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Angels of Death – Extract

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Chapter I

I-Day Minus 15

Obedience. Labour. Fidelity.

The three words stretched across the cyclopean wall, each letter ten metres high and stamped in steel. Lines of corrosion bled downwards from each word, scarring the ferrocrete blocks to which they were bolted. At the base of each wall, a narrow gutter carried the oxidised runoff into drainage pits, where it mixed with the waste of the smelters to create a slither of toxic steam that danced in the hot susurrus of the foundry’s machinery.

Yuxiang stared up at those words, feeling them pressing down upon him in all their corroded malignance. From no point in the mammoth processing plant was it possible to escape the steel letters. Like watchful gods, they glared down upon the slaves chained beside the conveyor belts, pneumatic presses, industrial ovens and bubbling slag pits. Every time the great blast furnaces vented a sheet of flame from their stacks, the steel letters reflected a hellish glow, the light of mirrored fires rippling along their length.

Above the din and roar of the conveyors, the fiery growl of the furnaces and the shriek of steam leaving the ovens, it was impossible to escape the low snarl being vomited by the vox-casters scattered about the plant. An endless litany of dry, grim voices chanting the same mantra stamped upon the factory wall.

Obedience. Labour. Fidelity.

The slaves in Processing Plant Secundus Minorus lived by the words that had been drilled into their very souls. Very often, they died by them.

Across the face of Castellax, there were millions who slaved to feed the war machine of their oppressors. Hour after hour, day after day, without rest or respite, they toiled to spread tyranny and destruction across the galaxy. Their only reward was the continuance of life, but for men like Yuxiang, it was enough. They had seen what became of those who defied the lords of Castellax.

Work had halted in Yuxiang’s section. Sometimes the machinery would require maintenance or some fault in the processors mandated a shut down. Such occasions were cause for cheer among the slaves. The reason for the current break, however, didn’t make even the most jaded labourer happy.

Yuxiang watched the whip-thin figure of Prefect Wyre, supervisor of Processing Plant Secundus Minorus, pace along the steel gantry above his section. Wyre’s face was lean and hard, his features stamped with callousness and cruelty. Among the thousands of slaves in the factory, there wasn’t one who hadn’t felt the burn of Wyre’s shock baton against his ribs. As he paced, the prefect slapped the deactivated baton against his palm, the hollow thwack making a menacing accompaniment to the click of his boots against the metal grating.

Kneeling before the prefect was a dishevelled, emaciated man, his scrawny frame draped in the coveralls of a factory slave, the brand of Secundus Minorus etched across his forehead. Blood streamed from the man’s broken nose and with each breath a bubble of blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. The black-clad overseers who flanked the prostrate slave hadn’t been gentle when they subdued him.

‘Who is that?’ The question came in a whisper, uttered by Chingwei, Yuxiang’s alternate at the pneumatic press.

‘Mendes, from Blast Furnace Gamma-four,’ Yuxiang whispered back.

‘An off-worlder,’ Chingwei sighed, a trace of envy in his tone. Yuxiang could understand the sentiment. Whatever fate awaited Mendes, at least the man hadn’t been born into servitude on Castellax. At least he had known some kind of life before he was condemned to the factories.

‘What did he do?’ Chingwei hissed. Despite the horror of the situation, the slave couldn’t restrain his curiosity about the reason for this break in routine.

Yuxiang hesitated before answering, glancing about to make sure none of Wyre’s overseers were near. ‘He made the sign of the aquila,’ he said.

‘Poor, stupid off-world bastard,’ Chingwei said. ‘Wyre will have him shot for that. When will these off-worlders learn?’

The gaunt prefect was launching into a harangue now, his voice raised in a caustic hiss that was amplified into a fiery roar by the factory’s vox-casters.

‘When will you vermin learn?’ Wyre asked. ‘When will you understand that your superstitions will not help you?’ The prefect leaned in, activating his baton and driving the butt of the weapon against Mendes’s midsection. The slave cried out as electricity crackled across his body. He writhed in the grip of the overseers who held him, his captors safe inside their insulated uniforms.

‘You are no longer a man,’ Wyre snapped, turning away from the slave and pacing along the gantry. ‘You do not think. You do not dream. You do not hope.’ He rounded on Mendes, smashing the baton across his mouth. Lightning sizzled through the captive’s clenched teeth. ‘You do not pray!’

Yuxiang watched the torture, impotent rage boiling inside him. He longed to do something, anything to stop the hideous tableau. But he knew there was nothing that could be done. He had seen Wyre at work too many times to hold any delusions that the prefect could be stopped. Any gesture of defiance and he would simply join Mendes in his suffering.

‘Did you really think anyone would answer you?’ Wyre sneered, stabbing the butt of his baton into Mendes’s shoulder. The slave’s body twisted and jerked in a spasm of agony as the shock scorched his flesh. ‘What did you pray for, scum? Did you pray for freedom? Did you pray for justice? Did you ask for revenge?’ The baton crackled against the man’s thigh, searing through the leg of his coverall as Wyre intensified the strength of its discharge. The smell of burned meat drifted down from the gantry.

‘There are none of those things here,’ Wyre announced, turning from his victim and glaring across the upturned faces of the factory’s slaves. He raised his baton, jabbing it over his shoulder, pointing at the steel words on the wall. ‘Obedience. Labour. Fidelity. Those are the only things here! And when you forget that… there is pain.’

Wyre spun around, thrusting the baton into Mendes’s gut. The slave screamed, thrashing wildly in the grip of the overseers. The prefect grinned sadistically as he held the activated shock baton in place, watching it burn into the slave’s body.

‘God-Emperor have mercy!’ Mendes shrieked.

Wyre’s face turned crimson with rage. He drew back the baton, revealing blackened skin where it had rested on the captive’s body. His gloved hand seized the slave’s hair, forcing the man’s face upwards, forcing him to look into the prefect’s blazing eyes. ‘There is no God-Emperor here,’ he spat. His finger ran across the power stud of his shock baton, pushing it to maximum intensity. Electricity danced from the head of the weapon. ‘There is only me!’

Wyre raised the baton to jab it into Mendes’s face, but before the prefect’s blow could land, a thunderous voice called out, ‘Restrain yourself, peon.’

The red rage drained from Wyre’s face, replaced by an ashen pallor. He turned slowly, facing in the direction from which the booming voice had sounded. Immediately, the prefect deactivated his shock baton and dropped to his knees, bowing his head in abject submission.

From the shadow of a loading elevator, a giant stalked out onto the gantry, the steel grates groaning under his armoured weight. The huge figure towered over the black-clad overseers, men chosen for their size and ferocity. His dimensions were superhuman, two metres from crown to toe, as broad as an ore-cart. The ornate armour he wore was a masterwork of ceramite plates, deeply engraved with gilded flames. The giant’s helmet encased his head completely, red optics glaring out from a mask of iron. The face of the helm was pulled forwards in a long beak, its sides carved into the image of a fanged, snarling mouth. Upon one bulky shoulder pauldron, a leering metal skull glowered down at the slaves of Processing Plant Secundus Minorus.

A thrill of terror swept through the assembly. Chains clattered as men covered their eyes, moans of horror rose unbidden from stunned spectators. For once, even the overseers were taken aback, staring with outright fear as the giant marched towards Prefect Wyre.

Yuxiang’s body trembled like a leaf in a storm. He longed to hide his face from the armoured nightmare but found himself as transfixed as a sump-rat watching an ash-viper.

Wyre was nothing. His brutality was nothing. His cruelty was nothing. The prefect was little better than a slave himself, a vassal to the masters of Castellax, a clever pet to the monsters who ruled over Yuxiang’s home world.

Among the slaves, particularly the off-worlders, there were whispers about the warrior angels who defended the Imperium, the semi-divine Adeptus Astartes, supermen who brought battle to the enemies of mankind and enabled the spread of humanity across the stars. They were demigods, sons of the God-Emperor Himself, protectors of His faithful children.

The masters of Castellax were a profane mockery of that holy image. They were angels defiled and corrupted, twisted into things monstrous and obscene.

They were the Iron Warriors.

‘My Lord Rhodaan,’ Wyre addressed the armoured giant, his voice little more than a frightened squeak. ‘You do Processing Plant Secundus Minorus great honour with your presence.’

Rhodaan stopped his march only a few metres from the cowering prefect. When he spoke, his voice was deep and malignant, infected with a metallic snarl by the amplifiers in his helmet. The Iron Warrior didn’t deign to look at the prefect when he spoke, instead fixing his gaze upon the tortured Mendes.

‘Why have you halted production?’ Rhodaan demanded. ‘Why is this Flesh not at its work station?’

Shivering with terror, Wyre risked a look at the slave he had been punishing. ‘I-I was making a-an example of this one.’ He pointed his baton at the slaves below. ‘I felt th-that the others n-needed discipline...’

The Iron Warrior stood in silence for a moment, still staring at Mendes. ‘What did this Flesh do?’ he asked at last.

The question brought beads of sweat dripping down Wyre’s forehead. He swallowed nervously. ‘He was ca-caught making the sign of the aquila.’

Rhodaan’s head turned, the lenses of his helmet boring down upon the trembling prefect. ‘That is unfortunate.’

‘I-I was making a-an example… Reminding th-the rest…’

The Iron Warrior was no longer listening to Wyre. With two steps, Rhodaan reached Mendes. The giant’s ceramite gauntlets closed around the slave’s scrawny forearms. With a single wrenching motion, he broke both of the man’s arms and dropped the screaming wretch at the feet of the overseers.

‘Hang this animal above one of the smelters,’ Rhodaan ordered Wyre as he began to march away. ‘Every minute the creature fails to make the sign of the aquila, you will lower him one centimetre. It will be interesting to see if his faith in the False Emperor sustains him when he feels the kiss of molten titanium on his toes.’

Yuxiang held his gaze on Rhodaan until the Space Marine vanished once more into the shadows around the loading elevator. Only then did he look back at Mendes, watching with horror as Wyre ordered his overseers to secure the mangled man to one of the chains suspended above the closest smelter. With his broken arms, there was no chance Mendes could make the gesture demanded of him. Centimetre by centimetre, he would be lowered towards the molten metal and hideous death.

Truly, the off-worlder would have been better left to the brutality of Wyre. Compared to the Iron Warrior, the prefect’s punishment would have been an act of mercy.

Captain Antares leaned back in his grox-hide command throne and watched as the icy grey globe grew steadily smaller. At this distance, he could just barely make out the superstructures of the transfer stations orbiting the moon. If not for the guide-lights mounted to their docking arms, he doubted if he’d have been able to pick them out from the black starscape which stretched across the bridge’s viewscreen.

