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Dante's Canyon – Extract

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FIRST CONTACT, SOUTH-WEST OF DC DRILLING STATION

The combat knife, angled just so, and driven in and upwards by gene-enhanced muscle, pierced the ork’s lung smoothly. A wheeze of protest escaped the greenskin before the blade was twisted with deft assurance, puncturing the second lung. Without pause, the blade continued on its journey towards the xenos’s foul heart. Orks were dangerous until the last drop of their blood had been spilled, and often for some time afterwards. They fought death as if they had a chance of beating it. It was only when they didn’t see it coming that they succumbed without undue protest.

Ariq withdrew his blade and let the ork topple forwards. Snow tumbled from his head and shoulders as he shrugged off the camouflage cloak he’d been hiding under. Even as the ork’s body struck the hard packed ice, the White Scars Space Marine Scout was moving forwards through the swirling snow towards the rest of the pack.

There were eight of the filthy beasts, and he intended to collect as many scalps for his lodge pole as he could. Orks were the Emperor’s gift to his chosen sons – they existed only to fight and kill and knew neither fear nor sadness, and as such they were the most perfect of prey for the sons of Chogoris.

The orks were festooned with a motley assortment of ramshackle gear – heavy close-combat blades, crude bolter-like weapons and bulky pistols that looked as likely to explode in their wielder’s hand as they were to fire. Crude icons decorated their patchwork clothing, and all were dressed somewhat alike in what the xenos considered camouflage. They moved on through the narrow bottleneck in the heart of the canyon, bickering and snarling at one another, wholly unaware of his approach.

Ariq and the rest of his squad had been waiting for hours, ever since they’d first caught sight of the beasts from their elevated position on the ice-sheathed kilometres-high canyon walls that now loomed above him, casting thick, night-black shadows down across the ice below. They’d descended those walls and prepared an ambush on the ice, trusting in their skills and equipment to hide any sign of their presence from the greenskins. They’d been ordered to use blades alone in dealing with the enemy – sound carried further in the twisting confines of the canyon, even with the muffling effects of the snow. And avalanches were far too common for Ariq’s liking. The thought of tonnes of rock and snow plummeting down from above to smash onto the ice was daunting even for a Space Marine. Some things even the Emperor’s chosen warriors couldn’t fight.

Through the eddy of falling snow, Ariq saw that his attack had as yet gone unnoticed by his victim’s companions. He grinned fiercely; it would be a pleasure to rectify that. The orks were scouts, sent ahead of the horde to check the strength of the ice and to find the enemy. That was the only reason they’d be so far ahead of the rest of them, and on foot. Most of the xenos who now infested the southern continent of Armageddon were as mobile as the White Scars, if nowhere near as organised. Hordes of smoke-belching bikes and rattletrap four-wheeled transports thundered across the ice floes, as the orks attacked the water-processing plants and pipelines that snaked across the icy salt-flats to the hives on the mainland.

He sent his knife sailing forwards, to take a second greenskin in the back of the head, drawing his Tulwar as he did so. The curved blade didn’t flash as it sprang into his hand, but it made a satisfying sound as it chopped through the bull-neck of an ork, and sent its head bouncing across the ice. ‘That’s three for me, brothers,’ Ariq said, as he finished off the one that was still pawing ineffectually at the tip of his knife, where it protruded from between its piggy eyes.

‘You were always greedy, Ariq. Even as a boy,’ a voice crackled over the vox. Ariq was about to reply, when he heard the telltale hiss of a blade descending. He sank low and pivoted, his foot shooting out to catch the charging ork on its knee. Alien bone crunched, but the greenskin didn’t stop. Ariq twisted desperately, hurling himself aside as the crudely forged blade bit deep into the ice. The ork spun with a roar, wrenching its blade free to launch a second blow at Ariq.

The blow was intercepted by a Tulwar, which removed the ork’s sword-hand at the wrist. The brute didn’t hesitate, but turned to face its new opponent with a bellicose growl that was cut short as the Tulwar did its work, opening a dark canyon in the ork’s twisted features. The beast fell to its knees and then toppled over like a felled tree. Ariq looked up at the other scout and grinned. ‘Now who’s being greedy, Guyuk?’

‘Merely taking my due, brother,’ Guyuk said as he helped Ariq to his feet. ‘No more, no less.’ Like Ariq, he was clean-shaven, and wore his long hair loose. Only when they had become full Space Marines were Scouts of the White Scars allowed to pull their hair into a warrior’s topknot. A necklace of ork teeth dangled from Guyuk’s neck, testimony to his skill with a blade.

