by C. L. Werner
The idea sent a surge of raw hate thundering through the janissary’s veins. Leaning over the side of the train, Taofang stared down into the bestial visage of an ork biker. Vindictively, he fired his lasgun at the monster. The ork braked hard, preventing the shot from striking its head. Instead, the energy beam struck the warbike’s forks, melting through the scrap-metal pipe. The damaged fork snapped, causing the bike to jerk to the left, straight into the path of a pursuing buggy. Both vehicles disintegrated in the resulting collision, spilling a junk-heap of debris across the tracks.
A loud explosion to the right turned Taofang’s attention away from his own handiwork. He watched in awe as the big battlewagon went spinning through the air, its cargo of burned and mangled orks hurtling across the desert. An instant later there was an explosion to the left – a wartrak had struck another mine.
Between the barrage and the minefield, the remaining orks lost heart and turned their machines around. Taofang watched the aliens as they tried to make good their retreat, stubbornly trying to navigate the cratered landscape where the first barrage had fallen. With their own fire marking the range for them, the artillery made an easy job of annihilating the fleeing aliens.
Taofang turned to congratulate Mingzhou on their miraculous escape, but instead found his eyes fixated upon the sight directly ahead of the train. Stretching away across the horizon, as far as the eye could follow, was an immense wall half a kilometre high. Rising from the barren waste, black as night, bristling with guns of every size and calibre, it could only be the Witch Wall, the almost cyclopean fortification engineered by the Iron Warriors to defend their world from invasion.
Today, the Witch Wall’s defences had claimed their first victims.
They would not be the last. Of that Taofang was sure.
Chapter VII
I-Day Plus Fifty
‘… and I say it is the failure of Morax’s vaunted Air Cohort that has brought us to this impasse!’ Admiral Nostraz’s words boomed through the vaulted halls of the Iron Bastion, drowning out the chorus rising from the gargoyles. ‘We are losing air superiority in our own skies to a bunch of slack-brained xenos trash!’
Skylord Morax rose from his seat and leaned across the table, his gauntlets hissing as they tightened about the edge. ‘If I had been given half the resources squandered on your system defence fleet, brother, then the orks wouldn’t dare show their filthy faces in the sunlight. As it stands, my squadrons are being taxed to their limit just trying to keep the xenos away from the Witch Wall and maintain control on this side of the Mare Ossius. I need more pilots. I need more bombs. I need more planes. Give me the tools to do the job and I will have the orks scurrying back to Dirgas like whipped curs.’
‘More empty promises from the hero of Janicar,’ Skintaker Algol scoffed. The clutch of robed attendants hovering about him, sewing fresh patches of leather into his cloak, froze as they heard their fearsome master speak. It would take much for him to lash out at another Iron Warrior, but almost less than nothing for him to turn his ire on mere slaves.
Morax’s face grew crimson as he heard Algol’s insult. The siege of Janicar had been fought over two millennia past, yet it was still a raw wound against his pride. There, too, Morax had commanded the Iron Warriors’ air arm, using it to smash the massed armour of the Imperium. He had caught an entire tank army upon the plains of Boresh, annihilating it in a merciless campaign of saturation bombing. At least, that is what he reported to his battle-brothers. In truth, he’d been tricked by the Imperial commander, gulled into destroying a phoney formation – civilian vehicles dressed to look like tanks and artillery. While he was bombing the fake army, the real armour was slipping away to surprise the Iron
Warriors ground forces encircling the planetary capital. It had been a near disaster and a stinging blemish on Morax’s career.
‘Damn it, Algol!’ Morax exploded, his armoured fingers digging into the table’s surface, cracking the transparent stone. ‘I can do nothing without more equipment. I need more Flesh to fly the planes. I need more munitions to drop on the orks. My resources are not unlimited!’ He swung around, pointing a finger at Nostraz. ‘Complain about the great admiral’s cowardly pirates. If they had done their job, we would still be able to draw supplies from off-world, instead of rationing every las-pack and protein-tube!’
