JAGHATAI KHAN WARHAWK OF CHOGORIS Read online

  Those combined forces, a vast array of ivory-clad war machines and infantry contingents, arranged themselves in a wide circle, blocking access to the Bloodmaw from all sides. Once the artillery trains had been hauled into place, heavy bombardment commenced, peppering the outer rim with incendiaries and mortars. Overflights of Legion bombers hammered the central regions of the enormous complex, knocking out the main banks of anti-aircraft fire and smashing the last of the flightworthy ork fighter craft. Soon the entire bowl was aflame, sending a towering haze of dirty black smoke curling above them, so vast that it looked like some grotesquely proportioned pillar joining earth to sky.

  The initial barrage lasted for more than six hours, pulverising the ground so completely that sections of it cracked and reformed as soot-stained glass. The target was so large that even orbital lasers lanced down into its centre, scything through the accumulated networks of bridges and chambers and gouging great pits deep into the Bloodmaw’s heart.

  But ranged fire could only accomplish so much. The complex was vast enough and subterranean enough that the xenos could shelter within it almost indefinitely. Bitter experience had taught Imperial tacticians that the only way to be sure of a greenskin kill was to cut it down at close quarters, for they had been known to crawl out of bombsites and rad-zones almost intact. So it was that the Khan assembled his captains in a shielded command bunker less than ten kilometres from the first artillery emplacements in order to give his orders for the final, and necessary, ground offensive.

  More than thirty of the combined field commanders attended, almost all of them Legion khans or captains, and more than two-thirds from the White Scars. Sejanus was the senior Luna Wolves officer, a tall and imposing figure with silver eyes and a solid bearing. Qin Xa, Hasik and Naranbaatar were present also, and when Giyahun entered the chamber the three of them burst into smiles of unfeigned happiness.

  ‘He returns at last,’ Hasik said, in Khorchin, reaching out to grasp him by the hand.

  ‘In time to end this thing,’ Giyahun grinned. ‘Even I tire of it now. I have not eaten good meat for too long.’

  ‘There are more worlds to conquer yet,’ said Qin Xa flatly.

  ‘I think we can leave those ones to you, brother,’ said Hasik.

  ‘Do not jest,’ warned Giyahun. ‘He would take the challenge.’

  Then the chamber’s doors slid open again, and the laughter died away. All turned towards the portal and bowed.

  The Khan had to stoop to enter. He was arrayed for battle, his gold-edged armour glinting under the bunker’s sodium lumens. Unlike all others assembled there, there was hardly a mark on his battleplate. In another commander that might have been looked on askance, as if he had not sought his fair share of hard fighting, but none were foolish enough to believe that – a primarch was made such that even getting a weapon close to him was an achievement; landing one was another matter entirely.

  ‘So here we are again,’ the Khan said, addressing them all, with a wry smile, in his deeply accented Gothic. ‘Another world on the cusp of falling.’ He glanced at Sejanus. ‘I am glad to see you here, captain. You have done honour to my brother, for I know your road was hard.’

  Sejanus bowed. ‘The honour was ours, lord,’ he said.

  ‘And Hasik too,’ the Khan noted. ‘Last, as ever, to make a muster.’

  Hasik bowed. ‘We had some trouble with the shamans, Khagan.’

  ‘Solved now, I understand.’

  ‘We found ways.’

  ‘Good. All should learn from them.’ The Khan looked up, then swept his eyes across the crowded chamber. ‘We know this will be hard fighting. The hain never make it easy – this is their world, and they will not lie down and let us take it from them. Admire them for that. I do.’

  All listened. The Khan never raised his voice; he spoke as he always did, in that almost lazy, solidly anchored timbre. He had never had to roar his commands – for him to breathe them was enough.

  ‘There is no great art or cunning that could take this place without bloodshed,’ he went on. ‘Even if there were infinite time, which there is not, we could not starve them out nor bleed them from a thousand choice cuts, so we will reach out into their nest and fight them on the inside. This is not work for the others. The brunt of it will be borne by us alone.’

