Chapter war, p.2
Chapter War, page 2
The dust began to settle. The outline of the rock itself could be seen. It wasn’t just a rock – its underside had been heavily plated with slabs of metal to help it survive the impact and it was studded with crude engines that had directed its fall. A gunshot rang out, and a screaming man fell silent.
Shapes emerged from the deep pits in the rock. At first they were just more bodies, the inhabitants who had died in the impact being kicked out to make way. Then a terrible cry went up from inside, a deep animalistic war-bellow echoed by hundreds of bestial voices.
As one, the attackers charged out of the rock. They surged forward with their guns blazing, raking through the bodies, great rusted blades dispatching the wounded as their hulking shapes lurched through the near-darkness.
Some of the soldiers turned and readied their autoguns, bayonets fixed. The attackers crashed into them and the Wardens of the Vanqualian Republic saw their enemy for the first time – huge, brutal, green-skinned with murderous red eyes, maddened with battle. Orks, someone yelled – aliens, foul xenos come to defile Nevermourn and the world of Vanqualis.
The battle at the gates was short and bloody. Blades fell on uniformed flesh. Autoguns chattered in response but the orks had the numbers and the momentum, and hundreds of troopers fell. More were crushed as the retreat forced its way through the gates and out into the civic districts of Vanqualis, the orks hacking into the backs of the troopers as they turned to run.
The resistance in the Processional Quarter collapsed, but the orks did not stop. As more rocks slammed into Palatium and disgorged their alien passengers, the orks surged forwards into the streets of the city.
Sovelin could hear Palatium dying. From his position by the Malcadorean Gate he could see huge columns of dust and flame spewing from all across the city as more asteroids smashed into it, and more bombs streaked down from above. The sky was almost dark, only a blood-red tinge across the horizon remaining of the daylight, and Sovelin could see silver specks hanging high above in orbit. Spaceships, he realised – and it wasn’t Battlefleet Scaephan. The battlefleet was gone. Vanqualis was alone.
‘You!’ he yelled at an artillery crew trying to manhandle their bulky mortar carriage towards the gate. ‘Unlimber the damn thing and carry it!’
Hundreds of troopers swarmed around Sovelin, all from his regiment, the Vanqualian Rearguard Artillery. He had got them off the parade ground as soon as their part in the Trooping of the Warding Standard had been done with. He had known that something was wrong, and he had known that no one would listen to him. They would not put the army on alert; certainly not break up the Trooping, on the word of someone like Sovelin who was barely senior enough to be spared the marching. So he had got his artillery out of the Processional Quarter and had been taking them to man the walls, just in case, when the first bombs had hit.
The sound was horrible. From far across the city he could hear more explosions mixed with screams. People were in the streets now – the Terran Avenue was lined with the homes of functionaries and house servants, and they knew that something terrible was happening to their city. Another rock streaked down from above and slammed home, the closest yet to the Malcadorean Gate, kicking up a plume of wreckage. Chunks of stone and red roof tiles scattered across the street. More and more civilians filled the streets, emerging from their homes or running from the areas of the city already under attack.
‘Get up on the wall!’ shouted Sovelin to his men. ‘Protect these people!’ The soldiers began to turn their artillery pieces to face the street and ready their guns, sheltering behind the monuments that flanked the Malcadorean Gate – a great stone serpent, the heraldic symbol of the Falken family, and an eagle representing the Imperium to which Vanqualis paid fealty.
Sovelin heard the orks and knew then what the forces of Vanqualis were facing. There was nothing else that could explain the war cries and the shrieks of raw terror that moved in front of them like a bow wave. Panic filled every face Sovelin could see as gunfire stuttered from the alleyways and windows smashed.
Closer. Sovelin could hear their grunting alien tongue and the screams of people who fell beneath their blades. Closer still and a building along the avenue collapsed, its front spewing rubble and shattered furniture into the street. Dark green forms scrabbled over it, blazing gunfire. More of them, thick like a green tide, flooded down the street.
