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Chapter One

And then there were more ork tanks.

They hadn’t been there a minute before. Temur Khan had expected their arrival, but he wasn’t pleased to be correct. There had been two Battlewagons: one that the Iron Guard had managed to destroy as it closed in on the walls of the bastion, the other, further to the rear of the ork force, taken out by a well-placed melta bomb slapped onto its side by Temur himself as he and his command squad stormed past it on their bikes. For several minutes, the riders of the Fifth Brotherhood had torn across the ork ranks, taking the greenskins apart with bolter and power lance, grinding them to muck beneath the wheels of the bikes. They blunted the ork advance. Forward of the White Scars incursions, many of the brutes turned back, enraged, to try to close with the Space Marines. Those who continued to rush forwards to scramble up the slope towards the bastion were cut down by the disciplined, unceasing fire of the Iron Guard.

The White Scars’ tactic was perfectly calculated to disrupt the orks: a harrying attack that killed momentum by sowing confusion and forcing the enemy to expend energy in conflicting directions. It succeeded. The orks’ vast numbers began to work against them. They became a mob afflicted by colliding currents. Temur wanted their advance transformed into a whirlpool, a confusion of rapids breaking into foam against the rocks of the Fifth Brotherhood. For those several minutes, he saw that configuration form. He saw the greenskins’ excuse for order break down.

Several minutes of apparent progress. Several minutes during which Temur knew all that progress would be reversed, while he hoped to be completely wrong. But then the tanks were there, appearing just over the rise to the north, only a few hundred metres away. Even over the baying of the greenskins, he should have been able to hear the approaching clamour of the Battlewagon engines. But he hadn’t. The vehicles were just suddenly there.

This was not speed or stealth. This was something else.

He had been proven right, but everything else was wrong. The entire tenor of the battle was wrong. The White Scars and the Iron Guard had come to purge the orks from the moon. But now the Imperial forces were the ones besieged.

The reversal was not due to tactical error. Temur had a powerful rapid strike force to command: six combat bike squads, three of them supported by multi-melta-equipped attack bikes, five Land Speeders, one assault squad, and a five-man Scout squad. And they had chosen their staging area well. The STC bastion elements had been dropped to a plateau that had a commanding position, its peak higher than anything else for a dozen kilometres in every direction. The bastion’s core was a squat, crenellated tower, crowned by a lascannon turret. The tower and the sectioned walls were constructed of prefab iron components and reinforced plasteel.

Within the perimeter were the landing pads for the two Thunderhawks, the Furious Lightning and the Khajog’s Stand. The bastion was a dark grey judgement upon the landscape, its outer barrier a hundred metres long on each side. Where, an hour before, there had been nothing, now there was the stamp of Imperial strength. But the bastion was designed as a beachhead, a powerful mustering point out of which would radiate the assault. It was, in its intent, a weapon, not a defence. If a siege was to take place, it was to be undertaken by the forces that were sent out from the fortress.

But the greenskins had no interest in Imperial war doctrine. The ground rose in a series of swells to the north, and it was from that direction that the orks had come. They had arrived just as the bastion had been completed, but before the White Scars had been able to scout out the ork positions. The watch in the bastion was able to see the dust kicked up by the greenskin infantry from a fair distance, but not the tanks. The heavy support kept arriving on the field as if from nowhere.

The implications were dark. And Temur resented fighting a defensive battle. That was a game for the Imperial Fists. But unless they could ease the orks’ pressure on the bastion, the White Scars would be stymied, their mission stalled. He had expected to encounter the greenskin tanks. That was why he was here: the orks were producing heavy vehicles on the moon, and sending them down to the surface of Lepidus Prime.

What was unexpected was the suddenness of their arrival. Temur’s philosophy of war was offended by tanks, especially the lumbering, ungainly behemoths slapped together by the orks, hitting a conflict with the impact and suddenness of drop pods. Lookouts and augurs were useless. The ork machines arrived as if they had been spat out by the warp.

Four Battlewagons. Unbelievable. Huge, clanking, roaring monstrosities. Spewing black exhaust, they chewed the ground beneath them as they descended the slope, rumbling their way towards the plateau and the bastion. They didn’t look built so much as assembled. They were patchwork metal horrors. There was no consistency between the machines, and barely any evidence of rational thought. They were fantasies of violence. Their hulking chassis bristled with spikes and guns and secondary cannons. Their fronts had been fashioned into faces that were blades and battering rams.

Two of the tanks moved faster. They appeared to be armoured transports, overflowing with hooting orks. The other two had massive cannons. They started firing the moment they appeared, even though the bastion was still out of range. The shells fell short, blowing up the orks’ own front ranks. The surviving orks responded with delighted laughter. Instead of creating more disorder, the friendly fire seemed to invigorate the forward elements, and the orks charged once more.

Temur emerged from the greenskin mass, his armour and bike drenched with xenos blood and pulped flesh. Stray bullets flew past him and careened off his ceramite. But the masses that had been raging for his blood had lost interest. They wanted the bastion. The Battlewagons were giving them focus. Temur cursed, then spoke into his vox-bead. ‘Brother Tokhta,’ he said. ‘A lesson needs to be taught.’

‘Understood.’

Moments later, Temur saw the Thunderhawk Furious Lightning take off from the bastion.

He switched to a company-wide channel. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘we need to strike the enemy armour with a mighty fist. I want the greenskins demoralised and broken. Land Speeders, take the forward tanks. Bikes, the ones to the rear. Assault squad, the central mass. Use the Furious Lightning as our cue. Let’s show them the truth of a sudden arrival.’

Temur likened the deployment to the snap of a steel-jawed trap. The bikes that had been scything through the ork mass pulled away and rode towards the back of the ork horde. Temur watched the sky, tracking the flight of the gunship. It came in low, screaming the rage of a storm, and unleashed punishment on the orks. The other White Scars attacked at the same moment. Blows from the front, the sides, the rear, and from above. Steel jaws. Snap.

The Thunderhawk began with its twin lascannons, scorching a furrow through the orks, leading up to the first Battlewagon. Then it switched to its battle cannon. The shell struck the ork machine head-on. The brutes who had been hanging on to the tank’s profusion of metal projections, riding it like ticks, flew away in chunks. Flames erupted from inside, yet the tank kept going, gears screaming against each other. Smoke poured from the front as if the beast were a wounded dragon.

The orks did not abandon their ride. If it had not exploded, then there was nothing wrong with it. Gunfire stabbed upwards at the Furious Lightning as it passed overhead. Rooftop turrets tracked its flight, but it was already streaking on to its next prey. Its lascannons never stopped firing. Tokhta was going to cut the ork army in half with a line of flame. He loosed Hellstrike missiles at the second Battlewagon, and was on to the next before the rockets struck.

