The Siege of Castellax Read online

  ‘I am in command of this entire section,’ Nehring said, turning towards Yuxiang. ‘If you desist now… I will… will not report this to the Iron Warriors.’

  Mention of the dreaded Space Marines brought gasps from some of the slaves, but if Nehring mistook fear for timidity, he was sorely mistaken.

  Yuxiang buried the butt of his lasgun in the officer’s belly, driving the breath from his body, smashing the arrogance and authority from his attitude. ‘You will get me guns,’ Yuxiang told him. ‘That is the only thing I want. Not threats. Not promises.’

  Coughing, trying to suck air back into his lungs, Nehring nodded in submission. ‘What… whatever… want…’

  As the officer started to rise, the sizzle-crack of a lasgun rasped through the room. Nehring cried out in agony, sprawling to the floor as the smoking wreckage of his knee failed under his weight. He landed hard, teeth chipping as his jaw smacked against the floor. Howling in pain, he clutched at his leg.

  ‘We don’t need his lies or his mouth,’ Taofang growled, aiming his lasgun downwards, sending another bolt sizzling through the back of Nehring’s hand. ‘The supply caches are actuated by retinal scan.’

  Nehring’s dark skin grew pale, a panicked yelp escaped his bleeding mouth. Desperately he groped along the floor, trying to drag himself to shelter. His effort was thwarted when Mingzhou’s rifle slammed down against his other hand, breaking every finger.

  ‘Gamma-Five,’ the sniper hissed down at him. ‘You made quite an impression on everyone who was there.’ She drove the rifle into his ribs. ‘Unfortunately, most of them aren’t here to thank you for your selfless leadership.’

  Yuxiang rounded on Taofang. ‘Kill him and get it over with,’ he demanded. The janissary shook off his restraining hand.

  ‘We’ll need his eye,’ Taofang declared. He reached down to his boot, drawing a wide-bladed combat knife. ‘We need his eye to actuate the retinal scans.’ He paused, glaring down at the terrified, whimpering officer.

  ‘We need his eye,’ Taofang repeated. ‘But I think I’ll take the whole damn head.’

  The ork’s snarling face burst into blobs of meat and splinters of bone as the churning blade of Rhodaan’s chainsword bit through the alien’s horned helm. Like a poleaxed grox, the huge ork slammed to the floor, its stumpy fingers still tugging at the triggers of the stubbers clenched in its paws. The Iron Warrior kicked the twitching corpse from underfoot, giving him space to confront the rest of the xenos horde.

  The eerie power of the Daemonculum had pierced the walls of reality, translating Squad Kyrith from Oriax’s sanctum deep beneath the Iron Bastion to the ork-infested city of Dirgas. In the blink of an eye, the Space Marines had been teleported across an entire continent, shifted across the face of Castellax. Whatever the Fabricator’s protestations, the thing still stank of witchery to Rhodaan.

  Rhodaan spun around, opening the belly of a howling ork rushing at him with a crude axe, a shot from the Raptor’s plasma pistol melting the skull off a second alien marauder. As the two creatures collapsed before him, Rhodaan lunged across their bodies, taking the attack into the midst of the alien mob. To an untrained eye, the tactic might seem reckless but it was actually a calculated exploitation of the savage xenos mindset. The ork was a creature which gloried in battle, eager to fight. At the same time, its society was one of strict hierarchy, the strong dominating everything weaker than themselves. An ork quickly understood its place in the hierarchy, deferring to the more powerful of its breed until such time as it felt itself strong enough to challenge its betters and raise its own position.

  Given even the briefest pause, an ork mob would automatically adjust itself, instinctually deferring to the leaders and allowing their biggest and strongest the right to sate their blood thirst. By denying them that instant for adjustment, Rhodaan wrong-footed the aliens, put them off balance, made them hesitate ever so slightly. Before bringing its shock maul down, a scar-faced ork glanced to make certain its boss wasn’t nearby. That fraction of a heartbeat was all the delay Rhodaan needed to open the brute from belly to groin.

  Beside him, Pazuriel and Baelfegor wrought havoc among the aliens. The orks were pure primal savagery, raw undisciplined force. They attacked with a simple, fearless brutality – an undiluted appetite for battle that wasn’t confused by consideration of tactics and strategy. Against a lesser foe, the very recklessness of the attack would have been overwhelming. Against Iron Warriors, however, it was a recipe for slaughter. Primitive might against the cold precision of tactical warfare. Beasts born for battle against men who had been trained, conditioned and engineered for war. Nature versus the deadly progeny of a thousand arcane sciences.