  There were soft murmurs of assent. The auxiliary forces had performed well throughout the long campaign, offering stalwart support in a hundred massed engagements, but this was different. The tanks would not get into those tunnels, and in such confines regular infantry would struggle. Space Marines had been designed for such work, whether it be in the catacombs of an alien world or inside the tight corridors of a battle cruiser.

  ‘The attack routes are planned, and you will have seen them by now,’ the Khan said. ‘All gates will be taken simultaneously, all routes inward assaulted together. They will be crushed from the outside in, but be wary – they have not forgotten how to channel that damned roaring, so the Stormseers will be essential. We will be spread thin, and the longer this takes the more men we will lose. I wish to see a swift end to it, so I will lead the attack into the centre. When we decapitate the monster, the body collapses. Hasik, Giyahun – you will come with me and the Legion keshig. Sejanus – I would welcome your presence also.’

  Sejanus bowed. ‘By your command, lord. I will relish it.’

  ‘They’re stirring already,’ the Khan said, an anticipatory smile creeping across his predatory features. ‘They know it won’t be long now, and they’re timing their frenzy. We must outmatch them in that. There is a saying on Chogoris – to hunt the beast one becomes the beast. Reflect on that, in the few moments we have remaining.’

  Hasik smiled in recognition, and looked at Giyahun. There was an air of impatience kindling now, a desire to see it done.

  ‘I told you to admire them,’ the Khan said. ‘But not too much. One can admire the thing one kills without being beholden to it. Do this with no spite, and take no pleasure in the killing itself, only the action that delivers it. You are warriors, of a proud and ancient line, and that is the essential matter – we indulge in this violence today because there are other days when we forget it. Thus are we made different from those we come here to end – in time, this will be behind us, and our joy will come from other sources.’

  Then his eyes glittered with the old raw enjoyment.

  ‘But not today,’ he said, almost conspiratorially. ‘On this day, we show them the storm.’

  The noise was incredible, off the scale, so violent as to be physically damaging. The hain-ghallh surged so mightily that the earth cracked underfoot, and every crystal shook like a leaf in a gale. The cannons boomed, punching through translucent outcrops and blasting them into spiralling balls of fused slag. The xenos came pushing up out of every hole and crevice, welling like a dark green boil-froth, hurling invective in their guttural battle-tongue before opening up with smoke-filthed hammerguns and gushing flamers.

  The legionaries ran straight into it. From every side, from every vantage, they sped headlong into the charge, a carpet of white that crashed against the defences and burrowed deep into them. The onslaught was as vicious as any that had been launched thus far on that world, only greater in scale, for all forces were concentrated now, merged and augmented and combined into a rampaging host of optimal killing power.

  Every Legion individual was a tiny army in his own right, capable of laying low entire cities – a mobile tank carcass built up around a living man. The sheer power concentrated in that nexus was formidable, and yet it was multiplied a thousand times by the way in which every one of them fought alongside one another. They knew where their battle-brothers were at all times, warned by both preternatural senses and the ever-changing stream of tactical data that enveloped their helm-augmented visual environments. If an advance looked reckless and haphazard, it was always anything but. A bolt-shell would be launched, and every fighter around it would already be reacting, knowing that its target was
now accounted for and reaching for another. A xenos would break from cover, and every fighter would know who would take it down, and how long that would take, and what to do if he failed, and how to react if he succeeded. Individually, a Space Marine could lay low cities. Collectively, they could lay low galaxies.

  The two armies smashed together, and the crescendo of ear-cracking noise ramped up further, pocked by alien screams and human bellows, by thin vox-crackles and fulsome throat-roars. Lightning, all of it now warp spun and glimmering, crackled down into the tunnels, catching and racing like wildfire, shriving the hurtling resonance of the xenos roar and winnowing it out.

  Hit simultaneously by more than twenty different battlefronts, all perfectly combined and interlocked with support fire, the xenos outer defences were swept aside and the slipshod gates broken open. Warriors punched through burning arches and into the tunnels beyond, breaking down into shadowy galleries lit only by the fungoid lumps and thick with animal stink.

