[Imperial Guard 06] - Gunheads

by Steve Parker - (ebook by Undead)

The very thought of it was almost enough to overcome the pain in Vinnemann’s back.

  “Bekker,” he said, addressing his driver, “get us behind that ridge on the right. Hull down, but leave plenty of clearance for the gun. The rest of you, prep for firing. We’re about to make things interesting around here.”

  With a great chugging cough from her exhausts, Angel of the Apocalypse rumbled into motion.

  Bergen saw Vinnemann’s massive Shadowsword roar towards a shallow rise and settle into firing position. The ork artillery pieces had turned their attention to the infantry’s forward lines. The bodies of good Cadian men were being blasted apart to rain back down to the ground in ragged pieces. Scores of them were dying with every lethal shot, and the greenskins on foot were using the cover of the artillery fire to bridge the gap, hungry for the slaughter that would take place at close quarters. Elsewhere, Vinnemann’s tanks were holding their own against the technically inferior but far more numerous ork machines. Smoking wrecks littered the land, providing cover for small groups of terrified men who had lost their nerve. Through his field glasses, Bergen saw one such group huddled together, eyes shut tight, hands pressed over their ears. It was hard to see through all the smoke and fire, but they were clearly green. New meat.

  Where in the blasted warp was their sergeant?

  If their regimental commissar noticed them huddled there, frozen in fear and panic, they wouldn’t live to become old meat. Executions for cowardice were swift and brutal. There were no appeals. Bergen didn’t like executions, but it was the way of the Guard: do your duty and die well, or run from it and die without honour.

  He pitied them. It was easy to lose your balance when everything around you was going to hell. He voxed Colonel Graves. “Division to Infantry Command. It looks like some of your rookies have lost their officer. Check those burning tanks on your ten o’clock, Graves. Get someone over there. Get them back in the fight. If the orks find them first they’ll be massacred.”

  Colonel Graves’ response was brief and affirmative. Seconds later, Bergen saw a squad push left and join the huddled men. His attention was diverted, however, by a high-pitched whine that rose from the right. He had heard its like before, though on regrettably rare occasions. Hearing it now caused a thrill to run through him. He immediately panned his glasses towards Vinnemann’s Shadowsword and saw a white glow forming at the muzzle of her huge cannon. Knowing what was to come, he turned his eyes towards the black artillery pieces by the outpost gates. Over-muscled greenskin gunnery crews were hefting shells the size of oil drums into the breech of each huge gun, readying to pulverise the advancing Cadian lines once again.

  There was an almighty crack, like a clap of thunder, so close that Bergen felt it resonate deep in his bones. Everything in the area outside the outpost’s main gates was engulfed in blinding white light. Bergen thought he saw the shot hit the row of greenskin war machines at an angle, cutting across them diagonally, but he could only watch for a fraction of a second. Looking directly at the beam was painful, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

  A glowing afterimage of the Volcano’s lethal beam remained behind his eyelids. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that a good number of the enemy machines had ceased to exist. Bubbling pools of liquid metal were the only trace left. Others, though not struck directly, would no longer be firing on his men. Their crews had been roasted to ash. The raw heat of the Volcano beam striking the neighbouring guns was simply too intense to survive.

  The Cadian infantry had seen it all happen. A great cheer sounded from the battlefield as their spirits were lifted, and they surged forward, inspired by the incredible display of power they had witnessed from their own side. Bergen could feel it on the air, the special moment that every commander awaited so anxiously. It was the beginning of the end.

  He voxed Vinnemann. “Division to Armour Command. Hell of a shot, Kochatkis. Hell of a shot. That showed the filthy savages.”

  Vinnemann answered through gasping breaths. “Thank you, sir. Great to fire up the old Volcano cannon again after so long. She’s drained the tanks, though. And we lost two capacitors. We’ll need a Trojan over here for a refuel.”

  “Are you all right, man? You sound…”

  “Don’t worry about me, sir,” replied Vinnemann. “It’s just the usual. I’ll deal with it when this is over.”

  Bergen was scanning the field of combat, watching his forces surge forward, taking a murderous toll on the foe.