Past Guyuk, Ariq could see that the remaining orks had been engaged by the rest of the squad, including Sergeant Rukn. The beasts roared and snorted as the white-armoured shapes of their attackers sprang in and out of the melee, like steppe wolves bringing down prey. The Scouts, besides Rukn, could not match the xenos for sheer muscle, but working in tandem, with surprise on their side, they were more than a match for the orks. One by one, the remaining beasts were cut down by Tulwar and knife.

‘Well done, brothers,’ Ariq said cheerfully as he crouched to clean his blades in the snow. ‘Eight scalps, and all without having to fire a shot. Truly, we are warriors without equal.’

‘Not just greedy,’ Guyuk said as he strode past. ‘Also stupid.’

‘Foolish, rather,’ Rukn said as he extracted an ork’s tusks from its slack jaw. ‘Ariq isn’t a complete idiot, after all. If he was, he would be dead by now, the way he fights. He’s lucky, which counts for almost as much as skill, in battle.’ The sergeant was bare-armed despite the freezing temperatures, and his sinewy arms were maps of scar tissue and old wounds. He wore a warrior’s topknot, and had a thick beard, bound into a single plait with intricately carved bone rings. Rukn had more kills than Ariq had years, and his cheeks were heavy with tribal scarring. It was said of Rukn that he had once ridden with the Master of the Hunt, Kor’sarro Khan himself, before requesting to be transferred to the Tenth Company. Why any man would give up riding alongside one of the Chapter’s greatest living heroes to spend his days instructing the young and foolish, Ariq could not fathom.

‘Thank you, Sergeant. I shall make a note of your kindness in my next poem,’ Ariq said. All recruits of the White Scars Tenth Minghan were expected to master many skills, including more delicate arts such as calligraphy. ‘The pen and the sword in mutual accord,’ as the Khan-of-Khans had once said. Ariq had already completed two hundred and fifty six stanzas of his ode to the destruction of the Khwarzm and their hill-forts by the Khan-of-Khans during the wars of conquest, and he looked forward to adding another two hundred, at the first opportunity.

‘I’ve read your poetry, boy. That’s an insult if I’ve ever heard one,’ Rukn grunted. He held up a bloody tooth and examined it for a moment before secreting it away in his armour. The sergeant collected ork teeth and carved them into Go pieces. It was considered a high honour among those whom he’d trained to be gifted a full set of playing pieces upon their promotion to fully fledged Space Marine. ‘We need to hide these bodies. No sense in alerting our prey before we’re ready. Sartaq, Yunan, give me a hand. We’ll crack the ice and drop them in.’

The last two members of the squad hurried forward.

Yunan, the youngest of them all, hefted a hand flamer as he sank to his haunches. As he began to melt a hole in the ice, he asked, ‘Which ones are they?’

Ariq turned one of the bodies over with his foot. ‘Does it matter?’

Yunan shrugged. ‘It’s a courtesy to know the tribe of the warrior you kill,’ he said as the ice at his feet began to turn to steam.

‘I don’t think orks have a concept of courtesy,’ Sartaq said. He hefted a body onto his shoulder as he kicked a decapitated head towards the pit Yunan was burning. Sartaq was a stolid, practical sort, and was built squat where his brothers were lean. Sartaq’s folk had been farmers or masons of some sort, Ariq thought. He rarely spoke of them. He rarely spoke at all, really. For the first six months that they’d fought beside each other Ariq had assumed the other Scout was mute.

‘But we do,’ Yunan said serenely as he turned off the hand flamer and stood. ‘The form of the thing is as much the thing itself.’

‘Between your poetry and his philosophy, this is going to be a long campaign,’ Guyuk said, looking at Ariq.

Rukn smacked him with an open palm on the back of the head. He had cut the glyph plate loose from a dead xenos’s harness and he bounced it on his palm as he spoke. ‘Quiet. Yunan is correct. The orks are beasts, but do we not honour the memory of a beast, if it is worthy? They are worthy prey, and will be treated with courtesy. Now dump their carcasses in the hole so we can do what we came out here to do.’

