[center][h2][i]The Fields of Ullanor Quartus[/i][/h2][/center]

Ash. Blood. Death rode on the wind.

Around him, the breeze stirred the defiled earth, wrought loose by the steps of steel leviathans and the blasts of tremendous weapons. The crumbled remains of flesh and metal moved lazily upon it, burned by unnatural flame, tortured by blades and monstrous claws, consumed by alchymical poisons that no cognizant hand would willingly have wielded. Man and xeno, beast and machine lay in a gruesome mosaic of carnage that stretched to the visible ends of the field. Already decay was setting in, hurried on by viral corruption, and its sweet, cloying notes came to join the chorus of filth and violence that hung heavy over the murky soil.

Like a pack of ghouls, his warriors prowled among the mire of corpses. Few of his kin understood the significance of the time after battles - or between them, as it was now. Not gathering, counting their wounds and arraying themselves for the next clash; that was a matter of course. Not mourning the fallen; that was a habit of weak mortality, unworthy of Astartes. No, the hours and minutes after the roar of gunfire had died down, and when friend and foe alike lay wheezing in pools of their own blood and foulness, were like vespertine meditation after a day of labour, a time of closure and rebirth alike. That which was fallen was cut down and cast away, to be forgotten. That which lay crippled was like the crops at harvest, inert but ready to be taken and given new purpose.

Lone figures, their armour decorated with the symbol of a skeletal hand in flames, trudged where greenskin bodies littered the ground most thickly. They pushed the carcasses together, without wasting time to pile them in mounds, then aimed their heavy, dark tubular weapons and spat sweeping gouts of irradiated balefire onto the masses of dead flesh, like underhive sanitizers dispatching particularly troublesome concentrations of refuse. The duty of the Hecatombion was not an enviable one. In battle, they were called to wither the enemy while it still lived, and victory earned them not well-deserved rest, but the new duty of eradicating all trace of the fallen, which in the case of Orks had a more than symbolic importance. All the while, the contamination of their weapons spelled a slow death for them, seeping through their respirators, rotting their bodies from within. Yet no word of lamentation came from them, not now, nor ever before. [i]As it should be. There is no I. Only duty.[/i]

Elsewhere, where fungal green turned to the blue of power armour and the grey of organic carapace, scavengers of a different sort were at work. Fleshweavers, bristling with servo-limbs, dug through the mangled bodies of their brethren. Those who were intact enough to merit the gamble of an augmentic graft for their survival were hauled up, their wounds injected with malodorous coagulants, and dragged off by impassible attendants. Those who did not fell brutally prey to the narthecium, the only final grace accorded them being the painless embrace of the carnifex. They had served their due and earned a peaceful road to blessed oblivion; no reason to waste anything more than that on them. Their armaments and ammunition, where still functional, were more valuable than the lifeless hulks they enclosed now.

He would have the Hecatombion burn them along with the dead Infestus when the salvagers were finished, he thought. With the Lord of Mankind so close, it was best to reduce them to the same cinders as the Orks. The triumph of his liege should not be marred with the traces of the transgressions which had been necessary to pave the way to it.

His shadowed gaze followed as the remaining packs of wretches were herded by their Mancipes towards the next advancing frontline. Those who lingered hungrily over one corpse or another were punished by crackling jolts. They had to remain ravenous. The battle was not yet over.

Sarghaul raised his eyes to the horizon beyond the newly mustering ranks of his legionaries. The rising wind had collected a shroud of dirty black clouds over the sky, polluted rain mingled with smoke belched by the horrors that passed for orkish factories, and he could look into the distance without squinting in the daylight. The survivors of the first horde had withdrawn that way, presumably to regroup. On its own, that was not a matter of concern. The greenskins’ reluctance to stop fighting had ensured that a precious few had scampered away from the field alive once their bulk was broken. However, the xenos’ tendency to cluster together suggested that the next major wave would advance from that direction, and so the Lurkers’ battle-lines had begun to turn, preparing to meet the foe in frontal combat. Detachments had splintered off from the main force, setting themselves in position for encircling movements, but given the magnitude and disorganized chaos of the Orks’ formations, catching a flank was a matter of luck as much as anything.