Impex V, outermost of the vagabond moons of the Castellax system. For an interplanetary tanker like the Stardrinker, it took two weeks to make the voyage, take on cargo and return. Two weeks of unrelieved monotony and boredom. Impex V to Castellax. Castellax to Impex V. Back and forth, week in and week out. An unbreakable pattern that had ruled Antares’s life for the past seven years, ever since he’d had the misfortune of surviving an Iron Warriors slave raid and become one of their thralls.

Antares rose from his throne, hearing the heavy grox-hide adjust itself to his vanished weight. Idly the captain descended the short flight of stairs separating the command dais from the main deck of the bridge. He filed past the technicians labouring at their displays, sometimes pausing to look over a shoulder and study the information scrolling across a screen. Antares didn’t understand half of what he was looking at, but it was more important that his crew thought he did. Efficiency through encouraged paranoia was something the Iron Warriors used to dominate their fleet. Antares found it worked just as well for him on his own bridge.

The captain looked up from the terminal of a sandy-haired officer, frowning at the younger man. ‘Don’t you think we can do better?’ he asked the lieutenant. Antares didn’t wait for an answer, but continued walking the bridge. Any questions might have proved awkward. He wasn’t sure if better meant an increase or decrease.

The black sprawl of the bridge’s pict screen stretched before Antares as he reached the last of the terminals. He paused a moment, staring out at the grey blob which marked Impex V’s position. Two weeks, he thought, and then I’ll be staring at the exact same thing all over again.

It was a problem that had plagued Castellax for a hundred years. Even before the world fell to the Iron Warriors, it had been a desolate place. If not for its vast mineral resources, the Imperium would have bypassed the planet. But Castellax was rich in promethium and heavy metals, so the Imperium had established a colony on the world to exploit the planet’s wealth.

That same wealth had drawn the Iron Warriors. They needed the resources of Castellax to feed their great war machine, to build new warships for their raider fleets, tanks and guns for their marauding armies. After seizing control of the planet, they had instituted a policy of savage exploitation that made the Imperium’s industry pale by comparison. Such rampant ravaging of the planet had not been without its consequences. The seas were drained to feed the factories and strip mines, the water table under the planet’s surface was hopelessly corrupted by industrial waste. After a century of occupation by the Iron Warriors, there wasn’t a spoonful of freestanding water left on Castellax that wasn’t nine-parts toxic sludge.

The Iron Warriors had been forced to look elsewhere to feed Castellax’s thirst. In the frozen outer moon of Impex V, they found their solution. Orbital stations were brought to surround the moon, each station deploying hundreds of small barges which would fly down to harvest the ice. A fleet of tankers like the Stardrinker would then collect it, ferrying the huge frozen blocks back to Castellax, a continuous chain of supply to keep the fires of industry burning.

‘Captain Antares!’ one of the officers suddenly cried out, breaking Antares’s contemplation of the ice-moon. He turned towards the excited crewman, marching over to his station and staring at the pict screen.

‘These objects just appeared in our starboard quadrant,’ the officer reported. Antares did not know much about the actual operation of his ship, but he was able to recognise the fast-moving blips whose trajectory put them on an intercept course.

‘Could they be elements of the supply fleet?’ Antares asked. The officer shook his head.

‘No, sir. They are too far from Castellax to be fighters and too small to be destroyers.’

As Antares digested the problem of what the blips might represent, the crewmen at the communications relays suddenly clapped their hands to their ears, swiftly turning down the volume of the vox-implants bolted to their skulls.

‘Captain Antares!’ one of them shouted. ‘We’ve tried hailing the blips. Every frequency is being overwhelmed by some kind of strange intercept.’ The comms officer reached down to his terminal. As he depressed an activation rune, vox-casters began to broadcast the weird chatter. It was a confusion of deep grunts and croaking laughter, a bedlam of gruff, brutal vocalisations.

Antares listened to the chatter, a feeling of dread crawling up his spine. He glanced again at the display of the starboard quadrant. The objects were quickly gaining on the Stardrinker. There was no question of them being meteors or any other stellar phenomenon – to maintain their position, the objects had made a deliberate course correction. Only something with awareness could pursue a ship.

‘Raise the defence fleet,’ Antares ordered the comms officer. Tell them we are being menaced by unidentified craft.’

The officer shook his head. ‘We can’t raise anyone, captain. The chatter is across the board. On every frequency.’

Antares stared once more at the display. At their present speed, the unknown ships would intercept the tanker within a matter of a few minutes.

‘All crew to battle stations,’ Antares ordered.

‘Keep trying to break through the interference. Find an open channel. Spread the alarm.

‘We are under attack.’

Bodras curled his gnarled hand around the jug of caff and took a long pull of the fiery drink. It was an old mixture he’d picked up from some gunrunners on the Eastern Fringe, back when his vessel had been an Imperial patrol ship – caff mixed with fermented vespid jelly and twenty grams of cordite. On a ship like the Vulture, it was smart to have a drink none of your crew would touch.

Wiping the treacly residue of the drink from his beard, Bodras shifted in his command throne, staring down into the crew pits flanking the captain’s bridge. The pits were so filled with scanners, relays, exchanges, comms hubs, fire control systems and observation-slates that there was scarcely room for the crew to breathe. The original complement of machinery the frigate had been fitted out with when it left the shipyards of Calth had been greatly augmented in the decades since she had entered the thraldom of the Iron Warriors. Every vessel the Vulture had captured had contributed something to her conqueror’s improvement, augmenting her far beyond the frugality imposed by the Imperial Navy.

Bodras smoothed the front of his brocaded jacket as he rose from his throne. The jacket was two sizes too big for him, but the smoothness of its virgin scand-wool and the jade-studded epaulets were too fine for him to worry overmuch about the garment’s fit. The jacket had belonged to the deputy governor of Galar IX, right up until five seconds before Bodras blew his head off. Such a noble heritage, he felt, was bound to have rubbed off on the jacket – and by extension to himself.

Aristocratic pretensions notwithstanding, Bodras bellowed down at his junior officers, ‘Any sign of that damn scow?’ and punctuated his shout with a cordite-scented belch.

‘Negative, captain,’ called back a hook-nosed lieutenant, the mechanical eye set into his scarred face whirring and buzzing as it focused upon Bodras. ‘We’ve picked up no sign of the Stardrinker.’

‘Did you try raising her?’ Bodras growled. He didn’t care for patrol duty to begin with – any interruption to routine only made it worse.

The one-eyed lieutenant jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to one of the frigate’s comms relays. ‘All we’ve been able to get is a bunch of noise. It’s across all frequencies. Probably solar interference.’

Bodras glared down at the lieutenant. ‘Did that shrapnel take out part of your brain as well as your eye? We’re sixty-four AU from the sun! Any solar activity that could interfere with us here would also burn Castellax to a cinder.’

The lieutenant ran his thumb along his scarred cheek. ‘My… my apologies, captain. I will have the arrays examined for malfunctions.’

‘All six of them?’ Bodras growled. He was beginning to wonder why he’d made this idiot an officer. Something about two kilograms of fire-emeralds if he remembered right. He was reconsidering that bribe right now. What good was all this equipment if the man in charge of it was a moron?

‘Narrow the range of the frequency sweep. If they are using unsecured transmissions on Impex V, we might be catching echoes.’ Bodras stepped down from his throne, passing between the pair of armed bodyguards flanking the raised dais. It was astounding what the threat of two shotguns could do to enforce morale in a confined space.

The captain loomed over the sunken crew pit, watching as the comms men adjusted their equipment. Bodras tapped the holster of his laspistol, growing irritated at the delay.

‘Captain, we’re detecting a vapour cloud one hundred kilometres starboard,’ another officer reported. Bodras favoured the communication section with a last menacing look, then turned his attention to the long-range scanners. The crewmen shifted aside to allow Bodras a clear view.

‘The molecular scan identifies a high oxygen/hydrogen content,’ the scanner officer said. ‘It could be water vapour. The tanker might have had an accident.’

‘If the idiot dumped his cargo, he’d better hope it was a serious accident,’ Bodras said. Even that probably wouldn’t save the tanker’s crew from the ire of the Iron Warriors. Men seldom lived to disappoint the lords of Castellax twice.

Studying the screen, Bodras pointed at a large blotch a few thousand kilometres from the vapour cloud. ‘What is that?’ he asked.

‘Asteroid,’ the officer replied. ‘High metal content. They will be happy to hear of such a find back on Castellax.’ The man’s face spread in a steel-toothed grin. ‘The ship who reports this discovery will be well favoured by the Iron Warriors.’

Bodras shook his head. Something wasn’t right. Castellax needed water more than metal – any captain who dumped his cargo so that he could race back and gain the dubious gratitude of the Iron Warriors for discovering a new asteroid was too stupid to be believed. No, there was something very wrong. An asteroid loaded with metal ore just sitting right next to the most travelled space route in the system…

The vox-casters on the bridge suddenly broke out in a chaotic din of savage growls and grunts. Bodras spun around, his eyes bulging as the hideous cacophony struck horror in his heart. The comms men had narrowed down their scan to isolate a very narrow frequency range, then filtered it further to a single transmission band. Now that he heard it, Bodras almost wished he hadn’t. The interference had been caused by a bedlam of crude vox-transmissions scattered across a range of frequencies, their erratic and unstable nature causing them to bleed across each other. In effect, their very primitiveness, the obsolescent inefficiency and instability of the transmissions had overwhelmed the frigate’s sensitive equipment. The Vulture’s sharp ears had been deaf to the howls of the worst predator in the galaxy.

Bodras knew those voices. He’d heard them before, on the Eastern Fringe.

Now he understood why there was an asteroid lying just off the trade route between Impex V and Castellax.

‘Battle stations! Battle stations! Battle stations!’ Bodras roared, storming across the bridge and smashing his fist through the glass casing of the alert signal. Claxons wailed as harsh crimson lights flashed from the ceiling.

‘Hail all gun crews,’ Bodras snarled down at his officers. ‘I want every battery trained on that asteroid! I want torpedoes at the ready! I–’

‘Captain, we are picking up thirty… no… forty energy discharges from the surface of the asteroid,’ one of the officers shouted. ‘Captain, it’s firing at us!’

Bodras raised the jug of caff and took a quick swig. They were too late. The enemy had gotten off the first salvo. All they could do now was hope their void shields could withstand the barrage.

Because what was out there, lurking off the space lane, wasn’t an asteroid any more. It had been hollowed out and turned into a space-faring fortress by the most murderous species in the galaxy.

The orks.

Chapter II

I-Day Minus 14

It came lumbering out of the void, a great darkness that blotted out the stars with its advance. A leviathan from space, a behemoth that roared between worlds like a vengeful devil. It had been born in the cauldron of an angry cosmos, a slab of rock and metal seventy kilometres in diameter, a fledgling planet that had never found its place and so had been cast into the emptiness between galaxies.

There, in the darkness, savage intelligences had found it, had descended upon this abandoned almost-world and through their barbaric technology had given it purpose, a place in the cosmos. A place of horror, havoc and destruction.

