Of Lions and Beasts
Part II
By author Perfidious Albion
"That's no moon."
No-one wanted to believe it. Yet the vid-cast from the Claw of de Leon's exterior lens still spoke its silent testimony.
The great terror was the size of a moon, five-hundred kilometres across, and roughly spherical, but there the resemblance ended. A moon was made of rock. This thing was solid metal, denser than lead. That should have made it much more massive than any true moon, which would have been noticed by the battleship's auspices. It was not. That could only mean there was something of low density in there, too, probably hydrogen: enormous quantities of hydrogen, for nuclear fuel.
It was not a perfect sphere, either. The superstructure was clearly unfinished, with great segments bared to space. But what was there was clear enough. There was a pair of jagged symbols engraved on the sphere's side—was 'engraved' the right word, when the engravings were like oceanic trenches, kilometres deep and across, and as long as continents?—whose meaning the Astartes knew nothing of. And the sphere was in the shape of a snarling Ork's face, complete with tusks and maw.
"I suppose we know where they were taking all those slaves, now," said one Conqueror faintly. The other Astartes on the Claw of de Leon laughed, though it was not funny. They were all too shell-shocked to process it in full.
"My sons, pull yourselves together." All jumped to attention when the King of Lions spoke. "Yes, this is a most fearful Orkish war machine. Nonetheless we will destroy it. We must. You see that, there?" He pointed at the lens's feed.
"What is it, Exalted Magnificence?" asked Diego de Uragon, Brother-Marshal of the First March of the Conquerors, the only such high officer to be on-board the Claw of de Leon and not some other starship.
The one who replied to him was a Tech-Marine, Battle-Brother Juan de Cabaca, not the Primarch. "It's a Warp engine. With your permission, Your Exalted Magnificence," de Cabaca added, turning to de Leon, a little sheepish. De Leon just told him without words to continue with a magnanimous hand-gesture. "Look at the shape. Those prongs, those streamlines, those nacelles. It is gigantic, grotesquely outsized, like nothing I have ever seen—it makes a Gloriana look small—but I would stake my life on it: that is an engine for Warp Drive."
"This is no mere Star Fort," de Uragon realised aloud. "This thing can cross the void between the stars."
"Precisely, which is why we must see it destroyed," said de Leon. "This monstrosity is a threat to every Imperial planet."
"My lords." The voice was so small it took them a moment to register that someone had spoken. When they did, the Conquerors and their mighty gene-sire turned to a lowly officer of the starship, a young woman who spoke Naranjomundan with a bourgeois, shopkeeper-like accent.
The woman seized up and almost fainted when de Leon's brown eyes fell upon her. The magnificent presence of the King of Lions tended to have that effect on people. "Speak," the king said, not unkindly.
"I… I studied… Orkish xenos," the spacewoman stuttered. "…Curiosity." This, as if to defend herself, though no-one was accusing her. "Those runes…" She flailed a hand at the jagged symbols on the side of the great sphere. "That means 'World-Doom'."
There was a grim silence. Not one of the Conquerors doubted that she spoke the truth. Not one of them doubted that the massive Orkish battle-station could do exactly what it said it could.
"Then all the more we must see it destroyed," the king said finally. "Set up a vid-cast to the rest of the Legion."
The Tech-Marines and mortal officers of the Claw of de Leon snapped to his command. Soon enough, the King of Lions was staring into a pict-caster. "My sons. Today we face the greatest enemy the Imperium has ever faced. This construction, this thing, this monstrosity of Orkish make—" his voice dripped the venom of disgust— "is called the World-Doom, by the very symbols upon it. You know what that means. You know what it is meant for.
"Conquerors! We face an enemy intent on razing our Naranjomundan Worlds and our Imperium to the ground. These higher Orks will slaughter their way through the worlds of mankind… if we let them.
"We stand in an unmapped star-system, two-thousand light-years beyond the borders of the Imperium. No-one is coming to help us. This monstrosity has a Warp engine. It can move. We cannot flee and come back with reinforcements. If we did, it likely will not be here anymore, and we cannot take that chance. No-one else is coming, my sons. We must destroy this World-Doom alone.
"But take heart, my sons! I have absolute faith in your will to conquer, to seize victory. We are the Conquerors. All we see, we conquer. These higher Orks will not be the end of that. We, yes we the Conquerors, shall defeat the greatest ever enemy of the Imperium! We shall win glory beyond imagining, and prove to all our naysayers that there are none—none!—who are alike in might to the Fifth Legion!"
Thunderous cheers rang out across every starship that was home to the Astartes of the V Legion. The Conquerors trusted in the words of their gene-sire. They knew that he spoke true. They would follow their king and he would lead them to glory as he always had.
Among the encomendados, there was no cheering. They knew who would bear the brunt of this attack. Or rather, they would know, if anyone had told them. They had not. The broadcast from the Claw of de Leon had been aimed at the Battle Barges and Strike Cruisers bearing Astartes, not the smaller starships, troop transports bearing the Conquerors' mortal serf-soldiers. The words of the king were not for the encomendados. They would be told what they needed to know, when they needed to know.
