The Last Son of Dorn Read online

  It was there that the ork forces would be concentrated.

  Issachar raised his fist and a pair of serfs in ivory and red habits hoisted the Escharan standard from a crossbar above his personal Land Raider, Tyrant.

  ‘Inquisition forces to hold. All other units advance on my command.’

  Nine

  Incus Maximal – Mons Primus

  Check 5, 2020:59:24

  Acid snow was already beginning to pile up around the Thunderhawk. Urquidex hoped to take that as a positive sign, meaning that they planned to return for it. The gunship continued to disappear as he was hustled away from it, and that was when he realised. It had been expended to bring them down and was now being abandoned so as not to double the risk of discovery with a second flight. The ubiquitous Thunderhawk was the cheap, standard template design workhorse of the Adeptus Astartes, as easily thrown to the ice in the name of necessity as any organic servant of Him on Terra.

  The air temperature was beyond freezing, and yet the snow burned where it touched bare skin. He pulled up his hood. Storm troopers in glassy black carapace and cold-weather survival gear crunched through the snow; two dozen of them together hauled the truculent ork by its chains. Steam billowed from its mouth and icicles of saliva bearded its jaw. The Sisters surrounded them like a warding hex, power blades spitting in the falling snow, causing the brute to snap and lunge and claw at its temples only for the chains around its wrist to yank taut and bring half a dozenstorm troopers skidding towards it.

  The Space Marines of Kill-Team Stalker, Urquidex could no longer see. They had pushed well ahead and the sub-zero conditions had frozen his optics on near-view.

  The landing pad projected from the upper bulge of the Mons Primus. It led onto a long ambulatory with great arched windows, detailed in brass, alternating from one side to the other. They ran down it, the drugged ork determining their pace. Snow swept in through the left-hand windows. They had previously been glazed by a conversion field that would have converted the impact of each flake of snow into glorious, eclectic light. Urquidex could see the emitters. They were unpowered now, several of the arches cracked. The siege-savants of Incus Maximal had authorised the destruction of the planetary capital in a bid to stem the ork advance onto the planet’s last Mechanicus enclaves. There had been no time to complete the sacrilege. The wreckage of the Ark ship Contrivenant still drifted in orbit.

  The view from the left now was frozen, and dark because of it. Flickering exchanges of fire lit the silhouettes of forge basilicae, as if in crude mea culpa for the destruction of the conversion field. The traces of explosions went largely unremarked: a wink of light there, the dim rumble of a collapsing superstructure there.

  By the time Urquidex saw the doors at the end of the ambulatory, the Thunderhawk was just another lump, indistinguishable from any of the forgotten lumps around it. Urquidex’s digitools twitched through a signum-code rendition of the Last Rites.

  Hakon and Numines held the doors as Tyris, Vega and Gadreel surged through.

  The ambulatory led to a covered chamber, and the first greenskins that Urquidex had seen alive.

  There were six of them, gathered around a metal barrel of cleansing spirit with the lid torn off, sitting on sturdy tables as if they were benches. Their necks were as thick as iron hawsers. Their biceps were the size of promethium drums. Urquidex was wholly unprepared for their brute immensity. The intense fungal stench overpowered even the astringent chemicals.

  A volley of silenced bolt-rounds dropped them before any of them could so much as grunt and Tyris and Vega powered through, smashing the tables aside to make way. Urquidex followed in behind the storm troopers and Sisters and looked around while his optics warmed through.

  It was a narthex. Here was where pilgrims would congregate to wait, pray and suffer the requisite physical deprivation to earn the Omnissiah’s admission to the temple proper. The columns were bronze. The floor and ceiling were ribbed and the walls were decked with cabling. ­Pistons glided in and out of their sleeves, but they were without function, symbolic of the perpetuity of the Machine-God’s power. The distant pops of gunfire echoed through the chamber.

  Tyris voxed a whispered ‘all clear’. The other Space Marines started after him with a startling lack of sound.

  Urquidex pointed the way, bypassing the ascensor, to the penitent stairs at the far end of the hallway, doubting for a moment that he had seen the orks alive at all.

  Just six corpses. No different to the tens of thousands shipped to Mars for dissection.

