and explosive impacts.
His horse bucked beneath him, kicking back to crush the chest of an ork with her iron-shod hooves, then stoving in another’s head with her chanfron, the armoured faceplate that protected her head and eyes. Belgutei shouted his encouragement with each kick and savage bite, trusting in her armour to keep her safe from the orks’ attentions. She was a good horse, Attilan-bred and as battle-hardened as he was, not some show pony from a blue blood’s parade ground.
‘Good girl, Nomi, keep going!’ he cried, gripping the saddle as she rocked violently back and forth. ‘Come to us, you bastards, meet your fate!’
The orks surged forward in a sudden rush, propelled by their fellows behind. Belgutei kicked out with a stirruped foot as he fought for room to manoeuvre, smashing teeth from gaping jaws and desperately hacking at bare green flesh with his sword, until he jerked back in surprise as he came face to face with another horse’s armoured chanfron – one that he recognised.
‘Belgutei,’ Do-Song said by way of breathless greeting. The Attilan commander’s scarred face was sheened with sweat and spattered with black ichor, but the old man fought with the vigour of someone half his age. His honour guard followed in his wake, snapping off shots with their lasguns and beating back the orks with savage slashes of their swords, and Belgutei realised that the sudden ork surge was less a charge and more a bow wave as they fled before the Attilan horses.
‘My lord,’ Belgutei said, thrusting down through the skull of a brutish xenos who was trapped between Nomi and Do-Song’s horse, Gori. ‘It is good to see that you still live!’
‘I will ride the winds at the God-Emperor’s side, but not today,’ Do-Song replied through gritted teeth, his free hand falling to a bloody smear on his abdomen.
‘Where is the fleet support, my lord? They were supposed to clear this ground from orbit!’
‘Worry later, for now we deal with what is before us,’ Do-Song said, kicking out at a charging ork, which fell back with a spray of broken teeth and bloody spit before being beheaded by one of his guards. Like Belgutei, his lance had been shattered in the first charge, but he swung his power-wreathed blade with brutal efficiency to decapitate and maim orks with every strike. ‘Gather your riders – we need to break free of this morass.’
Belgutei swung his hunting horn into his hand on the rawhide cord that hung from his neck, the ancient bone feeling fragile in his adrenaline-fuelled grip. With a quick breath, he let loose a piercing blast through the brass mouthpiece and sounded the muster.
‘How can we break free? We have no space to build a charge,’ Belgutei said, dropping the horn as Nomi bucked again to kick out at an ork who ventured too close.
‘I will make space,’ Do-Song said. ‘Keep your riders close, Belgutei.’
The first of Belgutei’s riders reached him as Do-Song set his own horn to his lips and sounded a long, droning note that fired the blood of every horse and Attilan within earshot. More riders fought their way towards the churning mass of circling horses, regrouping with one another to build momentum and break through to their kinsmen.
‘To me! To me!’ Belgutei bellowed, looking around for familiar faces amongst the grim-featured Attilans as they began to ride in a widening circle, building pace and rearming their lances in anticipation of what came next. Riders joined the swirling rumble of iron-shod thunder, whipping their reins to join the galloping pace.
Then Do-Song blew on his horn once more, blasting a long, mournful note that carried over the thunder of hooves, and the Attilan charge was unleashed.
Belgutei let out his clan’s war cry, a ululating scream that mimicked the lethal scream of the Attilan Raptor Hawk, and Nomi responded with merciless speed. He screamed until his throat ached, until his lungs burned, just as every rider in the charge honoured their kin with their own war cries.
Hateful red eyes flashed past above snarling, sawtooth-filled mouths as the Attilans cut a path through the bare-skinned savages towards a mountain on the horizon, its features hazy and blurred by the extreme distance.
‘We make for the mountain!’ Do-Song shouted from the very front of the charge. ‘We do not falter! We do not slow!’
‘We are with the wind!’ the Attilans chanted in unison.
Then they broke through the mobs of the bare-skinned xenos and slammed into the ranks of black-armoured brutes beyond.
‘He’s dead!’
Keori Arnetz dragged her sergeant’s limp form back towards the burning ork jet, and the line of flaring lasguns that poked out from the crater’s lip. Solid rounds buzzed past her head like Death Hornets, but she trusted in the God-Emperor and the orks’ piss-poor aim to protect her.
‘Arnetz, drop him and run!’
‘Frag that!’ Arnetz spat through gritted teeth, casting a look back over her shoulder at the other Catachan Jungle Fighters in cover below the dangling tail fin of the downed aircraft. Twenty yards, give or take – it would take less than ten seconds, even with Artova’s dead weight slowing her down.
One of the orks mistook her for an easy target, running in close as her back was turned, but it hadn’t dealt with a Catachan before. Hearing its heavy footfalls, she dropped Artova and drew her combat knife in a dagger grip, spun, ducked beneath the ork’s wild cleaver swing, and rammed her weapon into the creature’s gut. The monomolecular edge slid through skin and muscle like a las-scalpel, but a simple gut wound – even a mortal one – wouldn’t be enough to put an ork down. That was why she twisted the blade and dragged it upward through the beast’s belly and into its ribs, where any sane creature’s heart would be, before ripping it clear in a spray of sliced offal and stinking ichor.
The disembowelled ork fell to one side with a moan, clutching at its empty stomach cavity even as Arnetz grabbed Artova’s collar and dragged him the last few yards into cover.
‘I said the bastard was dead!’ Groger yelled between controlled bursts from his lascarbine, as Arnetz rolled their sergeant’s lifeless body into the slim protection of the crater.
Though Arnetz was only the squad medicae, it didn’t take a chirurgeon to see that Artova was beyond saving. His chest had been caved in by an ork brute carrying a heavy maul made
from a Cargo-8’s axle, and the second blow had smashed the sergeant’s head into bloody pulp.
‘You did, corporal. I remember it well,’ Arnetz said, ducking as rounds spanked off the dakkajet’s scorched hull. ‘But I also remember who had the damned vox-codes.’
Arnetz rummaged through the sergeant’s pockets for the plastek fob that contained their assigned vox-frequencies. It was smeared with blood, though Arnetz couldn’t tell if that was Artova’s or that of the dead ork on her own hands. She threw it over to Blasko, the vox-operator, and cleaned her combat knife on the sergeant’s trouser leg.
Catachan didn’t breed soldiers who were overly sentimental, just effective.
‘Give me good news, Blasko,’ Groger said.
‘Working on it!’
Arnetz checked the charge on her lascarbine and joined the firing line, picking her shots and taking out any orks that looked the Catachans’ way.
‘Come on, Strukker, what’s taking so long?’ she called over her shoulder, to where an especially muscular Catachan trooper was siphoning fuel from the downed ork jet into an empty tank.
‘I’m not even sure this crap will work,’ Strukker said as he shrugged the filled container onto his shoulders and repressurised his heavy flamer.
‘Damn it, Blasko, give us–’
‘They’re ordering a withdrawal!’ Blasko interrupted, his vox headset clamped over his ear.
‘Withdrawal to where!?’ Groger asked, looking at Blasko in shock.
‘I don’t think it’s for us,’ Arnetz said, suddenly aware that the rain of troop ships appeared to have halted. She hadn’t felt the earth-shaking impact of a crashing lander for a few minutes. ...
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