Shock and numbness bled off the moment Wulfe poked his head and shoulders above the rim of the hatch. There was no time for them. The air was filled with the noise of gunfire, alien battle-cries and the screams of the dying. In his peripheral vision, Wulfe saw the guns of the vehicles on either side of him blazing away, cutting down dozens of heavy brown bodies as they charged. Distantly, he noted that one of the tanks, the one to his right, was an Exterminator. Lenck’s machine.
Wulfe grabbed the grips of his heavy stubber, knocked the safety off, cocked it, and hit the thumb-triggers hard. He barely needed to line up.
Fire blazed from the stubber’s muzzle. The recoil shook him, a deep juddering that travelled right through his body. It was a satisfying feeling. More satisfying still was the sight of a row of massive greenskin warriors in iron plate being literally chewed apart by his hail of fire.
“Beans,” said Wulfe over the intercom, “if you don’t have any armoured targets, get on the damned co-ax. Put some autocannon fire on them. We have to hold them here until the rear elements get through!”
“I’m on it,” replied Beans. Seconds later, the co-axial autocannon rattled to life.
More orks fell.
“Push through,” shouted General deViers over the vox. “I want every last one of you through that damned gap at once. Don’t look back.”
The orks’ flankers from the south were closing fast. DeViers had moved the vulnerable machines ahead — fuel and water trucks, all the transports with their critical supplies — and ordered a rearguard of Chimeras to follow, turrets turned to protect the flanks. If any of the ork light armour closed before his rear echelons passed the breach, the Chimeras would have to hold them off. It was far from ideal, but all the heavy armour was up front, holding the corridor eastward. There was no time to reshuffle his forces. Together, the orks behind the wall and those from the south would try to smash his force, like glowing steel between anvil and hammer.
The general’s Chimera, Arrow of Alibris, moved at the head of the racing column, churning up the dusty ground towards the gap that Angel of the Apocalypse had made. Beside him, the Chimeras of his divisional and regimental commanders matched his speed.
We will make it, he told himself. If the tech-priests have it right, The Fortress of Arrogance isn’t more than eighty kilometres east of here. But how will I be able to recover it with all the damned pressure from our rear? How long will the Mechanicus need to send their damned beacon into space and bring down the lifter?
Thinking of the tech-priests, he put out a verification call. Were they still alongside him? What was their condition?
Tech-Magos Sennesdiar answered the call personally. His tinny voice was disturbingly calm. “Worry not, general. We are still with you. But you must ensure that our vehicles are adequately protected. If anything were to happen to them, your mission would end prematurely. Given atmospheric conditions, only we can signal the fleet for evacuation.”
It almost sounded like a threat to deViers, but that didn’t make it untrue.
“We’ve got a solid rearguard in place,” answered the general. “The orks at our backs will not take us, even if my men have to die to guarantee our window of escape. And the armour ahead is holding a road east for us as we speak. If you can think of anything I’m forgetting, don’t hold your tongue!”
Actually, he doubted the old Martian priest still had a tongue. He doubted he had a soul, either. If only the damned Mechanicus could have been kept out of all this. No doubt they would try to claim some, if not all, of the glory of the imminent recovery. He wouldn’t let that happen. He would…
No, Mohamar, he told himself. It isn’t the time to think about that.
“General deViers to all divisional commanders,” he voxed. “Status report. Now!”
“Armour in position and holding the corridor,” replied Bergen. “North and south parallels secure, sir, but let’s not gamble on holding them any longer than necessary. We’ve taken losses all across the board.”
“Rennkamp here. I’ve split my infantry to support Bergen’s armour on both sides of the corridor. I’m working with Killian to forge east. Forward elements are pushing away from the battle.”
“Major General Killian?” voxed deViers.
“Here, sir. My forward elements report a clean run on the far side of the corridor. No large ork structures to speak of, but the terrain gets rough a few kilometres out. The Ishawar peaks aren’t far, sir. If we keep heading east, we’ll soon be moving into the foothills.”
