Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [68]
The slaughter is easy, almost mindless. Priamus is like a wolf on the leash, eager to run ahead on his own.
My patience is wearing thin with him.
Each chamber also shows its own unique desecration. Tech-adepts and Ecclesiarchy priests lie dead and butchered, their bodies in pieces across the mosaic floors. Unarmed as they were, they offered little resistance to the rampaging invaders. Bookshelves are overturned, ceramic ornaments shattered… I would never put feral destruction past this xenos-breed, but it almost seems as if the greenskins sought something specific in their rabid assault.
‘The articulation structures are sealed. My bones are defended by internal forces. My heart-core is cut off from the parasites.’
Ambush or not, it is disgusting that it took them even this long to achieve such basic necessities.
‘We are retaking the Cathedral of Sanctuary,’ I tell her. ‘Resistance is minimal, Zarha. But you must stand. They are still coming. Bring the cathedral out of range of boarders, or we will be overwhelmed.’
‘I cannot stand,’ she says.
What a sin it is, for such a majestic warrior to speak with such shameful defeat tainting her words. Were she one of my men, I would kill her for such dishonour. Slowly. By strangulation. Cowardice does not deserve the rush of a blade.
‘I have tried,’ she intones.
The emotion colouring her machine-voice brings my bile rising. For all I know, she could be weeping. My disgust is so powerful I must fight the need to vomit.
‘Try harder,’ I breathe into the vox, and sever the link.
We fight our way to the outer battlements at Stormherald’s front, where the incline allows for easy boarding. An ork’s fat hand slaps on the red metal of the battlement’s edge, and the brute hauls itself up. My pistol meets its face, the heat exchanger vanes hissing against its skin. It has a moment to bawl its hatred at me before I pull the trigger. What remains of the alien falls from its handholds, tumbling to the ground, burning briefly on its way down as a living torch of white-hot fire.
The battlements resemble a true siege in all respects. The last remaining tech-adepts and priests defend the cathedral against boarding aliens, though no more than a small cluster remain. Few humans, augmented or otherwise, are a match for one of these beasts.
Priamus slips the leash of discipline. His charge carries him ahead, his sword flaring with light each time its power field saws into alien flesh. My brothers lay into the enemy along the besieged wall with bolter and blade. The few servitor-manned spire turrets that had been spitting solid shots into the mass of orks fall silent, not willing to risk striking any of us.
‘You will do penance for this, Priamus.’
He doesn’t answer. ‘For the Emperor!’ he cries into the vox. ‘For Dorn!’
In the pockets of battle where none of us stand, the turrets open fire once again. At least their servitors are worth something, then. The orks turn from butchering the few priests still standing. Their bestial faces are afire with brutish, eager emotion as they come for us.
One of them… Throne of the Emperor… One of them dwarfs his piggish brethren. His armour makes him twice the size of us, looking like scrap metal and primitive, chugging power generators bolted onto an exoskeletal frame. His hands are industrial claws that look as if they could peel a tank apart without effort. He even kills his own kin as he strides towards us on the inclined floor. His claws swing, battering his lesser allies aside, hurling them against the cathedral wall or over the battlement’s edge.
I raise my crozius in a two-handed grip.
‘That one is mine,’ I tell my brothers.
Dorn is watching this.
‘You asked to see me, sir?’
Tomaz didn’t bother to straighten his crumpled work overalls as he stood at what could loosely be called attention. Around him, the command chamber was its usual bustling