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Leontus: Lord Solar – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

FORTUNA MINOR, NORTHERN CONTINENT

SEGMENTUM TEMPESTUS

GORROLIS SUB-SYSTEM

The saviour pod slammed into the earth in a spray of dirt and scorched grass, scattering ground-dwelling leporidae back to their burrows in skittering streams as the metal shell bounced clear of its crater. It came to rest with a groan of tortured metal and a fading whine of impotent retro-thrusters.

One of the more curious leporidae, an inquisitive young female, was the first to emerge. It inched forward on long-fingered limbs, snuffling at the air through its octet of furry nostrils as it approached the pod. It fled back to its sanctuary as a glowing orange hole exploded in the pod’s hatch, and was hidden back out of sight when the panel was kicked clear by a leather-booted foot.

A lone human emerged from the pod’s interior with a long white pistol grasped in one gloved hand, coughing his way clear of the actinic haze of smoke that rose from the crash site. His dark eyes took in his surroundings quickly, from the bare dirt of the saviour pod’s impact crater to the meandering wound it had cut into the earth as it came to rest.

The Lord Solar, Arcadian Leontus, stepped down from his fire-scarred transport onto the surface of Fortuna Minor and cast his cold gaze skyward.

Leontus had landed on a high plain of rolling grasses burned a muted yellow by the sun, the open land dappled with patches of shade cast by lazy clouds that drifted across the endless sky. The hills behind him swept up towards a mountain in the distance, a craggy spear of rock that was capped with an unbroken blanket of snow. It could have been serenity itself, were it not for the massacre that painted the vista below in shades of black and red.

Trails of billowing black smoke wove their devastating tapestry across the sky, winding from burning Imperial troop landers as they careened to earth as blazing meteors. Ork aircraft tore at them like pack predators even as they slammed into the warring hordes below, eradicating both black-armoured Goffs and bare-skinned savage orks alike in geysers of fire and churned earth. It was enough to tear the creatures’ attention away from their enthusiastic slaughter of their own kind, and the xenos’ battle-lust found new targets in the humans arriving in their midst.

Entire wings of Imperial Lightning fighters were swarmed as they fought to defend the fat-bellied landers, but were themselves brought down by scarlet jets that chased their kills all the way to their flaming demise on the endless grasslands below. Several of the ork pilots were so embroiled in the chase that they slammed into the earth beside their victims, refusing to pull out of their dives until their stores of ammunition were spent.

But for each ork craft that was picked off in the swirling dogfights or by the xenos’ lack of a self-preservation instinct, still more flew in from the ork-held space port to the south-west, tearing through the Imperial lines to maul the landers with predatory tenacity. Each lander carried hundreds of Astra Militarum troops, if not thousands, and Leontus’ mind unconsciously estimated the losses as the doomed vessels ploughed into the earth in mushrooms of promethium flame.

Those Guardsmen that did escape the burning wreckages were set upon by a screaming green tide of orks, who seemed oblivious to the flaming comets that killed them in their hundreds with every impact. Pockets of Imperial resistance fought for survival where they could, but each was slowly overrun by the weight of numbers or by red-daubed vehicles that ploughed through humans and their drivers’ own kind with sickening speed.

Leontus activated his helm’s vox and listened to the grim chorus playing out across every frequency, each desperate voice begging for direction that might bring order to the disarray. He considered adding his own voice to it, as if his resonant tones might somehow provide a melody for the others to follow back into harmony and perhaps victory.

He killed the vox and cut short the last words of an unknown pilot, ending the doomed woman’s prayer before its final affirmation. His voice would change nothing and so did not belong on the already overcrowded vox-channels. Instead, he simply watched and momentarily embraced his isolation.

In the decades that he had commanded the armies of the Segmentum Solar, Leontus had never experienced the scale of defeat that was unfolding before his eyes. He felt the weight of those years bearing down upon him like a physical force, held at bay by a cold, insidious anger that grew with each passing moment. The plan had failed, that much was obvious. There was no hiding from that fact on the bare plains of Fortuna Minor – his political officers wouldn’t be able to spin this massacre into a daring victory, nor would the annals of history look upon it as anything but a contemptuous failure. The price of that failure was thousands of lives that he was powerless to save in that moment.

