The Last Son of Dorn Read online

  With a sonic clap and a promethium roar, an atmosphere fighter, with rippling flames chased in paint down its stub nose, dropped through the frag clouds and strafed the armour column with a linked pair of underwing quad-autocannons. High volume anti-personnel rounds spanked and rattled along armour plates, blood splashing across the turret of a Razorback as its commander vainly tried to track the jet with his pintle mount, and then in a rumble of afterburn it raced northwards into ork-held territory.

  Two or three kilometres in that direction, where it had been driven to keep pace with the Black Templars advance, Thane could see the great fifteen-metre-high pyre that had been Helfyre. In the glare of that inferno, the invincible Decimus Ordinatus shimmered in a liquid caul of purples and greens, tormented from every angle by sustained fire.

  As Thane watched, the Warlord raised an arm stained with pyrotechnic bruising, the diverted power causing its gatling blaster to glow like a birthing sun. The massive weapon began to spin, superfast, oddly silent against the cacophonies more immediate in Thane’s ears, and disgorged a blast of energy that carved the nearest of the offending gun towers in two. That beam of light was, in fact, a torrent of several million high-power las-beams per second, and the combined effect was devastating. The Titan dragged its arm diagonally across its body, chewing downwards through the blasted structure and overloading the shields of the pot-bellied ork gargant that had been sheltering behind it.

  The gatling blaster gave out with a sputter of light and a spent whir of barrels as the remains of the gun tower crumbled down over the bright yellow body of the unshielded gargant. The ork machine drove through it, a lunatic grin in brilliant yellow over its crude orkish face. Behind it came several more. Decimus Ordinatus shook the earth with a backward step.

  ‘After today there might be no children of Dorn,’ Thane had said. Not in argument, but the words needed to be said. They were greater than him.

  ‘No wall stands forever, brother, but I think that our father’s legacy was always about more than us. If Vulkan taught me anything it was to have faith. Humanity will prevail as it always has. It is for those like us to ensure that it is so.’

  Thane cursed on the Eidolican day as something unseen but earth-shakingly massive impacted somewhere in the conurbation, near enough to rattle his boots against the ground. He dropped to one knee in a crater and unloaded his magazine, speaking evenly and calmly into his helmet vox.

  ‘This is Force Commander Thane to all units still receiving – consolidate at the second marker and await–’

  A rocket screamed across from a tower block and struck the lead Vindicator side-on between the dozer blade and the track. The explosion flipped it over, with fingers of flame and nails of smoke, onto its back, smashing through the glacis armour of the vehicle behind.

  ‘–Brother Agrippus!’ Thane finished, debris raining down.

  His battle-brother tracked the aim of his heavy bolter round to the right and speared the crude rocket’s winding smoke tail with bunker-busting incendiary rounds. Thane saw a burly ork with a flared missile tube under one arm running window to window. Behind Thane’s back, the rest of the Aurora Chapter’s armour column snarled up into a congested huddle of vehicles behind the stricken Vindicator. Angry shouts and engine growls. The ork shooter crashed through a side wall and into an alley just as Agrippus’ heavy bolter tore up the last window in the row. It dropped, hanging onto its missile tube as though it doubled as a jump pack, and thumped two-footed onto the rear-axle suspension of a waiting truck. Wood and metal shards sprayed over the vehicle as it roared into a wheelspin and rattled off between the blocks, bolt-rounds spanking from its rear fender.

  Thane’s Lyman’s ear tuned to the sounds of ork vehicles: fighters being picked up and redeployed, unhappy about it by the tone of their xenos grunts, but obedient to their leaders. He mentally reconfigured his mindmap of the battlefield. The orks were refocusing their forces along a narrower front, digging in somewhere just ahead of the Black Templars advance.

  ‘They are withdrawing.’

  ‘An unlikely but predicted variable,’ said Brother Kahagnis. ‘Substitute strategem is staged advance, pull Black Templars back and extend flanks with Astra Militarum units. Draw the orks onto us again.’

  Thane took a moment to consider, to elevate his mind above the anarchy of the battlefield, to perceive in it the connections of cause and effect as every Fists Exemplar initiate was taught. Every possibility was considered. Every variable already had a strategy in place to counter it.

