The Beast Arises

That was all fantasy now. Chapter Master Alameda had gone out to meet the first wave of greenskins on the Fortunata Flats as they thundered from the black desert-world skies. Anticipating that the xenos would fight from the fortifications of their rocks and landing hulks, the Chapter Master had brought tracked fortifications of his own, in the form of the Chapter’s Land Raiders. A second wave of descents had landed almost on top of the first, however. While having the virtue of smashing many of the rocks and accompanying barbarian mobs into the desert peninsula, the second-wave descent also pulverised the Land Raider formation. Tanks were buried beneath rocks. Tanks were smashed to ruins. Tanks were bounced and toppled by the impact quakes of landing hulks. The formation scattered, while the crews of other partially immobilised vehicles were forced to fall back to exposed holdpoints in the dunes. Chapter Master Alameda wasn’t among them. His command vehicle had been one of the first smashed into the sands.

Thane couldn’t imagine how many waves there had been since that dark hour. Fifty? Perhaps a hundred. Barely a handful of Land Raiders had made it back, and those were sent on immediately by First Captain Garthas to support Captain Dentor fighting on the Tharkis Flats and in the Great Basin.

Two great arms suddenly wrapped around the captain. Something had seized Thane from behind. The arms were thick and scarred, and Thane felt like he was in the embrace of one of the Alcazar Astra’s redundant void-docking anchors as he was lifted off the deck of the star fort. A huge ork had reared to its full height and had taken him towards the heavens with it. The deluge of green fury swept in beneath Thane, hacking at the captain’s thrashing boots with chain-choppers and great axes.

Thane’s plate was telling him something alarming about the hulk’s colossal embrace and its effect on the suit’s integrity. He could hear the creak of ceramite about him and the strain of servos. Above him the monster’s elephantine skull belted out a roar of triumph, something to enrage the sea of green about it to savage jubilation, before it acted upon its intention to crush the Adeptus Astartes like a cheap alloy can.

Thane felt the monster tense further. His auto-senses registered a rapid descent, and before he knew it he was back on the hull of the Alcazar Astra. The creature had released him, and the captain was free. Descending further to one ceramite knee, Thane turned in the gore, his boltgun ready to blast a crater in the gargantuan thing.

He found that the giant greenskin’s legs had been taken out from under it. The creature had nothing below its knees and had fallen down onto the bloody stumps. As it toppled forwards onto all fours, Thane saw Apothecary Reoch standing behind the beast. Reoch had been responsible for the sweeping amputation. His armour was dripping with blood, but his chainsword gleamed like a surgical tool. The Apothecary stomped forwards, hacking down on the maimed creature, executing precision strikes like a living autopsy on the beast-ork. It roared its rage and frustration briefly before the Apothecary worked his way up to the fang-mangled skull of the thing and took it off at the neck.

‘Back!’ Maximus Thane bawled as he slid back around on his knee. Behind him he found the wall of green once more. ‘Back… Back…Back!’ he called, his commands accompanied by single bolt-rounds of persuasion. One by one, the rushing oncomers dropped before the weapon’s fury.

A Thunderhawk swooped above them, hammering into the masses with its heavy bolters. The gunship cut a path of mulched ork-flesh through the enemy lines, taking with it the next few beasts in line for Thane’s vengeance. The Thunderhawks were doing what they always did: performing admirably. They were inflicting horrific casualties on the invasion host, but the impact of their bloody work was neither seen nor felt by the battle-brothers on the ground. The orks weren’t impressed by the gunships or their death-delivering ordnance. The roar of the Mars-pattern engines and the punishment of their heavy guns and cannons drove the monsters into fits of exultant rage. As a homogenous war host, the ork invaders resembled some kind of mythical beast. Where one creature fell, two others would charge from the throngs in its place.

Standing once more, Thane felt his power pack brush against the Apothecary’s. The pair fought back to back — Reoch opening up monsters with precision and Thane finding his way to single-shot kills with his brutal bolter fire.

‘Mortalities?’ Thane called across the helmet vox.

‘Fourteen that have been relayed to my suit,’ Reoch replied, gunning his chainsword in neat arcs.

‘I thought worse than that.’

‘You’re relieved by the number,’ the Apothecary said. ‘You shouldn’t be. Do the arithmetic: we won’t see the dawn.’