And already, they came. Far ahead, a lower, thinner cloud moved beneath the overcast heavens, the storm of dust and debris raised by a horde on the move. Large, much too large. The approaching force must have been greater than the one the Lurkers had first engaged by orders of magnitude. Barbaric as they might have been, the Orks were clearly not unprepared for a planetary assault.

The gargantuan Primarch turned from the menacing plume and stalked over to where his gene-sons had assembled a rudimentary field command, directly adjacent to where their supporting Truthlayers had claimed their own ground to arrange their numbers. It was not something any seasoned Imperial Army commander would have dignified as worthy of that name: half a dozen towering charybdes stood in a semicircle, idly grazing on the plentiful bodies that weighed upon the earth. On their backs were not cannons, bolter nests or missile racks manned by crystalline-eyed servitors, but tangles of transmitter antennae, auger array visors and power cables, jutting into the sky like the spires of small alien cities. Their feeding conduits disappeared beneath the beasts’ underbellies, lost in the wilderness of the fastenings that bound the structures - precariously, as it seemed - to their clamped-on armour. A troop of Expergefactors busied themselves about the machinery, their liturgic droning less an invocation to the hive of spirits than a continued exchange with them.

“What do you see?” the telluric rumbling of Sarghaul’s voice broke through the toneless litanies, drawing several scores of mechanical eyes to him. The elder Techmarine, distinguished by the profusion of cogs and skulls on his livery as well as his privileged position atop the central invertebrate monstrosity, inclined his head before replying in a reverberating thrum.

“Machines, Lord Progenitor. The inhumans move a host of their foul soulless husks against us. Aberrant things, bereft of true spiritual essence, but numerous.” The cyborg flexed a segmented steel claw and a spark of azure current rattled through it, the only properly perceptible way for him to display his scorn. A waft of ozone briefly blew through the air. “A large presence is with them, no doubt one of those walking scrapyards the beasts call ‘Stompas’. These [i]necromancers[/i] of metal” he spat out the word as violently as his vocaliser would allow, “must have mobilised their whole assembly line.”

The Primarch raised a hand to stop any more disgusted rattling and ruminated the report for a moment. A Stompa so close to the frontline was both good and ill tidings. On one hand, the core of the Orks’ crude facilities must have been close, which confirmed the pre-insertion auspex scans. If the Lurkers struck at those focal points, the whole enemy force on Quartus would have been all but certainly pinned to the planet. On the other hand, the monstrous machine now stood directly in the way of that plan.

“Can we cripple them from orbit?” He motioned to the group tending to the transmitters.

“The fleet has done what it could,” one of the Expergefactors at the vox controls replied, raising a set of eyes, but not the rest of its head, from its work. “Enemy numbers will have decreased by sixteen to thirty percent by the time they engage our vanguard, but the chances of decommissioning their abominable titanic simulacrum before then are extremely low.” It paused as it observed something on a visor, rotating its photoreceptors, then added, “Barring sustained bombardment at risk of collateral damage to our positions.”

“Unnecessary.” The Tartarean churned beneath his helmet. “Let them cease and prepare for the next targeted strikes. What is their status?”

“Nominal.” Some turning and tapping. “Imbrifex Rimnal requests permission to take the Fourth’s reserve forces to assist Imperial operations in the outer system.”

“Granted.” While half a Tempest was far from insignificant, its absence would not detract much from the orbital presence of the Lurker fleet’s bulk. No doubt they could make themselves more useful in supporting offensives on the rest of Ullanor’s worlds than they would have been here. “Relay to all groundside troops. Assume sparse formations. Prime artillery and fire as soon as the xenos are close enough.” He glanced upwards for a moment before scraping his talons together. “Prepare the ancients for Titanomachia. And tell Akhron to make sure Opis and Clymene have eaten their fill.” A spectre of something that could have been mistaken for warmth momentarily passed through the Primarch’s voice.