Admiral Nostraz started to respond, but thought better of rising to Morax’s bait. From the corner of his eye, he studied Warsmith Andraaz on his diamond throne. Anything the admiral might say to defend the performance of his defence fleet would challenge the Warsmith’s policy of isolation. Any challenge to Andraaz’s authority was reckless, but especially on a day like today. The Rending Guard seemed especially eager for an excuse to defend their master’s rank and honour. Discretion proving the better part of wisdom, the admiral sat down and contented himself with glaring death at his rival across the table.
‘We must all make do with what we have,’ Warsmith Andraaz declared, his voice like the rasp of a chainsword. ‘In the hands of an Iron Warrior, the rudest tool becomes an instrument of death.’
‘I cannot work miracles with nothing,’ Morax grumbled under his breath. Andraaz leaned outwards from his throne, the talons of his power claw clacking against one another with unspoken menace.
‘You will perform as it is demanded of you to perform,’ the Warsmith said. ‘Fail me and you will not have the chance to repent your weakness.’
Sucking in a great breath, the chastened Skylord sank down into his seat. ‘As you command, Grim Lord.’
‘As I command,’ Andraaz repeated. ‘Do not forget that. Any of you.’ He turned his head and fixed his smouldering gaze on Over-Captain Vallax. ‘What news of the ork advance? What have your scouts reported?’
Disappointment flashed across Vallax’s hair in a ripple of lavender colour, the mutation betraying the emotion if not its cause. He had hoped to exploit the Warsmith’s call for deep penetration in the ork-held wastes. Captain Rhodaan had been so eager for action the cretin hadn’t even questioned the assignment. Vallax had been very careful to choose the most ork-ridden region of the planet for Squad Kyrith’s mission, stealing data-slates from Morax’s Air Cohort to verify the hazards. It had been frustrating to see Rhodaan and his rabble return to Vorago intact. Perhaps his rival hadn’t been as credulous as he had seemed.
‘An enormous concentration of ork machinery is gathering in the heights overlooking the Convallis Robigo,’ Vallax recited Rhodaan’s report. Having Squad Kyrith reassigned to duties in the Mare Ossius afforded the Over-Captain the opportunity to make the report himself and claim it for his own. ‘A mass horde of warbikes, buggies, trucks and primitive armour, supported by an array of artillery and rockets. Enemy numbers are estimated to be above six hundred thousand. There can be little question the xenos intend to move against the Witch Wall.’
‘Captain Gamgin has been alerted,’ Admiral Nostraz interjected. ‘The janissaries manning the fortifications have been placed on double watches. Supplemental provisions and water rations have been drawn from the stores at Aboro against the potential for a prolonged xenos assault.’
‘The orks won’t have the patience for a long attack,’ Algol said. ‘They’ll lose twenty or thirty thousand trying to break through the defences and then lose interest. They don’t have the discipline for a long siege.’
Sergeant Ipos stood and bowed his head as he addressed Warsmith Andraaz. ‘It is impossible to predict the alien mind,’ he cautioned. ‘It is just possible the orks may bypass the Witch Wall. We have to be prepared against that possibility.’
‘Your ambition is showing,’ growled Algol. ‘Afraid Gamgin will reap all the glory for himself and leave nothing for a scheming half-seed?’
‘The only glory I seek is that of the Third Grand Company,’ Ipos retorted, just the faintest hint of mockery in his deferential tone. ‘I exist only to serve the Legion.’ A thin smile twisted the Iron Warrior’s mouth. ‘To do so, I require another sixty t
housand slaves. Can you manage that, lord captain?’
‘Digging more holes in the desert, sergeant?’ Morax snarled.
Ipos kept his voice subservient as he answered the Skylord’s displeasure. ‘No, now we need to fill them. If the orks gain a foothold this side of the Mare Ossius, it will be the worst mistake of their campaign. I can guarantee it.’
‘Sergeant Ipos’s plan is sound,’ the metallic rasp of Oriax’s servitor-proxy intoned. ‘With the proper allocation of Flesh, everything can be in readiness. I have already detached three-quarters of my tech-adepts to the project.’
Warsmith Andraaz brought his armoured fist slashing through the air. ‘I have already decided on Sergeant Ipos’s plan. The debate is closed. Captain Algol, you will provide the sergeant with whatever he requires.’
‘The Flesh he asks for was already detailed to reinforce the Witch Wall,’ the Skintaker objected.