  There had been no regicide sets on Eidolica, and no one would ever challenge a Fist Exemplar to a game of strategy.

  These orks had shown a fondness for feints and counters.

  Perhaps it was time to show them something they did not expect.

  ‘Vulkan had faith in you, brother,’ Thane had answered.

  ‘He had faith in us all.’ Koorland had turned from the window then, and lain a gauntleted hand on Thane’s shoulder. Half his face was dark, shielded from the viewport’s lumen bars like a planet’s night side. ‘As do I. We fight to the last. We are the ultimate realisation of the hopes of mankind, and by our virtues do we hold humanity’s leaders to account. In heart and mind, we never waver.’ He released his grip and appeared to sigh though made no sound. ‘The real work begins tomorrow and the day after. We will rebuild the Imperium, brother. If one day the Khan or the Raven should be found as Vulkan was, if the Emperor should awake, then I would have the Imperium that they find be one of glory and not despair. I would make our father proud.’

  ‘Pull back the Black Templars. But then throw everything onto the Excoriators’ flank. Even the reserves.’

  ‘That is not the correct strategem for this set of conditions,’ Kahagnis argued.

  Thane’s expression was immobile as rock as he regarded the spires and gun turrets of the idolatrous palace complex, still several kilometres away. The orks knew that Koorland was inside and somehow, though he had not yet worked the problem through that far, his and Koorland’s roles of lure and trap had become reversed. Were it in his nature to do so, he might have smiled.

  ‘The objective is the same, brother,’ said Thane.

  Kill the Beast.

  It did not matter who did it, and Thane had no intention of becoming the last son of Dorn.

  Ullanor – Gorkogrod, inner palace

  The ogryn, Brokk, punched the locked door. Ripples of blue-green force spilled outward from the giant abhuman’s grinding knuckles and the force field cloaking the door gave an ozone sputter. The ogryn’s muscles bulged as he tried to force it. Sweat soaked his khaki vest. After a few seconds of straining, the ogryn withdrew his hand and shook out his seared knuckles, dog tags and chains clinking against the spit-polished campaign medals sewn into his jacket breast. Laurentis’ plasma cutters had failed to make a mark either. So had Asger’s lightning claws.

  To look at the door was to look at something clearly ork. The metal was thick, and clamped in the middle by a meaty lock in the shape of a bull-horned greenskin. The black and white diagonal stripes were garishly done, the brush strokes occasionally veering off the line to create a weird, kaleidoscopic pattern. The doors, however, were well balanced on their runners. The join was perfectly centred. And then there was the force field.

  Laurentis lifted an extensor that emerged from his robes on an articulated limb and tapped on the door at various points, like a medic manoeuvring his stethoscope as he palpated a patient’s chest. Small flowerings of counter-force rippled from around his bladed metal probe.

  ‘Supposition: a nanolayer force field, similar in concept to the adamantine surface layer of Thunderhawk or Land Raider armour.’ He tapped it again and watched the spread of colours. ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘Can it be broken?’ asked Koorland.

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  ‘Can you break it?’

  ‘Oh. I
think not. Not without further investigation.’

  Koorland nodded in acceptance – though his helm, bonded to his plastron and pauldrons, did not translate it well – and turned ponderously around.

  The corridor was of the same unidentifiable metal as the door, super-resistant, unmarked by the scrape of a lightning claw or the frustrated discharge of a commissar’s plasma pistol, but minus the paintwork or the energy field. It was remarkably clean. There was no light source that any of them could detect and there was no sign of external power generation. Every surface just seemed to glow with a soft, bluish light. Embossed plates and glyphs marked junctions and doorways.

  Kavalanera and her sisters filled the corridor with raised swords, a shield of exquisite war-plate and power-edged blades between Laurentis and Alpha 13-Jzzal and the servitor-restrained ork psyker. Asger held the rear. The second ogryn and Commissar Goss stood at one of the junctions. This door was unshielded and Bohemond was already on the other side with Kill-Team Stalker.