The hit was perfect. The explosion was massive, engulfing the tank, and then redoubling in force as the vehicle erupted. Fireballs grew out of each other. The orks in the vicinity scattered, burning and howling. Flaming wreckage rained down in a wide area. With it, as if born from the same fire, came the jump-packed assault squad, deploying from the Thunderhawk.

The White Scars landed in the middle of the orks, justice lashing out from the dark of the night sky. Each warrior killed dozens of greenskins in a wide swath around his landing area, then rose up to come down again, repeated hammerblows striking the orks. Eddies of confusion rippled out from each strike point. The advance was slowing again.

In the growing disorder, five Land Speeders hit the orks head on. They skimmed barely two metres above the ground, so fast it was as if they were trying to outrace the shells from their heavy bolters. They ploughed more furrows into the ork lines. They decapitated the greenskins who were foolish enough to stand tall and roar a challenge. They closed with the wounded tank with krak missiles from their Typhoon launchers.

Temur observed the first blows of the steel jaws as he and his bike squads approached the rear elements and the two remaining tanks. He saw the flashes and explosions, and he heard the reports over the vox. He thought, Good, good, good. The orks could throw their heavy armour at them, but the White Scars were still going to smash this assault.

The bike squads came in from two sides. The ones on the east side were targeting the same tank as the Furious Lightning. Temur led the assault from the west. The twin bolters of the bikes cut a path through the savage masses, heading straight for the tank. The orks responded more quickly, firing back with inaccuracy but wild abandon. Temur jinked the bike left and right. At this speed, riding over bodies, colliding with orks in primitive armour, he risked overturning. He only went faster. With his helmet on, he could not feel the rush of wind against his face, but he saw the smear of enemies falling in his wake, and he felt every jolt and bump of his hurricane ride.

The Battlewagon was just ahead now. And the Thunderhawk launched more Hellstrikes at the other tank. Another snap of the jaws–

No.

At the moment the Furious Lightning fired, the ork machine put on a burst of speed. It surged forwards. The rockets flashed past it, blowing up scores of foot-soldiers behind. For a second, the Battlewagon claimed the initiative.

A fatal second. The tank’s cannon fired. The exuberant, excessive, overpowered shell struck the gunship’s starboard wing.

The explosion lit the night, an evil sun. The ablative ceramite armour should have been proof against a single shell. The titanium rolled plates should have held. But it was as if this shell had been blessed by a ravening spirit of war. The wing sheared off. It tumbled end over end to the ground, killing more orks with flames and crushing steel. The Lightning went into a spiral. Its remaining engine roared as Tokhta fought to stabilise the flight.

There was nothing he could do. The gunship’s death was inevitable. Still, it fought hard against the end. The engine’s howl became a cry for vengeance. Wounded, burning, the Thunderhawk spun around its own axis and slammed to earth in a steep diagonal. The impact was storm and earthquake. The battlefield shook. Flames washed over the orks. As it died, the ship took a phalanx of greenskins with it.

The final retaliation meant nothing. The orks’ collective shout of celebration was deafening.

The stern of the Furious Lightning was on fire, but the fuselage was still intact. The Battlewagon closed in.

No, Temur thought. No, by the winds and by the earth, no! The tide would not turn like this. But there was nothing he could do. He saw only enough of the disaster to know what had happened. He was committed to his own attack, now seconds away.

‘Thunderhawk down, providing assistance,’ said a voice over the combat channel. It was Ghazan, leading the western charge.

‘Punish the greenskins’ temerity, Stormseer,’ Temur told him.

‘I will, khan, and more.’

Ghazan split up the squad. He and Brother Kaidu veered off towards the fallen gunship while Sergeant Qaraqan led Ulagan and Boralun against the tank. He urged even more speed from his bike. The Thunderhawk was a prone target for the Battlewagon’s giant gun.

The cannon fired again just before Ghazan reached the Lightning. The shell fell short, but not by much. The blast threw up a cloud of earth that half covered the wreck. Then Ghazan and Kaidu were at the front of the ship, on the port side, opposite the tank’s approach. The nose had dug itself into the ground. The primary access ramp was crumpled and half-buried. There would be no extraction that way.

‘Brother Tokhta,’ Ghazan voxed. ‘Are you still with us?’

Static at first, but then a volley of pained curses.

‘Sounds like he is,’ said Kaidu. They dismounted, leaving their bikes close to the fuselage.

The cannon thundered again, but at a different target. Ghazan heard the stutter of a bike’s bolters. Qaraqan’s attack was under way. The bike weaponry wouldn’t be enough to pierce the tank’s armour, but it was drawing the attention of the ork gunners, buying some time. Only a matter of seconds, though. The crash had killed scores of orks, but their comrades were rushing forwards to swarm over the prize, heedless of the possibility of being blown up by their own armament.

The secondary access hatch was also inoperable. Ghazan looked at the slope of the ruined bow. ‘Let’s climb,’ he said. He and Kaidu scrambled up. To the north, they were exposed to the Battlewagon’s cannon, but it was still trying to hit closer targets. From the east, west and south, the orks rushed towards the Furious Lightning. A sea of green savagery was coming to drown them. The orks fired as they ran, filling the air with bullets. In less than a minute, the wave would crash against the gunship.

The Thunderhawk’s forward armourglass windshield had been blown out by the impact. Tokhta was visible inside, pinned by crushed metal.

‘How are you faring, brother?’ Ghazan asked over the vox.

‘Left arm, leg, and ribs broken,’ the pilot answered. ‘No leverage.’

Kaidu dropped inside and began hauling the wreckage away. Ghazan turned to hold back the orks. As he did, he thought through another problem. They could not leave the Furious Lightning to be desecrated by the xenos. He thought of a possible solution. It was lunatic.

My destiny lies elsewhere, he thought. So this will certainly work. He didn’t think anyone else would appreciate the humour. He barely did himself.

‘Can you ride, brother?’ he asked Tokhta. His staff in one hand, he opened fire with his bolt pistol with the other, blasting at the orks that came near his and Kaidu’s bikes. He ignored the ones on the other side of the gunship for now.

‘If I can breathe, I can ride.’

Good. ‘Are there any jump packs aboard?’

‘In the troop compartment, yes.’