Andraaz clenched the talons of his power claw, sending a crackle of energy rippling across his forearm. ‘Then Captain Gamgin will just have to do without,’ he declared.
Stretching across half a continent, marking the shoreline of a dead ocean, the black mass of the Witch Wall was a synthetic scar upon the face of Castellax, so immense as to be visible from orbit whenever the planet’s pollution levels dropped to sub-toxic levels. A megalithic mass of stone, ferrocrete and plasteel half a kilometre high, the fortress was a monstrosity of guns and assault batteries. Divided every few hundred metres into fortified segments, fed by a network of subterranean railways, workshops, arsenals and troop-kennels, the wall was a world unto itself. Locked within its dungeons, generations of slaves laboured in the darkness to provide ammunition for its guns, to produce synthetic food for its garrison, to supply energy to its generators. Imprisoned within containment-crypts, their bodies immersed in preservative salt-baths, their brains wired into thrall-engines, hundreds of psykers sent their mental screams wailing through the battlements, a psychic clamour to confound the witchery of any enemy.
Four hundred thousand janissaries and mamelukes manned the defences of the Witch Wall, an army equipped with the best munitions to emerge from the factories of Castellax. Only the very best of the millions who passed through the brutal training regimes were allowed to serve here. Captain Gamgin would accept nothing less.
The Iron Warrior prowled along the wind-swept battlements, ignoring the caustic pollutants brushing across his armour as the breeze stirred up the dusty bed of the Mare Ossius. The extinct ocean was at his back, before him yawned the blighted wastes of the desert and the yawning pit of the Convallis Robigo, a great canyon gouged into the surface of Castellax by centuries of indiscriminate strip-mining. The lower depths of the canyon were a poisonous bog of acids and alkalis, toxic waste and industrial run-off. Those who attempted to desert the Witch Wall’s garrison, weak-willed cowards unable to endure the constant wailing of the entombed psykers, were often tossed into the canyon where their lingering deaths could be observed by the closest of the forts.
Now a different sort of spectacle was unfolding about the rim of the canyon. Gamgin raised the magnoculars to his helm, staring through the polarised optics to filter out the haze of pollutants and distance. His hearts pounded faster as he saw the magnitude of the ork warhost. It seemed to stretch away to the very horizon, an armada of ramshackle machines and roaring engines, a veritable storm of smog rising from the motley confusion of exhausts. Through the polluted sky, a swarm of alien aircraft soared and hovered, swooped and dived, like angry flies buzzing over an unburied corpse.
Gamgin lowered the magnoculars and glared at the nearest guard post. Even through the filters of his helmet, he fancied he could smell the fear dripping off his troops. Weak, fragile men. For all their training, for all the discipline that had been whipped, beaten and burned into them, they remained pathetic Flesh. This was the foundation the False Emperor had imagined he could build his Imperium upon. It would be amusing if it wasn’t so pathetic.
Gamgin marched to the guard post, the janissaries snapping to terrified attention as the hulking Iron Warrior loomed over the fire control of their missile battery. Obedience through fear, so long as the Flesh was more afraid of Gamgin than the orks, they would do their duty. Reaching down to the face of a trembling loader, the Space Marine decided to remind his troops why they should fear. Gripping the man’s insect-like rebreather, Gamgin pulled the mask away, exposing the soldier’s pale flesh to the toxic dust. At once, the skin began to blister.
‘Breathe,’ Gamgin ordered. The doomed soldier stared back at him, his eyes imploring the monstrous giant for mercy. ‘Breathe,’ Gamgin repeated, closing his fingers about the janissary’s face, forcing the man’s mouth open. The loader struggled in the Space Marine’s grip, but at last his starving lungs forced him to draw the unfiltered dust into his lungs.
The Iron Warrior dropped the quivering wretch, leaving him to bleed out as the poisons burned away his lungs. The twitching body would be an object lesson to his comrades, a reminder to them of who they served… and why.
‘Soldiers of the Witch Wall,’ Gamgin growled into his helmet’s vox-bead. His voice boomed out from the thousands of vox-casters stretching across the continent-spanning stronghold, echoing through the endless labyrinth of service tunnels and sub-cellars running beneath the ground. ‘The hour of your duty is at hand. The enemy shall set upon you with all his savagery and in all his numbers. He will seek to breach the wall. He will fail. You will drive him back. You will destroy him. You will kill him. You will butcher and annihilate him. Here we exterminate the xenos vermin who have dared trespass upon our world. No quarter shall be given, no mercy shall be shown. Your orders are total annihilation!’