  The penitent stairs led to a corridor, its walls adorned with tablet slabs stating the Universal Laws, and then on to another set of stairs. The metal newel rattled loosely as the Deathwatch powered ahead. Urquidex was only halfway up and feeling the lactate burn in his limbs when the roar of bolter fire carried down.

  A dozen orks were dead and sprayed roughly over the atrium’s cuneiformed bronze walls when Urquidex stumbled onto the scene, but twice that number were still fighting.

  They were machine-ork perversions, xenotech abominations of an engineer class. Slug bullets sprayed from crane-limbed servo-harnesses. Plasma blasts ripped craters out of the walls. Vega dropped to one knee behind a devotional font and disgorged a jet of flaming promethium from his bolter’s combi-attachment. An ork engineer wheezed through the flames, shuddering armour harness alight. It didn’t seem to notice. A multi-barrelled volleycannon attached to its fighting suit with swaying ammo belts began to whine, then to howl, and the font disintegrated. Vega and Numines went down. Icegrip took a glancing hit to the pauldron just as he was swinging up his frost blade. Tyris’ return fire spanked off the ork’s armour like rain hitting a drum.

  Urquidex had just starting screaming, metal splinters from the destroyed font lodged in the organic attachers of his eye, when he felt Alpha 13-Jzzal’s cyborgised frame slam him against the wall. The skitarius grunted as bullets riddled his titanium exoskeleton. A squad of storm troopers formed up behind him and opened fire. Las-fire stitched the atrium, brutally impressive as a laser display and as wasted as one on the thick skulls of the orks.

  The boss ork shrugged off the troopers’ attentions, beat one in half with a twist of its power claw, then lost the arm to the downward stroke of a Sister’s blade. She withdrew a step, pivoted on her toes, and with terrifying grace, backhanded the ork’s head from its shoulders. Her sister stood protectively over Urquidex and the growling ork psyker as the third took the fight to the orks. Tyris, Gadreel and Icegrip fought hard to match her battle-grace.

  The last engineer had backed itself into a corner. It took a short burst of bolt-rounds to the gut, which then erupted from its back and painted a streak on the wall as it slid down it. Vega rose, clutching his hip, liquid sealant bubbling up from the rents in his armour.

  ‘I can continue,’ he rasped.

  Numines didn’t rise. Gadreel crouched over him for a second, fingers to his throat, and spoke a prayer to honour the Fist Exemplar’s lost gene-seed. Tyris was already thumping towards the great set of double doors that the orks had been guarding. There was no stealth now.

  The stylised plasteel was no match for the Space Marine’s powered strength and he shouldered the doors apart without breaking stride. In fact he was still speeding up, bolter up and firing again before the doors had slammed back into the walls. Vega, Icegrip and, a moment later, Gadreel walked into the return fire without the slightest hesitation.

  Urquidex was awed. Here was the Omnissiah’s glory, expressed through biological perfection and the genetic mastery of the God-Emperor of Man.

  ‘Squads alpha and beta, left and right,’ roared Colonel Rothi as men surged forward, and held a hand to Urquidex to indicate that he should remain exactly where he was. ‘Delta on me, cover the payload, go.’

  The Apse Mechanicus was a technological marvel in copper, polished mica, and gold, crosshatched by gunfire and smoke. At a pro
saic level it resembled a temple of the Creed, but the pillars that upheld the vaulted ceiling were not monofunction stone, but great pipes that trembled musically with the Omnissiah’s breath. The Machine-God Himself was represented in sanctified metal at the end of the nave. It was more than just a statue. Its miraculous mechanics had breathed Motive Force into the lights, the energy fields, and provided Hyboriax its heat. It ran still, its isolation splendid, but its outward connectors had been hacked out of the walls. A necklace of human ribs hung from its cog-toothed neck. A crown of bent metal sat crooked on its head.