‘Brother Kaidu, I’ll need one.’ He maglocked the pistol, pulled a frag grenade from his belt and tossed it into the horde. The explosion hurled broken orks into the air. He had the pistol back in hand and was firing again before the bodies landed. Corpses accumulated in a semi-circle around the bikes. The greenskins on his side of the Thunderhawk slowed down and started shooting at him. Their bullets were no match for his armour. But behind these orks came their slower, larger, more heavily-armoured brothers.

‘Is that wise, Stormseer?’ Kaidu asked.

‘No, but it is necessary. Do hurry.’

A massive ork in clanking armour leapt up onto the Lightning’s nose. It took a bolter shell in the chest. The hit damaged the armour, but the ork kept coming, its forward momentum unaffected. Ghazan blinked at the greenskin’s strength. He had never seen an ork able to shrug off a bolter’s impact quite so easily.

It swung a huge chainaxe at him. He took a step back, and the axe went wide. Its head was so heavy that the ork’s swing threw it off balance for a moment. Ghazan raised his staff high. The eye sockets of the horse skull on its end glowed with the fury of Chogoris, and the winds of the White Scars home world rushed out from his being. They knocked the ork off the gunship, then raged to the ground below, hurling the attackers back.

Ghazan reached into the spirit of the moon itself. He touched its elemental strength. He spoke to it with the voice of Chogoris entwined with his own. Cast these vermin away, he said. Scour them from your surface.

The winds shrieked with anger. They flattened the orks and bowled them over, clearing the area around the two bikes by a dozen metres on all sides. Ghazan held the orks at bay. He pinned them to the ground with the moon’s howl.

Frothing with rage, the biggest of the orks were already pushing themselves up. Then the Battlewagon’s cannon thundered again, and this time it hit very close to the flank of the Furious Lightning. The gunship shook hard. It broke Ghazan’s concentration, and he lost his link to the moon and his home world.

Behind him, Ghazan heard Kaidu climb out of the cockpit, then pull Tokhta up. Ghazan turned. ‘You have seconds to get clear,’ he said. He took the jump pack Kaidu handed him.

Kaidu nodded. Tokhta said, ‘My thanks, Stormseer.’

Supported by Kaidu, the pilot slid to the ground. He slumped over Ghazan’s bike, but managed to start it unaided. Tokhta opened up with his bike’s twin bolters, pushing the orks back again, giving Kaidu the seconds and space he needed to start the run. Then they rode off, smashing through the greenskins, crushing them beneath their wheels.

On the starboard side of the Thunderhawk, the tank was closing in. It had been slowed by the other White Scars, but they hadn’t been able to cripple it. The ship was surrounded by orks racing with each other to claim the prize.

Ghazan had the jump pack on now. ‘Pull back,’ he voxed to the squad. ‘I have this.’

He dropped into the cockpit. Despite the damage, the control surfaces were still more or less intact. He drove his fist into the panelling until he had punched a hole through, then peeled the metal back, exposing the wiring. He was no Techmarine, but he murmured a prayer of apology to the ship’s mortally wounded machine-spirit. He asked it to accept what he was about to do, and act as he hoped it would.

The orks were on top of the nose now. Two were fighting with each other over which would have the privilege of entering the cockpit first. Ghazan shot them both. He grabbed the shattered windshield frame and hauled himself out. He looked down at the wiring, fixed its position in his mind, and triggered the jump pack. He shot into the air as the tank drew up beside the Furious Lightning. He kept looking downwards, visualising the cockpit, as he reached out once more to the elements.

He was a seer of storms. He would share his vision with the orks below.

The moon responded to him. The land was outraged by the presence of the greenskins. It was eager for retribution. It gave Ghazan its lightning. His staff crackled electrical silver along its entire length, and then the blast, a sear in the night, struck the cockpit of the Thunderhawk.

With a roar of final rage and triumph, the Furious Lightning embraced its namesake and found its vengeance. All its weapons systems fired at once. Its remaining Hellstrike missiles launched straight into the ground. Explosions grew from explosions as the fuel and ammunition ignited. The gunship disappeared in an earth-shaking blast. The fire swallowed the tank, and then it too added to the holocaust. The fireball rose to meet Ghazan, and the jump pack barely kept him from the hunger of the spreading destruction. Successive booms built on each other. They were a symphony of ending. They were the sound of the entire centre of the ork army gone in a second, incinerated at the moment of their celebration.

On the descending arc of his jump, Ghazan saw the lights of the two bikes streaking away from the fire, still cutting their way through the greenskins. As he landed just beyond the periphery of the blasts, he saw the last tank come apart in flames too, brought down by Temur’s bike squad.

Ghazan hit the ground with his bolt pistol drawn. He marched forwards, staff high, putting shells in the skulls of the nearest orks. A few fired back at him, but they were not attacking. The remaining force was in disarray, panicked by the massive, sudden losses of infantry and all their heavy support.

No other tanks appeared. The orks were retreating.

‘We have a respite,’ Temur said. ‘I don’t expect it to be long, and it was dearly bought. I have no intention of sacrificing our remaining Thunderhawk to gain us another breathing spell, and I dislike sieges. I dislike them intensely.’

The Fifth Brotherhood had regrouped in the bastion. The khan was speaking to his sergeants in the command block. Colonel Gregor Meixner of the Mordian Iron Guard was present, but standing to one side, remaining silent with good grace while Temur paced. Meixner struck Ghazan as an officer with a finely developed sense of the possible and the political. The 64th was a justifiably proud regiment, but Meixner knew that he and his men were present in this engagement in a supporting role. They would assist the White Scars as they could, but it was the Fifth Brotherhood that would stab the ork operations on this moon through the heart.

Ghazan was impressed by Meixner’s good-natured calm as he listened to Temur. The Iron Guard on this day had wound up being little more than bait. As Ghazan turned over in his mind what must happen next, he realised that the men would continue in this role. They were the inviting target that would keep the main body of the ork army focused on this spot, distracted from protecting its own base.

He doubted that Temur would be as sanguine when the same happened to him. But that was what the scenario he was outlining would be.

‘Our choices are limited,’ Temur said. ‘We will not give up our foothold on this moon, and we cannot attack a target whose location is unknown to us.’ He grunted, as if the reality of his situation just now fully registered. His scars, in the pattern of the claw marks of a berkul, darkened as his frustration shaded towards anger. ‘We will have to hold this position until we know where to strike.’ He turned to Sergeant Kusala, who led the Scout squad. ‘Brother-sergeant,’ said the khan, ‘I believe it is clear what we need you and your men to do.’

