Chapter 60: Demetrian Titus
Under the Thunderhawk's strafing runs and the Leman Russ main guns hammering a path forward, Duvette's battered remnants had managed to seize and hold a position in the middle of the Ork tide. The human line and the Ork main force met in a sustained, violent collision at the boundary between the ruins and the plain, the fire from both sides crossing at close range and holding an ugly equilibrium in the space between them.
Duvette was pressed against the wide rear armor of a Leman Russ. The exhaust smoke from the pipes was burning his throat and he had neither the time nor the attention to care about it. He was driving his voice through the comms channels, the Strategic Display giving him the full picture, moving squad elements and the surviving armour to the critical fire points where the line was under the most pressure.
While he was in the middle of this, a non-human sound tore out from somewhere in the battle's center. A place the Thunderhawk had just been working over. From inside the rising fire and smoke, from atop a war truck the gunship had converted to wreckage, something impossibly large dropped to the ground.
The Warboss.
The Thunderhawk's strikes had not killed it. The creature was encased head to foot in super-heavy mega armour, thick metal plate sections welded together in layers. What made the situation worse was the energy field shimmering across its entire body — a custom force field generator, built into the armour itself by a Big Mek's personal work.
It did not pause. It roared and charged the human defensive line directly. A Leman Russ fired at it from the side, a high-explosive round taking it squarely in the chest. The round hit the energy field, the field crackled, and the round lost its trajectory and detonated in the mud at the Warboss's feet.
That vast and massively armored body did not slow. The creature moved like a fully powered battle tank given will and fury, walking through the concentrated las and bolt fire coming at it from every direction, and it came down on a Leman Russ that was still moving at full speed, driving from the tank's flank. The power klaw locked around the tank's track assembly. Metal shearing against metal, hydraulic lines rupturing, and the thirty-plus ton main battle tank was physically flipped onto its side.
This spectacle broke something in the soldiers nearest to it. The PDF holding that section let out a cry of something close to terror. More than a dozen of them dropped their lasrifles and broke for the rear of the position.
Duvette's eyes went flat and cold.
On a battlefield like this one, once routing starts spreading, an entire defensive line can collapse within minutes. He drew the bolt pistol without hesitation, sighted on one of the deserters running in his direction, and fired.
The round detonated in the man's chest. The body hit the mud and did not rise. The sound of it cut across the noise of the battle with brutal clarity. The flight stopped.
He had been about to order every remaining heavy weapon to concentrate on the Warboss when the situation above the battlefield changed.
The Thunderhawk, which had just finished suppressing the Ork anti-aircraft positions, came down. The massive aircraft descended on full engine output and held at barely ten meters off the ground, the assault ramp at the rear lowering on its hydraulic arms with a pressurized release of air.
A rank of figures in deep blue power armor appeared on the ramp. Across the length of the defensive line, the morale that had been close to breaking found something to stand on again.
When the Emperor's Angels arrive on a battlefield, even the most exhausted soldiers remember they are not alone.
Duvette tilted his head back and fixed his eyes on the Space Marine standing at the front of the ramp. No helmet. Short, precise hair. A face that was built from hardened conviction and nothing more comfortable than that. Above the right eye, a service stud set into the skin.
He looked at the face and it became increasingly familiar.
Then recognition arrived.
Titus.
Duvette's pulse kicked upward. If Titus was here, this might well be the Ultramarines 2nd Company. If it was the 2nd Company, Cato Sicarius might also be on the field somewhere. With the 2nd Company engaged, the arithmetic of this battle had just changed completely. Certain victory did not feel like an overstatement.
He knew what Titus was capable of. He had no doubt the Warboss would not survive the encounter. But before the Astartes engaged the creature at full strength, giving them a weakened target seemed worth the effort.
"All heavy weapons! Concentrate on that Warboss's joints! Its legs! Now!"
The combined fire converged on the Warboss's lower structure. Without the force field, which had apparently exceeded its capacity and failed, its right knee joint took sustained impact. The mechanical leg buckled visibly, sparks erupting from the joint housing. The vast body lurched.
In the instant the creature lost its footing, Titus led his twenty Ultramarines off the ramp.
They dropped ten-plus meters without deceleration equipment. Pure power armor and transhuman bodies. They hit the mud in the middle of the battlefield and the impact sent Orks flying outward from the landing zone. The ground shook.
"For Ultramar!"
The battle cry went out across the position and then the twenty Astartes moved into the Ork mass and began their work.
This was the Ultramarines at their characteristic quality. Complete and absolute discipline. Two assault squads operating under Titus's direction, advancing continuously.
The front ten raised their boltguns and the fire that came from those barrels was not fire in the ordinary sense. It reduced the Ork tide breaking against it to scattered fragments, nothing able to come through the overlapping fields of fire in any coherent form.
The flanking ten worked with chainswords and power swords, meeting the Orks pressing in from the sides and doing so with an efficiency that had no relationship to effort. The motion was precise and continuous. No break in the formation, regardless of what hit it.
"Cover the Astartes! Heavy weapons suppress those Orks!" Duvette issued the orders without taking his eyes off the advancing assault squads.
The Warboss, right leg damaged by the concentrated fire, turned. It had been looking at the humans, and now it had found something more interesting. It recognized what had just landed on the field. These were threats worth engaging.
It roared, abandoned the human infantry it had been tearing through, and charged Titus on a damaged leg through a wall of bolt fire.
The power klaw swept down.