  “You won’t have to wait long, Kochatkis. Our lads are really pressing forward now. You’ve inspired them, by Terra. They’re cutting into the ork lines like a bayonet through butter.”

  It was no lie. The greenskins’ brute strength and instinct for battle simply weren’t enough to hold off the well-coordinated Imperial forces any longer.

  Within the hour, the walls of Karavassa were breached.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gunfire still stuttered here and there along Karavassa’s narrow streets, but the sounds of battle were little more than faint echoes of the madness and bloodshed that had now passed. The outpost had been retaken. Bergen had achieved his objective. General deViers had the first of the positions that would defend his supply and transport routes between Hadron Base and his intended destination in the east.

  One of Colonel Marrenburg’s mechanised platoons had found and killed the ork leader, an abomination of preposterous size and musculature, while securing the old Imperial communications building at the heart of the outpost. Bergen had been invited to verify this as soon as the area was judged clear of significant threats. Now he stood in a broad, low-ceilinged room, looking down on the body, marvelling at the size of the creature that lay motionless on the stone floor at his feet. The smell from it was overpowering, like stale sweat and rotting garbage.

  He judged the fallen warboss to be at least two and a half metres tall, and not much less from shoulder to shoulder if one included the hunks of iron plate that had been bolted together to form its crude armour. It would have needed to hunch over just to fit inside the building, but then, orks tended to hunch anyway due to the massive slabs of overdeveloped muscle that covered their bodies. There was a poorly painted skull and dagger design on its angular breastplate, the symbol of whatever clan the foul wretch had lorded over. Bergen didn’t recognise the glyph.

  “Not the best looking bastard I’ve met, sir,” said Colonel Marrenburg. He stepped forward, stopping at Bergen’s side.

  “He’s no charmer, Edwyn,” Bergen replied, “that’s for sure. Are we certain this one is the leader?”

  “It’s always the biggest, isn’t it?” said Marrenburg. “He had a bodyguard around him, too. Lost eleven men taking him and his guards down.” The colonel kicked the dead ork’s thick forearm in contempt. Bergen watched the huge lifeless hand flop on the floor. The creature’s thick fingers looked like they could have crushed a man’s bones to powder. “Made him pay in the end, though,” said Marrenburg. “Mind if I smoke, sir?”

  “Go ahead,” said Bergen. “Maybe it’ll cover the stink.”

  “We’ll have this place cleaned out in no time, sir,” replied Marrenburg as he pulled a packet of smokes from his breast pocket. “Offer you one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Sorry, sir,” said Marrenburg with a grin. “I always forget you don’t. Anyway, if you’re done looking at this one, the enginseers are waiting to set up some kind of equipment. Don’t suppose they’ve come up with a solution to the long-range vox problem, do you?”

  Bergen turned from the dead ork. “In a roundabout way, I suppose they have. The tech-priests have been laying cables under the sand all the way here, a kind of landline that they insist will do the job. Tech-Adept Armadron has promised to brief us fully once the system is operational. It’ll save us having to send any more runners all the way back to Hadron to communicate with the general.”

  “Have you sent one to report on our victory here?”

  Bergen nodded. “Two, actually, just in ca
se. Hornet riders with coded parchments. I sent them out as soon as we entered the gates. I expect Tech-Adept Armadron will have his landline system up and running before they reach Hadron Base, but I like to have a little insurance.”

  Hornet motorcycles were a variant of the old standard-issue Blackshadow bikes. They were noisy, unarmed, and unarmoured, but they were the fastest machines available to 10th Division. Excepting for any problems, Bergen expected the couriers to reach Army Group HQ the following day.

  “Very wise, sir,” replied Marrenburg with a nod.

  Bergen didn’t feel wise. Today’s victory had lifted his spirits — he had seen the raw might of his armoured division overcome a significant enemy presence, and he knew a good number of his men, including no small percentage of those who had died, deserved medals for what they had achieved — but he still railed against the stupidity of the whole operation. Taking Karavassa wouldn’t matter a damn once General deViers got to the final way-point and found nothing left of the legendary tank he so desperately sought.

  Bergen intended to be there when it happened, to see the look on the general’s face.