Kusala nodded. ‘It is, my khan,’ he said. He had lived long enough that his hair, tied back following tradition in a horse’s tail, was grey. Though Ghazan was younger, his hair was white. It had been since the night of his first vision, when his fated role as zadyin arga had been made manifest. ‘We will find the greenskins’ manufactorum for you,’ Kusala went on.

‘Good. And when you do, we shall fall on it like the worst of gales.’ To Meixner, Temur said, ‘When that moment comes, we will move to destroy the manufactorum, regardless of the situation on the ground here. That may well mean abandoning you to face another siege like we saw today. Quite possibly a worse one.’

‘We will do our duty,’ Meixner said. ‘We will hold.’

Temur grunted again, this time more satisfied. ‘I look forward to your being put to the test, colonel. We cannot afford to let this mission drag on too long. Neither can the Raven Guard on Lepidus Prime.’ Temur stopped pacing. He had barely glanced at the tacticarium table behind him. Not that it was proving useful. They all knew the lie of the land around the bastion. Northwards, where the target lay, was mostly conjecture. The difficulty was not in knowing the terrain of the moon. The problem lay in how the orks had transformed the surface since their arrival. None of the lithographs produced by orbiting augur arrays were helpful. The only way to find the site of the orks’ heavy armour production would be to find it on the ground.

All the same, Ghazan found himself looking past Temur at the table. The lithograph of the regions north of the bastion seemed to look back at him. The longer he stared at the image of the terrain, the more he felt the fraying vibration around the contours of reality that preceded his visions. Destiny tugged at him. The being he would fight awaited him there.

‘I will accompany the Scouts,’ he said.

Temur’s pacing stopped dead. He gave Ghazan a sharp look, but didn’t respond to him. He spoke instead to Kusala again. ‘When will you be ready to leave?’

‘Within the hour, khan.’

‘Good. Make ready, then.’

Kusala saluted and left. To the rest of the sergeants, Temur said, ‘We will make what repairs we can to the bikes and Land Speeders. We will have constant, rotating patrols out there. We know the orks are coming back. I would have us hit them before they get so close again.’ He glanced at Meixner and visibly stopped short of issuing commands to the colonel.

If Meixner noticed the near slight, he didn’t show it. ‘We will be ready as well,’ he said.

‘Thank you, colonel.’ To the White Scars he said, ‘To war, then. For the Khan and the Emperor!’

The war cry was echoed, and the sergeants left the command room, as did Meixner. Temur made no move to go. He stood beside the tacticarium table, as still as he had been restless a few minutes before. Ghazan remained where he was. The two of them waited until they were alone.

‘You are needed here, zadyin arga,’ Temur said. ‘On the front lines.’

‘Perhaps. But this is where I cannot be. I am fated to be elsewhere.’

Temur’s scars darkened again. ‘You saw what we were up against. Your presence tonight was the difference between our provisional triumph and disaster.’

‘That is not a certainty.’

‘The certainty is that our losses would have been much greater.’

Ghazan inclined his head once, conceding the point. He said nothing.

Temur began to pace again. As he did, he tapped a finger against the surface of the table. He struck it with the rigid tak, tak, tak of a march. ‘You arrived on my ship without any notice, at the last moment before the commencement of the mission,’ he said.

Again, Ghazan bowed his head. What the khan said was true. Ghazan saw no need to expand on that truth.

Temur moved to the far side of the table. The tapping continued. He seemed to be expecting more of an answer. When he received none, he said, ‘I received you with, I believe, the respect due to your office.’

‘That is so.’

‘Yet you will not do me the courtesy of telling me why you are here.’

‘I do not intend to be cryptic, khan. The full contours of my fate here are hidden to me. I have come to do battle with a powerful enemy. That is the full truth.’

‘And you don’t know who or what or where this enemy is?’

‘No.’ Ghazan gestured at the tacticarium table. ‘But my sense is that it waits for me in the north.’

‘Has it not occurred to you that this enemy might be drawn to the battlefield here? I have a great respect for the visions of Stormseers, Ghazan, but are they not open to different interpretations? You just admitted that the details are hidden from you.’

Though his soul already knew the answer to the khan’s question, Ghazan did not dismiss it. He considered it long enough to confirm his certainty that he was choosing the right path. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This foe will not come to me.’

‘Then let the Scouts do their work, and in the meantime, fight where you are needed.’

‘I am needed in the north. With the Scouts.’

‘You are wrong. Your destiny may be pulling you there, but that is not where you should be at this time.’

Ghazan was silent for a moment. ‘I am sorry to disappoint you, Temur Khan. But fate is not subject to pragmatism. I have no choice.’ He said the last sentence as if to speak it were to cast aside all doubt. He brought his arms to his chest in the sign of the aquila and left before Temur could answer.

He did pause in the corridor outside the command centre. He understood Temur’s growing anger. His actions would appear, from the outside, to be selfish and quite possibly foolish. He removed his left gauntlet and held his staff with his bare hand. He felt the ridges of the protective sigils. He closed his eyes and opened himself up to the warp.

The tug was there immediately. The chains of destiny were pulling at him with even more insistence. At their end, the figure of the foe awaited. The shape was no clearer than it had been before. But what it radiated had come into focus: triumph, bestial delight, destructive hunger. And power. Power that somehow was not entirely inherent to the foe itself. Power that was being fed, and was growing. Power that Ghazan must extinguish or die trying.

The Stormseer opened his eyes. Temur was right to think that the White Scars had little time before the war became entirely a defensive one and was lost. But the key was in the north. That was where time was slipping away. Time for the White Scars, time for Lepidus. Time for many systems beyond.

Chapter Two

They left at dawn, heading north from the bastion, travelling at close to top speed for several hours. Ghazan was on his bike. In the Land Speeder Storm were Kusala and the four Scouts: Tegusal, Ariq, Bokegan and Yekejin. Day on the moon was a smear. Visibility was poor, thanks to a perpetual ground fog that was knee-height over much of the land, but rose as high as three metres in patches.

The ork army, though, was easy to spot. Ghazan and Kusala slowed their vehicles when they saw the greenskin horde appear over the horizon. They veered east, giving the orks a wide berth. The land had more pronounced rolls in that direction, and they were able, as they drove over the hilltops, to observe the size of the greenskin force and vox a report back to Temur. The numbers were greater yet, but there were no tanks. There were no vehicles of any kind.

‘I wish those were glad tidings,’ the khan told them.

Ghazan agreed. In the initial stages of the first assault, there had been no sign of tanks. And then suddenly they had been there.

‘Well, they’re not hauling them down the road with them,’ Kusala observed. ‘That much we know now.’