“Their legs will be the ones that carry us to victory today.”

[center][h2]***[/h2][/center]

The green tide came. Through the ground-shaking blasts rained down by the fleet overhead, through the towering clouds of plague and flesh-eating venom that burst from the missiles as they erupted, the Orks trudged ahead, fueled by sheer stubbornness and bloodlust. Warriors stumbled and fell dead in their tracks as the foul barrage overwhelmed even their inhuman vigour. The clattering limbs of roaring Deff Dreads rusted in a blink, devoured by rad-shrapnel and chemical corrosion. Grots choked and collapsed at their posts, falling into the gears and furnaces they were tending. But nothing so much as slowed the horde. With snarls and curses, guffaws and jeers of “wotta panzy git!”, they marched, intent on giving the ‘ard umiez the scrap of their lives.

Like a walking tower, the Stompa loomed over even the most imposing war machines, its steps sending out quakes to rival the impacts of the bombardment. The colossal mechanical effigy of fungoid gods bristled with all manner of weaponry - cannons, rockets, gatler-guns, everything that could possibly be fastened to its bulk, and some things that straddled the limits of both decency and physics, had been bolted on and covered in the greenest paint to be found on the planet. A ragged banner topped by the skull of a massive squig surmounted its head, and at its foot the master of the scrapworks bellowed out orders to his army, rabid froth flying from his rusted cybork tusks as he raged in anticipation.

What doubtlessly angered the Ork even more was that none of his commands seemed to have any effect. It was only when the first volleys of artillery fire from the Astartes’ groundside forces began to pummel his vanguard that he realised he had been speaking without an amplifier the entire while. When it finally occurred to him to retrieve the improvised beaten metal cone that served that function, he was fast to make up for the lost time.

“DREADS GO A’EAD, YA ZOGBRAINZ! DREADS GO A’E- WHADD’I SAY? DAT BLUE IDJIT OVVA DERE, GET OUTTA DA TRUKKS’ WAY! WOT? I DUN’ GIVE A ZOG IF ‘E’Z-”

A stray Whirlwind missile crashed into the force field surrounding the gargantuan vehicle, drowning out the next words in a fiery blast. The shimmering aura of greenish energy gave a pulse and faded away with a fizzle. Something creaked in the Stompa’s underbelly.

However, it was a poor Ork that was daunted by explosions, and the shouting resumed almost immediately.

“KUSTOM FIELD’Z GONE? WOTCHA YA TELLIN’ ME FOR, I CAN SEE DAT MESELF! OI, YA DOWN DERE, DUN’ FINK I DON’T SEEZ YA! LOOTIN’ COMES [i]AFTER[/i] DA SCRAP, UNDERSTOOD? MARSCH! AND GIT DA FIELD UP AGAIN, OR I’Z COMIN’ DOWN TO SORT YA OUT!”

More rockets rained down among the Orkish ranks, scattering the brutes in howling masses and engulfing their leaking vehicles in infernos of flame. More toxic clouds bloomed across the earth, and the noxious fires of phosphex sprang up here and there like the growths of an infesting weed. Rad-missiles tainted the soil and air where they fell. Vengeance warheads scattered mangled limbs and vaporised blood on the wind.

For the greenskins, the fun part was only just starting.

“OI, YA RUNTY UMIEZ!” the manic roars of the Stompa’s master thundered over the clamour of weaponry, lashing over the Lurkers’ ranks like the sound of an approaching cataract, “YA FINK YA’Z TOUGH CUZ YA KRUMPED DAT GIT RAZTUSK? WELL YA AIN’T! ‘E WUZ A DUMB SQUIG’EAD WHO SAID ‘IZ DUMB CHOPPA WUZ KILLIER THAN ME SUPA-GATLERS! WOT?”

