Twenty-four hours.
Nolan had stopped tracking time with any precision somewhere in the middle of the night cycle and had not picked the habit back up. He moved through the green tide by feel now, the Warscythe in one hand, the ten rings orbiting at varying distances and cutting return paths through whatever had closed behind him. The vibranium shell was uniformly green from collar to boot, and he had long since stopped noticing.
The Lamenters had exhausted their bolt ammunition in stages across the night. The Astartes who ran dry fell back to chainswords and led the armed mortal fighters in the trench lines, holding the positions by the force of power armor and the particular willingness of people who had decided that dying with a weapon in their hands was acceptable and dying without one was not. The mortal slaves fought with a ferocity that their weapons did not support and their bodies did not fully survive, and they kept fighting anyway.
Nolan worked the battlefield in the way he had learned to work it: constant motion, constant pressure on whatever was posing the greatest immediate threat to the line. He cleared one pocket of the front, identified the next critical point through the eyepiece, and moved toward it before the first pocket had fully settled. It was not elegant. It was the only approach that was keeping the line intact.
The Ork army had introduced Death Dreadnoughts to the assault some hours into the second wave. Heavy mecha units, slower than infantry but substantially more dangerous to everything on the human side of the trenches that was not wearing a vibranium shell. Each one that reached the line was capable of ending a section of it, and the Lamenters in chainsaw range could not cut through the armor fast enough to stop them.
Nolan dealt with most of them personally. The ten rings could find joints and vision slits, the Warscythe could exploit whatever the rings opened, and the combination worked against everything that had appeared so far. He worked through a line of them in what felt like the early hours of the second day, the last one falling as the high-explosive grenades ran out simultaneously, and was turning to locate the next problem when the eyepiece showed him something worse.
A larger Death Dreadnought had reached the Lamenters' forward trench in a section where the Astartes density was thin. Three of them went at it with chainswords, and the chainswords were not reaching anything that mattered through the heavy armor. The Dreadnought's arm swept across the trench in a single motion and the three Astartes came apart.
"David." Nolan was already moving, the Warscythe clearing a path through the bodies pressing against him from every direction. "Lascannon focus on the Death Dreadnought at the forward line, northern section. Now."
The beams came across the battlefield an instant later, three of them converging on the same point of the Dreadnought's upper hull. The armor resisted the first beam, heated under the second, and the third burned a molten channel through it.
Nolan snapped four rings into the gap at speed.
The sounds from inside the Dreadnought's hull stopped. The machine went down.
He exhaled once through his nose and looked for the next thing.
The Ork special warfare units came at dusk, using the failing light and a section of trench where the Astartes numbers had thinned through attrition. Small groups, fast, hitting the weak points in rapid sequence. The Lamenters combat teams nearest to the breaches responded immediately, driving broken power armor into the gaps and engaging at close range. The mortal fighters in those sections did not wait to be ordered. They threw themselves at the special warfare Orks with whatever they were holding, accepting casualties at a rate that would have been catastrophic in any conventional assessment, and buying the Astartes the seconds they needed to close the line.
The breaches were sealed. The special warfare units were dead. The Ork assault pulled back marginally, as if reconsidering its approach.
The human side of the trenches used the pause to breathe.
Nolan dropped back into the trench line and pulled the helmet off. Several mortal slaves approached him carefully, holding between them a small bowl of fresh water drawn from the mine's depths. Their lips were dry and cracked. He looked at the bowl, looked at their faces, and accepted it without comment. He drank all of it.
He put the helmet back on and went to find Foros.
The Chapter Master was at an elevated position in the trench network, watching the Ork lines and managing the repositioning of every unit he still had available. He acknowledged Nolan's arrival without fully taking his eyes off the field.
The conversation was short and honest. They had water from the mine. They did not have food, not in any quantity that would sustain three million people for the time remaining until support arrived. Two options: endure on willpower and whatever the Emperor's blessing accounted for in metabolic terms, or find a way to feed people from local materials.
The Ork dead were numerous and immediately available. The problem was that Ork biology was profoundly hostile to human digestion. Consuming Ork flesh would kill most of the mortal slaves before the Orks did.
They did not reach a conclusion before the next assault began.
Nolan was back over the trench parapet before the discussion had formally ended, the Warscythe coming up and the ten rings spreading wide.
This assault was different in scale from everything that had preceded it. The Orks had apparently exhausted whatever patience their command structure operated on and had committed to ending the position. The weight of the attack hit the human line across its full width simultaneously, and the line bent in multiple places at once. Mortal fighters went down in numbers that were not sustainable, and the Lamenters Astartes were now spread too thin to plug every breach as fast as the breaches opened.
In the midst of it, Nolan felt something shift.
It was not a sound and not quite a sensation. The Black Rage was building in the Lamenters around him, driven upward by the intensity of the fighting and the accumulated weight of the hours behind them. He could feel it in the psychic register, individual threads of it rising from the Astartes across the battlefield, converging, gathering mass. And as they converged they were moving toward him specifically, drawn to whatever the psychic wings represented, pulling together behind his position.
A black light wing extended from the back of the power pack involuntarily. The psychic feathers of the Black Rage attached to it and fed it, and the wing grew as they accumulated.
Nolan looked at it for a fraction of a second.
Then he had the idea.
He brought the wing forward in a single sharp motion and beat it outward with force, driving the accumulated feathers away from himself and across the battlefield in a spreading wave. Not toward the Lamenters. Toward the mortal fighters in the trenches, the ones who were being pushed back, the ones who were running short of the will to keep standing.
The feathers reached them.
The sound that came back was not the sound of human beings in a desperate defensive action. It was something rawer and louder and considerably more frightening than that, a rage that did not originate in tactics or training but in something much older, surging up through three million people who had survived unspeakable things and had just been given, without warning, the psychic equivalent of permission to stop enduring it and start answering it.
The roar crossed most of the battlefield.
The Orks, whose own war cries had been the loudest sound on the field for twenty-four hours, heard it and paused.
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