Thanks for the encouraging words
Second installment below. Hope you like it, it's a continuation, but shifts the perspective - stick with it, it's about nobz really!
This has been a fun comp; if people are interested, I might post another installment or two, even after the competition is over.
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Captain Vates bowed his head reverently before the shrine, the stone floor of the sanctum cool on his knees, even through the padding of his jumpsuit. He was a good officer, he told himself, his faith in the Emperor unshakeable. He had advanced further than any other in his class, and it was undoubtedly due to his unswerving devotion that the commisar had given him command of the first line of defence surrounding the city-station of Altimus IV. Mechanically, he intoned a liturgy under his breath, the words so ingrained that he no longer needed to pay any attention to the utterance - his body was simply a conduit for the Emperor’s will, his voice a solemn vow of obedience that needed no reflection.
And yet today his recital did not steady his growing sense of disquiet. He glanced down at his left hand, observing the trembling in his smallest finger. He narrowed his eyes, and tried to tell himself that it was simply his body resonating the deep rumbling sound that shook the dust from the statues around him, and opened fresh hairline cracks in the weathered bunkers that were his current charge. It was a deep and persistent sound, so sonorous that at times it was possible to ignore it, to pretend that it was merely part of the background, like the sound of lavabugs at sunrise across the choked desert plains. But Vates could not ignore the blunt truth behind the sound - the approaching horde of ramshackle vehicles thundering across the cracked earth towards their current position was about the bluntest truth he had ever had to face.
He clenched his hand into a fist to stop his finger shaking, and got to his feet. He glanced at a small spherical holograph to the right of the shrine, and then turned to the low roof and gave a short salute in the indicated direction, towards distant Terra. The simple ritual made him straighten his back and scowl at himself. He was an officer of the Imperial Guard, a defender of humanity. No matter how many accursed xenos were descending upon him, he had his faith as his shield, and the blessed armoury of mankind at his disposal. He knew his liturgies, had studied the approved tactica of imperial warfare for over a decade, and he would not - could not - fail in his duty. He flexed his fingers with sudden conviction, and wrapped them around the handle of his gold-inlaid bolt pistol as if he were choking the alien threat with a single gesture. He stood motionless for a moment, and allowed the sound of the advancing machines to fully enter his consciousness, and heard them anew as a pounding rhythm to set the words of prayer to; he welcomed the chance to prove his devotion to the Emperor, and to champion the defence of the city. Snatching his chainsword from the door jamb, he stepped smartly up the steps and out into the blistering heat outside.
An orderly ran up to him, a look of trepidation on his face. Vates sensed the young guardsman had something new to cause him concern, and he felt a knot tighten in his stomach.
I am a shield of mankind, he thought firmly.
“Sir,” breathed the orderly, his chest heaving. “You’d better come up to the wall - it’s nearly time.”
The wall was both a physical and metaphorical barrier that stretched across the cracked plains for more than a mile, from the high cliffs on one side to the edge of the lava sea on the other. It was nearly twenty feet high, built largely of earth, but fortified every so often by armour-plas bunkers and towers. There were few enough reasons to pass beyond the wall, so there were only 3 gates, one of which was supported by the network of defence and support buildings that Vates’ company now occupied. The gates were massive, heavily reinforced affairs - nearly as thick as the wall itself, and cumbersome and time consuming to open or close. To his recollection, he had only ever seen them open and close twice, both times for inspection and maintenance purposes. In front of the wall was a long disused network of trenches and abandoned buildings, stretching out for nearly half a mile into the wastes. Here and there were scattered the remains of reinforced palisades, sticking out of the broken earth like the skeletal ribcages of long-dead behemoths.
Vates crossed the forecourt that led to the enormous bulkhead gateway smartly, and ascended the rough-cut earthen steps to the summit of the defence line, passing nervous-looking guardsman as he went. Some were praying quietly over their weaponry, others looked at him with a mixture of anxiety and hope in their eyes. He returned all gazes with a steely countenance, trying to exude calm conviction. His men needed nothing from him now but determined example, and he would meet the enemy secure in the knowledge that they were the very instruments of the Imperium: loyal, trained, ruthless.
At the top of the wall, he paused, despite himself. He had expected to see a convoy of ramshackle vehicles - his scouts had reported a fleet of transports, accompanied by smaller support vehicles and backed by a mechanical and infantry detachment that would take hours to reach their position after the initial spearhead had hit. What he saw as he crested the top of his fortifications was a huge roiling cloud of dust and smoke, obscuring everything from cliffs to sea, and rising fifty feet or more into the sky. At its fore, he could make out indistinct shapes, racing just ahead of the cloud, but so violent was the maelstrom that each time he tried to focus on one it was engulfed by the tumbling folds. Beyond that he glimpsed only the faintest outlines of larger shapes, and each one only momentarily. The cloud was streaked with black oily belches, intermingling with the yellowish dust of the plains, which gave it a peculiarly marbled quality, and it reminded Vates more of an angry stormfront than anything. The noise had grown to gargantuan proportions, and ordinary speech on the wall had become impossible - and the onslaught was still over a mile away.