  And there they died. The orks were outmatched in organisation and equipment, but not in numbers and not in raw strength. Fuelled by the ongoing roar-harmonics of the shamans, they hit back at every ingress site and launched counter-attacks of their own. Ironclad lurch-walkers swaggered up from the depths, their rusty claws whirling with fire. Hulking creatures with blood-daubed faces spat out blinding levels of projectiles before throwing themselves into the blood-soaked melee with hooked mauls and energy-wracked cleaver blades.

  The tunnels were murderous, tightly wound and locked deep with killing. There was no room in them, no space even to breathe, only a claustrophobic press of crystal edges and dripping fungal growths underlaid with oppressive clamour and stench. The legionaries were driven by steel-edged discipline and the prospect of glory; the xenos by the absolute refusal, drilled deep into every chromosome of their ludicrously resilient bodies, to even contemplate standing down.

  So not every battle was won. The greenskins pushed the Legions back in some of the salients, bogged down more, but enough were swept aside in the blitz-paced attacks to form an ingress route, shoving long wounds deeper and deeper into the thickening underground maw. Tactical squads overran intersections and drove on further, backed up by ranged-fire teams. Krak grenades blew barricades apart, and were stormed by warriors wielding thunder hammers and storm shields before others came to consolidate the gains.

  In methodology there was little to choose between the two attacking Legions. Both looked like ghosts in that hellish underworld, their armour pale amid the flashing whirl of lumens, both soon streaked with the blood of the enemy. There was no latitude for finesse there, no clear runs for grand charges; there were only the essentials – sword thrust, fist punch, close-range bolter shot – and in that every Space Marine was much the same: as fast and as accurate, as indomitable and as dogged, as any fighters ever created. Even their mingled voices were lost in the echoing thunder, so that Gothic and Cthonian and Khorchin were merged and all that remained distinct was the desperate, elemental struggle for supremacy.

  Only one engagement was one-sided – the launch of the primary spearhead formation, headed by the Khan and his keshig. Qin Xa fought at his primarch’s side, a living tempest in ivory and gold, his habitual reserve swept away by the sheer volume of killing he unleashed. Hasik and Giyahun were scarce less brutal, leading their own chosen retinues and flinging disruptor-crowned blades around with abandon. Sejanus of the Luna Wolves, also in full Terminator armour, headed up his own knot of grizzled veterans, fighting in a more orthodox fashion but with no reduction in deadliness. Three hundred warriors in all made up that spearhead, by far the smallest of the tactical units launched into the xenos hive, but by a distance the most lethal and the fastest moving. Driven onward by the unmatchable example of the primarch, they tore their way deeper, tearing a path towards the deepest core.

  The Khan himself was unstoppable. The psychic roar that had proved so destructive during the long campaign had no purchase on him. All who fought alongside him seemed immune to its soul-deadening effects, sharing in a corona of psychic protection as he slew and slew and slew. In his presence, every legionary was enhanced, lifted to an even more rarefied level of precision. Only before him did the orks display anything close to hesitancy – their bellows died out, their blows fell awry, their tenacity seemed to melt. As the Khan’s great curved blade rose and fell, shrouded now in thick layers of xenos blood, the spearhead delved ever deeper, hurtling towards the kernel of that dark and alien city.

  The perfect warrior, his sons called him. That prideful moniker seemed almost modest then, set against the magnificence of the Khan’s art, yet there was nothing arrogant in it, nothing reflective, just an unconscious and instinctive brilliance with the blade, an exuberance that lit up the narrow paths and banished the foetid shadows, an exactitude that carried both terror and awe in its glittering wake. When they saw this mood upon him, the White Scars believed the Khan had no equal in any army of any race of any time. His sons were hardly impartial, of course, and there were many such claims made about many other warriors. That did not mean, as Hasik was fond of observing when the matter came up, that they were entirely wrong.

  They finally broke into the huge chamber at the base of the entire complex. The earth shook with heat around them, and the walls themselves glowed a sullen red. Magma plumes jetted from the unquiet surface of a wide lake of fire, splashing against stalactites of crystal that jutted from the high chamber roof.