  Koorland glanced again at the cartolith. His current location was identified by a small pulsing icon, buried deep in a labyrinthine subterranean structure that more nearly resembled the root system of a tooth, than anything obviously palatial. Passageways spread out from his position like capillaries. It looked like they were in the midsection of a raised structure, one of several fortified edifices that ringed the Beast’s throne room. His best guess put them a hundred metres or so above it and about twice that horizontally.

  ‘The strange thing,’ Krule appeared by Koorland’s pauldron and gestured to the open door, ‘is that that’s the more direct route.’

  ‘The palace itself is movable. Are you certain?’

  ‘I wouldn’t open my mouth otherwise.’

  ‘A trap,’ Alpha 13-Jzzal said again, a vox-loop growl.

  Koorland wondered if Rogal Dorn had smiled when he had first set foot on Sebastus IV. ‘Of course it is a trap.’

  ‘If I might propose a theory?’ Laurentis scuttled around from the locked and shielded door to face Koorland, audio receivers extending from his cranial structure as if, in some remotely human way, to present himself fully at the Space Marine’s disposal.

  ‘I remember a time when you would not have cared to ask first,’ said Koorland.

  ‘I have, on occasion, been made aware that my hypotheses are not at all times relevant or welcome.’

  ‘They are today, my friend. Speak.’

  Laurentis blinked and lowered his eyeball, a gesture of humble gratitude. ‘The sole purpose of our mission is the assassination of the Beast, correct?’

  Koorland nodded.

  ‘To eliminate the one target that the enemy cannot afford to lose,’ Laurentis quoted, in paraphrase, then prodded Fidus Bellator’s huge pectoral aquila with a manipulator claw. ‘It occurs to me that the Beast could have had a similar thought.’

  ‘The mission is compromised,’ said Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘You have been lured here.’

  Koorland regarded the cyborgised warrior sternly. The skitarius knew, because Koorland had shared the data himself, of the calculus-logi’s latest prognoses. Terra had been calculated to collapse in a matter of weeks. The most optimistic upper limit of statistical deviation had the greater Imperium continuing as a unified entity for only another few months at best. These facts were no secret. Let the ugly face of failure inspire the mortals to sacrifice all, as Thane and the Last Wall did mere kilometres away.

  ‘It changes nothing.’

  ‘We should at least contact Thane or Issachar,’ said Krule. ‘Or both. If you’re right then vox-silence is clearly unnecessary.’

  ‘Impossible,’ came Bohemond’s voice-amplified reply from the adjoining corridor. The Black Templar clumped back into view, bulging armour plates blued by the odd, rinsing light. ‘External vox is being blocked. Did Koorland not tell you?’

  Krule puffed out his cheeks. ‘Then I suppose I’m with that.’ He jabbed his head sideways towards Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘I’ve been this way before without losing outside contact. It has to be deliberate.’

  ‘I assume then that your opinion is the same,’ said Bohemond.

  Krule’s expression was stony. His eyes widened slightly and the whites began to turn red. Without appearing to move, his musculature noticeably swelled under his synskin bodyglove. Chronaxic implants, Koorland reasoned, threat responsive, doping the Assassin’s already enhanced physiognomy with a sharp increase in metabolism. Krule grinned like a snake.

  ‘We came all this way. I brought all my favourite knives.’

  ‘Kill ork fur Empror,’ rumbled Olug, slowly.

  Koorland felt his heart warm with gratitude.

  ‘Signal on my auspex,’ growled Asger, suddenly. ‘Fifty metres. That way.’ He pointed one set of lightning claws down the corridor. Kavalanera and her sisters made ready with a swift rustle of oiled plates. ‘Closing with some haste.’

  ‘How many?’ said Koorland.

  ‘Enough for me.’

  ‘It seems that the auspex is working after all,’ said Laurentis, happily.

  ‘Ave bloody Omnissiah,’ muttered Krule.

  ‘Praise Him,’ Laurentis agreed.

  ‘Break through them,’ suggested Alpha 13-Jzzal. ‘While we are still capable of salvaging the weapon. There is no way of ascertaining from here whether this route to the throne room will not be similarly warded.’