With that, the attack began.
The first the Orks saw of the Conquerors' offensive was a scarlet blaze of Lance battery fire, streaking through the void at the speed of light. Next, barely a step behind, came the Thunderbolt Cannons, hurling relativistic projectiles at 90% the speed of light. Thunderbolt Cannons did not have specially made ammunition. They just used lumps of rock, about ten metres across, carved out of asteroids, and thus easily restocked. Thunderbolts were not made of adamantium or tungsten or depleted uranium. They did not have any explosives. They did not need them. When you were travelling at that speed, it did not matter what you were made of. A piece of rock of that size, that close to the speed of light, carried more than ten-billion times the energy of an atomic bomb from ancient Terra.
Yet that fearful bombardment did not breach the Void Shields of the World-Doom. The great fusion reactor inside the Orkish battle-station was the size of a planet's core, and powered by the white-hot heat of the heart of a star. It would not easily fail. Slowly, the battle-station turned to face its pursuers.
On they came, those pursuers: the war-fleet of the V Legion, closing the distance from where they had begun the attack, at more than a million kilometres away. The Conquerors' battleships formed into a Wall-of-Battle, pouring fire onto the World-Doom. Barrage after barrage of Lance batteries and Thunderbolt Cannons lashed out at the colossal battle-station, streaks of scarlet light and rocky Thunderbolts too swift to be seen. And they did not attack indiscriminately at the entire battle-station. All of their fire was focused at one point, or as near enough as they could make it.
The Orks' own war-fleet leapt to the World-Doom's defence. Hundreds of battleships—true battleships of Orkish make, not Space Hulks captured from other species—massed to surround it. But they had been taken by surprise. The Orkish battleships had not the time to form up in a proper Wall-of-Battle: the mighty three-dimensional formation of a wall of starships, stacked high above and abreast, so that they were able to concentrate all of their firepower at one enemy target. It was this Wall-of-Battle that gave battleships their name: starships of the Wall-of-Battle, like the wet-navy ships of the line-of-battle that had existed in elder days. The Orks did not have one. Not yet, and so not ever. The Conquerors had arrived without the Orks knowing of their presence, and Hernan de Leon took full advantage of that surprise with all the deadly intellect and killing instinct that Primarchs were known for.
De Leon gave the Orkish starships no time to mass in a Wall-of-Battle formation facing the direction of his fleet. Instead he kept the entire firepower of the Conquerors' fleet on one Orkish battleship, then, when she was destroyed, another, then another. There was to be no quarter, no relenting, no gentlemanly offer of time to catch breath and fight back. This was war unto the knife, brutal, merciless, and this time the Greenskins were at that knife's receiving side.
But the Greenskin fleet was the lesser part of the Orkish strength here today. The greater part by far was the World-Doom, and its fight was far from over.
Great plates rumbled and shifted on the battle-station's surface, revealing weapons turrets in tremendous numbers, some of them the size of the whole starships they were attacking. And the World-Doom unleashed its power against the fleet of the V Legion.
There was no sound in the void. If there were, the World-Doom's first barrage would have sounded like the roar of an angry god.
Millions of kinetic projectiles came roaring out to answer the fury of the Conquerors. Orkish Macrocannons were not Thunderbolt Cannons, for the Greenskins lacked the technological sophistication, or perhaps just the will, to launch things at large fractions of the speed of light. They made up for it with size. Asteroids up to a kilometre across hurtled out of the World-Doom's Macrocannons at thousands of kilometres per second. That was much slower than Thunderbolts or Lance fire. Some of them were able to be blasted out of the way. Some. Many an Imperial battleship was struck.
Their Void Shields rocked. Shield generators screamed from the momentum, almost torn out of their moorings by the massive impacts at terrible speed. They held, though. At least, they held this time. Void battles were lengthy affairs. They were rarely over in mere minutes, unless one side was greatly inferior. It was not a contest of one overpowering first barrage. It was a slugging match of energy, ammunition, armour and time.
That slugging match was only ever going to go one way. The World-Doom dwarfed any starship. Its moon-sized bulk could have swallowed up thousands of battleships, even those of the mighty Gloriana class. And it had reserves of reactor fuel and ammunition to match. In a prolonged battle against the entire V Legion fleet, there was not a chance that the World-Doom would run out first.
Hernan de Leon, of course, knew this. So the second part of the battle would begin.
Thus far, only the battleships had fought. Now it was their smaller sisters' turn to join the fray. Docking bays opened. Millions upon millions of small aerospacecraft dived out, prometheum engines bursting to life and streaking into the black of night.
On-board those aerospacecraft, more than a billion encomendados huddled together, fresh from the starships that were their troop transports, strapped tightly into their seats and clutching their lasguns in mortal hands.
One such encomendado, Jorge from the planet Ricamundo, asked, "Sergeant, d'you think we're going to make it?"
Jorge's parents had promised him endless times they would never sign him up for encomienda. Then they had, when he hit sixteen. They needed the money. It had been a bad harvest.
Jorge was seventeen years old. He had survived encomienda for more than a year. He was hoping to see eighteen. He had thought he might. That did not look as likely, now.