  Even if the orks had possessed minds capable of understanding, the Iron Warriors didn’t allow them the time to understand just how woefully outclassed they were.

  ‘All charges in place,’ Brother Gomorie’s voice crackled across the inter-squad vox.

  Rhodaan smiled inside his helmet, blasting the growl from a huge ork warrior with a blazing beam of plasma. The report was welcome news. Any chance Vallax and his Faceless had of stealing triumph from Squad Kyrith was quickly evaporating.

  Oriax had been as good as his word. The Raptors had materialised within the ferrocrete halls of the blockhouse Biglug was using to stockpile the horde’s aviation fuel. Secure in their control of Dirgas, the orks had positioned their sentries on the perimeter of the blockhouse, to keep their own kind from sneaking in and stealing fuel. There had been no provision for guards inside, no thought that the Iron Warriors might pose a threat to them so deep inside their own stronghold.

  If not for a pack of xenos scavengers that had managed to sneak into the blockhouse, the Raptors might have achieved their objective without alerting the enemy at all. Rhodaan was tempted to attribute their encounter with the thieves to bad luck, but it was too much of a coincidence to be so easily dismissed. He could still feel the chill of the Daemonculum clinging to his armour, the mephitic vapour of the warp. How might that lingering taint affect them? How might perverse warp entities amuse themselves by violating laws of causality and probability? Was it coincidence that had caused the scavengers to stumble onto Squad Kyrith? Was it simply bad luck that had allowed a few of them to escape and spread the alarm?

  Ill fortune or daemon-engineered doom, Rhodaan didn’t care. Whatever fates conspired against him, he would defy them with his every breath. Let the gods of Chaos plot and scheme, they would not cheat him of his glory.

  ‘Set the charges for five minutes,’ Rhodaan growled across the vox. The chatter of a heavy stubber forced him to duck behind the bulk of a support pillar, chips of ferrocrete flying in every direction as the ork gunner tracked the Raptor across the storage chamber, oblivious to the cocktail of fuel spilling from ruptured drums and barrels.

  ‘Add thirty seconds,’ Rhodaan amended, the aiming reticule in his optic display picking out the ork gunner from the mob of lesser aliens. It was a big brute, its leathery chest bared to expose a network of wire piercings that formed the leering visage of an alien glyph. The weapon it carried was a massive automatic stubber, so massive that even a Space Marine would have thought twice before trying to fire it from the hip the way this monster was. That the ork could do so and maintain some rude semblance of accuracy was more a testament to its brawn than the mental agility required to compensate for the weapon’s recoil.

  Rhodaan seized one of the fuel drums stacked near his refuge, hefting the burden in an underhand shift, sending it wobbling across the floor. The ork shifted its aim, barking with laughter as its bullets shredded the drum. Sparks and burning drops of fuel blossomed from the disintegrating drum, lighting upon the floor. Pools of fuel blazed into hellish fury, racing through the chamber, throwing walls of flame in every direction.

  Many of the orks howled in alarm, scattering before the flames. The brute with the stubber maintained its murderous barrage with stubborn ferocity, blindly sending bullets slamming through the obscuring
flames.

  From the midst of the fire, a vengeful figure of ceramite and plasteel came hurtling at the ork. Fire dripped from Rhodaan’s power armour, smouldered against the blood-slick pinions of his demi-organic wings. Thrust ahead by his jump pack, the Raptor smashed into the surprised alien, the heavy stubber shattering beneath the Iron

  Warrior’s impact as he crashed into the ork.

  The brute was sent reeling, stumbling across the chamber, slipping in the burning fuel. Arms flailing, the ork collapsed into a pool of liquid fire. Anguished howls rose from the creature as it thrashed among the flames.

  Rhodaan didn’t relax. He had seen the stubborn vitality of orks too often.

  The brute sloshed painfully in the pool, then rolled onto its back. Through the pain and blinding fire, the ork was able to focus upon its attacker. Its body wrapped in flames, it lunged up from the floor, meaty paws clenched into burning fists.