Some dissension seemed to have arisen on the command platform, because a pause punctuated by inarticulate sounds followed.

“WHY ‘E’Z A DUMB SQUIG’EAD? CUZ I SAYZ SO! ANYWUYZ, WOZ’I SAYIN’? YAH, I’Z NOT SOME IDJIT SLUGGA BOY! YER WRANGLIN’ WITH BIG MEK ZAPGOB NOW, AND I’Z GOT DA MOST DAKKA DERE IS ON DIS STINKIN’ ROCKBALL! ARRA’! LET ‘EM HAVE IT!”

The Stompa’s forest of weaponry whirred to life with a ringing and clattering that made most nearby Orks wince and cover their ears, and then, in a single flash of stupendous violence, it let loose. A storm of steel and flame surged from the mechanical titan, a veritable compact wall of howling death. Shells of all sizes, etched with obscene taunts, scratched and rusted, flaming before they left their barrels sliced through the air alongside rumbling rockets steered by screaming grots, heedless of how many pieces they might end up in as long as they got to make a proper blast. Around the skull-mounted banner, shokk guns buzzed and spluttered, firing out a barrage of crackling energy, scrap and haphazardly teleported gretchins.

The echoes of the cooling guns had not yet faded when an even louder rumble picked them up. All around, Orks shouted and cheered as they fired everything at hand in the general direction they saw the enemy to be. Shoota volleys darkened the sky, and under their shadow crimson speed freaks rode ahead on smoking warbikes, all regard for where they steered their engines lost as they finally closed in on their foes. The lavine of trukks, Dreads, Kans and innumerable boyz followed, guns discarded in favour of blades and mauls and snapping power klaws. The battle was joined.

Arrayed against them, the Imperium’s warriors did not stand waiting for the screaming tide to cover them. Scattered wedges of blue-armoured Lurkers marched forth under the cover of their Aestus shields, fending aside the whirlwind of bullets before colliding with the charging mobs, like thorns seeking weak points in the enemy’s body to batter through. Many were caught by the Stompa’s gargantuan barrage, single massive slugs sending dismembered Astartes bodies flying on impact. More yet were sundered and thrown to ground in a rain of shrapnel by bursting rokkits. But most of the Orkish fire went wide, wildly raining into the ground between the dispersed Gales, and the decisive struggle was fought at close quarters.

The Infestus were first into the fray. Shock-whipped into a frenzy by their handlers, the hybrid aberrations leapt into the greenskins’ thick with ravenous fury, and in places even the savage Orks staggered under their feral onslaught. Serrated claws tore through skin and flesh, many-rowed teeth bit through bone and metal alike, chem-enhanced muscles tossed swarming gretchin like twigs. Maddened by the taste of blood, the monsters converged where they found the most to feast, ripping through battle-squigs and lightly armoured grunts. Yet, as often as not, they met the acrid metal of war machines, and Dread pilots cackled madly as they beat the gibbering abhumans aside.

In those foci of resistance where the first wave of fang and chitin broke against steel, the space marines descended to do battle with the hardiest adversaries. Some, held aloft by their jetpacks, dropped onto the shoulders of walkers and roofs of trukks before slicing them open with power claws. Others traded blows with the rugged constructs on foot, with sword and chainfist, bolter and talon. Armour cracked under the superhuman might of both sides. Among the chaos, charybdes stood out like creeping bastions. The autocannons on their backs spat out death in salvoes, and their augmented pincers scythed down Ork and vehicle alike. They fell, crumpling under the Stompa’s blasts or under clambering mobs of xenos, but more and more kept crawling ahead, as if the gateway of the abyss had been opened.

The Truthlayers had not failed to present themselves in this exchange, supporting and aiding the lines from the rear, laying down their own variable wall of intense bolter fire from above the shoulders of their battling cousins. Wherever the Stompa had laid enough fire to weaken the frontlines, they presented their own blades, and ran to the fore, fighting side-by-side along their equally silent allies, all the whilst vocally overwhelmed by both the chatter and blasts of Ork screeches and weaponry. In direct contrast to the Orks’ brutish ilk, the battlelines of the Space Marines were as brutal as they were thorough, the Truthlayers’ support directed from a single individual gifted the authority of leadership by Sarghaul’s own brother.