"We're gonna make it." His sergeant, Manuel, was a man of twenty-one: a wizened veteran by encomendado standards. "Just remember your training. Shoot at the enemy, don't spray and pray, don't waste your power-pack. You're gonna be fine, right?"
Shakily, Jorge nodded.
"There's my man."
The serf-soldiers of the Conquerors were coming to the World-Doom.
The World-Doom was ready for them.
Even as the larger Macrocannon turrets continued their duel with the battleships of the Imperial fleet, great plates of metal on the World-Doom's surface shifted, opening up smaller ones. These light, anti-aerospacecraft Macrocannon turrets spat death at the aerospacecraft carrying the encomendados.
In one volley, billions of small chunks of asteroid hurtled at the aerospacecraft. The encomendados' aerospacecraft juked, twisted and turned desperately to avoid them. Most of them succeeded. Some of them did not. Those unlucky few collided with pieces of asteroid at thousands of kilometres per second—much smaller than those that were being fired at the Void-Shielded starships but plenty big enough to kill an aerospacecraft.
Millions of encomendados died in the very first volley, far away from ever getting the chance to set foot on the Orkish battle-station. More died in the second volley, a quarter of a second later—they were closer, then, and easier to hit. Even more died in the third.
One of them, in the third volley, was Jorge's.
Aboard the Claw of de Leon, Hernan de Leon stood still, facing a metaplexiglass viewport, where he was watching the surviving aerospacecraft close in on the Ork-built monstrosity. Many aerospacecraft disappeared on the viewport. Tiny dots of light appeared and then winked out: brief bright prometheum explosions when an aerospacecraft was struck. Each light meant the lives of dozens of men. And there were so many lights going out, so quickly, that no man could count them.
One in four of the encomendados made it to the World-Doom. Those dots of light, small and silent in the void of space, represented a loss of life on a scale which even by Conqueror standards was staggering to contemplate.
A lone Astartes approached his gene-sire. "Your Exalted Magnificence," he said hesitantly, "should we call off the attack? It's been less than a minute since launch. Hundreds of millions of our encomendados are dying."
De Leon did not look back. "Hundreds of millions of them are still alive."
The first of the surviving encomendados landed on the World-Doom. They leapt out of their aerospacecraft, clutching lasguns, autocannons and melta grenades—the luckier of them had some tanks and artillery, here and there—and found themselves facing the great Orks of this new alien empire, bigger and stronger and cleverer than any Orks mankind had met before. The great Orks slew them by the millions. And yet the encomendados displayed a courage that their Astartes overlords did not respect or understand. Brave men stood and fought, knowing that their only ways out of here were to win or die, standing side-by-side with their comrades. And, somehow, their courage prevailed. With weight of numbers and of that courage, the encomendados cleared out a landing zone hundreds of kilometres wide. They overran the heavier anti-starship Macrocannons and lighter anti-aerospacecraft Macrocannons in that zone of the great battle-station's surface.
That was when the Conquerors came to conquer.
From the Battle Barges of the Conqueror fleet, a deadly rain of Caestus assault rams drove like daggers into the World-Doom. These were swift, blunt aerospacecraft, meant to dig in through a starship's armour and deposit their cargoes of Space Marines within. Astartes assault rams were much faster than the aerospacecraft used by the encomendados. This was not cruel disregard for the lives of their serfs, though it was true the Conquerors often displayed that trait. It was necessity. An ordinary human did not have the augmented skeletal and muscular structure of an Astartes. Put them in an assault ram and the impact would crush them to a bloody smear. It would be a death sentence. And even Hernan de Leon, the kind of man who would unhesitatingly send a million men to their deaths to achieve a military objective, would not send men to their deaths to achieve nothing.
From out of their assault rams sprang the Conquerors, like the lions of their symbol, red in tooth and claw. The great Orks rushed to face them. The Orks were the greater in size and strength, three to three and a half metres tall, versus only two and a half for the Astartes. But the Conquerors were better-armed. Whole brigades of yellow-armoured, red-helmed, red-gauntleted Space Marines burst out from their assault rams. Every Conqueror had his jetbike, and every jetbike had a mounted storm bolter, a heavy automatic weapon that could fire at a rate of two-hundred bolts a minute, and plenty of bolts for it. As soon as Orks turned a corner to face a squad of Conquerors, the Conquerors' storm bolters roared their bloody greeting. Often it took one, two, three bolts to kill one of these mighty Orks; but however many bolts it took, the Conquerors had plenty. Moving fast and ferocious as lions, the Conquerors mowed down hordes of hundreds of Orks like wheat to the scythe. Rarely did an Ork get close, and when he did, he would soon be felled by a Conqueror's Power Lance.
Thus did the sons of de Leon slash a bloody path through the great Orks of the new alien empire. One such son of de Leon was José de Carval, Brigadier of the 24th Brigade. His path seemed smooth. He and the five-thousand Space Marines under his command hit the greater Orks as they had hit every other foe: a fast fist, firing from afar, and striking down all in their way before the foe could rally against them. It was working well, until it was not.