  The Iron Warrior met the monster’s attack with a sweep of his chainsword that sent the roaring head bouncing across the floor. He sidestepped as the burning body came hurtling after him. It staggered on a few paces, as though unaware that its guiding intelligence was lying on the floor. The fists abruptly fell to the ork’s sides, its shoulders slumped. Almost in slow motion, the headless corpse dropped to the ground.

  ‘My error,’ Rhodaan said across the vox. He stared at the burning corpse. ‘Twenty seconds.’

  ‘We shall require all the time we can get for extraction,’ Uzraal said, the sizzle of his meltagun audible across the vox.

  Rhodaan was already in motion, turning to address the threat presented by a new mob of orks rushing at the Iron Warriors from the far side of the chamber. Ignoring the flames and the threat of explosion, he grabbed a burning fuel drum and threw it into the midst of the aliens. A blast from his plasma pistol detonated the drum like a bomb, splashing the mob in burning promethium. A half-dozen orks collapsed in fiery agony; the rest, many of them with burning clothes and singed skin, scattered.

  ‘Through this pack,’ Rhodaan ordered, dropping one of the fleeing aliens. In the corner of his helmet’s visual display he could see the layout of the blockhouse. The lift would be nearby. In his mind, he could picture the aerial reconnaissance images provided by Morax’s Air Cohort.

  There was no guarantee of outside help; even if Vallax and Uhlan hadn’t initiated any treachery, the valour of Flesh was uncertain. The Raptors couldn’t count on them to brave the defences of Dirgas to reach the blockhouse. Certainly not in the time allowed to them. No, Squad Kyrith would have to attend to their own withdrawal, an eventuality Rhodaan had prepared for.

  ‘We fight our way to the roof,’ Rhodaan told his Raptors.

  ‘And then?’ Pazuriel demanded. Rhodaan could just see the other Iron Warrior from the corner of his vision, shooting down orks with bursts from a hand flamer. Against the backdrop of a burning fuel dump, there was something almost ridiculous about the scene.

  Rhodaan scowled inside his helmet. He was depending on the orks to act true to form, aggression overruling caution. Otherwise, they were all going to die.

  ‘Reconnaissance shows several vertical lift aircraft parked on the roof,’ Rhodaan said. ‘We fight our way up there and steal one of their planes.’ A touch of black humour crept into his voice, humour that had nothing to do with the alien warriors he continued to gun down as they rushed at him through the flames.

  ‘Be attentive for anything that looks like a pilot,’ Rhodaan said. ‘Whoever finds one better have a strong omophagea.’

  There was a chorus of disgusted groans across the vox-channel.

  Rhodaan smashed his way through an axe-wielding ork, then brought his chainsword down, slashing the arm off another charging alien. ‘Content yourselves, brothers,’ he said. ‘An ork’s brain isn’t a big meal.’

  Chapter XVII

  I-Day Plus One Hundred and Six

  Rhodaan stared in revulsion at what passed for controls in the ork aircraft, feeling the pit of his stomach drop out. He’d hoped the alien aircraft would be simple enough for them to fly out of Dirgas. It was simple, he had to admit that much, but it was so simple he didn’t see how the xenos could make it fly. How they were going to was a question he hoped Gomorie’s gruesome snack would answer. He’d been the lucky Raptor to catch the ork pilot on the launch pad, though Baelfegor’s reluctance to close with the xenos might have contributed to Gomorie’s opportunity. No Iron warrior shirked his duty, but there were some objectives it was more appealing to leave to another battle-brother.

  The cockpit was a glass-faced box squashed onto the nose of the bomber, having every appearance of being welded onto the fuselage as an after-thought. As though the orks had built the rest of the plane and then realised they’d missed out any way to control it. The control panel was a crude box, its face pitted with a few dials and levers, an enormous and clunky-looking steering column, several vulgar-looking patches of graffiti and a bank of buttons that was missing at least three of its number with a fourth dangling from the panel by a few wires. A pair of huge foot pedals rose from the floor, one of them bolted flat by a strip of sheet metal, the other flapping limp in its fastenings. A huge copper pipe stretched along the side of the compartment, its surface pitted and scored in dozens of places, greasy rags wrapped about the worst of the ruptures. Rhodaan winced at the heavy promethium smell rising from the pipe, realising with alarm that it was some element of the plane’s fuel system and that once the craft was in motion, it would start leaking all over the cockpit.