The Vulture was like a fly buzzing about the wings of a hawk, the disparity between the patrol ship and the rok was so immense. The rok was vast enough to exert its own gravitational pull on the ship, dragging her slowly towards it, affording the terrified crew an increasingly clear view of their mammoth adversary.

The rok was pitted and scarred, pockmarked with the impacts of smaller asteroids against its surface, gouged by the crude excavations of the orks. Towers and bunkers projected from the asteroid’s surface, hangars gaped in the walls of its canyons, gun emplacements bristled from its jagged mountains. Cyclopean engines, their exhausts a hundred metres wide, projected from the rok’s sides, spitting streams of atomic fire as the orks inside the asteroid struggled to direct its trajectory, to exert some measure of control upon the elemental force they had attempted to enslave.

It was a futile effort. The best the orks could do was cause the rok to revolve, to spin on its axis as it hurtled through the void. For the xenos, however, it was enough, allowing them to adjust the position of their heaviest guns and bring them to bear against those victims unfortunate enough to encounter the rok.

The crew of the Vulture was almost upon the rok before they were aware of their peril. The deranged array of guns and missile batteries the orks had fitted to the hollowed-out asteroid opened fire in a savage burst of destruction. An armada of alien craft exploded from the canyon hangars and from launch craters littering the surface. The rok had provided shelter to a ramshackle flotilla of smaller ork ships, an ugly assortment of scrap metal that somehow managed to be space-worthy. What the ork ships lacked in grace, they made up for in firepower. Some of the weapons they boasted were so massive that the ships which carried them fairly disintegrated the moment they fired.

It was punishment the frigate’s void shields were never meant to handle. More and more of the alien barrage was getting through, ripping Bodras’s ship apart.

The Vulture reeled as another broadside smashed into her. The ship’s artificial gravity struggled to compensate for the rolling vessel, creating a wild confusion of forces upon the bridge. Bodras watched as one of his bodyguards hurtled forwards, then was grabbed and dragged by a malfunctioning inertia dampener. The screaming man smashed into the wall as though he’d been fired from a torpedo tube, his ribcage collapsing as the dampener tried to pull his body through the bulkhead.

The captain took another pull of his jug and shuddered. Squashed like a bug wasn’t a pretty way to die.

‘Damage report,’ he snarled at the bloodied men down in the crew pits. Between overloaded circuits, dislodged machinery and debris from the ship’s infrastructure, not a man in the pit had escaped some sort of injury. The dead had been unceremoniously dumped onto the walkway where the inertia dampener grabbed hold of them. The worst of the wounded had been similarly disposed of until Bodras ordered the practice stopped. Even if they were in the way, the wounded had to be shown some consideration. It was bad for morale if they weren’t.

Lieutenant Collorus studied one of the flickering pict screens and cried back to the command throne. ‘There is a hull breach aft, exposing three decks to vacuum. The gravity generators can’t compensate, so we’re vacillating between a seven and ten degree list. Alpha and Beta batteries have been obliterated by direct hits. Gamma battery is still firing but we’ve lost all communication with the gunnery crew.’

‘Send runners,’ Bodras snapped. ‘We need to maintain fire control. The only way we’ll survive is by concentrating our fire!’

Even as he gave the order, Bodras wondered if it would really make any difference.

‘Only one macro-cannon still operational,’ an ensign with a raw gash across his forehead reported, cringing back as his terminal spat a shower of sparks at him. ‘Vox communications have been lost throughout the lower decks!’

Bodras groaned. That would be those filthy missiles the rok had fired into them. The moment they had struck, the crew had breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they were duds. Then the electronic pulses had started, gradually increasing in scope and intensity. Somehow the missiles were both absorbing and projecting energy. The effect was like a massive haywire grenade, shorting out machinery close to the point of impact and utterly severing the lines of communication passing through that part of the ship.

‘Fires in the kitchens, crew barracks and officers’ deck!’ another ensign shouted.

‘Get a fire control team down there,’ Bodras ordered. If a fire was allowed to go unchecked in that part of the frigate, the ship would be effectively cut in two.

‘The team assigned to that area was killed by a hull breach,’ Lieutenant Collorus reported. ‘We’re trying to redirect another team there now.’

‘Don’t try, do!’ Bodras roared. He stared at the view-screen beside him. The rok was slowly closing upon the frigate, rotating to bring an obscenely huge cannon mounted on its surface to bear on the Vulture. Some of the smaller ork ships were scattering, intimidated by the approach of their hulking comrade. Others, too lost in their mindless urge to destroy, continued to swarm about the frigate.

‘More hull breaches in decks nineteen through twenty-four!’

‘Fire control has been hit! Can’t raise fire control!’

‘Last macro-cannon has gone silent!’

‘Delta battery reports two plasma batteries have overheated!’

Bodras turned the jug upside down, draining the last few drops from the bottom. He tossed the empty vessel aside, watching as the inertia dampener caught it and smashed it against the bulkhead.

‘Report to Castellax,’ the captain said, his voice cold as he watched the rok rotate into position. ‘Tell them we’ve occupied the orks as long as we can.’

Bodras watched as a brilliant glow gathered in the mouth of the rok’s oversized cannon.

‘Tell our dread masters they can expect some company real soon,’ Bodras spat. He glanced down at his elegant jacket. It was such a shame that so fine a garment was going to be ruined.

Mummified husks of humanity, bound in sinews of steel and garbed in mantles of iron, mouths stretched wide in frozen screams, the Eternal Choir loomed from the vaulted heights, incense dripping from their desiccated chests, madness crawling in their shrivelled eyes. Each servitor was bolted fast to the face of a curved pillar, their broken arms wrapped about the obverse side. A low chant hissed from the throats of the automatons, a sibilance that somehow melded the harmony of song to the howling of beasts.

The monstrous chant swept across the grim chamber below. Promethium lamps cast an infernal glow, sending weird shadows slithering about the pillars and dancing along the heavily adorned walls. Bas relief battles raged anew as the play of crimson light and black shadow swept across them, once more igniting the ancient campaigns of Sebastus IV and Olympia. Power-armoured giants contested bloodied battlegrounds, their gilded bolters and chainswords glistening with reflected light. Stone Titans rained destruction upon screaming masses of humanity, thorny towers bristling with armaments wrought carnage upon Space Marines of the Imperial Fists Legion while gloating killers adorned in the heraldry of the Iron Warriors visited doom upon those striving to escape the trap.

Everywhere in the frescoes, one terrifying visage was repeated. The glowering countenance of an Iron Warrior encased in baroque Terminator armour, wielding a storm bolter and a power claw encrusted with shining rubies. Half the Space Marine’s face was flesh, the rest was nought save a snarling skull of metal. Wherever the hulking warrior appeared, there the enemy lay heaped and torn about his feet. Always there was a sense of malignance and power in his piercing stare.

Seated in a throne of pure diamond, clear as ice and strong as adamantium, its legs shaped into clawed feet and its back carved into folded wings, the half-faced monster from the wall cast a steely gaze across the gloom. The flesh of his face was puckered and raw, scarred with hideous burns and the corrosive caress of things beyond human imagining. The metal of his exposed skull bristled with cables and power feeds, a nest of synthetic serpents that coiled about the Iron Warrior’s neck before sinking into sockets scattered across the bulky armour he wore. Even in rest, safe within the halls of the Iron Bastion, mightiest fortress-keep on Castellax, Warsmith Andraaz kept himself locked inside his ancient suit of Terminator armour. It was whispered that his body hadn’t stirred from the plasteel and ceramite shell in five millennia.

To either side of the throne towered the hulk of another Space Marine encased in Terminator armour, a member of the elite Rending Guard. Bodyguard to the Warsmith, the Terminators were veterans of countless campaigns, their armour studded with battle honours and draped in trophies torn from the bodies of their conquests. When the Terminators committed themselves to combat, it was only on the express command of Andraaz. They recognised no other authority short of Perturabo himself.

The Warsmith stretched out his hand, closing the armoured gauntlet into a fist and smashed it down against the immense table of obsidian which dominated the centre of the chamber. The crazed network of glowing wires and relays streaming through the semi-transparent rock blinked as the impact sent a tremor through the table.

‘Enough,’ Andraaz growled, his voice like a metallic scratch. The word echoed through a suddenly silent room, even the chanting of the servitors retreating before the monster’s anger.

Seated about the obsidian table, a half-dozen armoured giants shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. Masters of life and death, gods of destruction and doom to the millions of slaves entombed upon Castellax, the Iron Warriors felt their hearts quicken as Andraaz focused his ire upon them.

‘It does not matter how the filthy xenos infiltrated the system,’ Andraaz hissed, turning the red lens of his synthetic eye upon the man seated to his right.

Broad of build, massive of frame, Captain Morax, Skylord of Castellax, glared spitefully at his opposite across the table. Morax ran a jewelled glove through the stubble of hair covering his scalp, wiping away the beads of perspiration gathering there. ‘Honoured Warsmith,’ Morax said, sucking at the moist fingers of his glove, ‘I was merely observing that if control of the fleet had been shared with my administration, then these intruders would have been dealt with much sooner.’ A trace of a smile curled the Skylord’s flaccid cheeks as he watched his rival across the table react to his taunt.

‘That is a dangerous insinuation, Sky-rat,’ the other Iron Warrior spat. Admiral Nostraz was a towering man whose face was, if anything, even more scarred than that of Andraaz, though he hadn’t augmented any of his mutilations with cybernetic implants. ‘The raider fleets stand as ready for action as they ever have.’ His eyes darkened and his voice dripped with menace. ‘Or perhaps you would prefer we send half our ships out every time we hear a noise or one of our tankers is overdue?’

‘It is a sad thing to see timidity masquerading as strategy,’ Morax said, grinning. Nostraz’s eyes narrowed into murderous slits and he lurched up from his chair.

‘The Warsmith said there was to be an end to this squabbling!’ roared the Iron Warrior seated to the left of Andraaz. Captain Gamgin was a vicious specimen of savagery, one arm a mass of gears and cables bound in plasteel plate and armaplas fibres, one leg given over to a grumbling bundle of machinery, his lower jaw a set of piston-driven steel fangs. The Ruinous Powers had been quite attentive to Gamgin over the millennia, corrupting his body with fierce mutations. Each time the warp corruption settled into his flesh, a bit more of Gamgin had been cut away and replaced by metal. The millions of conscript soldiers Gamgin maintained on Castellax held that the first part of him that had been changed to steel was his heart. Only one purpose beat there now: complete and merciless loyalty to Andraaz.