  Squads alpha and beta lacerated the defiled space with las-beams. Orks built like armoured walkers turned around as though unexpectedly spat upon. A missile screwed across the nave from a crude shoulder-mounted launcher and wasted two men to armaplas scraps and flesh lather. Alpha 13-Jzzal’s caliver deoxygenated the air with rippling volleys of superheated plasma that left two orks as molten husks. Overheat runes glowed a dangerous amber as the weapon steamed off into the cold. Rothi roared. The troopers focused their fire, and twenty-plus convergent beams managed finally to punch one of the xenos brutes down.

  Luckily for the mortals, the Space Marines had the orks’ attention.

  Tyris advanced at speed towards the right transept, going column to column. Controlled bursts punched the orks cleanly down as they moved towards him. Wild returns ripped open the ornate pipes, mangled them as though grenades had blown them apart from the inside. Vega meanwhile advanced slowly down the centre, his limp growing more pronounced with every step. Heavy gunfire slugging his battleplate, he dropped to one knee and rolled a grenade down the aisle between two blocks of plug-in banks.

  It burst into a thick pall of smoke. Tyris disappeared but for the muffled sound of him. Vega became a ghost. Urquidex could barely make out the silent Sisters beside him. Without his optics he doubted they could see him as well, but they appeared as unflustered by their sudden blindness as they were by everything else.

  ‘The weapon must be deployed as close to the centre as is possible,’ said Urquidex. ‘If the test is to yield meaningful data then it must be done properly.’ He looked back. Rothi was there. He had one hand pressed to his ear, the other cupped over his mouth.

  ‘Lord Issachar, come in. Lord Issachar–’

  One of the storm troopers left dragging the payload cursed as it began to pull back against them.

  ‘It needs another dose!’

  ‘No,’ Urquidex replied. Xenos species reacted unpredictably to human pharmacopoeia. Even sub-breeds could show eccentricities of response. He began to see why Kubik had recommended him for this mission. Few if any knew as much about Veridi genetics as he did. ‘It must be as conscious as possible. I don’t know how the somnambulum might interfere with its psychic powers.’

  ‘Then release it now!’ yelled the storm trooper. The ork was small relative to others of its species, but more than equal to the five men left holding it. The soldier’s arms were wound through the chain and his feet braced, but he and his comrade beside him were being drawn back regardless.

  ‘Here, then,’ said Urquidex, and signalled as much to the one Sister of Silence still beside him. She took a step back.

  He took a deep breath.

  Fortunate that he was in a house of the Omnissiah.

  He wanted his prayers heard.

  Ten

  Incus Maximal – Hyboriax Primus

  Check 5, 2021:45:02

  The Land Raider’s glacis ramp crashed down into the rubble. Issachar was first out, shredding an ork in thick red body plate with a burst of bolter fire. Another ork pushed through the girdering that had fallen across a window. He bracketed it with bolter fire until it dropped. Something pulled the blocking metal aside and lobbed in a grenade. The frag burst shook floor and ceiling, but Issachar barely felt it. Space Marines encased in wounded artificer armour and draped in scripture stomped towards windows and doors, weapons blazing.

  The Land Raider had ridden through the tin wall and disgorged Issachar’s honour guard directly into a manufactorum complex attached to Hyboriax Primus. It was a shell, but it was cover and provided firing lines over the primus road and from the back onto the ork bikers flanking on secundus.

  The big doors onto primus came down on their acid-corroded hinges, an ork walker bulldozing through and walking into the atmosphere-sear of Tyrant’s sponson lascannons. The smoking can spouted fire and crashed to the floor. Ork warriors poured in behind the wreck, bellowing and hooting and firing wildly into the air. Tyrant raked them with its glacis heavy bolters, body parts slapping into puddles of their own liquefied tissue. High-yield mass-reactives perforated the walker’s gouting shell with hollow thunks and exploded, showering the orks still behind it with boiling shrapnel. Even the tank’s commander popped the cupola hatch and added to the outpouring of firepower with its pintle-mounted storm bolter.

  The honour guard were still laying down thinning fire from the windows, leaving it to Issachar to deal with the xenos inroad in person.

  He crushed an ork’s spine with a blow from his power axe. Filled another with a close-range volley that tore it apart. An ork almost twice his size waded through the Land Raider’s bullet storm. It had a crossed axe branded on a box-magazine of a jaw, a lumpen bionic wedged into the crease of one eye. It barged him sideways and they grappled, servos whining, gears clunking.