“That’s exactly where we want to go, major general,” said deViers. “That’s where she waits.”
It took all Bergen’s efforts just to make sense of the constant vox-chatter that sounded in his ears. The corridor was holding, but the rearguard had been engaged by the orks from the south. Their light armour wasn’t a serious threat, but he had seen this all before. The orks used their fast trucks, bikes and buggies to slow prey down while they moved the heavy stuff up for the kill. It wouldn’t happen like that today. The 18th Army Group couldn’t afford to turn and fight.
DeViers was pushing everything he had left into a desperate dash, but what the devil would he do when he got there? Bergen wondered. The orks would be coming right along behind them, right on their tail. There would be a face off, sooner or later. It would be a straight, stand-up fight, and the Cadians were looking at bad odds.
Immrich seemed to be holding up, at least. Bergen had worried that the news of Vinnemann’s death might undo him, but battle had a way of keeping a man’s priorities in order. There would be time for sorrow and mourning later. Right now, the fight for survival was keeping him together.
Bergen’s driver, Meekes, called back to him that they were through the breach. Bergen would have known it anyway. The sound of battle was deafening. He moved into the Chimera’s turret to get a look through the vision blocks. All around him, he saw Imperial machines blasting away with everything they had. Dead xenos lay in dense heaps all around, but every second, hundreds more clambered over the corpse-mountains to add their fire to the battle. Pistol and stubber fire danced and ricocheted off the Chimera’s hull. There were other weapons, too. The orks seemed to have developed las and plasma analogues. Could it be that they were learning from their battles with the Guard?
“Keep your speed up,” he told Meekes. “There’s no time to join the fight. The sooner we’re clear and running for the hills, the sooner we can pull our armour back in behind us.” And the sooner deViers will realise that this was a bloody wild grox chase from the start, he thought.
He knew Rennkamp and Killian were thinking the same thing. All three men seemed to have a silent understanding. DeViers was out of control. His ambition had become an obsession, and the obsession had led to madness. Look where his haste, his impatience, had got them: orks left and right, orks at the rear. It was a blasted miracle that Exolon had survived this long.
He saw Vinnemann’s tanks — no, Immrich’s tanks — blasting away for all they were worth, great tongues of flame and beams of las-fire leaping out from their weapons. No, he thought, it’s nothing to do with miracles. It’s them. It’s their determination, their refusal to lie down and die.
Vinnemann lived on in them.
They were Cadians, and he was damned proud of them all.
“Immrich to all tanks,” voxed the captain. “The command staff are clear. Rear echelons are through. I want all machines to fall in by company. We run east, but keep your turrets covering the rear. There’ll be more ork machines coming through that breach once we move off. Keep your speed up. They’ll be chasing us all the way. Let’s make it as unpleasant as possible for the bastards.”
Wulfe listened carefully, and then relayed the information to Metzger. In formation with the tanks on either side, Last Rites II started rolling again, still firing as she went.
The orks on foot rushed into the space left by the departing Imperial machines, but they couldn’t hope to match the speed of the fleeing armour.
Wulfe watched the tide of brown bodies grow smaller. He could still see the breach, but the light that shone through from the other side was cut off by massive angular shadows, the first rows of reinforcing ork armour moving through to give chase.
They could only come through three abreast. That’ll slow them down, thought Wulfe. If the top brass hadn’t been in such a damned hurry to move, we could have used the bottleneck to slaughter the filthy sods. What the hell are the brass thinking? If we come back this way, we’ll have to go through this all over again.
Metzger was pushing Last Rites II along at full speed, tearing up the ground. There was nothing orderly about the retreat. It was a mad, desperate flight. There was an undeniable sense of panic and disorder about the whole thing. Wulfe hoped someone knew what they were doing, because right now, he couldn’t see a good end to any of this.
As the ork wall disappeared behind the Imperial column in clouds of dust, smoke and heat-haze, Wulfe turned his attention straight ahead and saw the Ishawar mountain range rising above him. They dominated the landscape, towering over everything like dark, glowering gods. The foothills were much nearer. The land was already rising to meet them.