Both Nostraz and Morax shifted their hateful gaze from one another to Gamgin. As much as the two rivals might hate each other, their mutual contempt for Gamgin and envy at his favour with the Warsmith gave them common cause. At the slightest nod from Morax, Nostraz pointed at the shifting pattern of lights displayed above the surface of the obsidian table. It was a three-dimensional star-map of the Castellax system, not a true hologram but rather a projection of the table’s weird elements. As Nostraz pointed, the table reacted, shifting and magnifying one portion of the starfield while allowing the rest of the map to recede.

‘The orks struck from the fringe of the system, in the vicinity of Impex V. The high proportion of asteroids in that sector has always been a detriment to our sensors.’ The admiral gestured and brought the image of an old Imperial frigate into view. ‘Our initial response, a single system patrol sentry, was overwhelmed by the intruders. They have since penetrated the static defences surrounding the ice-moon and its neighbours. Mostly through the crude callousness of their assaults. They think nothing of driving their smaller ships straight into the waiting guns of a satellite and obliterating the position with the debris of their own comrades.’ At the snap of his fingers a dozen more ships appeared on the map, each image slowly collapsing into a menagerie of lights gradually streaming towards Impex V. ‘The second wave consists of five Infidel-class raiders and seven system-defence destroyers. They will engage the orks. After whetting the aliens’ appetite for battle, the raiders will withdraw, using their greater speed to outdistance the destroyers. They will maintain a presence just beyond the enemy guns while the orks are occupied with the destroyers. With the greenskins busy, the raiders will use their macro-cannon to pick them off from afar.’

‘And if the xenos have weaponry able to match the range of the macro-cannons? Or if the orks have infiltrated in numbers capable of focusing on both elements of your fleet?’ The questions came from a scowling man, his richly adorned armour studded with battle honours and the leathery trophies of past conquests. Over-Captain Vallax, his face split by the jagged scar of a World Eater’s chainaxe, his long hair shifting in hue as his emotions darkened, leaned over the obsidian table. The Over-Captain’s gauntlet touched a line of ships further towards the core of the system.

‘I see these possibilities have already occurred to you,’ Vallax mused. As he touched the lights, each was revealed as another vessel in the Castellax fleet. In all, there were fifty-nine ships in the second line Nostraz had established.

The admiral nodded his head. ‘The second wave has a two-fold purpose. The first is to engage the xenos, but more importantly they are to gauge their numbers and deployment.’

‘Orks don’t have any rational deployment,’ scoffed the ghoulish Skintaker Algol, Slavemaster of Castellax. The Iron Warrior’s armour was lost beneath the hideous folds of the cloak he wore, a garment fashioned from human skin flayed from slaves. The stink of blood still clung to the freshest patches of Algol’s vestment. When the aroma wore off, he would stalk back into the strip mines in search of fresher replacements.

‘Rational or not, we need to know where they are,’ Morax snapped back. ‘Our sensors can’t give us proper intelligence for that sector, and there is too much psychic disturbance in the area for the Navigators on our ships to provide us with anything useful.’

Captain Rhodaan stood and faced the Skylord. ‘What about using the Speaker?’ he suggested. Morax ran his glove across his scalp again, hesitating to answer the question.

When the question was answered, it was Warsmith Andraaz who spoke. ‘The Speaker may be needed for other duties.’

A dull, mechanical rasp crackled from the end of the table. Alone among those gathered in the war room, the speaker wasn’t an Iron Warrior, but rather a withered shell of humanity. Pale, corpse-like flesh fused to a mechanical armature, its gaping mouth housing the meshwork of a vox-caster, the servitor was acting as the proxy for the only member of Castellax’s hierarchy absent from the chamber. When it spoke, however, all within the room knew they heard the voice of Fabricator Oriax.

‘To focus the Speaker’s thoughts upon such a task would require a drastic change to the chemical mixture in its bath. To safely perform such a procedure would take days. To unsafely perform such a procedure might kill it. Or, even worse, return it to awareness.’

There was no emotion on the corpse-face of the servitor as it transmitted Oriax’s words, but a flicker of uneasiness crossed the countenance of each Iron Warrior who heard them. Veterans of thousands of wars, victorious conquerors of hundreds of worlds, they knew better than to tamper with an alpha-grade psyker, especially after what they had done to him.

‘Using the Speaker is out of the question,’ Andraaz declared. ‘We will proceed with Admiral Nostraz’s plan.’

Three scarred and battered Infidel-class raiders raced across the stellar emptiness. Behind them, the ships abandoned wounded comrades and slower support vessels, consigning each to the doubtful mercies of the orks. Survival, not loyalty, was the law of the moment. Flee now, or remain forever with the dead.

From the bridge of the Requiem, Arch-Commander Vortsk watched as the survivors drew steadily closer to the defensive line his fleet had established. The old pirate’s brow knitted with dismay, disturbing the nest of cables implanted into his forehead that hardwired his mind with the cogitators of his battleship. He could feel his vessel’s agitation pulsing through the wires, like a hound smelling blood. The Requiem was an old hand at slaughter, having perpetrated thousands of atrocities in her time, both for and against the decaying Imperium. Since defecting after the Badab War, the battleship’s lust for violence had only grown. Vortsk sometimes wondered if her time in the Eye of Terror had endowed his ship with a consciousness of her own.

‘Patience,’ Vortsk whispered, his fingers tapping against the command baton resting in his lap. ‘You shall glut your hunger soon enough, my sweet.’

The Arch-Commander forced the ship’s agitation into his subconscious and focused his attention upon the pict screens scattered about his control-nest. The armoured, tomb-like pod was ringed with flickering displays, cycling through views of every deck on the battleship. Vortsk ignored these and the thousands of relays transmitting views of the Requiem’s exterior hull. What interested him were the long-range observium reports, the transmissions from the fleeing raiders and the vox-chatter of the on-coming enemy.

Together, the data created a fearsome picture. The raiders and their destroyer escorts had encountered a far bigger mass of orks than the doomed Vulture had reported. The rok was still active, but now it served as just another warship in an armada that dwarfed the combined might of the entire Castellax fleet. If the data from the raiders was to be trusted, the aliens had infiltrated the system with three hundred vessels of destroyer-size or greater, including two monstrosities boasting a mass approaching that of an Oberon-class battleship.

There were other ork vessels operating deep in the system. An alien species as wild and vicious as the orks rarely maintained focus and cohesion, and the invaders of Castellax were no different. Small splinters of the armada were attacking the remote mining outposts scattered through the planetoids at the fringe of the system, while a hulking kill kroozer had been closing upon the Impex V station when the last message was transmitted from the ice-moon.

Vortsk scowled as he examined the data. The odds were against the human fleet, but he knew there was more to securing victory than simple numerical advantage. The human mind was organised, analytical and calculating. That of the ork was simple barbarous instinct, with no greater thought than closing with an enemy and giving immediate battle.

The Arch-Commander studied the pict screens displaying the proximity of the ork forces. While some of the armada had lingered behind to finish off the abandoned destroyers and crippled raiders, a small number of ships were pursuing the three raiders that had escaped. Vortsk licked his lips as he saw that among the pursuers was one of the big battleship analogues. The ork armada as a whole might outnumber the human fleet, but in the present circumstance, the advantage belonged to Vortsk. There were only a half-dozen escorts with the ork battleship, none of them larger than a frigate. Even allowing for the ork propensity to pile ridiculous amounts of armament onto their ships, the human battle line had them outgunned twenty to one.

‘Raise the captains of the Pride and the Damnation,’ Vortsk said, hissing into the vox-sceptre which would convey his order to the bridge surrounding his command-crypt.

‘What about the Vindictive?’ a sub-altern’s question crackled back. Vortsk smiled as he glanced again at the positions of the approaching ships.

‘Maintain strict silence as regards the Vindictive,’ Vortsk said. ‘It is best that her captain doesn’t know our plans.’

Arch-Commander Vortsk felt a shiver of excitement crackle down his steel spine as he watched the pict screens. The raiders and their pursuers had only just drawn within range of the battle line’s guns. Instead of losing momentum, the ork pursuers had picked up speed. Vortsk smiled as he imagined the desperate efforts the aliens had made to force this last burst from their ships. They were so eager to sate their appetite for battle that they were charging headlong into destruction.

Only one thing more was needed to complete the trap and, by prearranged conspiracy, the Pride and Damnation provided what Vortsk required. As soon as the three raiders were within range of the fleet’s heavy guns, the Pride and Damnation fired upon the Vindictive. The close-range barrage tore through the raider’s void shields, smashing into her engines and leaving her a cripple.

Predictably, as her betrayers raced away and left her behind them, the Vindictive blasted away at them with the few guns she could bring to bear in such an unexpected emergency. Her fire was ineffectual as far as punishing her betrayers, but it did serve the purpose Vortsk needed it to. It reminded the pursuing orks that, though crippled, the Vindictive was still very much alive.

Vortsk’s breathing became shallow, his mind feeling the eagerness of his ship as he watched the drama playing out upon the pict screen. The Vindictive abandoned her vengeful fusillade and turned her guns back upon the approaching orks, unleashing a desperate and futile barrage into the grotesque battleship. The crackle of energy shields intercepted most of the raider’s fire, what little penetrated did nothing more than scratch the battleship’s armoured hull.

The frantic efforts of the Vindictive to save herself did ensure she had the orks’ full and undivided attention. The battleship and her escorts closed upon her like a pack of wolves. Vortsk grinned, lifting the vox-sceptre to his trembling mouth. ‘Arch-Commander Vortsk to all ships,’ he said. ‘The orks are engaging the Vindictive. When they close to three kilometres of her, open fire. All batteries are to concentrate upon the battleship designated as Target Omega.’

Dim memories of his pampered childhood flashed through Vortsk’s mind as he waited for the aliens to close the distance. He remembered waiting impatiently for his father, a noble of Decima X’s ruling cadre, to bring home the traditional grox-hide cassock each St. Julian’s day. The same unbearable eagerness gripped him now. He could almost hear the Requiem growling in expectation.

‘Unleash hell!’ Vortsk hissed into the vox-sceptre as the orks finally came within range. From every ship in the fleet, a withering barrage of macro-cannon, lances, plasma batteries and lasers slammed into Target Omega. The ork battleship seemed to glow like a tiny sun as its shields struggled against the awesome violence. Two of its escorts, whether by accident or design, diverted into the path of the barrage and were almost instantly gutted by the concentrated fire.

Target Omega, venting vapour from breaches in her hull, fires rippling across her starboard side, began to turn, shifting away from the Vindictive.

‘Close with Target Omega,’ Vortsk screamed into his vox-sceptre. ‘Don’t let it get away!’ He could hear the blood pounding in his heart. The idea that the ork ship could survive the initial barrage wasn’t half as repugnant as the idea that it might escape from his trap.

The fire coming from Target Omega was far less than what the battleship had been directing against the Vindictive. Vortsk smiled. The initial assault must have obliterated most of the xenos gun batteries. More than ever, he was determined not to allow the ship to escape. Gripping his vox-sceptre, he demanded greater speed from his ships.