The greenskin army stretched for kilometres. Its clamour reached further yet. The moon’s day was filled with the yells and laughter and crude songs of the beasts. The cacophony of the voices was backed by the beat of thousands of trudging feet and the clanking of weapons and armour. It sickened Ghazan to think that he was looking at another nomadic army. That there should be any parallel between the orks and the culture of Chogoris was obscene. But the distorted, monstrous suggestion of the familiar was before him. It underscored the need to exterminate these xenos.

But his fight was not with that army. Not with those orks. Not now.

Half an hour after they left the marching horde behind, bike and speeder climbed a ridge, then stopped. Before them was a wide plain that had been transformed by the orks’ presence.

‘I do not like to credit the greenskins with genius,’ Sergeant Kusala muttered over the vox. ‘But the bastards can make our life hell without even trying.’

The plain had been turned into a refuse dump covering hundreds of hectares. Broken and half-finished vehicles and tonnes of scrap metal covered the area. The fog eddied over and between the detritus, concealing and revealing jagged edges, senseless assemblages, and endless, endless waste. Scattered irregularly were much larger piles of cast-offs, some of them the size of low hills. Smoke rose from fissures between the debris, and from exhaust pipes poking out like toxic weeds. There was a deep, arrhythmic beat that Ghazan could feel coming up from the ground. It was strong enough that he could see the contours of his bike vibrate slightly in time. Now and then, flame would belch up from the plain. There was no consistency, though. Ghazan didn’t see the burn-off emerge from the same spot twice.

‘How did they do this so quickly?’ Tegusal wondered. ‘Or have they been here longer than we thought? Is this deliberate?’

‘Does it matter?’ Bokegan asked. ‘It exists. Now we have to deal with it.’

‘Brother Tegusal’s questions are relevant,’ Ghazan said. ‘If the orks have been here longer than we thought, that means they hid. Successfully. That means they planned. There is already considerable evidence for this. They established their heavy armour facility on an uninhabited moon, giving them plenty of opportunity to build up their arsenal unmolested before they attacked Lepidus Prime. Do those actions sound like the familiar tactics of orks?’

Tegusal began, ‘On Armageddon–’

Kusala cut him off. ‘We are not fighting that enemy. There cannot be two orks in the galaxy like that.’

‘Still,’ Ghazan said. ‘This is unusual. And in close combat, these orks seem... more resilient.’

‘Stormseer,’ Kusala said, ‘do you have any good news to bring to the table? Or is the galaxy already doomed?’

Ghazan smiled. He gestured at the view before them. ‘Well, brother-sergeant, there can be little doubt that the greenskins are producing their vehicles somewhere here.’

‘Mm,’ said Kusala. The grunted syllable might have been amusement, or it might have been displeasure. With the sergeant, it was often both.

‘They’re building the tanks underground,’ Ariq said.

‘Yes,’ said Kusala, ‘but where? Everywhere?’ A gout of flame appeared at the base of the descent to the plain. It vanished. A moment later, another appeared a hundred metres further in. ‘No industry should work like this.’

‘Nothing about the greenskins should work the way it does,’ Ghazan said. ‘It is pointless, perhaps even dangerous, to try to reason it out. We must accept that it is so, and deal with its reality.’

‘All very true, Stormseer,’ Kusala answered, ‘and all very well. That doesn’t help us, though. We cannot be sure of destroying everything beneath the surface without deploying cyclonic torpedoes.’

‘We are here to reclaim the system, not destroy it,’ Ghazan said.

‘Exactly.’

‘Where do we begin to look?’ Ariq asked.

‘Near the bigger piles?’ Tegusal suggested.

Kusala thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘There has to be some way in. Those are as likely spots as any.’

Ghazan agreed. The tug of fate was stronger yet. The battle was waiting for him underground. He was not close enough yet, in time or in space, to know more precisely where to find the enemy.

There were no orks visible on the surface. Kusala decided to favour mobility over stealth, so they kept to the vehicles and rode down onto the plain. They started with the nearest hill of debris, about two hundred metres to the north-east of their position. They circled it twice. There was no entrance. Nor did they see any means by which the discarded metal had arrived here in the first place. They moved on to the next hill, with no better luck.

As they reached the third, not far from the centre of the plain, there was a shrieking grind of gears. It came from beneath the surface, a few metres away from the north face of the heap. The hill began to shake. Slag tumbled down the slope. The lower portion of the mound heaved, and a trap door rose on hydraulic lifts. A maw the size of a Thunderhawk troop compartment gaped. The interior was a throat descending beneath the surface of the plain. From within came the screech of metal against metal.

Ghazan and Kusala steered bike and Storm around the curve of the hill and killed the engines. They kept the weapons pointed towards the entrance.

‘Did they spot us?’ Yekejin asked.

‘We’ll know in a moment,’ Kusala answered. ‘Do not fire without my order.’

They watched a treaded vehicle crawl out from the interior. It was loaded down with scrap. It was followed by another, then a third.

They were driven by grots. The diminutive greenskins had become permanent parts of the machines: the creatures’ legs had been amputated, and their torsos emerged from the centre of the guidance mechanisms. The ends of their arms had been fused with the gears and steering wheels. They were almost servitors, except servitors did not howl and complain about their fate.

The grots did. Their litany of injustice continued without pause as they drove up the hill. The box of each truck tipped to the side. The dumped loads ran down the hill, creating a small avalanche of metal. The vehicles then backed up. They disappeared once more into the maw. Filthy smoke billowed out as the door lowered itself shut again. Debris continued to tumble down the side of the heap, covering the door once more with accidental camouflage.

‘Well,’ said Tegusal. ‘I suppose that’s one way in.’

‘It might be a way directly into one of their infernal machines,’ Kusala said. ‘It is clearly not used by the warrior greenskins. Better to find how they get in and out.’ He pointed to the door. ‘Note this location, though. We may yet have to use it.’

‘The other debris hills are likely more of the same,’ said Ghazan.

The sergeant nodded. ‘Then we proceed on foot.’ He looked around. ‘This is close enough to pass for the centre. We’ll start here.’

Twenty metres away, there was a pile of discarded vehicle parts. With the addition of a camo-net, the bike and the Storm blended in with that confusion of metal. The Space Marines began a search that moved out in a spiral from the hill.

The hunt felt like drudge work. The orks had forced them into a humiliating slog through industrial offal. There were no options. The entrances to the complex, if that was what it was beneath their feet, could be doors or something as simple and lazy as holes in the ground. They would be hard to spot. Maybe the orks were hiding them, but it could also be that the greenskins simply weren’t bothering to mark them.