A great voice was heard, deep and strong: "On, you useless maggots! Get yourselves together!" That alone was a shock, for the voice spoke not the Orks' crude pidgin Naranjomundan—it was well-known that Orks adapted to speak a broken version of whatever was the nearest non-Orkish species's language, and in this case, that was the Naranjomundan Worlds. The voice spoke perfect Naranjomundan.
"DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING MYSELF?"
And around the corner turned a monster.
José barely had time to register the sheer size of the thing—twice his height! five metres tall!—before it was upon him. With admirable Astartes reflexes he turned his storm bolter upon it and shot eight bolt rounds straight into its centre mass. The great Ork scarcely noticed. Its thick plates of Power Armour took the blow. José hefted his Power Lance. The Ork thrust it aside with the Power Sword in his green right hand, a contemptuous gesture, a flick of the wrist so powerful that the Power Lance was torn from José's hand. The Power Sword was thus poorly positioned to strike at José, so the Ork simply punched him. The impact felt like being hit by a truck. José was flung off his seat on his jetbike, which went spinning into a wall, and he crashed into the opposite wall and through it. He felt blood on his lips. It was hard to breathe. If he were to guess, he had several broken ribs and a punctured lung. All straight through his Power Armour. All from just one punch.
José's men of course were not idle. His brother Astartes of the squads around him aimed all their fire at the massive Ork. It availed nothing. The Ork took their bolts on his armour without flinching, parried their Power Lances with his blade, and slew them. A few were like José, dazed, winded and thrown into the walls. Most were no longer alive.
The huge Ork sprinted on, paying no heed to José. José soon saw why. Behind him, hundreds of his fellow Orks followed, roaring their WAAAAGH!-cries. This was no mindless Greenskin charge. The Orks moved with efficiency, taking shelter behind obstacles and laying down suppressing fire to assist the advance. It was as if, with the monstrous high Ork among them, they themselves became better somehow.
The two charges collided with each other, both uncompromisingly fast-paced: the charge of the 24th Brigade and the charge of the high Ork. In time even the great Ork's momentum slowed, for there were simply too many. The two forces, yellow-armoured and green-skinned, clashed in brutal close-quarters combat, which was not the Conquerors' forte. The Orks loved it. Slowly but surely, they were grinding the Conquerors down. And the Warboss—for surely he must be—was death wherever he went.
José de Carval spat out a mouthful of bile and blood and struggled to his feet. His chest was aching. He had no time to tend to his injuries. His brothers needed him. He recouped a jetbike from one of the slain, rallied the other survivors from around him and dashed back to take command of his brigade.
The fighting was intense. José had to duck, shoot and cut his way through hundreds of Orks to reach friendly territory. The xenos scum had advanced scarily far.
It was no easy thing to find someone of authority to conspire with. He had been with the 2nd Chapter of his brigade when he had been attacked. The 3rd and 5th Chapters were here too. The 1st and 4th had been too far from the 2nd, separated by the speed of the brigade's advance across the Orkish battle-station. They were coming as fast as they could, he did not doubt, but they were not here to give aid yet. And Space Marine officers tended to lead from the front. Still, in time he managed to find Brother-Commander Hernan de Bivandas of the 3rd Chapter of the 24th Brigade.
"Brother-Brigadier!" cried de Bivandas, audibly relieved. "We thought you were dead."
"Nearly was," said José, spitting out blood. Straight to the point: "We need to get that Ork."
"We all know that," said de Bivandas a little irritably. It went without saying that that would tear down the elevation of the others. All of them knew the nature of the Orks. "How?"
"It's got to be possible. Brother-Marshal de Loragro had a pict-cast of himself with a skull of an Ork just like this one."
"That's all well if you're a duellist as good as Brother-Marshal de Loragro. In case it's escaped your notice, we aren't! No-one in the Legion is, if you don't count the king! A brother blew up a Land Raider on him and he walked it off like it was nothing!"
"I have an idea."
Soon indeed, the great Warboss returned to face José de Carval, tempted by the prospect of decapitating the leadership of his human foes. "You again?" he laughed, towering over the Conqueror officer half his height. "I rather thought I killed you already. Was I not thorough enough?"
"I'm persistent," spat José.
"Very well, then, fool and ruler of these fools. Know that your death comes at the hand of Vorkhak Grashdun." José would never get over hearing an Ork who sounded eloquent. "Come and die."
José stepped forward to fight. When Grashdun lunged with his Power Sword, he turned tail, leapt on a jetbike and fled as fast as it would carry him.
"Coward!" cried Grashdun, but the great Ork seemed more amused than outraged. He chased after José, followed by his entourage of hundreds of lesser Orks. 'Lesser' only compared to their master. The Orks of Vorkhak Grashdun's entourage stood three and a half metres tall. In any campaign before this one, he would have thought them Warbosses.
The great Ork took huge loping strides, of course. Furthermore he was even faster than the length of his legs implied. Propelled by more-than-natural strength, strengthened by the Orkish WAAAAGH! field, he bounded after José, almost keeping pace with the best a jetbike could manage. Dozens of Conquerors leapt in to try to fight him, to defend their Brother-Brigadier. They were heroes all, brave Astartes champions, skilled with lance and sword. They barely slowed him down.