For a moment, uncertainty gripped him. The wall was defended by batteries of defence guns, but how would they target anything in that billowing smog? His knuckles turned white beneath his glove where he still gripped the handle of his bolt pistol, and he muttered an oath under his breath. Nearby artillery crews had turned to watch him ascend, and were watching him intently for his solution. He bit the inside of his cheek and took a last step up onto the crenulations. There was no point shouting, so instead he pointed his chainsword at the oncoming fury, and kept it as level as he could at shoulder height, squinting at the cloud as he tried to judge the range. Crews turned back to their guns in grateful obedience. Fortunately, the abandoned trenches and ruins were still visible, and he knew well how his guns would penetrate that familiar expanse. If only he knew what they were shooting at.
Finally, as the invasion breached the outer perimeter of the abandoned defences, the indistinct shapes at the front of the advance became clear enough to identify. Warbikes, dozens of them, jinked in and out of the cloud, skipping nimbly over trenches, or skirting them altogether. Their engines belched blackest into the towering dustcloud, and the breakneck speed with which they tackled the haphazard terrain was almost breathtaking. Decisively, Vates lowered his badge of office, and as the sword came down, the barking retort of the imperial artillery guns echoed off and around the wall.
Vates watched the scene with as much impassivity as he could muster, deaf to anything but the roar of approaching engines and the thunder of his guns to either side. He watched incredulous as the bikes increased their speed to overcome the barrage, racing through ruined masonry and towards the palisades as if they would at any moment sprout wings. More than one ended its run in a fiery ball of twisted metal - sometimes a casualty of the smoking artillery, sometimes simply a casualty of the terrain and rider’s momentary inattention - but still they came on. Then something caught Vates’ eye: amongst the nearest palisades, some thirty feet from the wall itself, the sand began to move. He stared for a moment, uncomprehending, before he realised what he was seeing. Orks, who had lain submerged and camouflaged beneath the sand, presumably approaching unnoticed through the network of trenches during the night, were begin to re-emerge and busy themselves around the palisade itself. It took Vates a moment or two longer to react, in which time the orks had already begun to twist and wrestle with the protrusions themselves. Even as Vates was barking unheard orders, he realised that the orks were beginning, slowly but surely, to reverse the direction of the fortifications; so that the palisades would point directly at the lip of the battlements on which he stood. To what end, he could not imagine, but he didn’t intend to wait to find out. Abandoning his useless voice, he spun around to glance down at the courtyard beneath him. The orks were inside the range of his artillery, but he had much more at his disposal than the long range guns. He motioned a short command to a veteran company waiting in strict regiment below. Without hesitation they readied their lasguns and trotted smartly up the steps to line the wall.
Several of the orks fell to the first volley, more to the second as the guardsmen found their range, but still more put their shoulders to the task, seemingly unheeding of the incoming fire. Vates felt a sense of rising urgency, and tried to shout encouragement over the cacophony. Then, as he began to taste the dust cloud at the back of his throat, he realised with sudden horror what the orks were planning. Three of the palisades had been almost fully rotated, and towards each of these several of the bikes were converging, intending to use them as makeshift ramps to assault the ramparts themselves. Vates pulled his pistol free of its holster, and uttering a desperate prayer to the Emperor, he flailed his chainsword frantically towards the racing warbikes, willing his troops to ready for the charge.
“We are the shield of mankind!” he cried, but even he could no longer hear his own voice.
* * *
Gizmik shook his head violently in frenzied excitement as he twisted the throttle again, threatening to tear it from the handlebars. He bared his teeth defiantly against the hail of fire scattering around him as he hit the readjusted palisade, barely aware of the kommando stumbling away riddled with lasgun holes. He felt the bike shudder underneath him, and then he was momentarily airborne, hurtling through the air towards the humans crouching behind their pathetic defences. He dimly registered that one was still standing, pointing a thin human weapon at him, and recognised it as something human commanders carried. His grimace widened into a grin, and he revved the engine again, spinning his back wheel faster in mid-air.
Gizmik knew no liturgies, and had not studied imperial tactica for so much as an hour, never mind a decade. He fought not for a distant and frail Emperor, and only nominally for Gorvag, the biggest and self-proclaimed boss of the many bikers who had flocked to Mugragga’s waaagh. All he had was a big axe, biceps like a bag of rocks, and the brute aggression and instinct for war common to all of his race. As he sailed over the crude fortifications the humans occupied, he felt a slight scratch as the chainsword rattled against his ribs; then, with a bellow that was audible even over the roar of his engines he let go his handlebars and swung his axe in a mighty circle, even as he careened into the courtyard beyond, the third stabilising wheel he had crudely bolted to his bike’s chassis grinding noisily against the oversized suspension as it fought to keep his warbike upright.