We’re going up, thought Wulfe?
Looking back the way he’d come, he saw the sun’s dull red glow behind the clouds. It was barely visible, just peeking now and then from cracks in the thick cover. Night would be coming soon. That would help. Orks didn’t cover so much ground at night. He remembered the Kasrkin he had met earlier — the tooth collector from Stromm’s 98th — and the general belief that orks were highly superstitious. Wulfe wondered if that extended to feelings about the dark. Mankind had always held a special fear of the night. It was a primal thing. Even now, Throne only knew how many millions of years since mankind’s mastery of fire, it was still deeply ingrained. The darkness was to be feared. Did the orks feel something similar?
Wulfe dropped down into the turret basket, reached up, and locked the hatch of his cupola.
Sitting in his command seat, battle having turned to flight, he allowed his exhaustion to finally settle on him. His muscles ached. Straining against a growing stiffness, he lifted a jerrycan from a rack on the floor and took a mouthful of lukewarm water. Siegler and Beans were looking at him expectantly. Beans in particular looked keen for his sergeant to speak.
Wulfe nodded at them, but he couldn’t smile. Colonel Vinnemann was gone. Things already felt different.
On the intercom, he told his crew, “Good job, you lot.”
“Thanks, sarge,” replied Beans, but Wulfe sensed he was waiting for more, which was only natural given the fact that he had just survived his first front-line engagement. In fact, he had distinguished himself. Wulfe wasn’t in the mood to give him his dues right now, though. He felt like he’d had the wind knocked out of him.
“Beans,” he said, “you and Siegler need to get some rest. Metzger, I’ll cover for you as soon as we get a chance to stop, but that might not be for a while yet. Can you go on?”
“I’ve got a flask of caffeine that’ll see me through,” said Metzger. “Get some rest, sarge. Sounds like you need it.”
Wulfe decided he would tell them about Vinnemann later. He would spare them the grief for now.
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the inside wall. The rumble of the tank rattled his teeth together, but, after so many years of sleeping on the move, he was well used to it. It actually seemed to help him sleep these days.
“Wake me if something bad happens.”
Raising an eyelid, he checked to see if Siegler and Beans were following his example. Siegler was, but Beans was still looking at his sergeant.
“I meant what I said, Beans,” said Wulfe. “Get some shut-eye while you can. There’s going to be more fighting soon. And if you thought today was bad…”
He never finished the sentence. A warm darkness embraced him, and thoughts of battle slipped from his mind. He dreamed of a blue sky and the green banks of a shimmering lake. There were purple mountains in the distance, each with a perfect cap of white snow, and, on one of the grassy hills at the foot of the mountains, he saw a great structure of white marble, a shining fortress.
To Wulfe’s eyes, it seemed close, just a few hours walking distance, but, at the same time, and with an inexplicable surety that can only exist in dreams, Wulfe knew that the fortress was much, much further away than it looked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Then where the frakking hell is it?” raged General deViers.
A blood-red dawn found the general and his beleaguered forces in a dry, rocky valley between the foothills of the Ishawar Mountains. It was a scene that held the eye and boggled the mind. Here, at long last, was the reported resting place of The Fortress of Arrogance, at least, so the Adeptus Mechanicus had told the Munitorum. General deViers had pinned all his hopes on it.
But there was no sign of Yarrick’s tank. In fact there was no sign that it had ever been here at all.