  Only one path spanned that inferno – a long spur of reflective rock, ten metres wide and a hundred long, thrown out across the churn below like some incongruous processional. The spur was both smooth and wide, rising gradually along its length towards a final gate – the portal into the innermost chamber of the entire subterranean complex.

  The orks had gathered before the gate in huge numbers, knowing that this was their last stand. They clustered before heavy piers of rock, each one decorated with crude effigies of their strange gods, their warriors’ hides almost black against the dance of flame. These were the largest of their kind, held back for the greatest of the great fights, and they lumbered heavily out to war now, screaming with almost inchoate belligerence.

  And it was there, halfway across that causeway, that the advance was halted for the first time. The huge xenos monsters crashed in among the Terminators, and a matched slaughter began in earnest. A maelstrom of bullets and energy weapons scythed out from positions below the gate’s vast sagging lintel, spraying death into the popping magma below. White Scars and Luna Wolves elites strove with oncoming waves of xenos, drawing deep on near-limitless reserves of strength, but still the assault faltered. The Khan himself engaged a hulking leviathan clad in power armour, and the two of them wrestled together at the apex of the spur’s arch, two titans of combat raging amid the leaping flames.

  For a critical moment, the position teetered. The vanguard force had pushed on far ahead of all other elements in its audacious bid to sever the beast’s head and bring a swift end to the engagement. The entire Bloodmaw above them was still gripped with a rictus of combat on every level, but most of those battles were still a long way off. The orks sensed this, and every one of the gate guards surged out to slam heavily into the outnumbered throng. The multiplied impact of those hits was horrific, and one of Giyahun’s own Terminator guards, weighing many tonnes, was thrown bodily from the causeway and sent plummeting into the magma below.

  Giyahun slew the originator of that stroke, slicing the creature in two with a savage slash of his glaive. As he did so, something even greater stirred under the occlusion of the gate itself – something huge and sluggish, bleeding with xenos malice, its hide crackling with greenish energies, its limbs barred with overlapping plates of iron so thick that a man would have been crushed to bear just one of them.

  ‘Chogoris!’ Giyahun cried, spinning out of contact with the next greenskin, swerving around the next and vaulting past three more.

  Spurred by that example, others pushed forwa
rds. Qin Xa was as deadly as ever, eviscerating each opponent with his crackling blades even as he turned to face the next. Hasik and Sejanus fought on side by side, screening one another as they hacked and maimed. The Khan dispatched the monster before him with a blistering flurry of speed-blurred strokes, kicking the corpse out into the magma lake.

  By then Giyahun had reached the gate. He killed twice more before turning to the hulking creature emerging from the gloom. He got two strikes in – jabs with his glaive that seared flesh and provoked a roar that made the entire chamber shake to its foundations. Even over that booming bellow, the warrior’s laugh could be heard – savage, unfettered, capricious.

  Then the fist swung out – a vast alien slab, a curl of green-black flesh as hard as beaten adamantium. It caught Giyahun at the neck, a jackhammer blow that drove him to his knees.

  ‘Ukhrakh!’ shouted the Khan, too far away, alarmed for the first time.

  Withdraw, the Khorchin signified – a principle of warfare on the plains as old as time, but here just a command, shouted in sudden desperation.

  Giyahun reeled, with no intention of obeying. His break from formation had galvanised the attack, and he whirled his glaive around to plunge it into the behemoth’s armour-clad neck. The stave flashed around, perfectly aimed, but the creature was faster than it looked. It struck out again, biting into the warrior’s helm and smashing through ceramite, tearing up muscle and breaking bone.

  Giyahun’s feet flew from the earth, his heavy body propelled, breaking apart, over the seething lake of fire. The Khan reached out, impossibly distant, as if he could reel him in by force of will alone.

  When Giyahun hit the magma, his hunched power pack exploded, igniting a bubble of thundering flame. For a moment the entire chamber seemed to shudder. The White Scars halted, sudden disbelief staying their hands. Even the orks sensed something, and their headlong charge missed a beat. The Khan himself broke from combat and stared into the waves of breaking fire, his cloak snapping against the gale of force unleashed. What remained of Giyahun’s body was consumed in that hurricane, burned away, rendered down to atoms.