He looked to the skies again with a prayer on his lips, hoping against hope that his last order had been heard and obeyed before his Aquila lander had been shot from the sky and he’d been forced into the saviour pod. His shoulders sagged with relief as he picked out the dark spots on the very edge of the upper atmosphere – Imperial landing craft abandoning their descent and returning to the embattled fleet in orbit before they came within range of the ork flyers. His instructions to call off the attack had been heard, and he thanked the God-Emperor for His mercy.

With the flow of burning landers staunched, he turned his attention to more immediate concerns. It would only be a matter of time before his forces on the plains below were destroyed. Any survivors would make for the defensible high ground offered by the mountain if they had any sense; it was likely that there would be topography there that was more favourable to a man on foot. It certainly couldn’t be any worse than the bare ground where he stood.

With the clamour of battle echoing to him over the low hills, Arcadian Leontus turned from the massacre and made towards the mountain.

‘Form up on me! Riders, to me!’

Belgutei let loose a cry of frustration as yet another of his riders was dragged from the saddle by the ork horde, their screams of fear and pain cut short by the hammering blows of brutally primitive clubs and blades. He lashed out at a leering ork face as it came within range of his power sword, the blow driven as much by frustration and anger as by experience. The xenos fell back in a spray of ichor, the body spasming grotesquely as its head bounced away across the bloody ground. Each moment was a maelstrom of snarling mouths beneath hate-filled red eyes, bloodied weapons and screeching horses. Everywhere he looked there were xenos braying for his blood, each hammering heartbeat drawing him closer to the moment he was overwhelmed.

Belgutei wheeled his mount around in tight arcs, driving back attackers that seemed to come from everywhere all at once. He was lost on a roiling sea of green flesh, cast adrift from his riders as they fought their own battles like rocks standing firm against a raging tempest. The occasional whip-crack of las-fire cut through the guttural chorus of screaming xenos, punctuated by the rattling bark of their rudimentary solid-shot weapons and explosive impacts.

His horse bucked beneath him, kicking back to crush the chest of an ork with her iron-shod hooves, then stoving in another’s head with her chanfron, the armoured faceplate that protected her head and eyes. Belgutei shouted his encouragement with each kick and savage bite, trusting in her armour to keep her safe from the orks’ attentions. She was a good horse, Attilan-bred and as battle-hardened as he was, not some show pony from a blue blood’s parade ground.

‘Good girl, Nomi, keep going!’ he cried, gripping the saddle as she rocked violently back and forth. ‘Come to us, you bastards, meet your fate!’

The orks surged forward in a sudden rush, propelled by their fellows behind. Belgutei kicked out with a stirruped foot as he fought for room to manoeuvre, smashing teeth from gaping jaws and desperately hacking at bare green flesh with his sword, until he jerked back in surprise as he came face to face with another horse’s armoured chanfron – one that he recognised.

‘Belgutei,’ Do-Song said by way of breathless greeting. The Attilan commander’s scarred face was sheened with sweat and spattered with black ichor, but the old man fought with the vigour of someone half his age. His honour guard followed in his wake, snapping off shots with their lasguns and beating back the orks with savage slashes of their swords, and Belgutei realised that the sudden ork surge was less a charge and more a bow wave as they fled before the Attilan horses.

‘My lord,’ Belgutei said, thrusting down through the skull of a brutish xenos who was trapped between Nomi and Do-Song’s horse, Gori. ‘It is good to see that you still live!’

‘I will ride the winds at the God-Emperor’s side, but not today,’ Do-Song replied through gritted teeth, his free hand falling to a bloody smear on his abdomen.

‘Where is the fleet support, my lord? They were supposed to clear this ground from orbit!’

‘Worry later, for now we deal with what is before us,’ Do-Song said, kicking out at a charging ork, which fell back with a spray of broken teeth and bloody spit before being beheaded by one of his guards. Like Belgutei, his lance had been shattered in the first charge, but he swung his power-wreathed blade with brutal efficiency to decapitate and maim orks with every strike. ‘Gather your riders – we need to break free of this morass.’

Belgutei swung his hunting horn into his hand on the rawhide cord that hung from his neck, the ancient bone feeling fragile in his adrenaline-fuelled grip. With a quick breath, he let loose a piercing blast through the brass mouthpiece and sounded the muster.