In the blink of an eye, the situation suddenly, horribly, changed.

The front of Target Omega burst apart in a great fireball. At first, Vortsk thought it was the result of damage inflicted upon the battleship by his fleet, but he was quickly forced to think again. From the smoke and debris, a dozen bulky assault ships erupted onto his pict screens. He felt his insides grow cold as the Requiem’s cogitators analysed the fast, fat-bodied vessels. The ugly ships were almost all engine except for the immense mass of armour piled up about their prows.

Ram ships! As that hideous realisation came to him, a second explosion ripped through Target Omega. A smaller flotilla of ork craft burst from the battleship’s portside, racing straight towards Vortsk’s fleet. As they streaked away from the battleship, the larger vessel began to roll, its stability overwhelmed by the violent, speedy launch of its cargo.

Target Omega wasn’t a battleship at all. It was an assault carrier!

Panic crackled across the displays monitoring communications within Vortsk’s fleet. The ram ships, impossibly fast with their oversized engines, were smashing into the human vessels almost before their crews were aware they were being attacked. The ork craft charged straight into the fleet, breaching hulls with their armoured prows. More than the actual damage they inflicted, it was the confusion they wrought upon the fleet. Even as he tried to exert his authority and bring cohesion back into his force, Vortsk was seeing segments of his command scatter. Pirates and renegades, traitors to a man, there was no loyalty to bind them to the battle.

‘Arch-Commander!’ the screaming voice of the Requiem’s captain echoed from the vox-casters within the command-crypt. ‘Target Omega is losing integrity. She’s breaking up!’

Vortsk looked over at the pict screen showing the clearest view of the ork craft. With the loss of stability, the slow roll had turned into an apocalyptic vision. The spine of the ship had snapped in the middle of its roll, turning the scrap-work mass of metal into a spiralling corkscrew of shrapnel. Shrapnel hurtling directly towards the Requiem.

‘Evasive manoeuvres,’ Vortsk growled. Even as he spoke, however, he could feel the Requiem cry out. The battleship shuddered as one of the rampaging ork ram ships slammed into her side.

‘Hull breach in decks fifty through fifty-five,’ the captain’s voice cried out. ‘The ork ship has buried itself in our starboard!’

Vortsk closed his eyes, pulling the information he needed from the Requiem’s cogitators. The drag of the ork ship would compromise her manoeuvrability, too much so for her to escape the spiralling wreckage of Target Omega.

The Arch-Commander raised the vox-sceptre one last time. ‘All weapon batteries, open fire on Target Omega.’

The order tasted like ash on his tongue. Even the firepower of an Oberon-class battleship wouldn’t help them now. The best they could hope for was that the Requiem’s armour would hold and they wouldn’t suffer so much damage that they’d be left immobile and defenceless when the rest of the ork armada showed up.

Damn xenos, Vortsk thought bitterly. They used my own trick on me.

‘Grim Lord, there can be no question that the orks will penetrate the second line of defence.’ Admiral Nostraz’s voice was subdued as he made the pessimistic report. He bowed his head in contrition as the Warsmith stirred upon his translucent throne.

‘How long can we expect the third line to hold?’ Andraaz demanded.

Skylord Morax reached out and brought the cluster of lights representing the third of Castellax’s defence fleets into focus. ‘Raiders and slaveships,’ he grumbled. ‘Nothing here that can possibly stand up to the orks.’

‘Then the aliens will make planetfall?’ Captain Gamgin asked, a trace of anticipation and eagerness in his tone. After five generations of training, he was curious to see how his janissaries would perform against an enemy more formidable than a rabble of feral slaves.

Morax ran his glove across his scalp and glowered at Gamgin. ‘An armada that size might have a billion howling greenskins. If they make planetfall…’

‘We will destroy them,’ Andraaz stated, his voice brooking no argument. His red eye focused upon the youngest of his war council. Sergeant Ipos was the only member of the inner-circle who had been created with hybrid gene-seed, a necessity for a Legion whose own genetic material was rife with corruption and mutation. Despite the admixture of gene-seed, Ipos had proven himself a brilliant strategist and tactician, as well as a shrewd political manipulator. He had used a careful campaign of conspiracy and subterfuge to worm his way into his position as Castellan of the Iron Bastion, one long coveted by full-blooded Iron Warriors like Algol and Vallax.

Ipos rose from his chair, sweeping his gauntlet across the surface of the table. The starfield faded. In its place appeared an orbital view of Castellax itself, its satellites and space stations. Another sweep of Ipos’s hand and hundreds of lights began swarming around the world.

‘We shouldn’t expect a concentrated attack by the orks for several hours, perhaps even days,’ Ipos declared. ‘Until their warlord exerts its influence, the xenos will attack by individual squadrons, each warboss trying to cheat its fellows of loot and glory. We can exploit that.’

Admiral Nostraz smirked at the last statement. ‘How do we do that, half-breed?’ he grumbled.

Ipos ignored the admiral, directing his attention instead to the other Iron Warriors. ‘We can’t keep the orks from making planetfall. What we can do is prevent them from gaining a firm foothold once they are here.’ He pointed to the ring of defence satellites and armed weapons stations orbiting the planet. ‘If we adjust the orbits of five per cent of our installations we can present the orks with deliberate gaps in the defences. Eager for plunder, the xenos will use those gaps to try and reach the surface as quickly as possible.’

‘You want to make it easier for the orks to reach Castellax?’ Algol almost choked on the words, such was his incredulity.

The sergeant shook his head and made an adjustment to the illuminated display. Now some of the swarming lights were streaming down towards Castellax. ‘By focusing the orks into pre-arranged windows of opportunity, we will funnel them into specific areas of the planet. Far from the industrial centres, though we will need to present the orks with some lesser installations to maintain their interest. As the xenos converge upon these sacrificial settlements, the Air Cohort will deploy and bomb them into oblivion. We’ll be able to destroy the first wave of orks piecemeal, a tactic which Skylord Morax’s squadrons should be fully capable of implementing.’

Morax clapped his hands together, almost chortling with pleasure as he imagined the glory which would belong to his Air Cohort. ‘Indeed, indeed. We’ll burn down every xenos that sets one foot on Castellax!’

Over-Captain Vallax leaned over the table, studying the pattern of lights swirling about the projected planet. ‘That might settle for the vanguard, but you don’t expect the entire armada to hit us at the same time. I’ve fought orks. They might be stupid, but they’re also cunning. They won’t fall for the same bait twice.’

‘Afraid of getting your chainaxe dirty?’ Morax chuckled, waving his jewelled glove at the Over-Captain. ‘By the time the orks figure out what to do next, our surviving ships will be well on their way to Medrengard for help.’

‘The Third Grand Company fights its own battles, Skylord,’ Vallax snapped. ‘To contemplate anything less is cowardice.’

‘I shall quote you when the warlords of Medrengard demand to know why their shipments of arms are behind schedule,’ Admiral Nostraz retorted. ‘If the greenskins are allowed to set up a siege of even a few months, production will grind to a halt.’

‘We might manage food for the slaves,’ Algol said, pondering the problem. ‘Synthetics will last out for the better part of a year and can be supplemented, but water will be a problem. The only extra water supplies we can tap into are those at the embryo farms and that will deprive us of our next generation of workers. Unless we go out and collect our own on a large scale. Like in the good old days.’

‘Castellax has been fortified against full assault by the False Emperor’s minions,’ the crackling drone of Oriax’s servitor announced. ‘We are the sons of the Iron Cage. We are the Betrayers of Isstvan. However great the xenos horde, it shall break upon our walls.’

Warsmith Andraaz stepped away from his throne, steam venting from the coil of cables sunk into his armour as idle servo-motors pulsed into life. The hulking Iron Warrior stalked across the chamber, his Rending Guard falling into step behind him. Andraaz kept one eye fixed upon the obsidian table while his mechanical eye flashed across the faces of his officers.

‘There will be no call for help,’ Andraaz stated. ‘There are those upon Medrengard who believe the Third Grand Company to be weak, that our days of glory and might are behind us, that we are but a sorry remnant of the past!’ The Warsmith drove his fist straight into the middle of the projection, stabbing deep into the sphere representing Castellax. ‘This battle will belong to us, and us alone! We shall exterminate the xenos and send their skulls to Great Perturabo as tribute. There will be no retreat. There will be no surrender. And there will be no mercy.’

‘What of our fleet, Grim Lord?’ Admiral Nostraz asked. ‘If they remain engaged with the orks they will be destroyed and we will lose them all. We can’t replenish our losses without raiders to secure fresh materials.’

‘The Warsmith has already said there will be no retreat,’ Gamgin growled. His temper subsided when he felt Andraaz’s gaze focus upon him. Abased, he sank down into his chair.

‘The fleet will disengage and withdraw to the far side of the sun,’ Andraaz decided. ‘That will put Castellax between them and the ork armada.’

Morax nodded appreciatively at the strategy. ‘With the orks caught up in the planetary fortifications, we can recall the fleet and have it engage the ships the xenos leave in orbit.’ The Skylord cast a sneer in Nostraz’s direction. ‘Or they can withdraw into the warp and get help.’

A cold smile twisted the half of Andraaz’s face that was still flesh. ‘There will be no withdrawal.’

‘But, Grim Lord, many of our ships are crewed by pirate scum,’ objected Nostraz. ‘If one of them should lose nerve, or perceive our situation as being–’

‘There will be no retreat,’ Oriax’s proxy droned, the servitor’s lifeless eyes staring emptily at the ceiling. ‘The Speaker will issue a compulsion to every Navigator in the fleet. They will bite down upon the capsule hidden in their teeth. The poison will put them into a coma until such time as an antidote can be administered.’

Warsmith Andraaz slammed his fist against the obsidian table once more, vanquishing the display in a crackle of sparks. ‘The pirates will have to come to the Iron Bastion for that antidote. Without the Navigators, they dare not tempt the warp. No, my brothers, there will be no retreat from Castellax, no display of weakness to cheer our persecutors.’

The Warsmith turned and slowly marched back to his throne. ‘Castellax belongs to the Third Grand Company of the Iron Warriors Legion. No one will forget that fact. Not the filthy xenos. Not the pawns of the False Emperor. And not the warlords of Medrengard.

‘Castellax is ours. Any who think otherwise live on borrowed time.’

Chapter III

I-Day

The binary rasp of a Lingua-Technis chant hissed through the mesh-work funnel of copper and titanium which had replaced the mouth of Enginseer Heroditus three centuries ago. The protruding, insect-like muzzle of his respirator melded into the blocky contours of a face rebuilt in adamantium and platinum. A confusion of pipes and hoses snaked away from his cheeks, coiling around his head to secure themselves to sockets built into his spine and servo-limbs. Crab-like arms jutted from spurs built into his shoulders, steel mechadendrites that rippled with the gleam of idle energies.