But whilst their presence allowed their blue-plated cousins reprieve from the infinite onslaught of the green tide, with their cannon fire, and their Terminator Veterans spraying fire and fury through both Reaper autocannons and Cyclone-pattern missile racks, for every foe slaughtered mercilessly, five filled in the abhorrent mockery of what the Orks may consider as ranks. All the while the Stompa, whilst now unshielded, continued to put down its hurt upon the Imperium’s most resolute warriors. From the foes perspective, undoubtedly it seemed like the tides were about to turn, and the immense wave of the Abyssal Lurkers would eventually be swayed.

Needless to say, from the frontline command site of the combined offensive, things were hardly so nefarious as to deem the assault a failure; far from it. They were simply waiting, and with the solemn reminder of their grey-green allies’ commander, Praetor Sextus, and his seerdom, the cogs would soon shift in the Lurkers’ favour once again.

“Lord Tartareus,” he spoke, shifting his blind eyes and many-eyed, visorless helm from the fore and towards the towering goliath at his side, surrounded by both the command staff of Truthlayers’ sixth chapter as well as the Lord of the Deep’s own gene-sons, “they come.”

“Then it is time we end this.” The giant motioned to the cluster of vox-operators behind him, and their encoded litanies rose to a feverish pitch. Without sparing them another glance, he strode ahead, raising a claw in summons, and the Orcus Lictors, who had encircled their position as motionless sentinels, sprang into motion in his wake. Larger shapes yet stirred ahead of them, as the hulking forms of venerand Dreadnoughts reared themselves on their segmented limbs. They were many, full two dozen held in reserve until the battle reached its apex. As they stirred from their lifeless sleep, their fragmented modulated voices rose in a chilling discordant chorus of nightmare-warped battlecries.

[b]“SILENCE BE MADE IN AETERNUM! VOID AND ANGUISH!”

“NO VOICE, NO SOUND, NO SUN TO SHINE ON THEIR BONES!”

“OBLIVION TAKE ALL IN ITS BLACK MAW!”

“TO BATTLE I ARISE! LIFE MY PRISON, SLAUGHTER MY FREEDOM!”

“DEATH, SHOW YOUR MERCIFUL FACE!”

“IN DAMNATIO VITAE! AD ABSOLUTIONEM VACUI!”[/b]

Unprepared for the cataclysmic violence of the Ninth’s most exalted warriors, the nearest Orks well-nigh ceased to exist under their sudden assault. The Lictors’ talons and corrosive bolts rent flesh before the ancients’ immense cannons and pincers devastated armour as if it were porcelain. In their midst, Sarghaul trampled ahead like a juggernaut of war, uncaring of the shells and blades that rained onto him, and every step sent a sickening crackle of bones and agonized howls to the sky. Burning through the greenskins like a thunderfist through molten plascrete, the cuneus forged its way to the Stompa, where the Orks’ leader was straining his throat to extremes only made possible by cybernetics as he directed his troops.

The titan began to raise one of the crushing platforms that passed for its feet in order to make good on its name and stomp the approaching enemies into the ground, but the combat forelimbs of the head Flegias Dreadnought clamped onto it before it had been pulled up too far. Machine struggled with machine for a moment, the crude yet stupendously potent engineering of the Orks fighting the immemorial craft of mankind’s long-lost apogeum, before another ancient warsuit sank its claws into the foot, and another. The titan was pinned in place.