People were pouring from their homes, running and screaming. They were heading for the Malcadorean Gate, beyond which was the jungle and the hope of safety. Perhaps they could make it to the coast, and from there reach the cities of Herograve.
But they would not make it. Not unless the guns of Sovelin’s artillery made a stand, and bought them time with their lives.
‘What do we do, sir?’ said Captain Laesc, who had his laspistol and sword drawn as he crouched down by the closest autocannon mount.
Sovelin couldn’t answer for a moment. Thousands of people were now crowding the street and the orks were surging forwards. Sovelin could see the crude totems, festooned with severed hands and heads that the orks carried ahead of them, the gleaming bone of their tusks, the savage glee in their eyes as they cut down the civilians who straggled behind.
‘We run,’ said Sovelin. ‘Run! All of you! Now! Go!’
The Vanqualian Rearguard Artillery broke cover and ran, Sovelin at the heart of them, hauling their autocannon and mortars with them as they headed between the monuments of the Malcadorean Gate and out into the deep green mass of Nevermourn’s jungles.
As Sovelin’s troops broke and ran a great cry went up from the fleeing civilians of Palatium. They were the men and women who served the Falken family, for Palatium was not a city like the towering hives elsewhere on the planet but a place that had been built as the seat of the Falken family’s reign. Its civilians had given their lives to House Falken and now the army, led by scions of that same family, was fleeing before them.
Many gave up and died beneath orkish blades, trampled by the booted feet of the xenos. Others scrambled over one another and trampled fellow citizens, even friends and loved ones, in the scrum to escape. Those who made it to the Malcadorean Gate were crushed against the huge stone pillars of the gate itself or the podiums on which the statues were mounted. The serpent and the eagle looked down sternly on the carnage and panic.
Then the orks overran the gate and the butchery began in earnest. Thousands died in a few moments and the orks plunged into the crowds and emerged again covered in gore, exhausting the magazines of their crude guns and laying into their prey with swords and cleavers.
Survivors streamed from the Malcadorean Gate, a fraction of those who had fled the orks. The screams followed them and many of them, like Admiral Thalak, were sure that they had indeed already died to an orkish bullet and were now simply fleeing further into hell.
The hugest and greatest ork to ever emerge from the war-worlds of the Garon Nebula strode towards the pulpit of the Temple of Imperator Ascendant. The temple was a riot of howling orks, ripping down the tapestries that depicted the founders of House Falken taking their first steps on the shores of Herograve or forging through the jungles of Nevermourn. The greenskins blew the faces off statues with their guns and smashed the bronze plaques that showed scenes from the lives of Imperial saints. They smeared blood on the pale stone walls, blood from the temple’s clergy now being dismembered by the small slave-creatures who followed the orks everywhere. Dung and gore were heaped on the temple’s altar and the image of the Emperor now lacked a face, the intricate altarpiece scarred with gunfire.
One cleric was still alive and the slave-creatures were toying with him, kicking a gun away from his outstretched hand as he reached for it to take his own life. Again and again he reached haplessly for the skittering gun, and each time the lean, scurrying creatures howled with laughter. They looked up as the great ork’s shadow fell over them and their faces fell, cruel red eyes widening in fear above their sharp wicked little faces, and they scrambled out of his way to hide between the dark wood of the temple’s pews.
The other orks bellowed their triumph as their warlord walked among them. The warlord was bigger than any of them, twice as tall as most, its great gnarled head thrust brutally from between his shoulders and its huge jaw scowling around the forest of broken tusks. Its skin was as dark and gnarled as the bark on an ancient tree, and its eyes, even sunk deep into its bestial skull, burned with an intelligence and drive the other orks lacked.
The warlord only had one normal arm, with which he batted the closest slave-creature out of the way. His other arm was a contraption of metal and steam that spurted hot gouts of vapour as he moved, and ended in a great three-fingered claw large enough to rip the turret off a tank. The machinery encasing his ribcage and his spine was a rusted ladder of metal chunks that hissed black lubricant as he moved. Thick green cords of muscle had grown around his mechanical parts, loosening and contracting as he moved. To have survived the replacement of half his torso with such crude replacements suggested a level of toughness abnormal even for an ork.