José was sweating and he was bleeding internally in probably very unhealthy ways. He just had to make it a little longer. Nearly… nearly… there!
He turned just as the great Ork burst through.
"Time to die, coward," said Vorkhak Grashdun.
"Yes," agreed José. That was when Grashdun noticed the supplies of half the 24th Brigade's artillery, all gathered together in a heap.
"You—!"
José lit a fuse, smiling a beatific smile, and his galaxy went up in smoke and blazing light.
Vorkhak Grashdun was not the only Warboss aboard the great Orkish battle-station known as the World-Doom. There were others. Multiple others. And not all would share the same fate.
One of these others was Tankhag Zugash, a mighty Warboss who had slain dozens of Astartes champions. Many thousands of Orks roared their cries of "WAAAAGH!" behind him, following the trail of carnage he led. He encountered one human, taller than the others he had slain. Roaring, he lifted his enormous Power Mace to deal death to this enemy—
"Stop."
Zugash's arm froze mid-motion. The Power Mace stayed above his head. The other Orks behind him froze with their master.
"Kneel."
Zugash knelt.
"Get out of my way."
Zugash stood up and got out of the human's way.
Hernan de Leon, the King of Lions, the Primarch of the Conquerors, surveyed his foe with a coldly satisfied expression. "Kill yourself."
Without hesitation, the mighty Warboss and slayer of heroes brought his Power Mace crashing down into his own head.
The Conquerors regarded their gene-sire with silent awe. Some of them had seen this before, of course. Still his prowess never failed to amaze them.
Onward strode Hernan de Leon, and onward strode the Conquerors. They were searching for controls. De Leon was no fool. Well did he know that even a force as mighty as this—the entire V Legion and more than a billion encomendados—would not suffice to conquer the World-Doom. He did not intend to seize the battle-station. He intended to destroy it. There would be nothing as convenient as a big red button to self-destruct, of course. There would, however, have to be magnetic fields to control the immense nuclear fusion reactor at the battle-station's heart, powering everything it did. If the electromagnets generating those magnetic fields could be sabotaged, the main reactor would go up like a supernova in a massive thermonuclear explosion. The World-Doom would be blown apart.
As de Leon strode across the surface of the World-Doom, felling Orks wherever he stood, a report came back to him. "Your Exalted Magnificence," called Diego de Uragon, his Marshal of the First March, "the 12th Brigade tell me they think they've found what you seek."
"Transmit," de Leon said tersely.
"Doing so," said Brother-Marshal de Uragon. "Coolant control for the superconducting magnets. It's miles deeper in the station than the surface, but if we could fight our way that deep and bring enough demolition charges…"
"Excellent," said de Leon, reading the display on the inside of his helmet. "We shall go there at once. My sons!" All followed him.
De Leon led thousands of Conquerors down to the place indicated by de Uragon. Before they got there, they started receiving urgent reports from the 12th Brigade. It seemed the 12th Brigade were in trouble. They were requesting urgent reinforcements.
"We're coming," called de Uragon over the vox, "eight brigades, led by the king himself. We'll arrive soon to your relief."
"Come faster," called a garbled voice over the vox, increasingly filled with static, "they—huge—run—come—don't—come—Ork—"
"We're coming as soon as we can!"
The voices on the vox cut off.
Wary, de Leon and his men came to the location of the 12th's last known dispositions. They found a great chamber, deathly cold. It was the size of a theatre. Millions could have sat there. From the curve of one of the walls of the room, the outline of a huge pipe could be seen on one of the walls. The pipe had to be enormous. Its diameter had to be kilometres across. No wonder, if it were feeding coolant to one of the superconducting magnets containing the thermonuclear fuel for a battle-station the size of a moon.
The chamber was deserted only of the living. The corpses of Conquerors littered the floor. Hundreds of Astartes, no, thousands of them, all in yellow armour, many of the bodies grossly mutilated as if cut by gargantuan blows.
Some of the Astartes surrounding de Leon knelt to close their fallen brothers' eyes. De Leon did not. He stayed standing, his brown eyes narrowed.
"Magnificence?" Juan de Leon, his Equerry and adoptive kin, said cautiously.
"Stop doing that," Hernan de Leon ordered. "It's not safe."
"Magnificence, this place is deserted."
"It is not."
A slow clapping noise came from the ceiling. "Your instincts serve you well. No, it is not."
Instantly, as soon as the first clap sounded out, the Conquerors aimed their bolters at the ceiling. Unperturbed by several thousand bolters pointing at it, a great dark shape detached itself from the ceiling and dropped to the floor. With perfect, elegant poise, it rose to its feet.
Rose… and rose… and rose… and rose… and rose…!
The Conquerors' jaws dropped. What stood before them was the largest Ork that any of them had seen, surpassing even the Warbosses of this new xenos empire. He looked less like an Ork than a Titan. He stood seven metres tall. He was clad in green-and-bronze Power Armour—not slapdash and ill-fitting, as had been common for Orks before the coming of this deadly new breed, but perfectly fit to every muscle of his body, as masterful as the armour of a Primarch. His tusks were bigger than a mammoth's. And he carried in both hands a colossal double-headed Power Axe that was twice the height of a Primarch, dripping with the blood of Conquerors.