“YA WANTZ A REAL FIGHT? I’LL KRUMP YA TO PIECES!” The Stompa’s left arm, little more than an immense chainblade, swung down as if intending to slice the entire world in half. It caught a Drednought directly, even its unbreakable body proving little obstacle to the enormous weapon nearly cut it in twain. Yet, even in his final throes and the haze of a long-overdue demise claiming him, the elder held true to his duty. The sarcophagus’ arms snapped upwards, punching through the surface of the blade and crutched onto it like grim death. The choppa’s teeth whirred furiously and its supporting arm pulled and twisted, but in vain - it was caught.

As the great walker continued to rage and blindly spew its firepower, the Tartarean and his sons latched onto its base like the stubborn oceanic predators they resembled. Ponderous Asphodels sank their power claws into the rim of its armour, dragging it down with their bulk. Terminators ripped their way through the wall of steel, emerging into the depths of the machine to the surprised bellowing of Mekboys and fearful chittering of grots. The Primarch himself plunged his talons into the mechanical beast’s hide, and ripples of lightning force wracked it, tearing off joints and guns in fiery short-circuit blasts. Sextus not far behind, delivering with one swift swing two willful Boyz seeking to claim a price far out of their own reach. His movements as rapid as the electricity which cloaked Sarghaul’s claws, hastened by the mental machinations of the his own ephemeral will, culminating in what could only be described as a blur as he and his entourage took to the perimeter of the metallic beast, allowing the Lurkers to delve ever deeper into its cruel heart and dislodge it.

All of a sudden, a loud grinding sound rang out from behind the Astartes lines. Overshadowing the rows of transmitter spires and swarming sternguard reinforcements, two imposing silhouettes rose into the ash-choked sky, metal and chitin blended in a fearsome vision to rival the revelations of the Immaterium. Opis and Clymene, favoured daughters of Carcinus’ depths, had finally arrived upon the battlefield, and their sight made even the most dimly fearless greenskin gape for a moment. So vast were the creatures that it seemed patently impossible they should have an origin in any way natural. Their gnarly, segmented legs spanned the breadth of a cathedral, and it seemed that whole palaces could have found their place on their ridged, carapace-bound backs. Their pincers could have torn down century-old reefs.

But it was what they bore on imposing harnesses bound to their bodies that raised the most cries of alarm mixed with admiration from among the xenos. Though the shape of the engines marked them as Medusa siege cannons, their size far exceeded the usual emplacements found of the Imperium’s combat vehicles. Those were no mere implements of disruption and field bombardment. They were tools wrought to bring low the most titanic of foes.

For an instant, all sound disappeared and the planet was plunged into the ancestral silence of its cosmic infancy as the two monstrous guns fired in unison. Their aim, adjusted by the superhuman eyes and minds of servitors over precious minutes bought at the cost of Astartes lives, was true. Without its shield to weaken the brunt of the impact, its arms and feet pinned in place, the Stompa was all but defenceless before them. One warhead shredded through its head, shattering its flag-bearing command platform and silencing Big Mek Zapgob once and for all. The other blasted apart its right shoulder, and the deadly supa-gatler fell to the ground as an inert heap of scrap. As the colossus still staggered, the next two shots struck together into its chest, and its upper half exploded in a hurricane of torn metal. When the smoke and shrapnel cleared, the Stompa had lost about half its height, and the victorious forms of Space Marines stood where once had been the core of its consuming furnace.

From then on, the outcome of the battle was assured. The Orks still fought with reckless courage, but without a leader to direct their attack they stumbled and trampled over each other as often as they struck the enemy, and without the mighty fire support of the titan the horde had lost much of its destructive power. For their own part, the Astartes pressed their advantage wherever confusion arose, scattering the xenos and felling their contraptions. Continued fire from Clymene and Opis tore apart greenskins by the hundred. Sarghaul was once again at the head of his sons, and no Deff Dread was so sturdy as to withstand his blows. Soon, the Ork army was crumbling, broken into warbands that were grimly stamped out one by one.

The numbers of the green tide were never truly exhausted, and its strongholds and fortified scrapyards still lay ahead, but upon that world its back had at last been broken. The fate of Ullanor Quartus was sealed.