‘How can we break free? We have no space to build a charge,’ Belgutei said, dropping the horn as Nomi bucked again to kick out at an ork who ventured too close.

‘I will make space,’ Do-Song said. ‘Keep your riders close, Belgutei.’

The first of Belgutei’s riders reached him as Do-Song set his own horn to his lips and sounded a long, droning note that fired the blood of every horse and Attilan within earshot. More riders fought their way towards the churning mass of circling horses, regrouping with one another to build momentum and break through to their kinsmen.

‘To me! To me!’ Belgutei bellowed, looking around for familiar faces amongst the grim-featured Attilans as they began to ride in a widening circle, building pace and rearming their lances in anticipation of what came next. Riders joined the swirling rumble of iron-shod thunder, whipping their reins to join the galloping pace.

Then Do-Song blew on his horn once more, blasting a long, mournful note that carried over the thunder of hooves, and the Attilan charge was unleashed.

Belgutei let out his clan’s war cry, a ululating scream that mimicked the lethal scream of the Attilan Raptor Hawk, and Nomi responded with merciless speed. He screamed until his throat ached, until his lungs burned, just as every rider in the charge honoured their kin with their own war cries.

Hateful red eyes flashed past above snarling, sawtooth-filled mouths as the Attilans cut a path through the bare-skinned savages towards a mountain on the horizon, its features hazy and blurred by the extreme distance.

‘We make for the mountain!’ Do-Song shouted from the very front of the charge. ‘We do not falter! We do not slow!’

‘We are with the wind!’ the Attilans chanted in unison.

Then they broke through the mobs of the bare-skinned xenos and slammed into the ranks of black-armoured brutes beyond.

‘He’s dead!’

Keori Arnetz dragged her sergeant’s limp form back towards the burning ork jet, and the line of flaring lasguns that poked out from the crater’s lip. Solid rounds buzzed past her head like Death Hornets, but she trusted in the God-Emperor and the orks’ piss-poor aim to protect her.

‘Arnetz, drop him and run!’

‘Frag that!’ Arnetz spat through gritted teeth, casting a look back over her shoulder at the other Catachan Jungle Fighters in cover below the dangling tail fin of the downed aircraft. Twenty yards, give or take – it would take less than ten seconds, even with Artova’s dead weight slowing her down.

One of the orks mistook her for an easy target, running in close as her back was turned, but it hadn’t dealt with a Catachan before. Hearing its heavy footfalls, she dropped Artova and drew her combat knife in a dagger grip, spun, ducked beneath the ork’s wild cleaver swing, and rammed her weapon into the creature’s gut. The monomolecular edge slid through skin and muscle like a las-scalpel, but a simple gut wound – even a mortal one – wouldn’t be enough to put an ork down. That was why she twisted the blade and dragged it upward through the beast’s belly and into its ribs, where any sane creature’s heart would be, before ripping it clear in a spray of sliced offal and stinking ichor.

The disembowelled ork fell to one side with a moan, clutching at its empty stomach cavity even as Arnetz grabbed Artova’s collar and dragged him the last few yards into cover.

‘I said the bastard was dead!’ Groger yelled between controlled bursts from his lascarbine, as Arnetz rolled their sergeant’s lifeless body into the slim protection of the crater.

Though Arnetz was only the squad medicae, it didn’t take a chirurgeon to see that Artova was beyond saving. His chest had been caved in by an ork brute carrying a heavy maul made from a Cargo-8’s axle, and the second blow had smashed the sergeant’s head into bloody pulp.

‘You did, corporal. I remember it well,’ Arnetz said, ducking as rounds spanked off the dakkajet’s scorched hull. ‘But I also remember who had the damned vox-codes.’

Arnetz rummaged through the sergeant’s pockets for the plastek fob that contained their assigned vox-frequencies. It was smeared with blood, though Arnetz couldn’t tell if that was Artova’s or that of the dead ork on her own hands. She threw it over to Blasko, the vox-operator, and cleaned her combat knife on the sergeant’s trouser leg.

Catachan didn’t breed soldiers who were overly sentimental, just effective.

‘Give me good news, Blasko,’ Groger said.

‘Working on it!’

Arnetz checked the charge on her lascarbine and joined the firing line, picking her shots and taking out any orks that looked the Catachans’ way.