Hernan de Leon spoke, coldly. He would scarce be otherwise, with the slayer of his sons. "Master of this place, I presume."
"You presume correctly," said the giant Ork, speaking in perfect Naranjomundan. There was not the slightest hint of crass Orkish pidgin. His voice was deep, rich, cultured. He sounded like a lord.
De Leon said: "Kneel."
The force of the command echoed like a cannon in a closed space. It hissed and fizzled with psychic power. Every Conqueror in the vast chamber knelt at once. Some of them fell over their feet, so fast did they try to kneel. The compulsive power of Hernan de Leon's voice was irresistible. It was unthinkable not to kneel.
The giant Ork laughed.
That laugh—deep, rich, an aristocrat's laugh, full of amused contempt—sent shockwaves through the Conquerors. They had seen foes struggle to resist their gene-sire's voice. Some of them, Blanks, or the worthiest foes, could even defy it, though their whole bodies were visibly shaking, shuddering, struggling to hold off its power.
Never had anyone laughed. Like it was not a struggle. Like it was easy.
"How rude. And here I thought you were enjoying my battle-station's hospitality," said the giant Ork. He stood alone, one Ork against a Primarch and thousands and thousands of Space Marines. Yet he seemed unafraid. He goaded: "Lord de Leon, you'll have to do better than that."
By this point the Space Marines were in terror; but of all the humans, by the compulsive voice's failure the King of Lions himself seemed least perturbed. "You know me," was all he said, his eyes narrowing.
"I do," said the giant Ork. "Numerous of my slaves have predicted your coming, claiming that you would be here to save them. A great warrior-king, to vanquish my evil, heroically. Or a cruel tyrant who will not suffer others to claim what is his."
Still the Ork spoke perfect Naranjomundan. His voice was one of amused contempt. It truly could have passed for a human voice, were it not too deep and loud. It was uncanny.
"I admit the prospect entertained me," the giant Ork said. "That was why I allowed you and your sons to find me here. —Oh, yes, allowed. Did you think you were being subtle?" The Ork laughed again. "This great warrior-king seemed like a pleasant diversion. It's been a while since I've had a fight that lasted more than ten seconds."
"If it is a fight you seek, it is a fight you'll have," said de Leon, tensing. For the whole conversation, he had not dropped the massive plasma cannon that was built around the right arm of his hand-crafted Power Armour. It had not wavered from pointing straight at the Ork.
"Oh, it is," said the giant Ork. "A fair fight, though. This seems a little unbalanced." He gave a short, sharp whistle.
The wall slid open. The far wall, the curved one, the one which hinted at the presence of a coolant pipe.
Thoughts ran through the Astartes' heads: Is he mad? Did he just open the coolant pipe of his own battle-station?
But no spray of coolant fluid came from the curved wall as it was rapidly sliding away. Instead, an army of Orks stood behind it, each of them a monster of that breed. Not one of them was a match for the true giant, of course. De Leon suspected that not a single Ork in the galaxy was. But not one of them was less than three and a half metres tall: the mightiest of this new breed of Orks, excluding their Warbosses, and this new foe that was beyond a Warboss.
This chamber had never been for coolant, the Conquerors realised, stunned. It had been a trick, a diversion.
One of the Orks spoke. "My lord?"
"Kill them."
"WAAAAGH!"
As the great chamber dissolved into battle, the giant Ork did not take part. Nor did de Leon. The two strode closer to each other, towards the centre of the enormous chamber, killing any enemy combatant foolish enough to step in their way. As other foes occasionally danced between them and were slain for the trouble, their eyes were locked to each other, one on one.
"One more thing," said de Leon. His voice should not have carried over the noise of battle, yet it did, somehow borne past the tumult by psychic force. "You know my name. I would know yours."
"Certainly." Again, that tone of amused contempt. "My name is Barzum Shrakuluk, Warlord of the World-Doom, and one of the Warlords of the Empire of Ullanor." The giant Ork lifted his Power Axe as tall as two Primarchs. "And that, I think, is quite enough of talking."
While Ullanor Orks and Conquerors fought on and under the surface of the World-Doom, another battle was raging in the void. A Wall-of-Battle of Imperial starships was relentlessly pounding on the mighty Orkish battle-station with their Lance batteries and Thunderbolt Cannons. The World-Doom retorted with its own massive Macrocannon arrays. The Orkish war-fleet was long gone, destroyed in the early minutes of the engagement, but the World-Doom alone was more than a match for its foes. For more than half an hour they had been duelling, trading arrays of firepower far more tremendous than all the atomic bombs ever built on Terra, every second.
In a secret chamber, buried deep within the battle-station's moon-sized bulk, an Ork named Grekhrash stepped, warily, carefully, towards another Ork seated on a high chair, by the name of Baldu Kudrug. Orks were not known for being cowardly, but it was fair to say that stepping carefully around this Ork was just reasonable. Kudrug was an… eccentric sort of Ork.