There was little of Enginseer Heroditus that remained organic. Five centuries of zealous service to the Omnissiah had replaced most of his decayed flesh with bionics. Bundled in a heavy robe of vat-grown synthfibre, the only exposed portion of the tech-priest betraying his tenuous relation to humanity were the pale, empty eyes staring from the depths of his metal face. Sight had fled from those eyes long ago, his vision replaced by mechanical sensors embedded in his forehead and on the backs of his bionic hands. Heroditus had declined to have his organic eyes removed, despite their obsolescence, believing he must maintain them until the Omnissiah’s advent. Only then would he offer them up to the Machine-God as a final sacrifice of flesh.

The enginseer’s valve-pump slowed its pulsations as his brain sent a surge of emotion crackling through his nerve-relays. The hiss of binary faltered for an instant as Heroditus fought down the pathetic despair that flickered into life within his brain. It was true, he was unlikely to ever make that sacrifice, to gaze upon the glory of the Deus Mechanicus incarnate. That was no excuse for such weakness. To be a servant of the Machine-God was to cast aside the flawed illogic of the flesh and embrace the cold reason of technology. A tech-priest did not know regret. His purpose was to accept the path before him and to walk it in such a way as to bring greater glory to the Machine-God.

Heroditus bowed his head in acknowledgment of his weakness. However much they cut away, it seemed there was still too much flesh left inside to make him complete. Without disrupting the binary chant hissing from his mouth, he transmitted a liturgy of penance from the vox-caster built into his chest, an appeal to the machine-spirits of his bionics and augmetics to forgive the discord caused by his sorrowed emotions. To ensure the sincerity of his prayer, Heroditus had the flagellation bundles fixed to his spine send pulses of electricity throbbing through his organics.

It was an act of self-castigation that Heroditus had performed many times since Castellax fell to the Iron Warriors. When the traitors had descended from the stars and rained death upon the colony, the adepts of the Machine Cult had been spared the most infamous of the Chaos Space Marines’ outrages. Indeed, the invaders had expended some effort taking as many of the tech-priests intact as possible. It was not an act of mercy, of course, but rather a question of practicality. The Iron Warriors wanted to transform Castellax into a forge world to feed the war machine of their infamous Legion. To do that, they required more than billions of simple slaves. They needed specialists, men who understood the arcane sciences of manufacturing and design, processing and refinement.

Under the terrible scrutiny of their Fabricator Oriax, the Iron Warriors had pressed the captured tech-priests into their service. The exchange was simple: life for obedience. Some of the adepts had refused. Their deaths had been terrible spectacles of barbarism, outrages against the machine-spirits of their components as they were disassembled piece by piece.

Most of the adepts, like Heroditus, had agreed to obey, believing that even under the lash of the Iron Warriors they could serve the Machine-God. While they could function, they might yet serve a greater purpose.

Heroditus raised his head, staring at the acid-scoured walls of the immense drainage sluice, watching the crust of oxidised metal slowly drip into the toxic mire on the floor. Twenty metres across, nearly half again as high, the barrel-like tunnel ran the length of Vorago’s processing district, funnelling pollutants and waste from the city into the abandoned strip mines that pock-marked the face of Castellax. Poisonous vapours rose from the rainbow-hued confusion of sludge and slime, filling the passage with an atmosphere so hostile to life that the hardiest sump-rat would be dead before it drew its third breath.

Only something as devoid of organic frailty as a tech-priest could prowl these passages in relative safety; yet even here Heroditus was wary. He knew Oriax was a fiend incarnate, a living devil, a Chaos Space Marine who had compounded his outrages with a perverted corruption of the Quest for Knowledge. There was no place on Castellax one could be certain the Fabricator did not have his spies. The floating ‘Steel Blood’, Oriax’s ghoulish imitation of servo-skulls, flitted throughout Vorago, watching everything and everyone. Oriax claimed each of the fiendish skulls had a bit of his own genetic material pulsing through its circulation, heightening its responsiveness to his commands. Servitors, both those crafted in the Fabricator’s workshops and those scavenged from the conquest of Castellax, were often fitted with transmitters that fed intelligence directly to Oriax’s stronghold in the sub-catacombs of the Iron Bastion. More hideous still were the seemingly organic specimens Oriax had transformed, implanting them with complex mechanics without consideration of the subject’s suitability and worthiness for such augmentation, or the dignity of the machine-spirits of the devices he abused in these monstrous experiments.

A terrible darkness had descended upon Castellax, but Heroditus calculated that there might finally be a chance to see the light again. It was why he chanted orisons to dull and mislead the sentinel-implants Oriax had attached to his body. It was why he braved the toxic miasma of the drainage sluice, hiking through kilometres of corrosive sludge.

Hope, that most irrational of feelings, had begun to burn once more in the mind of Enginseer Heroditus.

Taofang pulled the goggles from his face and stared up at the night sky. Even the sting of Castellax’s polluted atmosphere wasn’t enough to dissuade him from watching the awesome light show unfolding far above the planet. It was a spectacle of such beauty as to move even the hardened janissary to tears. Great spheres of light streaked across the sky, sometimes spewing streams of energy, sometimes expanding into brilliant blazes before collapsing in upon themselves and fading into darkness. Whorls of star-fire coruscated through the blackness, racing about the planet in dazzling displays of colour and patterns of the most compelling fascination. To Taofang, it was like watching the birth of some cosmic–

‘Put those goggles back on!’

The sharp command broke the fascination. Hastily, Taofang pulled the protective lenses back across his eyes and turned his gaze from the sky to the men around him. There were over five hundred of them, janissaries of the Scorpion Brigade, each man fitted out in the corrosion-resistant duster and ore-scuttle helmet of their regiment. Mustered from the grim ferrocrete barracks which cast its shadow across the marshalling yard, the soldiers waited for their quartermasters to distribute arms from a sunken bunker at the far end of the plaza. Officers in black storm coats stalked among the troops, chastising those who, like Taofang, allowed their awe of the light show over Castellax to overcome their discipline.

‘There is a beta-level caution tonight!’ one of the officers, a thick-necked, dark-skinned colonel named Nehring barked over a vox-caster. He raised a gloved hand and tapped the opaque lenses of the goggles he wore. ‘Three minutes of exposure to the air and the pollution will begin to deteriorate your vision. Half an hour, and you would be as good as blind. If that isn’t enough to make you scum keep your goggles on, consider this: any man who can’t pull his own weight is a burden on the regiment...’ Nehring’s hand dropped to the jewelled holster hanging from his belt. There was no need for the colonel to continue his threat. The janissaries had seen him use his laspistol too many times to need the consequences explained to them. It was a custom weapon, plunder from some forge world, calibrated to fire a wider, more powerful beam than a standard pattern weapon. The charred wounds it left behind were big enough to put a man’s fist through.

Colonel Nehring removed his peaked cap and raised his face to the sky. A sneer twisted his features. ‘That spectacle you find so fascinating is our orbital defences and satellites being obliterated. A few of the big ones might be remnants of the system fleet falling to xenos guns.’ Nehring’s shielded eyes glared over the faces of his soldiers. ‘Hold a happy thought,’ he growled. ‘When the orks are done up there, they’ll be paying us a visit down here. Then each of you will get the chance to show our masters the quality of your training.’

A few jeers of defiance rose from the ranks. The janissaries weren’t strangers to combat, even if their previous experiences had been limited to putting down slave revolts or tracking renegades in the wastelands between the mining settlements. Only a few of the soldiers in the Scorpion Brigade had ever been seconded to the raider ships and engaged in battle off-world – and even those expeditions had been strikes against the Imperium. None of the janissaries had ever seen a xenos in battle, but they doubted it would be much different to killing their fellow man. All of them had done that often enough to become calloused to the prospect of battle.

Taofang was still in shock. Orks attacking Castellax! It was fantastic, unbelievable. Born and raised under the lash of the Iron Warriors, he had come to view them as invincible, a malignant force as irresistible as an earthquake or an ash-storm. The very idea that anything would dare to attack them was almost absurd to Taofang. That the orks had succeeded in driving through the system fleet and threatening Castellax itself was incredible. Yet, the evidence was all around him. The first frantic rumours of battle above the planet, the frightened mutters of orks from the comms tower garrison, the mustering of every soldier in Dirgas – all of it was grim testament to the reality of the situation.

As Nehring began barking new orders to the men filing past the quartermaster’s bunker, the officer’s voice caught in his throat. His dark features turned ashen as he snapped to attention and bent his body almost in half sketching a profound and self-humiliating bow. Taofang had never seen a colonel display such deference to anyone before. He turned his head, following the direction of Nehring’s gaze. Instantly, the janissary snapped to attention. All around him, the click of boots filled the air as the rest of the brigade followed suit.

As he stood at attention, an icy wave of fear rushed through Taofang’s body, chilling him from toe to scalp. Striding across the plaza was the armoured hulk of an Iron Warrior, his ceramite boots scarring the flagstones as he marched. The soldier had seen the Space Marines before, but always at a distance and never one as terrifying in appearance as the legionary he now gazed upon. A revolting mantle of flayed human skin was draped across the giant’s shoulders. Taofang didn’t need to look at the skull-like helm with its maze of jewelled campaign-markers to recognise the monster. It was Algol, the fiend of Castellax, feared as the Skintaker, the merciless Slavemaster.

Every eye in the plaza was locked upon the Skintaker as he marched towards the bunker. Even the shriek of Air Cohort fighters as they streaked overhead wasn’t enough to make the janissaries look away. They watched Algol’s gruesome cloak billow about his shoulders as the fighters screamed through the sky. They watched as the Iron Warrior approached the still bowed Colonel Nehring and held their breaths in anticipation.

‘I require the Scorpion Brigade,’ Algol said, the vox-casters in his helm sending his voice booming across the plaza.

Nehring’s words came in a frightened squeak. ‘Of course, Dread Lord! We are distributing weapons right now. They can be–’

Algol reached out with one of his armoured hands, his gauntlet closing about Nehring’s head as he drew the bowed officer upright. The crimson optics in his helm bored into Nehring’s terrified eyes. ‘You have two minutes to get this rabble armed,’ Algol hissed. ‘I want them loaded on the trucks within five.’

‘Ye-yes, Dre-Dread Lord,’ Nehring sputtered. Algol removed his crushing grip and turned away, leaving the colonel to dab at the blood trickling from his crumpled cap.

‘Five minutes,’ the Iron Warrior reminded as he marched away.

Nehring reached to his holster and drew his pistol. The colonel spun around, firing the weapon into the face of the closest unarmed janissary. The soldier didn’t even have time to scream, simply dropping to the flagstones, a smouldering crater where his forehead should have been. ‘Faster, you maggots!’ Nehring shrieked. ‘Lord Algol wants you scum in the trucks and by the warp, you will not disappoint him!’