‘Come on, Strukker, what’s taking so long?’ she called over her shoulder, to where an especially muscular Catachan trooper was siphoning fuel from the downed ork jet into an empty tank.

‘I’m not even sure this crap will work,’ Strukker said as he shrugged the filled container onto his shoulders and repressurised his heavy flamer.

‘Damn it, Blasko, give us–’

‘They’re ordering a withdrawal!’ Blasko interrupted, his vox headset clamped over his ear.

‘Withdrawal to where!?’ Groger asked, looking at Blasko in shock.

‘I don’t think it’s for us,’ Arnetz said, suddenly aware that the rain of troop ships appeared to have halted. She hadn’t felt the earth-shaking impact of a crashing lander for a few minutes.

‘Fragging cowards,’ Groger hissed, coming to the same realisation as Arnetz as he looked to the skies. There was no sign of the fat-bellied drop-ships, and even the Lightning fighters looked to have pulled out.

‘Blasko, see if you can raise anyone planetside.’

‘We’re not forming up for the attack on the space port, so I’m thinking that objective has been scrubbed… No one’s got a Throne-damned clue what’s going on, but I’m getting a return from a Krieg vox-op about five hundred yards north by north-east,’ Blasko shouted.

‘A walk in the park,’ Arnetz said. Their entire northern flank was filled with a sea of orks and dying Imperials, interspersed with islands of burning scrap that had once been the blessed aircraft of the Navy. If the Krieg were out there, she couldn’t see them.

‘Does anyone have any better ideas?’ Groger asked.

There was no time for anyone to reply. A mob of orks chose that moment to make a run for the Catachans, brandishing improvised weapons and firing their ramshackle guns from their hips as they came. Their fire was indiscriminate, but it forced the Catachans into cover for the few heartbeats it took for the xenos to reach the crater’s edge.

Then the orks were in amongst them. Arnetz caught a wild axe-swing from one on her lascarbine and twisted, throwing the blow wide and giving her enough space to blow three scorch-rimmed holes in the creature’s bare torso. It did little to slow the beast down and she was forced back a step, only for Blasko to lunge in to slam his combat knife into the ork’s eye socket. She emptied the rest of her charge pack at another that reared up behind the vox-operator, blowing out the back of its skull through its gaping maw.

‘Hit the deck!’ Strukker roared, and Arnetz caught the screech of the heavy flamer’s compressor cycling up a heartbeat before she dropped to the blood-slicked dirt.

Heat, unforgiving and primal in its cleansing fury, washed overhead in a tongue of blazing fire. Arnetz felt the sweat on her shaven scalp flash-dry in the backwash, the caked blood on her forearms cracking as the moisture was torn away by superheated air.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the heat was gone. Orks screamed as they burned, their skin blackening and sloughing from their charring bones as they clawed at their ruined flesh. Strukker grinned at the fruits of his work as his flamer hissed and spluttered, its machine spirit clearly sated by the carnage it had wrought.

‘Let them burn!’ Groger ordered as the Catachans got back to their feet and collected themselves for the next assault, but the sight of their burning kin seemed to have forced the orks’ attention elsewhere.

‘Blasko, any Catachan returns on the vox?’

‘None, just the Krieg one,’ Blasko said, grimacing at the shining burn along his forearm.

‘Then we find the blank-eyed bastards and go from there. North by north-east – Strukker, clear us a path.’

Arnetz helped Blasko sling the vox-pack over his shoulder and took a moment to smear a stinking yellow unguent onto his burned arm from a small tin in her medicae pouch.

‘Death Hornet honey? Don’t waste that on me,’ he grunted as Strukker shouldered to the front of the line, cycling up his flamer to fire once more.

‘Anything that keeps us in the fight,’ Arnetz said with a reassuring slap on his shoulder. ‘Now move, trooper. We’re not out of this yet.’

Sweat ran freely beneath Belgutei’s armoured coat as he rode, down his arm and over the hilt of his sword, mixing with the caked ichor that coated the limb up to the elbow. Each strike tested his tired grip and pushed his fatigued muscles to new, burning heights, but to stop was to die against the black-armoured brutes.