  “Any word on getting a hospital set up?” he asked, returning his mind to more immediate concerns.

  Marrenburg said he didn’t know, but Bergen’s adjutant, Katz, stepped forward and answered, “The Officio Medicae staff have taken over a two-storey barracks building close to the west gate. It’s been swept for threats. No problems. Their triage teams have already brought in the high priority cases.”

  “Good,” said Bergen. “Make sure they have everything they need. I’m also worried about Colonel Vinnemann. I want him seen by an augmetics specialist as soon as possible. The gravity here, the dust and all the rest of it… From the sounds of it, it’s all playing absolute hell with that damned metal spine of his.”

  Marrenburg seemed about to comment when Colonel Graves marched in, boot heels loud and sharp on the stone floor. After a momentary glance in the direction of the dead warboss on the floor, he stopped, saluted, and said, “Just had word from one of my sweeper teams, sir. There’s something I think you ought to see.”

  The something in question did nothing to improve Bergen’s dark mood. In fact, it had quite the opposite effect.

  “Slaves,” he gasped. “Human slaves.”

  He stood in an open square a few hundred metres inside the north wall, looking at a mound of dead men and women. All were stripped. All were chained together, each iron collar linked to the next, every wrist and ankle tightly manacled. The flesh of their skinny chests and buttocks had been cruelly branded with the same glyph that Bergen had seen on the greenskin leader’s breastplate. Worst of all, each torso bore broad axe and cleaver wounds. They had been slaughtered like grox. But why? He could only guess. Perhaps, with the battle-lust on them, the orks within the walls had lost control, desperate to share in the bloodletting, and turned on those humans closest to hand. The results were stomach-churning. If Bergen’s heart had not already been filled with hatred for the greenskin race, the sight before him would certainly have done the trick. Blood-drinking ticks crawled in swarms over the cooling bodies, searching for the sustenance they craved, but finding little in veins that no longer pulsed.

  “We should have expected this,” muttered Lieutenant Katz from behind Bergen’s right shoulder.

  “Should we, Jarryl?”

  “I would have thought so, sir,” answered the adjutant. “Orks have been raiding the nearby systems unchecked for years. Salvage ships, mostly. The Navy can’t do much to protect those that break the spacing restrictions. High risk, high reward and all that.”

  “I’m glad my adjutant is so well informed,” said Bergen.

  “Sorry, sir,” stuttered Katz. “I didn’t mean to sound—”

  “Actually, Jarryl, I was being sincere. You know I value your observations. I just hadn’t thought to see something like this.”

  “I imagine the poor souls were brought here from Hadron, sir. It was the only ork spaceport in the immediate area before the Navy cleansed it. We know ork clans sometimes trade with each other. These poor souls might have been traded for fuel or ammunition.”

  “May the saints guide them on,” said Bergen. He pressed his hands to his chest in the sign of the aquila, and Katz immediately followed suit. Together, heads bowed, they offered a prayer for the dead. When they were done, Bergen said, “We’ll find more of them out there, won’t we?”

  Katz looked grim. “I expect so, sir, but not alive. I imagine the other divisions will find some when they take Tyrellis and Balkar, but the orks will kill them before they can be saved.” He gestured miserably at the pile of bodies in front of him. “There’s nothing we could have done, of course.”

  Bergen saw the truth of that, but it didn’t make him feel any better. These people’s lives had been stolen from them by dirty xenos scum. Their spirits, on the other hand, still belonged to the Emperor.

  “Make sure the confessors are told of this, Jarryl. I’d like the souls of these men and women to be commended to the Emperor’s side as soon as possible. I know the priests are busy with our own dead right now, but these bodies will have to be burned. I don’t want the outpost crawling with disease now that we’ve taken it back. Understood?”

  “Understood, sir,” said Katz. “With your permission, I’ll be about it, now.”

  “Good man,” said Bergen. He listened to his adjutant’s footsteps fade behind him.

  Above Karavassa, the sky was dimming with the onset of afternoon. The brown-bellied clouds looked almost low enough to touch. They flickered with sheet lightning. Booming claps of dry thunder shook the air.