  He was Chapter Master of the Excoriators. He had served Katafalque as First Captain for a century. He had fought the enemies of mankind for nearly seven hundred years, and the Astronomican would cease to shine before he would fall at the hands of an ork.

  He spat Betchers’ acid on its chest-plate, then slammed his forehead through the dissolving metal. The ork roared, in surprise, not pain, and released its grip on his power axe enough for him to molecularly disrupt the brute’s skull with force fit to topple a wall.

  Chapter vox chattered in his ear the whole time, telling him exactly where and how badly they were being beaten.

  ‘Order all forces back to the secondary extraction zone,’ he voxed, calmly, bolt pistol eviscerating the next monster to test its luck against his fury and lose. ‘I will not sacrifice what little we have left for a test.’

  ‘Chapter Master.’ Orgos made a line for him from Tyrant, where he had been coordinating with air support. ‘Payload is signalling. They are ready to–’

  There was a crack, and the Space Marine fell with a slugger round still embedded in the side of his helm. Issachar snarled and stepped over him.

  He had lost too many brothers to be moved by one more.

  Incus Maximal – Mons Primus

  Check 5, 2021:58:15

  Urquidex nipped in smartly behind the ork’s back and stabbed it in the side of the neck with a hypodermic. It roared, and instinctively tried to bite off his hand, but it was still groggy and snapped a few centimetres shy of his hastily withdrawn digitools. The storm troopers braced. There had been no way to drill for the actual detonation. All they had to go on was the Dzelenic IV recording and they looked duly terrified.

  The ork psyker was growing increasingly lucid. With a furious bellow, it dragged on the chain around its muscular right arm and pulled the storm trooper holding on to it off his feet. He slid along the floor on his chest carapace and the ork stamped on his head.

  ‘Throne!’

  The storm trooper escort detail cried out in alarm. One drew a laspistol and had singed the ork’s chest before Urquidex shouted for him to stop. The ork pounded on its chest with its free arm and grabbed hold of the chains around its left arm and its neck.

  With a crack of energy discharge, the Sister of Silence severed its arm just below the shoulder. She regarded Urquidex frostily as the psyker howled. Gore turned the edge of her power blade a fizzing purple. Taking advantage of the ork’s momentary distraction, the storm troopers unclasped the chains from their carapace and started to wind them t
hrough the data-pews either side of the aisle.

  Meanwhile, squads alpha through delta were firing blindly into the roiling smoke.

  The Doom Eagle, Vega, fell out of the smog and hit the floor with an ork on top of him. The troopers tattooed it with las as it smashed the back of the Space Marine’s helmet into the floor. From somewhere, Urquidex could hear the cry of a wolf, the powered whine of a Techmarine’s servo-harness.

  Good. The harder they attacked, the stronger the psychic field would become.

  The more devastating the explosion.

  The ork psyker hollered and struggled around towards the Sister of Silence, the source of all its pain.

  ‘Now!’ shouted Urquidex, but the Sister was already vanishing into the smoke. Her high gorget hid her mouth, but from the movement of her skin and the shape of her eyes, Urquidex was certain that she smiled.

  The effect of her departure on the psyker was profound.

  The ork’s eyes took on a glassy inner light. Its shoulders tensed and bulged with swollen musculature. Urquidex had no equipment for the measurement of the uncanny, but he could feel the force that built inside of its skull. It was the pressure in the air that grew in the wake of a storm. The creak of a dam.

  The diagnostiad had theorised, on forensic analysis of the Dzelenic IV recording, that the surge of energy that followed a psychically neutered ork psyker being suddenly exposed to a large group of its kin would have catastrophic results.

  The storm troopers felt it coming in the rattling of their chains. They abandoned them and started to run. The ork was free, but it made no move to join the fight. It clapped its remaining hand to its face as if to contain the swelling of its head. Bolts of energy spat from its nose, mouth, ears. The flesh of its forehead stretched as its cranium pushed through. Its skull creaked, split, and then burst open, spraying Urquidex and the fleeing storm troopers with brain matter and whizzing bone.