The Beast Arises

The Thunderbolts were banking for another run and orks were leaping from the blasted city-shell. Flailing green bodies tumbled the lethal distance to the roofs and rockcrete below. Some creatures made it, however, latching on to drifting gunships and carriers with claws and brute prosthetics, before smashing though into the cockpits and bringing the aircraft down. Worst of all, the hive was drowning in alien filth. Like a rampant mould growing up the city walls, greenskins were swarming the shell, rabid and unstoppable. The pontoon shanty would share a similar fate.

A beast erupted from the water like a carnivorous fish, its jaws snapping. Pulling hard on the trigger, Allegra unloaded the rest of her power pack into the thing’s face. Another had torn through the rickety walkway and was cannoning towards her. Las-bolts from nearby guardsman plucked at the monster, but did little to stop it. The patchwork floor bounced with its footsteps. Dropping the empty pistol and grabbing the wobbly support, Allegra leapt the rail, allowing the creature to thunder past.

Just as she was about to climb back, a meaty claw grabbed her by the leg. An ork had her. She could feel the feral fury in its grip, its filthy fist enclosing the whole of her booted calf. It hauled itself up to meet her, its tusk-thronged maw mumbling some alien insanity. Allegra snatched for the only weapon she had left: her officer’s hanger. It was a polite weapon, nothing like the brute blades she used in her former life. Its single monomolecular edge was serviceable, however, and cleared its stubby scabbard with oiled ease. The blade slashed though the greenskin’s exposed throat, giving even the mindless monster pause. It released her and with the sole of her boot against its cavernous chest she pushed it back into the water with a grunt.

As she climbed up onto the pontoon shanty, the commander felt the structure lurch. A rock or capsule had plunged into the water nearby, rocking the section and knocking several terrified inhabitants into the water. It wasn’t stopping the greenskins, however, who were surfacing from sinking pods and descent craft and climbing up the nearest structures they could find.

‘Lux!’ she heard as she wiped and resheathed her bloody hanger. It was Gohlandr. The chief was on a bent and rusty balcony above, tangled in washing lines and rags. Gunner DuDeq was with him, and the Lord Governor’s skeletal arm was draped across the vox-officer’s shoulder. Gohlandr dropped DuDeq’s assault rifle down to Allegra and she caught it in both hands. She called up to him.

‘Get Borghesi higher,’ she ordered.

‘What about you?’ the chief roared back over the chaos.

‘I’m coming,’ she told him. Checking the lasrifle’s depleted power pack and priming it to fire on full automatic, Allegra shouldered the weapon and began a messy climb of the shanty structure.

Two floors up, and the profusion of purchase offered by the ramshackle hab-shacks and walkways allowed the commander to make good progress. Occasionally, she hooked her flak armour on protruding struts or exposed rivets of the structure. In the background she could still hear the bark of enforcer shotguns and the staccato drum of las-bolts above. Greenskins, frothing at the maw, had made equally economic climbs and were savaging the dwindling party of guardsmen and survivors making their way up through the shanty. Risking a glance below, Allegra saw that the pontoon levels were completely overrun. Like Hive Tyche, the shanty had succumbed to the greenskin swarms.

The structure suddenly staggered, knocking Allegra from her precarious purchase. This wasn’t the shockwave from a plunging rock or pod: something had hit the shanty. Her arm slipped out of her rifle strap. She snatched for the stock, and dangled from the lasgun’s pistol grip by one hand. The strap had been caught on a rusted nail. As the shanty rocked, Allegra bounced off the corrugated wall of a shack.

A greenskin — black, scarred and charred — had surfaced like a behemoth and punched through the pontoon hull of the shanty. As water cascaded from its gargantuan body, the beast swept derelict shacks and habs aside with one furious arm, knocking mobs of its own xenos kin back into the shallows. One monster had the rabid audacity to roar its frustration, and the larger beast snatched it up in one titanic claw and snapped its carping head clean off its shoulders.

Reaching up for the rifle with her other hand, Allegra found her way back to hand- and boot-holds on the shanty wall. Slipping the blessed rifle back over her shoulder, the commander climbed for her life, with the greenskin starting its own shanty-listing ascent behind her.