  A crackle of sound in Bergen’s right ear announced a short-range vox-transmission just a fraction of a second before Colonel Graves’ voice said, “Graves to Division Command. Are you there, sir?”

  Bergen tapped a finger on the transmit stud of his vox-bead and replied, “Bergen, here. Go ahead, Darrik.”

  “One of my squads just reported the discovery of primary and secondary ork munitions dumps, sir, plus a significant fuel reserve by the south-east corner. Looks like they didn’t get around to scuttling it. Also, I’ve set up sentry patrols on the walls, as ordered. No room up there for the Tarantulas, I’m afraid, unless we extend the parapets ourselves. One more thing, sir. Captain Immrich is requesting permission to refuel his tanks from the greenskin cache.”

  “Immrich?” asked Bergen.

  “Yes, sir. He’s standing in for Colonel Vinnemann. The colonel is seeing the medicae augmeticist on your orders, remember?”

  “Right, yes,” voxed Bergen. “Tell Captain Immrich to go ahead, but I want the fuel store searched for nasty surprises first, and have him ask one of the tech-priests for a substance analysis before he fills up. Emperor alone knows what the orks put in their fuel tanks apart from promethium.”

  “One more thing, sir,” said Graves. “Tech-Adept Armadron tells me his preparations are complete. A vox-node antenna has been set up and connected to the landlines. We’ve just opened a link with Army Group HQ. The sound quality isn’t too bad at all. General deViers expects you to report personally within the next thirty minutes.”

  “Understood, colonel. I’ll be back at the comms station in ten. Meet me there. Division, out.”

  Bergen turned and began marching back towards the centre of the outpost, retracing his steps along streets filled with rusting junk and reeking of ork blood and excrement. He was glad of a reason to leave the piled bodies of the murdered slaves behind him, but the image of what he had seen stayed with him, a powerful memory that he would draw on later.

  It would fuel his hate in the days to come.

  Three days after Karavassa was secured, Major General Rennkamp’s 8th Mechanised Division moved up to take the old Imperial supply base, Tyrellis, located in the Garrando region of the desert to the east-south-east of Bergen’s position. Resistance was fractionally lighter than at Karavassa, and the troopers might have been in high spi
rits had it not been for the increase in sickness and parasitic infestation that they suffered. The flesh-boring dannih were a constant nuisance. Orders had gone out for the men to shave their heads and remove any thick body hair in order to help combat the problem. Some troopers, preferring to drink their valuable alcohol rations rather than use them to get rid of the vicious ticks, developed nasty infections. Others reported to the medicae station with skin so saturated by the fines that they looked as if they had been bathing in spinefruit juice. The jokes and taunts didn’t last long. The worst afflicted men suffered so badly from the resulting sickness that they died. It was a miserable way to go, organs clogged by accumulating dust, failing one after the other until the whole body shut down. That cast a dark shadow over those who survived, for they knew it was only a matter of time before their own cells became choked with the stuff. The quicker the general gained his prize, they grumbled, the better.

  In that respect, at least, things were proceeding well. It was apparent that the greenskin presence between Hadron Base and the last known coordinates of The Fortress of Arrogance had been greatly overestimated. It seemed Ghazghkull Thraka’s pogrom against mankind had called far more of the orks away from Golgotha than the Officio Strategos had anticipated. This alone remained in Exolon’s favour, for if the orks were proving less of a threat, Golgotha was doing her level best to make up for it.

  Bergen and the men of his division remained garrisoned in Karavassa, anxiously patrolling the surrounding lands, waiting impatiently for the general’s order to move east. That order was expected to come through on the landline once the fortified settlement at Balkar — last of the major outposts needed to secure the route between Hadron Base and the site of the objective — had been retaken by the 12th Heavy Infantry Division under Major General Killian. Until then, there was little to do but wait, and, with time on his hands, Bergen began to notice little things that worried him, such as the subtle change in the tone of his skin. Each time he shaved, he looked into the mirror and noted the deepening pink tinge that coloured the whites of his eyes. He was far from alone in this. Medicae staff had issued everyone in the division with detox packages to help them combat the fines, but they didn’t seem to be doing much good. Bergen had pressed Sergeant Behr, the medic on his personal staff, for worst case scenarios.