Do-Song’s charge had faltered the moment it struck the hulking Goffs – orks clad in black plates of metal that appeared to be bolted directly into their muscular green flesh. The Attilans had carved a path through the savage, unarmoured xenos without much resistance, but they had broken over the Goffs like a wave striking a cliffside. Ogryn-sized beasts smashed aside horses and riders alike with brutal swings of man-sized axes, or tore them apart with vicious chainglaives spewing black promethium fumes that obscured the geysers of blood from their sundered victims.

An ork roared as it advanced on Belgutei, its iron-shod boots kicking up mud as it lunged out of the throng with its cavernous fang-lined mouth ready to bite. Belgutei lashed out and separated the creature’s jaw from the rest of its skull, which did little to slow it down. He cried out as the ork’s upper teeth sank into his leg, and their eyes locked momentarily. The little red orbs glared from beneath its thick black metal helm, filled with so much hate…

Then its armoured hands grasped Nomi about the neck, and heaved.

The sky and ground whirled overhead in a dizzying arc, with only Nomi’s terrified screams giving Belgutei any sense of which way was up or down. He struck the ground with rib-cracking force and rolled, instinctively putting distance between himself and his horse as she clambered back to her feet in a whirl of hooves and cloth barding. She stumbled almost immediately but managed to stay upright, shaking her armoured head as she fought to regain her senses.

His own rise back to his feet was far slower and much more painful; the ork’s fangs had made a bloody ruin of his trouser and the leg beneath, and each shallow breath was like inhaling fire into his bruised chest. His sword was gone, leaving him with only his laspistol to defend himself as orks and Attilan riders fought desperately around him.

The ork that had unhorsed Belgutei bulled its way through the fighting towards him, its tongue lolling uselessly over the ruin of its lower face as its blood flowed down the plates of its armoured chest. Taloned hands flexed in black metal gauntlets as a riderless horse galloped past, and Nomi followed it away into the press.

‘Go well, my old friend,’ Belgutei gasped between agonised breaths, and dragged his laspistol from its blood-slicked holster. His helm came away in his other hand to be held like a buckler, the fur rim and leather strap both wet with his own sweat. Attilan doctrine dictated that a warrior who was knocked from their horse was as good as dead, but Belgutei would not die meekly on his knees.

The ork swiped at him with a taloned hand, then another, each swing clumsy but powerful enough to disembowel him. He met the third with his improvised buckler, the helmet’s spiked crown punching through the ork’s palm as it was torn from his grip, then fired three laspistol shots at the beast’s face. The ork blocked the shots with an armoured fist, letting out a rhythmic, wet, guttural noise as it pulled the helmet out of its hand just as Belgutei might remove a splinter; the noise it was making was not of pain but laughter, he realised.

He emptied the rest of the laspistol’s meagre charge at the ork before his wounded leg gave way beneath him and he fell, with little to show for his defiance but a few scorch marks on its already battered armour.

The creature loomed over him, raising an iron-clad boot as its beady red eyes locked with his.

Its skull disappeared in a blast of ichor and shrapnel as hooves thundered past Belgutei’s head, spraying him with mud and the splintered shards of a broken hunting lance.

‘On your feet, cousin!’ Do-Song commanded, wheeling his horse to face him as his honour guard cleared some space around their leader. He reached out with a hand to help Belgutei to his feet, and it was the last thing he ever did.

Do-Song’s chest ruptured in a blur of spinning steel and hot blood, his body bisected by the whirling teeth of a circular saw blade. It tore through his armour, sinews, and bone with a high-pitched screech, spraying his vitae over Belgutei as his torso flopped from the saddle in a boneless heap. His honour guard roared their defiance and charged at the beast that had killed their leader, but Belgutei couldn’t tear his gaze from Do-Song’s eyes as they looked blindly at the smoke-scarred sky above.

‘Belgutei, get up, damn you!’

The voice wrenched Belgutei away from his fallen kinsman. He took Do-Song’s power sword from his limp grip and pushed to his feet, taking hold of Gori’s reins to steady himself. He dragged what remained of Do-Song’s body down and swung himself up onto the blood-slicked saddle, the sword an unfamiliar but comforting weight in his hand.

There were so few riders left, he realised with a twist of grief – less than twenty against the endless ork sea. Hundreds more hulking black-armoured xenos lay between the remaining Attilans and open ground, and the distant mountain that had been Do-Song’s last target. With a quick look at the faces about him, Belgutei came to another grim realisation: he was the highest-ranking Attilan left, and his kinsmen were looking to him for leadership as they fought for their lives.