Titus did not step back. He dropped his center of mass and angled his body in a single movement, slipping into the space just inside the arc of the claw's swing where the striking surface could not reach. In the same motion he drove his shoulder into the Warboss's abdominal armor using his full Astartes strength. The impact stopped the creature's charge. It held.
In the moment of contact, the chainsword in Titus's hand spoke. He drove the blade into the gap at the chest armor's joint with a precision that did not require a second attempt. The armor plate opened with a metal-on-metal shriek and the dark fluid inside erupted outward.
The Warboss screamed in pain and fury.
Titus reached for the bolt pistol at his hip, put the barrel into the Warboss's open mouth, and pulled the trigger three times.
Three rounds detonated inside the skull cavity. The Warboss's head ceased to exist as a single object. The massive body convulsed once and went to its knees in the mud.
Silence fell across the battlefield like something dropped.
The Orks around the position went still. They looked at their Warboss, who had been impossible and unstoppable a breath ago, and was now a headless body in the mud.
Titus kicked the corpse aside. He flicked the chainsword's blade to clear the residue and pressed the deactivation control. The blade stopped. He returned it to the magnetic lock at his hip.
The reversal was total.
The death of the Warboss drained the Waaagh energy that had been sustaining the entire assault force. The frenzied certainty went out of the Ork tide like air leaving a punctured thing. Panic moved through them instead, spreading in the same exponential way the Waaagh cry had. They dropped their weapons. They turned. They fled in every direction across the plain, howling without organization or purpose.
The Orks' will to fight was gone.
"Cease fire. Hold your positions. Do not pursue."
Duvette's voice was worn down to something rough and barely carrying, but the comms channel reached every squad. He did not order a pursuit. The human forces had given everything they had. The 101st were leaning against tank hulls trying to breathe. The Eisenmark tanks had nearly no ammunition left and overheating engines.
He let his shooters clear the isolated Orks still offering resistance within sight. Then he turned and walked toward the center of the battlefield.
The twenty Ultramarines had not withdrawn. They were conducting a methodical advance through the field, boltguns and chainswords completing what the fight had left unfinished, eliminating anything still dangerous.
Duvette stopped in front of a Space Marine who had just put his chainsword through an Ork at the waist and was now scanning the ground for the next priority.
He straightened, raised his hand to his chest, and gave the sign of the Aquila.
"Thank you for your support, my lord."
Titus turned. He set his boot against the Ork wreckage on the chainsword blade and cleared it, pressed the deactivation control, and returned the weapon to his hip. The towering transhuman looked down at the mortal commissar in front of him. In the eyes that had seen more battles than most regiments accumulated in their entire history, there was no Astartes arrogance. There was only calm, and something that was close to recognition.
"Courage and honour, Commissar." Titus's voice carried the weight of a man who did not use words to fill space. "The resilience your regiment showed in these circumstances was impressive."
With that acknowledgment between them, the two men exchanged brief words on the smoke-covered plain.
From Titus, Duvette gathered the broader picture quickly. This Ultramarines force had not been deployed here by any planned schedule. They had been completing another assignment in the outer sectors when an urgent recall order reached them from Chapter Master Marneus Calgar himself — all Ultramarines operating in the surrounding regions were to complete whatever they were doing immediately and return to Macragge at maximum speed.
While returning, their fleet had received the Shrine World's distress signal. Given the distance to Macragge, the commanding officer had decided to render assistance on the way.
"The Ork fleet in low orbit has been cleared," Titus stated the outcome with the matter-of-fact quality of someone filing a report. "The sector patrol fleet coordinated with our strike cruiser. The orbital lanes are now under Imperial control. Our Captain, Severus Agemman, is currently providing support along the collapsed front lines with the remaining battle-brothers."
Duvette nodded. Agemman was still the 2nd Company's captain, then — which made sense for this point in time. Both Titus and the celebrated Cato Sicarius would each bear that legendary command later, in their own seasons. But that was the future.
With orbital control completely in Imperial hands, bringing this war to its conclusion was a question of time rather than outcome.
But the detail that settled over Duvette with genuine weight was the recall order from Calgar.
He knew what it meant. There was only one threat in the current period that would cause the entire Ultramarines Chapter to converge on Macragge for a defensive stand. The Tyranids.
The Hive Fleet that would later be designated Behemoth was coming. It would bring its shadow in the Warp with it, and that shadow would fall across the Realm of Ultramar. The Astronomican would go dark in its approach. Entire systems would go silent before it arrived.
And that meant the Astra Militarum forces currently operating in the Macragge system's surrounding space — forces that included the 101st Regiment of the Ash Watchers — would never receive permission to withdraw to safer rear areas. The Departmento Munitorum would conscript everything in range. They were going to fight in the apocalyptic war against the Tyranid tide. Beside what that would look like, today's Ork assault was a warmup exercise.
Duvette let out a long breath. He pressed the enormous shadow of what was coming back down into a place where it would not interfere with the present, said nothing about it, and gave Titus a final nod before walking back to his regiment.
Kleist and Volkov came to meet him. Both of them were covered in dried blood, uniforms past any reasonable definition of the word, and both pairs of eyes held a wordless question.
Duvette shook his head. "No bad news." He looked at both men. "We survived. This planet's war is nearly over. Orbit has been retaken. The Ultramarines' main force is on the front line. The Orks have run out of time."
The shoulders of both men dropped. Kleist and Volkov exhaled as one, and the exhale carried something that had been held under pressure for a long time.
But Duvette's expression did not follow them into relief. His eyes went cold in a different direction. He turned his head and looked north.
"Now," he said. The killing intent in his voice was controlled and very clear. "We have a conversation to have with that treacherous Major General."
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