The Beast Arises

Dazed, Laurentis stepped backwards. He trembled. He knew there had been long ages in Imperial history when the greenskin tribes had posed the greatest of all threats to the security, the continued existence, of the Imperium of Mankind. He’d always presumed this was simply a result of their sheer numbers, their ubiquity. He’d never considered the orks to have any potency as a species. They were little more than animals, mindless and unskilled, mobbing in the fringes of the stars, an endless supply of cannon-fodder for Imperial guns in the frontier wars. They were not a genuine threat, not like the malevolent forces of the Archenemy, or the threat of heretical civil war, or even the genius machinations of the eldar. Those were dangers to be taken seriously. The orks were a joke, an annoyance, a bothersome chore. They were an infestation that had to be managed, cut back, and kept down. They were not a critical hazard. They were not… They were not…

They were not this.

He understood now. Laurentis understood. He understood why past eras of mankind had lived in fear of the greenskins for centuries, why the frontier wars had raged forever, why the periodic Waaagh!s had been threats that had caused the entire populations of colonised systems to evacuate and flee, why the prospect of a credible warboss and his horde was something that could make a sector governor or a warmaster quake. He understood why, more than any other accomplishment of the Great Crusade, the God-Emperor had been so determined to stop the greenskin threat dead at Ullanor.

He understood why the orks were an eternal menace that could never be ignored.

He just didn’t understand how they could be six warp-weeks from the Terran Core.

He looked up. The rain hit his face, washing blood out of his beard. He stared at the manifested moon. Its machined, pock-marked, plated surface was ork technology. He could see that. How? How had they done this?

The moon whirred. Surface features moved and adjusted. Vast armour plating structures re-aligned. Shutters the size of inland seas opened and folded. A huge maw appeared. The stylised image of a vast and monstrous ork face manifested on the surface of the rogue moon. Its eyes burned with magmatic light from the moon’s core. Its titanic, tusked mouth stretched open wide, and it bellowed at the world below, the loudest and biggest noise burst of all. It was like a pagan god screaming at a sacrificial offering.

I am Slaughter.

Laurentis shuddered. He was having difficulty standing up. A hand grabbed at his arm.

It was Nyman.

‘What are you doing?’ Nyman yelled. ‘Get into cover!’

At least one of the rampaging beasts nearby had spotted the magos biologis. It was coming for him through the rain, shield and cleaver raised. Nyman fired several shots at it with his pistol and then began to drag Laurentis back into the tunnels. The ork came after them. As it entered the confines of the blisternest duct, its roaring screams began to echo and resound.

Nyman stopped and fired at it again. The ork advanced. Laurentis could smell it. It seemed to fill the tunnel, head down, shoulders hunched. The rasping tone of its voice was deep, deeper than any human voice.

‘Run!’ Nyman told the magos biologis. Laurentis tried to obey, but he wasn’t very good at it. Nyman had pulled a grenade from his battledress pouch. He primed it and hurled it at the advancing monster.

The blast brought a section of tunnel down, either burying the ork or driving it back. Nyman and Laurentis picked themselves up and struggled back towards the magos’s chamber.

‘We’re finished,’ Nyman said. ‘Did you see their numbers?’

Laurentis realised he could hear the major quite clearly, because the major had opened the faceplate of his orbital armour.

Laurentis could hear something else, something tinny and thin crackling out of the man’s helmet set.

‘Your vox is working,’ Laurentis said.

‘What?’

‘Your vox!’

Nyman noticed the noise.

‘I… Yes, I suppose it is. The signal’s live again.’

Laurentis thought feverishly. He sank to his knees in front of his bank of devices and instruments, and began to reset and adjust them. White-noise screens flickered back into life. He had resolution on several of them, and dataflows. Some of them had burned out entirely, but many were functioning better than they had done in weeks.

‘There’s still gross interference from the noise bursts,’ Laurentis said as he worked, ‘but the gravitational storm has eased. Yes, look. Look.’

Nyman crouched beside him.

‘We’ve got vox-banding again,’ he said. ‘And data sequences.’

‘Exactly,’ said Laurentis. ‘All the while the moon was in transition from… from wherever it came from… there were colossal levels of gravitational disruption. The storm itself. The whole of Ardamantua was stricken with it. Most tech was as good as useless.’

The magos biologis glanced at Nyman.