Belgutei took hold of his horn and raised it to his lips. If the Attilans were to die, they would do so on the charge, becoming one with the wind.

Arnetz let out a blasphemous curse as Blasko’s eyes unfocused and his features went slack, his usually sun-kissed skin sickly and pale beneath the blood spattered across his cheeks and jaw. A Krieg trooper stepped past the kneeling medicae without a second glance, filling the gap that the fallen Blasko had left in their firing line.

‘The vox-set?’ Groger shouted, his lascarbine tight to his shoulder as he pumped shot after shot into the xenos.

‘Fragged!’ Arnetz replied over the whip-crack report of massed lasguns and the braying scream of the ork horde. The brute that had gutted Blasko had smashed the vox to sparking ruin with a single blow, laughing in the face of the Catachan’s muscle and training. She snapped off her fallen comrade’s ID tag and red bandanna, stowing both in her medicae kit before picking up Blasko’s lascarbine. Her own had been cleaved apart by an ork’s choppa not long after they’d linked up with the Krieg, and she was glad to have a weapon back in her hands.

The Krieg were suffering terrifying losses with each passing moment; unlike the Catachans, they didn’t have the size or strength to meet the orks hand-to-hand, nor could they carve some distance between them and the murderous horde. They fought on regardless, forming ever-shrinking firing lines as they gave their lives willingly to blunt each ork charge. It wasn’t a way of war that the Catachans were suited to.

‘We can’t stay here, Groger,’ Arnetz said as she ejected the lascarbine’s empty charge pack and slapped in a fresh one.

‘I know, I know,’ the corporal said, his mouth a grim line as he assessed their options. ‘Sergeant Raust, we need to move!’

A Krieg sergeant put down the ork at his feet with a bolt pistol shot, and turned the blank lenses of his gas mask to the Catachan corporal.

‘Krieg operational doctrine dictates that we must maximise enemy casualties as we await revised orders,’ he said in heavily accented Gothic, before parrying an incoming ork blade on his chainsword. Rough-forged iron squealed and sparked against adamantine teeth as the ork brought all of its weight down on the comparatively slender Krieg trooper, but Raust didn’t try to best the xenos in a test of strength. Instead, he put two bolt-rounds into the ork’s belly and another into its skull.

‘Yeah, that’s not happening. We make for the mountain – get clear of these filth and regroup,’ Groger shouted over the gunning of the sergeant’s chainsword, pointing over the ork mob to the distant cloud-wreathed peak. Raust looked from Groger to the mountain then back again, his expression unreadable beneath his mask.

‘Staying here does not maximise enemy casualties, sergeant,’ Arnetz added.

‘Agreed. Krieg, fix bayonets!’

The remaining Krieg troops attached bayonets to the ends of their lasguns with regimented uniformity, each rank covering the one behind as they paused their fire to rearm.

‘Blades!’ Groger shouted to the Catachans, who all drew their combat knives and held them ready alongside their lascarbines. ‘We make for the mountain. Keep tight and follow my lead.’

A horn sounded nearby, the sonorous note somehow alien to the battle raging on all sides. Arnetz looked to Groger in confusion, but didn’t have the chance to voice her question before the Krieg troopers charged forward in a storm of grey greatcoats and volley upon volley of las-fire. Arnetz tore after them alongside the remainder of her squad, cutting, slashing, and shooting her way through the ork lines.

The air was thick with the musty stink of ork sweat and the metallic tang of blood, and she stepped over Krieg bodies as she fought to keep up with the other Catachans. Strukker was at the tip of the spear, his heavy flamer blasting a hole for his comrades to follow as Groger followed on his shoulder to protect his flank.

The horn sounded again, but closer. Arnetz found herself looking around for its source between kills, kicking out at a canid-sized creature with red skin and a maw full of craggy teeth just as the charge collapsed.

A massive ork careened into Strukker from the side, easily half as tall again as the Catachan trooper and twice as broad in its black armour plates. It bowled him from his feet and into a mob of smaller xenos, hefting a maul overhead to deliver a final blow. Arnetz didn’t have time to reach her squad-mate and friend, or even to cry out. The ork’s maul fell with catastrophic force, and Strukker’s promethium reserves exploded in a blooming geyser of heat and flame. Orks and humans alike screamed in pain and terror as the burning fuel drenched them, splashing across friends and enemies indiscriminately as the fire spread unchecked.