Gripping the throttle once again and bodily forcing his front tyre into contact with the ground once more, he turned his bike in an expansive three-quarter skid, knocking two more humans flying with the side of the enormous machine. He gnashed his teeth in satisfaction as he spun around in time to watch the human commander topple down the steps in two halves; then, with barely a moment’s hesitation he gunned his engine again, and thudded up the rough steps, crushing the freshly detached torso beneath his dust-caked wheels. In a mad zig-zag, he barrelled along the top of the wall, sending humans leaping down on either side, aiming his forks directly at the repeatedly recoiling flak gun at the nearest emplacement. Another nob biker sailed over his head into the courtyard, but he did not stop to see who it was - he wasn’t going to let anyone else get to his target ahead of him.
He could feel the trembling of the walls even through the suspension of his bike, and knew the konvoy was close. Without warning, a bomma broke cloud cover, almost entirely inverted, and struggled to right itself before it collided with the wall. The flak guns strained against their mountings as their crew struggled to turn them to bear on the fresh threat, but even as they raked the flank of the plane, it flipped almost elegantly over before releasing its payload and pulling up suddenly in a stomach-lurching climb. The plane disappeared in seconds, and Gizmik collided with both crew and gun in a chopping frenzy, at exactly the moment that the dropped bomb collided with the large gate beneath them. There was a huge explosion, and the wall ruptured, spilling its contents across a wide area.
* * *
Mugragga’s battlewagon, the
Wurldkrusher, turned aside the broken remains of the wrecked portal with a grinding of metal, and juddered to a halt just inside the wall, heat still rising from its blistered exhausts. The uppermost hatch flipped open, and Mugragga himself emerged, swinging one large and iron-plated boot over the rim so that he sat on the edge with one leg still inside the vehicle. He scratched his chin through brush-like bristles, and surveyed the carnage around him. Beneath his foot, a large iron plate slid aside smoothly, and then fell off entirely, clattering noisily to the ground. From the opening, his personal body guard lumbered out of the wagon and dropped heavily the short distance to the sandy, debris-strewn courtyard below; cyborked gitz with even more dakka than teef. Almost lazily they swept the courtyard, improbably large snazzguns covering every step. Gokmaz, a brute with a metal skull for a face, gave a brief snort - something between derision and amusement - as he kicked at a large piece of fallen masonry. Beneath it was the twisted wreckage of a warbike.
“Wun ov Gorvag’s ladz ‘ere, boss,” grunted Gokmaz through his metal jaws. Mugragga stopped scratching his chin momentarily, and craned his neck to see.
“’E alive?” he growled, his voice as deep as the low rumble of the battlewagon’s idling engine. There was a brief pause as Gokmaz made an examination with the toe of his iron-shod boots.
“P’raps,” he conceded eventually.
Mugragga leaned over and thumped hard on the roof of the battlewagon beneath him. He used the hand that was not encased in a huge power klaw, but still the noise was impressive. In response, another ork poked his head out of the opening, and then eased himself down onto the floor. Half of his head was covered by a large array of bionik optics at the centre of which was a large red unblinking orb which had given him the typically imaginative name Dok Red Eye. He sauntered over to where Gokmaz was still poking something with his foot, and then bent over his work with sudden enthusiasm. Between them, they hauled the unconscious body of Gizmik free of the rubble. Red Eye prised open the prone ork’s eyelids, revealing the unseeing eyes beneath, and grunted thoughtfully. After a moment’s deliberation, he reached into his pack and pulled out an ugly looking syringe, crusted in grime, an oddly glowing and dried green goo, and caked blood. After an experimental swing, he dug it deep into Gizmik’s chest, who suddenly jerked upright and began vomiting copiously. The dok stepped back in satisfaction.
After a short coughing fit, Gizmik waved a hand vaguely around, and tried to speak. Greenish froth spilled from his lips.
“Wot did ‘e say?” asked Mugragga, leaning forward as if it would help. Gokmaz leaned over with obvious distaste, so that what should have been his ear was close to the recent source of vomit and green foam. Gizmik mumbled something, and Gokmaz straightened again, chuckling slightly.
“’E sez ‘e needs anuvva bike,” he reported.
Mugragga smiled too, a terrifying sight.
“Get ‘im wun, and get ‘im on it.” He raised his power klaw accusingly at the nearby human settlement of Altimus IV, now without its outer defences. “Tomorra, da propa fightin’ starts.”