The valley was two kilometres long, curving away to the north-east where its floor gradually rose to meet the mountain slopes. The hills between which it nestled were of loose orange sand and darker orange rock, but much of the land was covered by rusting metal, for it was here that a great battle had once been fought. Yarrick’s forces had passed through these foothills, hounded by Ghazghkull Thraka’s hordes from the north. It was here that the Imperial troops had truly foundered, sandwiched between their pursuers and a well-equipped secondary ork force that came up from the southeast in a pincer movement. Thraka had surprised Yarrick and wreaked havoc on his army, fielding some of the greatest monstrosities available to any ork commander, massive avatars of war to rival in power and stature the mighty Titans of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
For the sake of target identification, the Officio Strategos tagged these towering creations Gargants. Similar designs of a lighter class had been code-named Stompers. They looked much the same but for the difference in size. There were reports of Gargants as tall as the greatest machines of the Legio Titanicus. They were as tall as the orks could make them: massive effigies of their savage gods, dressed for war in great skirts of the thickest armour plating the greenskins could find. Clouds of toxic gas and steam vented from them with every lumbering, earth-shaking step, and they were typically armed with more weapons than was practical.
More often than not, their arms were comprised of cannon of outrageous calibre, all grouped together so that they might launch volleys of devastating shells at a single target. Atop each giant body sat a control deck in the shape of a monstrous metal head. The orks designed these to look much like themselves; they had red eyes, albeit glowing ones made up of sensors, and jutting metal jaws that thrust forward, providing a parapet for the insane infantry that manned the gun positions there. Each shoulder was a firing platform bearing everything from artillery pieces to mortars and fixed stubber positions. Nothing else in the ork arsenal embodied their enthusiasm for war like these oversized abominations.
It was the wreckage of one of these Gargants that told General deViers he was looking in the right place.
The Gargant was practically skeletal. Over the years since Yarrick had managed to fell it, ork bands had come, stripping away everything they could use from its mighty carcass. They took the weapons. They took the armour plates. All that lay before deViers and his forces was a rusting frame that barely hinted at the terror of the original machine.
Other, smaller machines lay all around it, also half buried in the sand, also looted. They were mostly dreadnoughts, much smaller than a Stomper, but deadly enough in their own right. There were signs that Imperial Titans had fought here, too. The wreckage of their mighty guns lay half-buried in the hillsides. The valley had seen a great battle, so great, in fact, that few living beings had walked away from it, and few machines had survived it intact.
It was here that Yarrick had lost his Baneblade and his freedom. It was here that the greenskin warlord Ghazghkull Thraka finally captured his nemesis
, though he released him soon afterwards so that he would have a worthy opponent for his second war on Armageddon.
“Someone answer me,” demanded deViers. He was standing halfway up the left hillside, scanning the valley desperately, and the air of panic he exuded was palpable. Bergen stood close by, shaking his head.
I knew it, he thought. He wasn’t gloating. His feeling was one of resignation. Here was the proof that his doubts had been justified all along. There was no need to feel guilty for harbouring such scepticism. He had been right, but he had truly wanted to be wrong. The current question was this: what would Tech-Magos Sennesdiar do now? The ancient tech-priest must have known all along that the whole expedition would eventually come to this. He must have known he’d have to answer for the missing Baneblade eventually.
General deViers was thinking about the tech-priests, too. “Get the damned cogboys over here. I want a bloody explanation. And don’t let the men stop searching. I want to know the moment anyone finds anything, absolutely anything at all.”
Bergen looked out over the opposite slope. The day was still new, but the air was already warm. There was no breeze, not yet anyway. Looking westwards, he gazed along the row of tanks and transports that sat waiting patiently for their orders. The tank crews were out, stretching their legs after a long hard run from the orks. The Sentinels were up on the high ground, keeping watch on the gullies below. The greenskins couldn’t be far off. The hours of pitch darkness might have slowed them down a little, but Bergen knew it was a temporary reprieve. The orks wanted to fight.
What would deViers do, Bergen wondered? Would he have Exolon make a stand? Or would he urge them on? Where was there left to go after this?
“You called, general,” said a mechanical voice from Bergen’s right. He turned his head to see the three senior tech-priests drift forward, red robes rippling around them as they moved. “May we assume that your men have found The Fortress of Arrogance? I shall launch an orbital beacon as soon as I have verified this.”
[Imperial Guard 06] - Gunheads Page 25