The worst of the explosion was absorbed by the orks between Arnetz and where Strukker had died, but the heat still washed over her in a wave of pain that was as much emotion as physical hurt. She found herself carried forward by the press of Krieg behind, who hadn’t reacted to the blast at all – they continued their charge regardless, like servitors who hadn’t been given the order to stop.

‘Groger!’ Arnetz shouted as she stumbled over the scorched carcass of a fallen horse, but the other Catachan was nowhere in sight. She slipped on the horse’s spilled innards, which had been torn from its carcass and left the ground slick under her boots, but kept her feet and fought on. There would be time to grieve her squad, but she would have to survive the next few minutes first.

At the head of the charge, the Krieg sergeant, Raust, had taken over as the tip of the spear; his bolt pistol barked without cease, blasting bloody chunks from the xenos as he forged forward with surgical efficiency – until he met a foe whose armour turned aside his fire, and swatted aside his chainsword with the back of a hand. It brought up a heavy glaive and swung wide, felling two of the Krieg troopers ahead of Arnetz as if they weren’t even there. Raust caught the backswing on his chainsword and was forced back by the strength of the blow.

Arnetz emptied her lascarbine into the creature’s flank, but it did little more than stitch a line of scorch marks into its armour. It ignored her, stomping forward to swing at Raust again and again as the Krieg fought back the orks pressing in from every side. The moment stretched out for Arnetz with every las-shot, each hacking blow, and every body that hit the ground. The air itself resounded with finality – their efforts had fallen short, their disastrous mission ending before it had truly begun. Dead carpeted the ground in every direction, human forms entwined with the orks that had slain them and then been killed in turn.

Raust’s pistol clicked as its hammer struck an empty chamber, and the ork’s cleaver slammed into his chainsword until the metal splintered and shattered. Adamantine-tipped teeth spewed from the broken weapon as the ork’s blade hacked off his arm below the elbow, but the sergeant didn’t fall.

Arnetz was running, a bestial scream of her own on her lips as she launched herself at the ork’s armoured back. Raust pointed his stump at the ork looming over him, spraying its face with his blood and forcing its next blow wide as he beat at it with the butt of his pistol. Arnetz slammed into the beast, plunged her combat knife down into the gap in its armour between neck and shoulder, and twisted.

The ork roared in rage and pain, grasping at the Catachan as Raust finally fell to his knees and dropped his pistol. Arnetz glimpsed him between the creature’s taloned fingers. It was clawing at itself to get to her, leaving scratch marks of bare metal in its own armour as she pulled her blade free and drove it into its bloodied flesh.

Then Raust was back on his feet, the shattered chainblade still screeching in his remaining hand. With a cry, he drove it upwards into the ork’s armpit in a spray of ichor.

The xenos brute’s strength faltered, and it dropped to one knee as Raust dragged his weapon clear. Like a felled tree, it toppled to the blood-soaked earth next to the Krieg sergeant, with Arnetz still clinging to its back.

Thunder rolled past her in a tide of armoured hooves and slashing blades. She began to crawl over the ork’s still-twitching corpse, reaching for Raust as he tried to staunch the flow of blood from his ruined arm. They were alone in the maelstrom, the rest of their people lost to the horde, but Arnetz went to work with mechanical efficiency. The tourniquet she tied was bright red; at first she thought it was blood, then realised with numb detachment that it was one of her squad’s bandannas.

‘Do you want to die here, Catachan?’ a voice asked.

The speaker was an Attilan Rough Rider, bloodied, battered and without his helmet, but still in his saddle despite the wounds he carried.

‘Get him out,’ Arnetz said, pulling Raust to his feet and pushing him towards the Attilan.

The rider barked an order to another horseman, who scooped up Raust and muscled him into a seated position on the front of his saddle. Then the first rider held out a hand to Arnetz, who took it gladly.

‘I am Belgutei,’ the rider said, hauling her up behind him.

‘Thank you, Belgutei,’ Arnetz said, and made to sheathe her combat knife.

‘You may need that before we are done here,’ Belgutei said. ‘Thank me when we are clear of this.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2024.
This eBook edition published in 2025 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Aurore Folny.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-843-3

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