The orderly ranks of men collapsed into a crush of humanity as the janissaries swarmed towards the bunker, snatching lasguns and autoguns from the quartermasters. As soon as they had a weapon in their hands, the soldiers were sprinting across the plaza towards the motor pool and the waiting trucks. Such was their panic that many of them neglected to snatch extra ammunition from the crates lined against the bunker’s wall.

As Taofang pushed his way into the mass, he looked once more at the terrible figure of Algol. The Space Marine continued to stalk across the plaza at the same measured march. He has such contempt for us, Taofang thought, that he didn’t even bother to see what we’re doing. He didn’t even care who was shot. We’re too small for him to even notice us.

Taofang stared skywards again, watching as another bright burst of light slowly faded into nothing. How terrible must the orks be to cause war-gods like the Iron Warriors such concern? What could mere men like the Scorpion Brigade do against such an enemy?

The fat-bodied trucks lurched and bounced as they rumbled through the deserted streets of Dirgas. Curfew had been imposed upon the city on Algol’s command, freezing all shipment to and from the factories, arresting all transportation from the production plants and hab-pens. Slaves were ordered to remain where they were, either locked inside their cells in the hab-pens or else shackled to their machinery in the factories. Travel meant communication, and communication was something now forbidden in the city.

Taofang hugged the cold steel of his lasgun closer to his chest, grimacing as he stared down at the three clips of ammunition he’d taken. Among the last men to leave the plaza, he’d been in too much of a hurry when he’d raced past the ammunition boxes. Instead of three energy cells for his lasgun, he had three clips of bullets for an autogun. Trying to haggle with his comrades in the truck had been fruitless. None of the men were from his own platoon and several of them were in an even worse state than he was, having neglected to grab any ammunition at all. As it stood, Taofang had twenty shots from the energy cell already inside his weapon.

With a shudder and screech, the truck came to a stop. The steel doors at the back of the cabin swung open, the bark of an officer ordering the janissaries from their conveyance. Taofang dropped down from the truck, finding himself in the warren-like sprawl of a factory. Metal girders and ferrocrete pillars soared dozens of metres upwards to support a vaulted roof. Stamps and presses, a river of conveyor belts and production lines filled the immense structure. Toppled carts, their cargo of tank treads and hatch-doors strewn about them, littered the floor. Here and there, a gore-soaked body lay sprawled amid the wreckage. Looming from the destruction like some scrap-work colossus, was the still-smoking casing of a huge rocket, its hull glowing a dull orange from its fiery descent through Castellax’s atmosphere.

Taofang’s truck had pulled up halfway along the sloped ramp leading to the factory’s transport node, a monorail connecting it to Dirgas’s main railway. A quick glance showed him that a half-dozen other trucks were likewise positioned around the transport node, an officer snarling orders at the soldiers as they disembarked. In all, there were about two hundred janissaries being deployed. He thought he could hear the sound of the other trucks’ engines below the din of the factory’s machines and thought the rest of the regiment might be deploying on the far side of the building.

Closer at hand, however, was the sinister bulk of an armoured transport quite unlike the crude trucks employed by the janissaries. It was a box-like vehicle, its hull fashioned from plates of reinforced plasteel, every centimetre pitted and scarred from millennia of warfare. Great titanium treads powered the machine up the ramp, its engine belching thick black fog as it powered its way forwards. Stained in dull grey livery, marked with the metal skull of the Iron Warriors, the transport was a formidable contrast to the khaki-painted trucks.

‘Establish a cordon!’ the officer was bellowing at the janissaries as they disembarked. ‘No xenos leaves this factory!’

Only a few metres away, a pair of janissaries jerked in agony as large calibre rounds ripped through their bodies. Soldiers scattered from the doomed men, taking cover behind the trucks and abandoned loading cranes scattered about the transport node. Taofang thumbed the activation rune on his lasgun and dove for shelter behind a wrecked cargo carrier, falling flat as his boot slipped on the slick floor. He bit down a livid curse as he found himself staring into the mushy remains of what was either the carrier’s operator or a regurgitated mass of vita-gruel.

Heavy slugs continued to slam into the floor, pulverising the dead bodies of the ambushed janissaries. A confusion of other shots plastered the same area, displaying a crazed variety of calibres and ammunition types. The helmet of one of the corpses melted under the glowing discharge of a low-intensity plasma weapon, the skull inside smoking as the man’s hair caught fire.

Taofang followed the afterglow of the plasma beam, tracing it back to its source on one of the steel gantries criss-crossing the factory. As he did, he felt his skin crawl. There were creatures crouched upon the walkway. He could see one of the beasts clearly, a thing the likes of which he had never dared imagine. Its shape was vaguely human, or at least humanoid, though swollen in proportions with thick knots of muscle and sinew. Its arms were short and thick, its legs stumpy and broad. Its head seemed to jut directly from its powerful shoulders, an apelike skull that was mostly jawbone and tusks. Beady little eyes glistened from shadowy pits sunken into its monstrous face. A patchwork of crudely assembled textiles clothed its massive frame, each scrap stained and dyed into a checkerboard of white and black. Bandoliers of bullets and knives criss-crossed its chest and straddled its waist. A machete bigger than Taofang’s arm was thrust through the alien’s belt, keeping company with a cluster of primitive-looking grenades and a nest of still-dripping human scalps.

The alien’s leathery green skin marked it as an ork, but the vicious brute crouched upon the walkway bore only the slightest resemblance to the absurd, clownish marauders Taofang had heard of. Looking up at the monster, he couldn’t see anything amusing. It looked like death, and a more brutal death the janissary was unable to picture as his gaze strayed back to the mutilated bodies of his comrades.

Orks in Dirgas! How had the aliens penetrated the defences of Castellax so quickly? Even if they had pierced the orbital defences, there were the city’s defence batteries and the Air Cohort to fend them off. Indeed, Taofang hadn’t heard so much as a peep from the gigantic surface-to-orbit defence cannons, guns so immense their recoil felt like an earth tremor. It was impossible that the orks could strike so suddenly.

The rattle of renewed gunfire slammed against the sides of the trucks, some shots of such strength that they ripped clean through the vehicles and into the men cowering behind them. Screams of agony echoed through the factory as injured janissaries writhed on the ground, clutching at the bleeding stumps of arms and legs or trying to push splintered ribs into the wet meat of mangled chests.

The aliens on the gantries coughed and growled, savouring the carnage. Las-beams sizzled up at the monsters, searing ugly scars into their flesh and scouring their primitive vests of chain and scrap metal. Taofang joined in the vengeful fire, targeting his shots at the ugly xenos with the plasma weapon. Again and again he fired at the ork, watching its hulking body jerk with each shot. For a brief moment, Taofang felt exhilaration. For the first time he experienced a feeling of true accomplishment. He was a real soldier, fighting one of mankind’s most ancient foes. And he was winning.

Then, as the ork reared up and pointed its weapon in his direction, Taofang’s exhilaration evaporated. He could see now the effect his shots had on the alien. A half-dozen black splotches on its leathery green skin, a nice cluster of fresh scars to go with the confusion of old wounds already marring the alien’s hide. Staring down the sight of his lasgun, Taofang could see the ork staring back at him, its face pulling back in a leer of amusement as it brought its weapon to bear.

Before the ork could shoot, however, the greenskin was bowled backwards by the meaty impact of an explosive round. Bone and sinew burst from the alien’s body as the shell detonated against its shoulder. Uttering a shriek that was half snarl and half howl, the ork struggled to spin around and face its attacker. Even as it made the effort, a second explosive shell tore deep into its chest, detonating an instant later. Ripped almost in two by the explosion, the dying ork fell from the gantry and hurtled to the factory floor far below.

‘Iron within! Iron without!’ The bellow rolled like thunder through the factory. Marching from behind the box-like hull of his Rhino, Algol pressed a fresh clip into his ornately adorned boltgun and began looking for new targets. The armoured giant moved without hesitation, stalking towards the raised walkways and the xenos fiends infesting them. Like a heathen war-god, the Iron Warrior raised his weapon and sent burst after burst of high-calibre death speeding towards the orks. Alien howls of confusion and pain now filled the factory as the orks suddenly found themselves the attacked rather than the attackers.

The janissaries, only a moment before quaking in their boots, rallied to the gruesome Algol. The terror the Space Marine inspired now emboldened them. The Skintaker was the most fearsome fiend on Castellax… and he was fighting on their side!

Bullets from the ork guns gouged the floor as the aliens struggled to get the Iron Warrior in their sights. It seemed an effort beyond their savage brains. Algol’s huge frame was constantly shifting from one direction to another, fading into the shadow of a truck or support pillar in that fragment of time before an ork loosed a barrage of automatic fire. Instantly, the Space Marine would return fire, leaning out from behind cover to deliver unerringly accurate bursts from his bolter. Each shot seemed to send another xenos hurtling from the walkways.

‘Castellax!’ the voice of Colonel Nehring rang out. The officer rose from behind the shelter of a pile of steel crates and made a beckoning sweep with his arm. Dozens of janissaries took up his cry, lunging from cover and rushing towards the aliens on the gantries, loosing a withering stream of las-fire as they charged. With the invincible Iron Warrior leading them, the men forgot their fear of the orks, remembering only their training and the thrill of battle.

Taofang rose from behind the crane, his heart hammering in his chest. He felt his awe of the Space Marine flooding through his mind, driving him to bold heroics. Screaming an inarticulate war cry, he charged the closest gantry, firing at the skulking ork crouched at the top of the stairs. He saw his shots burn into the alien’s flesh, saw one of his las-bolts melt the tinted visor of the alien’s helmet and sear into the beady eye behind it. He saw the ork pitch and fall, tumbling down the stairs like a rag doll. He laughed as he continued to shoot the wounded brute, burning fresh holes into its leathery flesh.

It took him a few seconds to realise his weapon wasn’t firing any more. Taofang stared incredulously at his lasgun, noting with some confusion the blinking red light of the depleted energy cell. For an instant, fear tried to well up inside him. The ork he had been shooting wasn’t dead, its hideous physiology preserving it through the fusillade. Wounded, bleeding, several of its bones broken in its fall, the monster was struggling to rise, its one good eye glaring murderously at Taofang.

Before panic could grip the janissary, he noticed the terrifying figure of Algol marching across the factory. One of the orks, more crafty than its comrades, had played dead and now, as Algol passed beneath the walkway the xenos was lying on, the alien leaped down onto the Iron Warrior’s shoulders.

Algol didn’t even break stride. As the ork’s weight slammed into him, the Space Marine reached back and closed his gauntlet about the alien’s jaw. Pivoting at the waist, he used his grip to swing the ork across his hip, breaking its hold and dashing it to the ground. Before the ork was even aware of what had happened to it, Algol’s boot came smashing down into its face. The alien thrashed wildly, but a second stomp from the Skintaker crushed its skull and ended its struggles.