‘I thought we came out here to kill orks,’ Guyuk said, sheathing his Tulwar with a flourish. Guyuk was right, though Ariq would never say as much. Armageddon seethed with the fires of war, even here in the frozen reaches of the Deadlands. The great hives shuddered beneath the incessant hammer-blows of ork artillery as the greenskins spread across the planet. More than twenty Space Marine Chapters had responded to the invasion, including the White Scars, who, as was their right, had decided to trust in their own well-honed strategies rather than subordinate themselves to the monolithic joint effort in the making. ‘Though why we had to do it in the cold, only the Khan knows,’ Guyuk continued.

Rukn smacked him again. ‘Show respect for Suboden Khan, boy. It is his hand that wields the Tulwar Brotherhood, of which we are the sharp tip. And we came out here because it is better to ride free in the cold than to be trapped behind warm walls, as the Black Templars and the Salamanders choose to do.’ He looked at them all, holding their eyes one by one. ‘Never forget that. The Palatine huddled behind walls, and trusted in armour and stone, and the Khan-of-Khans threw down their fortresses one by one, even as he did to the Khwarzm and the Yukat. Better to ride with death at your side than to wait for it to come to you. As the Khan himself said, quickness is the essence of victory.’ He gestured dismissively. ‘Now, finish setting the charges, while I relay our coordinates.’

Ariq grinned and went back to where he’d been hiding when the orks had arrived. He rooted through the snow and found the reinforced satchel containing the plasma detonators. He tossed one to Guyuk, and a second to Sartaq. ‘Pace them out. We’ve only got a few left.’

The Khan had ordered that the shimmering path of ice that wound through the guts of the canyon be booby-trapped at intervals – every few kilometres they had planted explosives at varying heights along the walls of the canyon. The devices were positioned so that when they went off, the explosion would shave thick layers of rock off the face of the cliff and send it plummeting down into the ice below, shattering it and dumping anyone who survived the resulting avalanche into the freezing waters, to drown or succumb to the cold. Dead was dead, and the White Scars weren’t overly concerned about how the enemy got that way.

Ariq and Guyuk climbed up one side of the cliff while Sartaq managed the other. It took them no small effort to do so. While they were stronger than any normal human, the Scouts did not yet possess the enhanced musculature of a fully fledged Space Marine. Ariq thrilled in the effort it took to scale the frost-encrusted cliff-face, as he couldn’t help but thrill every time he utilised the strength with which he had been gifted. He could barely recall his time as a mortal now, short as it had been; human memory had been replaced by the war-rites of the gods of storm and wind, so that he might learn to kill with joy and pride.

When he reached the right spot, he held on with one hand and used the other to heft the explosive. He thumbed the activator switch for the anchor-rod, and a metallic spike shot out of the bottom of the device. He sank the spike into the rock with a muttered prayer to whatever sliver of a machine-spirit the explosive might possess. The activation light switched from green to red and he grunted in satisfaction. The explosives were set to go off many hours from now, when they would hopefully do the most damage to the great mass of orks even now squirming into the crooked confines of the canyon.

He paused, and looked out over the panorama of the canyon. Even from his current height, he could see just a minute section of it. The whole thing was only visible in its entirety from low orbit. The bone-numbing wind that crawled through the contours of the canyon brought with it a wash of freezing air that sought to steal his breath from his lungs, and he rocked slightly on his perch. It reminded him somewhat of the Khum Kharta Mountains, on Chogoris, though the Deadlands were, if anything, even more inhospitable.

And they were about to become more so, if the plumes of smoke he’d spotted piercing the snow to rise above the canyon were any indication. Orks, and more than eight. Ariq descended quickly. Even as he reached the ground, he saw that Guyuk had seen what he’d seen and was already telling Rukn. The sergeant waved his comrade to silence as he crouched over the portable vox-unit.

‘I repeat – we’ve encountered scouts – glyph-markings indicate they belong to one of the mechanised groups. They were on foot, but that doesn’t mean much. The greenskins have learned better than to assume the ice is of uniform thickness everywhere, more is the pity. It looks like the rest of them are on the way. We await further orders,’ Rukn said, into the vox. The vox hissed and spat. The inclement weather interfered with the signal at the best of times. ‘Say again,’ Rukn said.

‘…pull them in… trap…’

Rukn grunted. He peered across the ice, towards the distant mouth of the canyon. Then he smiled crookedly and waved a hand in the direction from which the orks had come. ‘Let’s go wave a bit of raw meat in front of the beast’s nose, hey?’

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