‘Here,’ Ariq called. He had found a chute. There was a rough ladder leading down into the depths.

‘Right,’ said Kusala. ‘Let’s see what sort of damage we can do.’ He started down the rungs.

Ghazan waited as the other Scouts followed the sergeant. He frowned at the opening. He would have expected to feel something if he was moving closer to his fated appointment. Something as simple as rising heartbeats, or an intensified anticipation. He did not. Somehow, this route was not getting him closer to where he needed to be. He saw no better possibility for the moment, though, so he descended after the Scouts.

The chute ended in a passage that appeared to have been blasted out as quickly as possible. Its width varied every ten metres or so, making it more like a series of linked caves than a tunnel. The floor was littered with bits of assembly.

The Scouts used beam-lamps to illuminate the passage, though empty fixtures on the walls suggested there had once been lighting here. The tunnel led to a larger cavern where there were even more bits of incomplete war machines. They looked like they had been on their way to being eccentric variations of tanks, and had been abandoned because they did not work, or their creators grew bored. On the far side of the derelict workshop was another tunnel, from which came the noise of machinery. Ghazan looked down the short passage. The clanking grew louder. After a few minutes, he saw a grot-driven trash hauler arrive. It paused a moment, as if waiting to receive an addition to its load, then moved on.

‘This doesn’t connect to anything except their disposal system,’ he said.

Kusala joined him at the passageway. ‘Then it seems we are fated to take that route.’

Ghazan winced at the sergeant’s use of fated. It was wrong. No, he thought, not this way. ‘That will not serve,’ he said.

Kusala turned to face him. ‘Why not? Clearly, construction is going on at the other end of that line.’

Ghazan shook his head. The tug of destiny was suddenly strong, and it was pulling him away from this path. ‘That may be so, but it is not what we seek.’

Kusala answered slowly, choosing his words with care. ‘The khan gave us,’ he gestured to his Scouts, ‘the mission of pinpointing, and if possible sabotaging, the greenskin manufactorum. Do you know something, Stormseer, to suggest this route will not take us to our target?’

Now Ghazan was cautious as he answered. Though he outranked Kusala, he did not want to put him in the position of having to choose between two contradictory sets of orders. But there was no question of taking this path. In this, he did not believe he was being selfish. If the struggle he faced was so formidable that it sent ripples from the future to the present, then it would have an importance that went beyond the personal. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If we go this way, we will not reach our goal.’

Kusala paused a long while. His face was concealed behind his helmet, but Ghazan could guess the doubts written on it. He could see them in the expressions of the Scouts as they waited for a decision. Finally, Kusala said, ‘Are you aware of an alternative?’

‘I am not.’

‘Then–’

‘Not yet. Give me a few minutes, brother-sergeant. Will you do that?’

‘Of course, zadyin arga.’ The respect due to Ghazan’s position permitted no other response.

‘Thank you.’ Ghazan wasn’t sure if Kusala was aware of the friction between himself and the khan. But he wanted the sergeant to know that he did not take his cooperation for granted. ‘This is necessary,’ he added.

Kusala nodded, non-committal. He stayed where he was.

Ghazan left the others and retraced their steps to the chute, and climbed back to the surface. He stood in the centre of the orks’ landscape of waste and turned around slowly. He stopped looking for a logical point of entry. There would be none, not in the normal sense of logical, not with the greenskins. The chambers below were proof of that. How many other semi-discrete workshops would they find if they kept looking? Some might be occupied, some not. Kusala was right that following the disposal line would bring them to an active facility. But if the manufactorum was spread out in bits and pieces, in haphazard fashion, underneath the full expanse of this plain, the White Scars could be searching for days and find nothing of any strategic value. There were great questions here. Not just where the tank-construction facilities were, but how the tanks were arriving at the battlefield. If the vehicles were being built here, how were they leaving? Shouldn’t there be a steady stream of them emerging from the ground at some point?

No, the answers were stranger, and deeper. They had to be. Surely that was why he had been called here. The being he must fight was tied to those answers.

He kept turning, letting the details of the plain blur into an impressionist continuum of debris. He opened himself to the warp, feeling the currents of the possible and the inevitable. He could not read the future, but he could feel its undertow, and he could sense the gathering density of the potential seeking to become the enacted. He reached out to the land. He spoke to its spirit. Its suffering must be great, wounded and abused as it was by the orks. We have come to free you of them, he told it. He sought the worst injury, the nexus of greatest harm.

The answer came in the form of an instinct. He stopped turning. He found that he was staring at a spot about a hundred metres away, further to the north-west. There was no landmark that he could see. He kept his eyes fixed on the location as he began to walk towards it. ‘Sergeant Kusala,’ he voxed. ‘I think I may have found something.’

He became more certain as he drew closer. There was nothing to confirm his instinct. There was only that growing certitude. It was enough. It fed on itself. He realised his lips had pulled back into a grim smile.

He stopped. There was still nothing to see, but this was the spot. He began tossing scrap metal aside as the Scouts joined him. He looked up at Kusala. ‘Right here,’ he said. ‘Our path begins here.’

Kusala was motionless for a moment. ‘Stormseer,’ he said, ‘there is nothing but more waste here.’

‘No. There is something. We have to dig a bit further. That is all.’ The sergeant’s tone had been flat, respectful, but his doubts were growing stronger. Ghazan was sorry for it, but not insulted.

Kusala and his squad helped with the dig. The scrap was deeper here. They kept going down, and had not reached the ground yet. Ghazan realised this was a declivity in the plain, smoothed out by the volume of rubbish. This, he thought, was camouflage. This entrance was too perfectly hidden. Here was more worrying evidence of something greater than cunning on the part of these orks.

The earth shook. There was a single, hard jerk. It almost knocked the White Scars off their feet. More debris slid down the heaps. The air was filled by the sound of thousands of torn sheets of metal scraping against each other. The shockwave was visible, the shadow of a ripple, as it travelled beneath the plain. Then the earth stilled. Metal settled with a rusty chorus.

‘What was that?’ said Tegusal.

‘The reason we are here,’ Ghazan answered. He reached down, grabbed a sheet of metal that looked as if it had been intended as a door, and hurled it away. Beneath it, a hatch, three metres across, was set into the rock of the plain. There was no visible way to open it. But there it was: the true door concealed by a false, discarded one.

Kusala examined the hatch. ‘Only to be used from the inside,’ he said.

Then the vox sprang to life. Their khan was calling. The reprieve was over.

No, Ghazan thought. Even before he heard Temur’s demand, he knew that he would refuse it.