"Boss," said Grekhrash, "we'z finished chargin'. What'z Boyz do?"
The Ork on the chair giggled. Coming from a five-metre-tall pillar of muscle, it was a bewildering thing. "We are going to buuuuuurn them."
Grekhrash froze. "You mean—?"
"Yes. I do." Baldu Kudrug uttered grandly, in perfect Naranjomundan: "Prepare the main armament."
Grekhrash wished for the floor to open and swallow him whole. Devoutly, he wished that one of his fellow Boyz had taken up the duty of informing the Warboss of this development.
He weighed up the positives and negatives of speaking. Neither looked good. The negative was his Warboss's anger. The positive was avoiding the anger of the Warlord. Reluctantly he decided that the positive was more important.
"Boss, you sure we is allowed fire?" said Grekhrash with extreme reluctance. "Warlord Shrakuluk might be ang—"
Kudrug moved shockingly fast; he was almost a blur. All of a sudden he was out of his chair and standing with a murderous snarl. He hefted the massive weapon that he kept at his side at all times and pulled the trigger. Red-hot flames engulfed Grekhrash. The Ork screamed as he was burnt alive. Even for an Ork, a flamethrower meant a cruel and unusual death.
"No-one questions me!" hissed Kudrug the Burner, as he was widely known. "I am Warboss! You obey me! Forget Warlord Shrakuluk!"
Grekhrash had not stopped screaming. Kudrug still had not let go of the flamethrower that was incinerating the luckless Grekhrash.
The cowering Orks around him—all Ullanor Orks taller and stronger than an Astartes, but dwarfs next to their Warboss—frantically "Yes, Boss"ed and nodded agreement.
It was important to impose discipline on underlings, Kudrug reflected, although in fact Grekhrash had something of a point. It was not that Kudrug was not terrified of Warlord Shrakuluk. Frankly, every Ork with two brain cells to rub together was terrified of Warlord Shrakuluk. He still remembered that cold-eyed stare boring holes into the back of his skull. He had no doubt that Warlord Shrakuluk would kill him in minutes if he was ever actually defiant. Fortunately, Kudrug knew something his underlings did not. Warlord Shrakuluk had expected an attack. He had given Kudrug explicit permission to wield the main armament against the enemy. He would not have dared, otherwise. Kudrug was aware enough to know that most people thought he was insane and self-aware enough to know they were probably right, but he was not suicidal.
In an instant, again moving so fast he could scarcely be seen, Kudrug the Burner was seated back on his chair. He ordered, "Reveal main armament."
Imagine beyond that secret chamber. Far, far beyond. Imagine the great war-fleet of the V Legion, trading firepower with the colossal, moon-sized battle-station of Orkish design.
The war-fleet of the Conquerors had long ago noticed that the great plates of the World-Doom's surface were adjustable. They had seen them move, to unveil Macrocannon gun turrets the size of starships that could fire projectiles up to a kilometre across. They had thought they had seen the whole of it.
They had seen almost nothing.
With a great grinding roar—only audible on the World-Doom itself, for sound did not travel in the void—the World-Doom opened. The great sphere was wrought in the shape of the face of a snarling Ork, complete with tusks and maw. Now it shifted.
Plates of adamantium the size of continents slipped aside, over and above the lips. It was as if the great beast's mouth was opening. Beneath where they had been, they revealed a colossal tunnel, deep and dark, and yet with distant light behind, an impossibly brilliant pale glow like fire in the mouth of a dragon.
The World-Doom opened its maw.
On his high seat, Kudrug the Burner was breathless with anticipation. "Commence secondary ignition."
Hundreds of kilometres deep inside the World-Doom, in its very reactor-core, unfathomable masses of superheated hydrogen were channelled from chamber to chamber. This hydrogen, combining with more hydrogen to make helium, was the power-source of the World-Doom, just as it was the power-source of the stars.
The battleships of the V Legion war-fleet had noticed that something was happening. Led by the Claw of de Leon, they shifted their position and redirected all their firepower at the revealed tunnel. The brave Imperial spacemen did not know what xenotech devilry this was. They knew it was something they had to stop.
If they had had hours and hours to keep firing, it might have worked. As it was, their shots made not the tiniest difference.
An Ork looked to his Warboss, Kudrug the Burner. "Ready, Boss."
Kudrug breathed, rapturously: "Fire."
A brilliant spike of hydrogen spat out of the open mouth of the World-Doom. It was millions of degrees hot, fresh from the battle-station's reactor-core, and at pressures usually found only in the heart of a star. It was already fusing into helium, unleashing energy on a scale undreamt of by whole planetary civilisations. When the Star-Torch fired, a billion tonnes of burning star-fuel issued forth from the snarling Ork's maw and slammed into the Claw of de Leon.
There was no time to dodge. No time to pray. No time for anything at all.
Brilliant light consumed the Claw of de Leon, the flagship of a Primarch and a Space Marine Legion. Her Void Shields were overpowered so instantly it was as if they did not exist. An instant later, she was gone. Destroyed. Incinerated in a millisecond.
Nothing larger than a molecule was left behind. Most of it was reduced to ions or atoms.
