Zerberyn held his breath as the echoes died. Chains and hoses clinked and swayed. Lips slurped. Tosque covered his angles warily. Columba calmly moved to cover another angle of approach through the maze of stalls. Zerberyn checked his visor display. Ident-runes shuffled across the display: there was Tarsus to his left, Galen and his team spreading out through the cattle sheds, Hardran in the plane above.
Nothing. He allowed his battle readiness to ease.
An enquiring grunt sounded from deeper in the complex. It was porcine, feral. Tension returned immediately to Zerberyn’s grip. The battle for Eidolica was fresh in his memory, the savage grunt-speak of the alien a repugnance he would remember until death relieved him of his duty.
‘Contacts!’ he roared, stepping away from the stall and aiming his bolt pistol into the swaying, clinking,
His beam hit something green. Metal winked from an axe-blade, tooth caps, the lead-hued base of tribal body art. He spared a passing split-second of a thought to the human cattle all around, packed in so close he could feel their body heat. He dismissed the minor variable. There was no longer any hope for them.
He fired.
The bolt-round exploded in the ork’s face, blasting the brute back and down against a partition wall. Reoch and Columba pushed forwards with him in lockstep, a perfect firing line, pistols blazing. From above, Tosque opened up with a strobing burst of fire, stitching a line of eviscerated ork green and human pink across a row of stalls. Without warning, the veteran-brother checked his fire, turned, and opened up on the second floor. Answering fire from stubbers and shooters bracketed the Space Marine’s armour and chewed into the steel wall behind him. He held firm, breaking up the incoming fire with controlled, even bursts of bolter fire.
A triumphant cry filled the unit vox, then cut off. Hardran’s rune blinked from gold to black in Zerberyn’s visor. Red threat icons, generated by his suit’s auspex, boiled around the edges of his display.
A firecrack bang hit the side of his helm with something hot and wet.
He staggered back until his genetic gifts could eliminate the aural shock and reassert his sense of balance. Reoch was down, a bullet in his temple. Zerberyn stepped over the downed Apothecary, solid slugs spanking off his battleplate.
Heavy stubber fire was thundering down on him from the second level. By weight of numbers and brute resilience, a mob of orks had taken the overhang that looked over the factory floor and forced Tosque onto the stairs. The veteran was firing point-blank now, descending backwards, ceding the stair step by step.
The orks were huge, bare-chested, arrogant in their simplicity. In a moment of clarity, Zerberyn saw them for what they were. They were the greenskins’ exemplars.
With a furious cry, Columba fired up his chainsword. The sergeant stepped up onto the air-cycler set against the stair-side wall and jumped across the walkspace, reaching the opposite side stall where he kicked, a servo-assisted release of superhuman force that drove his power-armoured bulk crashing through the metal balustrades and into the orks piling down the stairs. Blood sprayed across the wall, and for a moment it was impossible to distinguish the howls of the orks from that of Columba’s chainsword.
Reoch’s mouth-grille chewed out gravel sounds as he shook his head and rose with a slur of motorised joints, freeing a frag grenade from the clutch at his hip. He pulled the pin and lobbed the charge overarm onto the second level.
The explosion blew out the handrail, smashed the orks’ lacklustre fire discipline and brought down part of the ceiling. The Apothecary turned his half-metal grimace on Zerberyn. His face was a bloody mess, the bullet trapped between the metallic struts that secured his augmetics to the bone.
‘Retrograde aberrations,’ he snarled.
Zerberyn yanked the Apothecary behind him as an ork wearing serpentine tattoos and what looked like human-skin shorts kicked through a stall door and charged. Its axe clanged against Zerberyn’s raised vambrace. Steel on ceramite, it never stood a chance. With a loud crack the haft splintered, the head spinning aside, but the strength behind the initial blow was phenomenal and sent Zerberyn reeling.
A bolt-round punched through the ork’s ribcage and blasted half its chest out through its back. A second round blew out the other half before a third in quick succession detonated between its eyes and finally killed it in its tracks. Brother Antille lowered his boltgun, the muzzle steaming hot.
‘Gunship inbound. Five minutes.’
Zerberyn nodded gratitude and opened a vox-link. ‘Pull back to the landing zone and regroup.’ He turned to Reoch. ‘Select your subjects, Apothecary. They are to be the lucky ones after all.’
The bloodied Apothecary lowered his pistol and stalked to the nearest stall to obey.