  But somehow, Koorland knew that it would not be. The Emperor lit the galaxy through the Astronomican: was it not then possible that He watched over His children in spirit?

  ‘Krule, Tyris, you have point. Bohemond, with them. Asger, you know what to do if the orks catch up.’ The Wolf Lord flexed his lightning claws eloquently. ‘Goss, covering fire. Lady Brassanas, Laurentis – you’re with me.’

  Fifteen

  Ullanor – Gorkogrod

  The Fists Exemplar, and those of the VII Legion that were their genetic forebears, had fought in some of the Imperium’s defining battles. They had defended Terra from the Arch-Enemy, fought in the Consus Drift campaigns. Oriax Dantalion himself had been at the primarch’s side through the slaughter of the Iron Cage. But Maximus Thane doubted that so much honour had ever been earned by so few as during the second battle for Ullanor.

  He wondered if enough of them would be alive at the finish for their exploits to be remembered half as long as those names of legend.

  It had been Assault Marines of the Seventh Company, in concert with their brothers of the Black Templars, that had taken the fight to the primary fortress blocking the palace’s eastern aspect and broken it open. It had been bike squads led by Forgemaster Aloysian that had led the Aurora Chapter tanks through the orks’ minefield and allowed them to crack the greenskins’ defensive lines of trenches and bunkers. When an armoured witch-tower, wreathed in green lightning and trundling forward on massive tracks, had delivered the deathblow on Decimus Ordinatus and turned its psychic fire upon the Deathwatch vehicles, it had been Brother-Sergeant Aquino of the Second who had led the kill-squad of Sisters of Silence to nullify it from within.

  The galaxy would never again know his like.

  As for Thane himself, he was too humble to keep a personal tally, but his helm display recorded it for him: three hundred and eighteen kills for three hundred and nineteen rounds expended. It had been him to lead the sortie that crippled the orks’ flak guns, and him that then called down the finishing blow.

  The Icarus supercarrier, several kilometres of runstrip mounted over many windswept tiers upon two sets of awesome tracks, had been held in reserve with the Field-Legatus’ Leviathan and escort. Scant minutes after Thane’s voxed authorisation, dozens of low-flying Marauder bombers and Vulture gunships had turned what remained of the palace approach to ash and glass, dust under a Space Marine’s boot.

  There had been nothing left but a handful of survivors, crawling cockroach-like in th
e rubble of apocalypse, to prevent the hundred and twelve Demolisher siege tanks of the Ullanor Veterans forming up into one long, slowly advancing firing line and opening up against the palace’s outer wall with the full fury of mankind.

  The orks’ fortification was staggeringly vast. Superhard metals plated its sloped face. Energy fields flickered in ugly opposition to the shells and explosions that broke along its length. Fixed gun turrets raked the ground, even as shield overloads drove cracks through ablative plating and exposed bare rockcrete to the massed gunnery of the Astra Militarum. The wall crumbled.

  Maximus Thane was the first to cheer.

  Everything started to move forwards. On first impression it was as though the planet’s artificial tectonics were undergoing one of their gross scale rearrangements, but the sky was still, the ground was still, it was everything else that was moving. Every man, every vehicle was suddenly rushing towards the breach in the wall as though the planet was a voidship and they had just punched a hole in their own hull. Those that had been closest to the breach were the first to enter; no deeper thought went into it than that. They were the orks now.

  A tactical squad of Excoriators advanced through the rubble, into a pall of dust that sparked with torn electrics and bolter fire. The grey ceramite block of Venerable Otho moved with them, crunching forward, figure-of-eighting spirals of fire spraying from the Dreadnought’s heavy flamer.

  Thane joined the headlong rush over the shattered cityscape, unloading his bolter onto the breached section of wall, wildly skewing his accuracy ratios though he did not care. The urban terrain was post-apocalyptic: masonry in jagged lumps as though cut from passing asteroids and dropped from the sky, dismembered statues of armoured orks fifty metres high and brandishing chainaxes and heavy weapons. Vehicle wrecks, blackened, on their sides or in pieces; bunkers with smoke pouring from gun slits.