The warlord roared, but not with the triumph and gloating bravado of the other orks. The orks fell silent, even the burliest of them shuddering at the warlord’s displeasure. The warlord glowered at the greenskins and his eyes fell on one of them, who was slashing up one of the temple’s tapestries with the rusted, bloody blade of his cleaver.
The warlord darted forward with speed far too great for something of his size, and seized the vandalising ork with his natural hand. His fingers closed around the ork’s muscular throat and lifted the creature off the ground. The warlord shifted the ork to his mechanical hand and threw it across the temple. Its body slammed into the far wall leaving a crumbling dent in the stone, and slumped to the floor unconscious.
The warlord turned back to the slashed tapestry, pulling it off the wall closer to his face as he examined it. It showed the earliest Warders, the troops of Vanqualis who first protected the shores of Herograve as the planet’s cities were settled under the banners of House Falken. The soldiers were capturing a ridge, their stylised uniforms bright and their autoguns held high. The bodies of orks, cut up into pieces, were piled beneath their feet. The artist had shown them as weak and skinny, pathetic creatures barely worthy of Vanqualian bayonets.
The warlord yanked the tapestry off the wall and held it high, so the assembled orks could see the slain orks trampled by human feet. He yelled at them, spitting the hateful syllables of the orkish tongue.
The Vanqualians had won this planet from the orks. This planet belonged to the orks. This world, like so many of the worlds across which the warlord had strode, was green – and it would be green again. But these humans, the same humans now being slaughtered in the streets of Palatium, had once crushed the orks just as surely as the orks were crushing them. They were resilient and resourceful. They were driven. They believed in things that made them perform extraordinary tasks. To underestimate them, to treat them as blade-fodder and playthings, was a way to ensure the same defeat that had befallen the first orks to claim Vanqualis as their own.
If the orks in the temple understood this, any sign of it was hidden under the fear the warlord’s smouldering anger instilled in them. The warlord threw down the tapestry and spat on it. He noticed the only surviving cleric hiding behind the pew beside him. The man was elderly, his creased, terrified face smeared with blood and dirt, his fingers bloody and his dove-grey priestly robes tattered. Near him lay the gun he had been trying to grab off the slave-creatures.
The warlord bent down and picked up the gun. He crushed it in the fingers of his mechanical arm, and threw it back down at the cleric’s feet. The cleric looked down at it, then stared up at the warlord, terrified tears filling his eyes.
As the warlord stomped towards the pulpit the slave-creatures fell upon the cleric and the temple filled with noise again, the cleric screaming, his robes and his flesh tearing, the slave-creatures cackling as they slicked themselves with his blood. The orks took the racket as a signal to continue destroying the icons of the human enemy and gunfire roared again, blasting censer globes from the ceiling and blowing holes in the pews.
The warlord ignored them. Perhaps once, he had been the same, a simple and brutal creature with nothing but the love of war burning inside him. But the warlord was not like that now, Even the cleric, in the last horror-filled moments of his life, had realised that. He was not an ork, for an ork was a simple thing. An ork was not driven by convictions that equalled those of his most zealous human opponent. An ork did not live by cunning as well as strength, the lust for supremacy as well as the desire for violence and carnage. The warlord did.
He stomped to the top of the pulpit, which overlooked the main nave of the temple. Instead of facing the rows of pews as the temple’s preachers had done, the warlord looked the other way, past the ruined altarpiece and through the smashed window that still had fragments of stained glass clinging to its frame.
Palatium stretched out before him. It was a small city, built as a place for the planet’s human leaders to rule from instead of a centre of population and industry. Even so, the speed with which the orks had overrun it was impressive. Tiny green figures cavorted on distant rooftops, tearing down the banners of House Falken, hurling masonry and roof tiles into the streets below. Buildings burned, and through the palls of black smoke descended huge ponderous craft, daubed with the crude glyphs of the many ork clans united under the warlord.