Taofang looked back at the ork he had injured. With a vicious scream, he shifted his grip on the lasgun and ran at the alien. Swinging the weapon like a club, he brought its heavy stock cracking into the monster’s head, ripping open its cheek and knocking its helmet askew. The ork swiped at him with one of its paws, but the clumsy effort only spilled the brute back onto the floor. Standing above the prostrate beast, Taofang drove the butt of his lasgun into its head, pounding its skull until he felt it splinter and crack beneath his blows. Carried away by the violence and feeling of unspeakable power, Taofang kept up the assault until there was only a gooey mush clinging to the stock of his weapon.

Breathing heavily, his lungs burning with the intensity of his exertions, Taofang stepped away from the pulverised mess. The factory echoed with the bark of gunfire, the shouts and screams of men, the howls of savage aliens. He could see janissaries rushing up onto the gantries, hurdling the butchered bodies of slaves and overseers, firing at the scattered orks. He watched as Algol emptied his bolter into a huge ork with massive tusks and a rifle that looked like it had started life as a small howitzer. He saw the ork keel over, its face reduced to pulp by the Iron Warrior’s shots. The howitzer-rifle roared as the ork’s twitching fingers tugged the trigger, sending a shot straight into the roof with all the devastation of a mortar shell. Debris clattered down around the triumphant Space Marine, glancing off his ceramite helm and pauldrons.

Then, Taofang saw something else, something that offended his eyes and made his brain recoil in disbelief. As he stared at the victorious Iron Warrior, he saw a strange image, like a phantom vision projected across the scene. He could see the ghostly echo of some immense room, an impression of spectral orks scurrying about strange machines.

A sound like tearing metal shrieked across the factory and with it came an ozone stink and a weird ripple of light that penetrated Taofang’s eyelids when he closed them against the glare. As he tried to blink the searing pain away, he caught a blur of motion on the walkway above him. Forcing his eyes to focus, he felt his gorge rise as he began to make out more clearly what it was he was looking at. There was another ork on the gantry.

No, he corrected himself. Not on the gantry. In the gantry, its body inextricably fused into the metal framework, the grille woven through its leathery flesh. Taofang was at a loss to explain how such a gruesome thing could happen, even more so because he was willing to swear on the fiends of the warp, that the alien hadn’t been there a few seconds before.

The incredible supposition was further emboldened by the magnified sounds of combat roaring through the factory. Taofang could see orks charging at the janissaries from every quarter, even from places the soldiers had definitely cleared already. The men were taken completely aback by this incredible ambush, and the xenos spared them no chance to recover from their surprise.

Even Algol was beset by fresh foes, firing into a mob of orks who came charging at him from the transport node, a place that had been absolutely devoid of enemies only a moment before. To the strangeness of the attack was added the disheartening spectacle of the Space Marine retreating from the aliens, firing short, undirected bursts at them as he sprinted back towards the ramp and his transport.

Taofang wasn’t the only one who saw Algol’s withdrawal. Colonel Nehring’s stern voice rose above the crackle of gunfire, calling for the Scorpion Brigade to fall back to the trucks. Judging by the number of orks between most of the men and their transports, it was unlikely more than half of them would make it.

The janissary turned to make his way back to the ramp, but as he did so the tearing sound swelled to a deafening din, the ozone-stink so profound he fumbled for the respirator hanging from his belt. Whichever way he turned his eyes, he saw the same spectral image, the mammoth room with the scrap-metal walls and strange machines. And he saw orks. Not one or two, not dozens, not even hundreds. There were thousands of the aliens, their fanged mouths open in noiseless roars.

A blinding blast of light exploded through the factory, this time accompanied by an electrical crackle that set every hair on Taofang’s body standing upright. The janissary gave small notice to even this strange effect, instead clapping his hands to his ears as a thunderous clamour resounded through the factory. It was the bestial cry of a thousand savages, the primordial bellow of mindless brutality.

‘Waaagh!’

His clearing vision displayed a factory that had been torn to shreds, mangled and twisted as though the funnel of a tremendous ash-storm had rampaged inside the building. Walkways had been wrenched from their foundations, curled into knots by the malignant force. Pillars and beams had been toppled, bringing with them great sections of roof and wall. Conveyor belts had been flattened, stamps and presses twisted into jumbles of unrecognisable wreckage. Dripping heaps of meat gave loathsome evidence that the same havoc had been visited on flesh as well as metal and ferrocrete.

Taofang had only an instant to gauge the destruction, for the flash of light had brought more than simple carnage. It had brought the cause of that monstrous bellow. Massed among the wreckage was a horde of greenskinned aliens, their hulking bodies draped in ragged armour and tattered rags, their fists wrapped about a crazed assemblage of weaponry, from crude stub guns to complex meltas and everything between.

The city was infested with aliens now. The brutes hadn’t penetrated the defences, they had bypassed them entirely. It was teleportation, that most mysterious and esoteric of human technology, but on a scale so vast that even the most crazed tech-priest would balk at the possibility. Taofang had heard stories of boarding parties of five or six Adeptus Astartes appearing inside a raider during an engagement against the Imperium, but this went far beyond. The orks had teleported thousands of their loathsome breed from orbit to the surface of Castellax.

There was ghastly evidence of the hazards of the ramshackle alien technology all around. Many orks had been fused into pieces of the factory, their bodies melted into gantries and pillars. Hundreds of orks at the very fringe of the teleportation’s effect had only partially reformed, their horribly translucent bodies collapsing into puddles of quivering mush after a few abominable moments of agonised animation. Where some of the strange machines had failed to materialise along with the ork horde, at least two had been caught in the area of effect, emerging as sputtering, smoking towers of runaway energy.

Yet, however crude the process, there was no denying the brutal fact that the orks had circumvented all of Dirgas’s complex defences. The xenos invaders had gained a beachhead within the very walls of the city!

Algol’s Rhino was firing into the massed orks as it hurriedly backed down the ramp. With the Iron Warrior’s withdrawal, the trucks weren’t far behind, their drivers scarcely waiting for the frantic janissaries scrambling to climb onto them. Most of the orks were too disoriented by their transference to react to the fleeing humans, but enough of them opened fire to turn the retreat into a complete rout.

Taofang raced down the ramp, climbing onto the running board of a truck as it made a crazed three-point turn and tore out of the factory. The janissary was spun around as the truck turned, clinging to the massive door panel to maintain his footing. Behind him, he could see fleeing soldiers being cut down by the deranged marksmanship of the orks. He watched as a smoke-belching missile rose from the massed aliens and slammed into one of the trucks. The vehicle exploded in a burst of flame and shrapnel, shredding the janissaries racing after it.

The sight of the blazing wreckage was Taofang’s last view inside the factory. In the next instant, his truck lunged out into the streets of Dirgas and was racing along the desolate lanes.

Behind him, Taofang could hear the vicious aliens raise their croaking voices in another guttural howl.

‘Waaagh!’

Warsmith Andraaz glowered at the liveried slave trembling beside his diamond throne. The Space Marine’s eye smouldered with cold hate as he digested the report the man had brought into the Iron Bastion’s war room. It was news that sat ill with the overlord of Castellax, news that demanded an appropriate response.

In a blur of motion, the gigantic Warsmith surged from his chair. Before the slave could even blink an eye, Andraaz closed the armoured fingers of his gauntlet around the man’s throat. With a savage wrench, he twisted the messenger’s head, snapping his neck like a twig. Arrogantly, he let the corpse flop to the floor and turned to regard the Iron Warriors gathered about the great table. One of the Rending Guard stepped away from the diamond throne and dragged the carcass out of view.

‘The orks are in Dirgas,’ Andraaz repeated, his voice an angry growl. ‘Algol says the local janissaries are unable to contain the aliens to the manufacturing district. He requests extraction of all portable resources.’

Sergeant Ipos nodded in agreement. ‘As distasteful as it is, the Skintaker may be right. If Dirgas is lost to us then it would be prudent to remove whatever we can while we can. There is no knowing how long the xenos will lay siege to Castellax or what measures will be necessary…’

‘Pull out and flatten the city from the sky,’ Over-Captain Vallax declared, slamming his fist against the table. ‘Let the orks taste a few hundred megatons of vengeance from our bombers. That will make them think twice before using their teleporters again.’

‘Wasteful and impetuous,’ scoffed Captain Morax. ‘You couldn’t drive a thought into an ork’s brain with a power maul. All bombing Dirgas will do is destroy valuable infrastructure and material. By my calculations, losing the city will reduce overall production by fifteen per cent. We will have a hard time meeting our tithe to Medrengard if we turn the city into a cinder.’

‘What do you propose, Skylord?’ Admiral Nostraz sneered. ‘Leave the aliens to establish a foothold in Dirgas?’

‘There is something to be said for such a tactic,’ Morax said. ‘Dirgas is the other side of the Mare Ossius and the Witch Wall. If we can contain the orks on that side of the sea, we can fortify Vorago and our other strongholds.’

‘Which will disrupt our production even further,’ said Vallax. ‘If you are so set against bombing Dirgas, then maybe a deep strike is in order.’

From his place at the end of the table, Captain Rhodaan turned to face his commander. ‘You have heard Algol’s report. The ork numbers are already formidable. There is no telling how many more they might still be teleporting down into the city.’

‘Allowing that the xenos technology continues to function,’ came the mechanised voice of Oriax’s servitor, voicing its master’s objection. ‘Ork machinery is wildly unpredictable. The more complex the mechanism, the less likely it is to maintain integrity after repeated use. The xenos do not understand the necessity of placating the machine-spirit.’

Rhodaan shook his head and ignored the servitor. ‘Attacking Dirgas will be costly,’ he said.

‘Necessary losses,’ Vallax countered.

Rhodaan felt his blood begin to boil. ‘And whose squad will suffer these losses?’ he hissed through clenched teeth. The two Assault Marines locked eyes, each of them glaring deep into the blackened soul of the other. Centuries of rivalry and hate pounded inside their hearts and sent adrenaline coursing through their veins.

‘There will be no attack on Dirgas,’ Warsmith Andraaz declared. ‘Captain Morax is right. If we allow the orks to concentrate in the city, we will be able to more easily contain and monitor them. Moreover, until we can be certain this teleportation machine is no longer a threat, a direct assault would benefit us nothing.’ Andraaz shifted his gaze to Oriax’s cyborg mouthpiece. ‘The teleporter is your area of expertise, Fabricator. Whatever it takes, I want to know if it is still in operation.’

A cruel smile crawled onto the Warsmith’s scarred face. He stared at Vallax, then shifted his attention to Rhodaan. ‘If the teleporter is non-functional, then you will have your chance for glory. But do not be so eager to claim it that you forget your obligation to the Third Grand Company and the Legion.

‘No Iron Warrior dies unless I allow him to. Forget that, and the orks are the least of your worries.’

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