  Still, Rhodaan couldn’t even consider that to be the most alarming element of the ork cockpit. There was the little drawing of an arrow, for instance, scrawled across a strip of hide and nailed to a section of the fuselage above one of the levers. Whatever the meaning of the arrow, the direction it was pointing didn’t correspond with the direction the lever could be moved. Then there was the little box rising from the floor beside the pilot’s couch. It looked like a primitive clutch, a single control rod that could be slid into different positions to control the craft’s speed. Little las-marks seemed to denote the velocity the craft would make in each position the clutch was thrown. At some point, an ork had welded a piece of pig-iron over the groove, locking the clutch into its highest speed. The Space Marine lost no time tearing the bit of pig-iron from the groove.

  Gomorie wiped his mouth and placed his helmet over his head. The mangled skull of the ork pilot fell to the floor. The Iron Warrior stalked towards the controls, trying to manoeuvre around the bulky couch. From outside, the chatter of bolters rose.

  ‘More orks on the roof,’ Pazuriel reported over the vox. Along with Uzraal and Baelfegor, he was maintaining the perimeter the Iron Warriors had established around the aircraft. ‘If we’re going to leave, we need to do it soon.’

  Gomorie’s hands closed about the top of the couch. Viciously, he ripped it clear from its moorings and ejected it from the cockpit. His path clear, he pushed past Rhodaan and stared at the controls.

  ‘Can you make any sense of this hodgepodge?’ Rhodaan demanded.

  Gomorie nodded. ‘Have our battle-brothers embark, lord captain,’ he said. His finger pressed one of the buttons on the panel. When nothing happened, he pressed it again, this time hard enough to make it sink into the panel. When the plane still failed to respond, he smacked the side of the panel with his fist. Abruptly, the aircraft shuddered into life, the rumble of its awakened engine, the tremor of its activated pistons pulsing through the fuselage.

  ‘Squad Kyrith is aboard,’ Pazuriel’s voice announced over the vox.

  The crack of bullets and shells against the plane’s fuselage lent an immediacy to Pazuriel’s words. There was no one outside to maintain the perimeter. In a matter of moments, the orks would be swarming over the plane.

  ‘Now or never,’ Rhodaan told Gomorie.

  Gomorie stood confidently before the controls, the mag-clamps in his boots lending him more stability than the crude pilot’s couch ever could. ‘I
t is not a complex system,’ he declared. He lifted one of his feet and brought it towards the pedal that had been bolted almost flat to the floor. ‘All you need do is feed the engine…’

  As soon as Gomorie touched his foot to the pedal, the ork plane roared forwards, leaping from the rooftop like a hound loosed from its chain. Rhodaan was sent reeling, his helmet crashing against the low ceiling of the cockpit. Gomorie wrapped his arms about the steering column, more to keep himself upright than to direct the craft.

  ‘Slow this obscenity down!’ Rhodaan roared.

  Gomorie brought his foot smashing down on the other pedal, but it simply flopped limply against the floor. He turned and looked at Rhodaan. ‘That should have been the brake,’ he reported. ‘It seems the pilot took it upon itself to disable it. The ork didn’t want to appear timid to its fellows,’ he elaborated as some of the alien’s memories stirred in his mind.

  Rhodaan felt his hearts hammer in his breast. ‘How do we land without brakes?’ he demanded.

  Again, Gomorie focused upon the mental images from the ork’s brain. ‘We crash,’ was his far from encouraging response.

  Enginseer Heroditus focused his gaze upon the wondrous vision. Despite the emotional weakness, he regretted the atrophy of his organic eyes. Cybernetic implants were too stable, unable to cloud with tears of awe and devotion. Unable to exhibit the proper respect such a sight demanded.

  Above him, on the causeway, being lifted upon stout titanium chains, was the graceful casing of Vindex Lartius, every inch of its shell lovingly inscribed with liturgies of power and catechisms of revenge. Dozens of purity scrolls fluttered in the sluggish breeze of the underworld’s archaic filtration cycle, the lead seals binding them to the warhead embossed with the cog symbol of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  Vindication was coming, was nearly at hand. Justification for their years of subservience to the traitors, atonement for their debased survival. The works of the arch-enemy would be swept away. Castellax would be cleansed of its contagion.