The Imperial war-fleet was reeling. It had been so sudden. One moment, the Claw of de Leon was there. The next, she was not. The great battleship, she who had served well the Emperor and Imperium for years both after and before de Leon's finding, was no more. Most of her Astartes had not been on-board, for they had been on the World-Doom. Still, a Gloriana-class battleship had been obliterated in a single shot.
The twenty-six-kilometre behemoths were the pride of the Imperium, the best warships the Imperium could build, the best it could muster. They were not supposed to be swatted out of the stars.
Never had a Gloriana-class battleship fallen thus before. A few had fallen in battle, such as the Gloriana herself, the first ship of the class after which the class had been named. But when they had fallen, they had fallen only when against whole war-fleets of enemy starships. This was the first destruction of a Gloriana-class ship by a single enemy vessel in the history of the Imperium of Man.
On every starship of the Conquerors' war-fleet, men and women cried out in shock, fear and dismay. The Claw of de Leon's fall sent shockwaves through the morale of the Conquerors' fleet. It would do so afterwards—once the news would reach them—to all the fleets of the Imperium.
On his chair deep inside the World-Doom, Kudrug the Burner was giggling. "It is so beautiful," he half-cackled, half-wept at the sight of the Star-Torch's flames. "So, so beautiful…"
Among the Imperial war-fleet, meanwhile, things were almost descending into panic. "The moon!" cried Shipmaster de Ramon, an aristocratic officer from another battleship who had worked out he was supposed to be in command now. There had been a chain of command in case the Claw of de Leon were to fall. The Imperials were not stupid. It was just, the idea that it would ever need to be used…
"It's not a moon!" said another shipmaster over the vox.
"I know that, you fool! I mean the real moon!" said de Ramon. "We must move the fleet behind the nearest moon. It is our only chance!"
The Star-Torch fired again. A bolt of light, blazing impossibly brilliant, like a shard of a star turned into a lance in the outside universe. An instant later, another battleship was gone, reduced to stray particles drifting through the void of space.
"What about the men on the surface? We cannot abandon them!"
"We cannot help them like this! Not if they will just pick off our ships. They are safer down there than we are up here!"
"But—"
"If they manage to destroy it, there'll be no threats left, we can just come and pick them up." Shipmaster de Ramon hardened his voice. "My decision is final."
The Imperial starships manoeuvred behind another moon of the gas giant. The moon was far. In the multiple minutes it took to complete the manoeuvre, the Star-Torch fired again four times, destroying four more battleships.
The World-Doom was much bigger than the Imperial starships and correspondingly slow in the Materium. It could not follow them behind the moon. If it tried, they would just keep the moon between them and it. It was the perfect cover. Or so they thought.
Inside the World-Doom, the mad Warboss Kudrug the Burner wore the biggest grin of his life. He had not dreamt he would have this good an excuse.
Still clutching his beloved flamethrower, the pyromaniacal Ork turned to his underlings. "Commence primary ignition."
Inside the World-Doom, quantities of hydrogen built up to far beyond anything before, to quantities unseen since the superweapons of the wars between the Eldar Empire and the last great empire of Orks, more than a million years ago.
Kudrug the Burner gazed straight at the moon, or at least the moon on his display. "Dull lump of ice and rock," he murmured. "Why should such things rule us? By the power of the Orks are you mastered. For he is master of a thing, he who has the power to break it."
"Er, Boss? Boyz attack dem now?"
Kudrug incinerated the Ork who had spoken with a casual burst of his flamethrower. "You smaller-kin have no taste for philosophy," he said with scorn. "You have much to look forward to, in your evolution." He noticed the remaining Ullanor Orks cowering from him. "Yes, yes."
He grinned, savouring the anticipation, the shock and dread and terror he knew he was about to unleash.
"Fire."
The Star-Torch erupted in a spear of blazing light. The moon—the true moon of the gas giant, a moon the size of a terrestrial planet, not the false-moon that was the World-Doom—was struck straight in the centre. In the first instant of its arrival, the moon's crust turned liquid and its atmosphere and oceans boiled away. All life, if life there had been, would have perished in that instant. Much of the moon's outer layers turned to gas, not just liquid, from the sheer heat of the superheated hydrogen strike. Next—as the Orks watched in gleeful anticipation—the moon began to disintegrate. Giant chunks of rock bigger than continents burst outward in all directions. The moon had been given so much energy that its separate pieces had enough energy to escape. Its gravity no longer had the strength to hold it together.
Mortally wounded, the moon fell apart. All that was left was hot gas and a nest of broken rocks floating through the void.
Orks in general were known to be fond of explosions. Kudrug the Burner, whose attitude on that could be described as extreme, was in almost a religious experience. "Beautiful…" he whispered.
Kudrug the Burner looked at his display, seeing the icons of the human fleet. He knew how shocked and terrified they were. And he saw that it was good.
But… it was over. This battle was all but won. He would not get to blow up any more moons or planets today. That disappointed Kudrug. He had unleashed the main armament of the World-Doom at full power, once, and it had been the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He wanted to do it again.
Once was not enough.