Many such craft were already disgorging thousands more orks to fuel the invasion of Vanqualis. Some of the orks were specialists in the warlord’s army, sought out and won from their own warlords in fighting pit duels or all-out battles. There were orkish veterans in massive suits of powered armour, heavy and brutal as walking tanks. A squad of expert infiltrators, faces smeared black with camouflage, moved with silence and economy unbecoming of the more raucous ork warriors – these were the scouts and assassins whose natural habitat was a jungle war zone. Masked slavers with barbed whips lashed forwards squabbling crowds of slave creatures, who would be herded in front of the warlord’s main force to absorb bullets and set off mines. Other ships were lowering down rickety, temperamental war machines and tanks, with slaves scrabbling all over them to tighten screws and oil joints.
The humans who had slain the first orks to inhabit Vanqualis doubtless had no idea that orks could muster such soldiers. They assumed that the greenskins were nothing more than a horde of animals, all alike in their crudeness and brutality. For the most part they were right, but then for the most part the orks did not have leaders like the warlord to marshal them into a fighting force as deadly as anything the humans could field.
The warlord looked beyond the city, to the jungles. Beyond those jungles was the sea, and beyond that the coast of Herograve, the polluted rocky wasteland with its teeming cities and billions of humans. Weak, cowardly, doomed humans, for whom the cleaver or the bullet was too honest an end. Nevertheless, that was how they would die, because Vanqualis belonged to the orks and no greater desire burned behind the warlord’s eyes than to see it in the hands of the greenskins again.
For a long time, the countess was silent. The only sound was the hiss of the air recyclers pumping stale, cold, dry air into the pinnacle chamber. Her small, frail frame swamped by the sweeping pearl-studded gown, her hollow-cheeked face framed by the tiara of diamond spines, the countess seemed to sink deeper into the juvenat throne.
The chamberlain waited politely. He was a small and officious man who had lived a lifetime of service and delivered his share of bad news to the sons and daughters of the Falken family, but never had the news been this bad. He kept his composure and cast his eyes to the floor, awaiting the countess’s reply.
Countess Ismenissa Falken took a deep breath that rattled through her aged body. ‘When did this happen?’
‘But less than an hour, my lady.’
‘And of my husband?’
The chamberlain had evidently expected this question. ‘Nothing is known of him. With the grace of the Emperor it may be that he still lives…’
‘Spare me not, chamberlain,’ said the countess, cutting him off. ‘Is my husband dead?’
The chamberlain swallowed. ‘Lord Globus was on the Aristarchical Pavilion, my lady, and it was thought destroyed in the first attack.’
‘Then he is dead.’
‘Very probably, my lady.’
‘I see. Are there any of the family left?’
‘We do not know. Many citizens have escaped Palatium but with little order. Perhaps there are some scions among them. I fear I have little to tell you that is certain.’
‘It is certain that the greenskins have returned,’ said Countess Ismenissa. ‘And it is certain that our world is invaded. It is also certain that we cannot stand alone.’
The countess stood up. From the black slabs of metal that made up the juvenat throne snaked several thick cables that fitted into the rear of the jewel-studded bodice of her dress. Several children, dressed in the same crimson coattails as the chamberlain, stepped out from the shadows behind the juvenat throne, some holding the hem of her long skirts off the floor, others gathering the cables as they slid from the throne so they did not become tangled as the countess walked regally towards one of the tall arched windows that ringed the chamber.
The shadows behind the throne could not hide their blue-grey skin and hollow black eyes, nor the way they walked hunched or on all fours like animals. The wives of House Falken dutifully produced many children, not all of whom survived their childhood, and it was from those lost sons and daughters that the countess’s hem-bearers were created. The servitor technology leased to House Falken by the Adeptus Mechanicus was complex and flawed, so the half-living children fell well short of the cherubic ideal.