Gamgin’s voice dropped into a bestial snarl. ‘You will obey your orders. The Iron Warriors demand it of you. Fail your masters and you will wish the orks had taken you...’
All across the wall, Gamgin could see officers hurrying to spur their commands into readiness, lashing out with whips and clubs at those who failed to respond quickly enough. The bark of orders, the shouts of command echoed across the barrier, sometimes interrupted by the groan of shells being loaded or the creak of elevators bringing up missiles from the underground arsenals. The thrum of hundreds of lascannon and plasma batteries cycling over to full charge formed an omnipresent susurrus that silenced even the howls of the buried psykers.
This was the Witch Wall, and the green tide of the invader would be broken upon it. Gamgin already had a freight train waiting on one of the rail bridges to bear evidence of his victory back to Vorago. When the fighting was over, three thousand slaves would be sent into the wastes to collect the heads of slaughtered orks. It would be a fitting tribute to Gamgin’s command and the defences he had engineered. One that none of his battle-brothers would be able to deny him.
The shrieking siren of an ork fighter-bomber ripped across the sky, the primitive aircraft swooping so near the battlements that Gamgin could clearly make out the snaggle-toothed squig painted across its nose. Streamers of black smoke belched from the plane’s wing, but it was impossible to tell if it was from damage or the crude exhausts of its combustion engine. Whatever its condition, the Iron Warrior watched as the plane’s guns opened up, splashing the wreckage of a gun crew across the interior of a weapon pit. An instant later, the bright beam of a lascannon burned a hole through the plane’s fuselage, sending it plummeting from the sky to crash in a great fireball against the desert floor.
As far as Gamgin’s eyes could see, similar scenes of carnage were being played out. That swarm of ork planes and gyrocopters had struck with the fury of a tempest, blazing across the length of the wall in a firestorm of rocketry and gunfire. Hundreds had been burned from the skies and still there seemed no end to the alien flyers. With reckless abandon, the orks had flown straight into the anti-aircraft batteries and missile defences, negating the efficiency of each strategically positioned emplacement and ruthlessly trained gun crew through sheer weight of numbers. The
orks had simply overwhelmed each position, sacrificing dozens of their planes to knock out a single lascannon or missile battery.
It was viciously inefficient, but Gamgin could not deny that the xenos strategy was yielding results. He had been compelled to husband his resources, order entire batteries to stand down and keep quiet so that they might avoid drawing the attentions of the ork flyers. It galled him to allow the aliens any kind of respite, but he knew he had to preserve his strength. For all the malignity of their attack, the ork planes were only a distraction. The real battle would be joined when the xenos ground forces joined the assault.
Out across the desert, the black smog of the ork advance drew closer. Gamgin stalked towards the edge of the battlements, ignoring the chatter of a passing fighter-bomber’s boltguns as he peered through the magnoculars at the oncoming horde. Like some thousand-headed beast, the alien army rolled through the dust, implacable and unstoppable.
Or so it might appear. Gamgin smiled coldly as he watched the advance. Soon the xenos vermin would reach the range of the wall’s heavy artillery. It was disappointing to allow the alien vanguard to pass unmolested, but it was necessary. There were other defences that would deal with them. He turned the glasses, following the leading rabble of bikes and buggies, trucks and wartraks. He could see some of the ork gunners firing at the wall, ignoring the fact they were still woefully out of range. Pitiful brutes, it was almost embarrassing to slaughter them. They’d never appreciate the skill with which they were exterminated.
A red-painted warbike was the first of the ork machines to hit the minefield. It was thrown into the air in a burst of flame and smoke, spinning end over end until it crashed in a smouldering heap. Other machines soon joined it in destruction, an entire section of desert seeming to blossom into a garden of explosions. Now that the first mine had been struck, the proximity sensors attached to the rest had been activated. The orks didn’t need to actually pass over the buried explosives now. Simply coming within five metres of them was enough. It was amusing to watch the xenos trying to veer across the deadly expanse, trying to avoid the death lurking under their tyres.