At the head of the Fifth Brotherhood, the engine of his bike snarling its hunger for xenos blood, Temur Khan rode out from the bastion to meet the orks. The White Scars had had ample warning this time. The greenskin foot-soldiers were hours away when the report had come in from Kusala. Temur had the position of the orks, and the time and the distance to savage them utterly.

The entire mounted Brotherhood was part of the attack: the six bike squads and the five Land Speeders. The assault squad was carried by the surviving Thunderhawk, the Khajog’s Stand. What raced towards the orks was nothing as mundane as a mere opposing force. It was war and wind combined. The sudden change on the battlefield, the flash of fortune’s reversal, the decapitating blow of surprise: all of these things were embodied in the charge of the White Scars. The tribes of Chogoris had followed a tradition of combat for millennia. The technology had changed. The philosophy had not. The enemy was shattered not by overwhelming numbers or impregnable armour. It was speed, and the terrifying momentum that came with it, that routed the foe. It was lightning, not thunder, that was lethal.

Even so, the Fifth Brotherhood came with thunder. They eschewed the Land Raiders and Rhinos that were the mainstay of other Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, so the deep growls of the heavy vehicles were absent. But the snarl of Land Speeders and bikes in such numbers was monstrous. The air itself turned feral. The White Scars were a storm flying over the land, and it would flatten everything in its path.

The wind rushed at the green tide. It came to break the waves, to turn them back. It would blow so hard that it would show that a tide could be stopped after all.

Temur Khan did not believe in comforting illusions. He knew, when he saw the ork mob stretching out for kilometres, that he was here to perform a miracle. So be it. He knew what he and his battle-brothers could do. He closed the distance with the orks, the landscape a streak in his peripheral vision, and he laughed.

‘Behold the greenskin numbers!’ he called out over the vox’s company channel. ‘Do they imagine that will make any difference to us? All they have done, brothers, is ensure that each of us may quench his thirst for xenos blood this day. Destroy them! For the Khan and the Emperor!’

The orks started shooting as soon as they saw the Space Marines. For the first few seconds, the range was too great. Then the gunfire became something to take seriously. The orks were not marksmen, but they didn’t need accuracy when they had volume. The calibre of most of the bullets could do little against power armour, but the vehicles were vulnerable.

Speed was the answer here, too. The orks couldn’t get a fix on targets moving that fast.

Temur kept the Thunderhawk’s heavy arsenal in reserve for now. The White Scars struck as a series of spearheads. Temur’s bike squad hit first, killing the orks at a distance with bolter fire, and then driving hard into the centre of the lines and moving forward to cut the march in half. As the orks’ resistance stiffened, the squad broke to the left and right, slicing through the greenskin flanks and out. Next came the Land Speeders, plunging the knife deeper into the enemy’s heart. And when they veered off, the next wave of bikes followed on. By then, Temur and his squad were harassing the periphery of the horde as they looped back for another run.

The White Scars attack was a perpetual shock. The orks reeled. They were hit in the centre and on the sides simultaneously, and they were unable to get a fix on one group of Space Marines before it had moved on and another was renewing the charge. The bastion’s plateau was barely visible over the horizon. The orks’ advance ground to a halt, and bit by bit the White Scars crushed them to pulp.

When it came, Temur didn’t see or hear the disaster. It happened on ground hidden by the gentle swell of the landscape. From the perspective of the battlefield, nothing had changed for the bastion. Temur wasn’t even looking in that direction. He was focused on the next group of greenskins about to go down under his wheels and be shredded by his guns. The White Scars were tearing the enemy apart, moving so fast that the orks had yet to claim a single kill, unless it was their own kin as they fired indiscriminately in all directions.

The Fifth Brotherhood had absolute control over the battlefield, and yet Temur knew that it had all gone wrong. Something had changed. Perhaps the corner of his eye caught the flash of energy discharge in the distance, back towards the base, as he began his turn once again to drive through the orks’ disintegrating front lines. Perhaps it was something as simple as premonition. But his heart was already sinking when Colonel Meixner was suddenly on the vox.

‘Multiple heavy armour units inbound from the north,’ he said. ‘Six of them. They’ll be at the foot of the plateau in minutes.’

From the north? Temur wanted to roar at the impossibility. How could the tanks have bypassed them? Yet they had, and now his entire force was hours away from the bastion that was in immediate danger. The army of thousands of orks, the army that he was shattering, now looked like a decoy.

The idea that he might have been outmanoeuvred by orks was an obscenity that robbed Temur of words. It took him several more moments of outraged killing before he was able to answer Meixner. ‘Hold fast, colonel,’ he said.

‘We plan to,’ Meixner answered, clipped and assured, and fooling neither of them about the odds against six of the orks’ war machines.

Temur turned sharply, cutting his advance short. The rest of the squad followed behind as he cut his way back out of the howling mob of xenos beasts. ‘Brothers,’ he voxed, ‘we have been deceived. The bastion is in need of our aid. We must fly to the true battle.’

The orks were deciding where and how he fought. For that outrage, he vowed to coat the surface of the moon with their blood.

Then he opened a channel to the Scout squad.

Ariq was rigging a demolition charge on the hatch when Temur’s voice came through on the company vox-channel. ‘Have you found the manufactorum?’ the khan asked.

‘We have found another potential entrance to it,’ Kusala answered.

‘Six tanks are closing with the bastion. The greenskins’ ability to field heavy armour must be neutralised.’

‘Agreed,’ Ghazan put in.

‘Brother-sergeant,’ Temur said, and the slight aimed at Ghazan was clear, ‘how close are you to accomplishing the mission?’

‘I don’t know, my khan,’ Kusala said. ‘The lead is promising, but not definitive.’

‘Very well. Carry on. You are more useful to us there. Understand that it may fall to you and your Scouts alone to destroy the facility.’

‘Then that is what we shall do.’

‘Good.’ Still on the company channel, Temur said, ‘Stormseer Ghazan, you must return to base. I hope your aid will not be too late in coming.’

Ghazan switched to a private frequency. ‘I can best help the struggle here, Temur Khan.’

‘If the entrance has been found, the Scouts can do their work. Your work belongs here.’

‘I have no choice in this matter,’ Ghazan said. ‘And neither do you.’ He terminated the link. He looked back at Kusala. The sergeant had removed his helmet after leaving the abandoned ork workshop. He wasn’t even trying to hide his doubts now.

‘None of us has a choice now,’ Ghazan said, as much to convince himself as Kusala. ‘What is coming is destined. Now open this hatch.’

Chapter Three

Speeding south, away from the orks, Temur bit his tongue hard, preferring to draw his own blood than vent his rage pointlessly at the static that had replaced Ghazan’s voice. He focused the energy of anger into greater velocity for his bike. He willed the terrain to flow faster. He opened a channel to Meixner. He got through, and he heard what he thought was the colonel’s voice, but the man was drowned out by the sound of explosions.

The White Scars raced for the bastion. They flew over the land. They were a blinding streak of war. The ork force had vanished in the distance behind them. It seemed to Temur, though, that the greenskins’ laughter followed them across the terrain. His ritual scars burned. His blood was up with fury, and with humiliation. He would tear the sky in half before he saw his company defeated by ork strategy. He still had difficulty in believing that there even was such a thing.

Geography was his enemy now, too. He needed to be at the siege of the bastion now. But no matter how hard he pushed his bike, he could not compress the distance to nothing. The Thunderhawk was faster than the Land Speeders and bikes, and he ordered pilot Naku to take the Khajog’s Stand and its assault squad on ahead.

The gunship couldn’t cross that distance instantly, either. By the time it reached the battlefield, and Naku began appraising Temur of the situation, the orks had had far too much time to wreak their havoc.

‘Is the bastion still standing?’ Temur asked.

‘It is.’

‘The walls are holding against the bombardment?’

‘Not exactly,’ Naku said. ‘The Iron Guard has managed to draw the greenskins away from the walls for the moment.’

‘How?’

‘By mounting a charge.’

The implications of that tactic sank in. Infantry charging heavy armour. Temur could imagine nothing other than a massacre. ‘What is the status of the colonel’s men?’

‘They are still fighting.’

No elaboration was needed. Temur gave the Mordians a mental salute. He understood what they were doing. Their assault would distract the orks, who would seek to destroy the humans before them and save the bastion for later. He also understood the irony that loomed: the bastion might be standing after all the forces it was meant to shelter were dead.

Faster.

The terrain a vibrating blur beneath his wheels.

Faster.

The wind against his armour going from whistle to howl to shriek, its transfiguration of fury taking it from the voice of the moon to the voice of Chogoris.

Faster. And there, there, the bastion in sight, veiled by black smoke. On the plain before it, heroic but outmatched men fighting visions of giant, mechanised violence.

The voice of Chogoris calling him to battle, calling him to be wind himself, to be the gale, to be the violence of speed.

He rode with a thousand generations of tribesmen at his back. The wind was their voice, too. In his mind’s eye, the spirits raised the curved blades of their tulwars high. As he topped the final rise before the plain of battle, the ancient cavalry flowed with him.

Temur Khan took to the field with a momentum to shatter worlds. At his sides, and following, was the scythe of the Fifth Brotherhood. And if an infantry force had been before him, the battle would have been over. Human or xenos, a hundred or ten thousand, no such enemy could withstand the shock of that charge. But no such enemy was here. This enemy had taken the form of metal monsters. And they were laying waste to a different infantry.

What the Mordian Iron Guard had achieved was worthy of monuments. The mortals had three Chimeras at their disposal, and had hurled them against the ork armour, as they had their own fragile bodies. The Chimeras were outnumbered and outgunned. Their armour was not in the same league as that of the ork machines. One of them was already a smoking wreck, identifiable only by the sheer amount of blackened, twisted metal. The other two were damaged but still fighting. They had destroyed one of the ork tanks. And the foot-soldiers of the Iron Guard were still charging, again and again. The sun shone, resplendent, on their uniforms of blue and red and gold. They were pride and they were discipline. More than that: they were heroism, rushing to fight what could not be fought.

Worthy of monuments. Rewarded with a mass grave. Two of the Battlewagons moved around the field on random trajectories, pouncing on whatever large clusters of Mordians were closest at any moment. Gigantic, articulated claws were mounted on their hulls. They reached down into the mass of soldiers and pulled them up by the score, crushing them, spraying the ground with blood. The attacks were savage. With the claws, the orks had found a way to exaggerate even the violence of war. The machines appeared to revel in the sadism, to drink in the vitae that they squeezed from their prey as if downing casks of chinyua. At the same time, the main guns fired into the more distant formations, shattering charges, hurling body parts high into the air. The Iron Guard had diverted the orks from the goal of the bastion, and had given them the gift of enormous slaughter. The orks had accepted the gift with glee.

As he descended the slope, Temur saw a Battlewagon ram the side of one of the Chimeras. The front of the ork machine looked like a fist with teeth. The Chimera’s gun fired one last time. The shell might as well have been wet sand. The Battlewagon was untouched. It collapsed the flank of the APC as if it were vellum. Flame and smoke poured out of the wound. The tank rode up over the Chimera, crushing it down.

The Mordian vehicle exploded. The blast was muffled beneath the weight of the Battlewagon. Fire enveloped the tank, an embrace and surrender. The Battlewagon drove out of the flames. The huge, jagged metal cluster at its front looked like a snarl of triumph.

The remaining Chimera was limping, slowed by its injury. Its moments were numbered. Its crew pushed it towards another of the Battlewagons. The main gun fired, and fired again. Its heavy stubbers sent an unending stream of bullets at the target. Its opponent had two cannons on staggered levels above the hull. They were short, primitive, and with a bore twice that of the Chimera’s weapon. Their fire was a syncopated double-beat, the sound of a monstrous heart.

The accuracy of the Iron Guard was impeccable. Every shot hit. The orks missed, and missed again. Yet the outcome of the duel was preordained. The men were doomed. Their ordnance did little more than render the forward armour of the Battlewagon even more grotesque. The ork shells kicked up huge fountains of earth where they hit. Only one strike would be needed to kill the Chimera.

The Khajog’s Stand criss-crossed the field, striking at the tanks. Naku was being more conservative than Tokhta had been. The White Scars could not afford to lose both Thunderhawks. Nor could Naku fire with as much freedom. He did not have a plain filled with greenskins below him. His targets were larger and fewer. The gunship’s heavy bolters and lascannons harried the Battlewagons, scoring telling hits against the weaker top and side armour. The Thunderhawk cannon had killed one of the other tanks. Its corpse was a gutted shell on the eastern edge of the battle. The assault squad had deployed, and was vectoring in on the tank closing with the Chimera.

‘For the Khan!’ Temur voxed to the company.

‘For the Emperor!’ his warriors answered.

And though he felt the truth of the battle cry to the depths of his soul, he also thought, For me. He owed the orks a debt of humiliation.

He led the charge towards the nearest Battlewagon. The tank turned to meet the bikes. Its claw reached out with delighted hunger.

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