A few of the lasgunners had managed to break away from the fighting and report what had happened. The commissars would probably execute them later on charges of cowardice.
The Gunheads were down to three tanks. Van Droi could hardly believe it. Soul-sapping misery hovered over him, threatening to descend and engulf him at any second, but he fought hard to keep it at bay. Other men were depending on him, now, a platoon of Colonel Stromm’s Kasrkin troopers. They followed just behind his crate, hellgun stocks raised to their armoured shoulders.
He couldn’t afford to lose focus.
Van Droi looked out from his cupola, fists tight around the grips of his pintle-mounted heavy bolter. His Vanquisher had already been stung twice — once on the glacis and once on the mantlet — by rockets fired from blind corners. She had soaked up both hits, but how much more could she take? Her hide was scarred silver by all the stubber-fire she had drawn, and stained black where the rockets had struck.
Thinking that his remaining Gunheads deserved to know of the company’s latest loss, he hit the vox-link button on his headset and said, “This is 10th Company Command. Listen up, Gunheads. I’ve just heard from Colonel Pruscht that Steelhearted II is dead. Viess and his crew are gone. So, keep your damned eyes open, both of you. If Yarrick’s tank is here, this will all be over soon. You have to keep it tight until then.”
Two brief acknowledgements came back to him. One from Wulfe, one from Lenck. Van Droi knew they utterly detested each other. They were just about as different as two men could be, but they were both survivors. They had that much in common.
What was it about the character of each man, he wondered, that had got him this far when so many others had fallen along the way? Was it Lenck’s self-serving ruthlessness? Wulfe’s rigid honour code? Or his almost paternal concern for the lives of his crew?
If they both survived this, maybe van Droi could find a way to bridge the gap between them. Troopers who disliked each other at first were often bonded by the trials they shared. He had seen it before.
Then again, he thought, maybe not.
Up ahead, he noticed that the avenue was quickly widening. The ork structures were bigger and more widely spaced apart. From some of the roofs, great crooked armatures reached up towards the sky. They looked like construction cranes. Their heavy steel cables swung in the wind.
“Take it slow, Nails,” van Droi told his driver over the intercom. “It looks like we’re approaching the eastern edge of the settlement. I can’t believe we’ve seen everything the orks have left.”
Nails shifted down a gear, prompting a question from the Kasrkin lieutenant at the rear.
“Trouble up ahead?” he voxed.
“Can’t be sure,” replied van Droi. “Come up and take a look.”
The Kasrkin officer, a rough-spoken man by the name of Gradz, clambered up the back of Foe-Breaker and stopped close to van Droi. Despite their proximity, they spoke over the vox. The noise of the engine was too loud for anything else.
“What do you think?” asked van Droi.
The Kasrkin took a moment to answer. “I think we’ve just found our warboss, armour. That hangar dead ahead is the biggest structure I’ve seen so far. Twice the size of those ones to the side. I’ll bet you ten bottles of joi the bastard is in there right now. The minute our lads move into that open square, the orks’ll launch their last stand. The warboss will lead it.”
Van Droi nodded in silent agreement.
“Well?” asked Gradz. “You gonna take the bet?”
Something large moved in the shadowed mouth of the hangar. The muzzle brake of a massive battle cannon poked out into the daylight. Van Droi and Gradz both saw it at the same time, but it was too late to do anything. The gun belched fire and smoke. There was a clap of thunder.
They didn’t see the shell that killed them. It happened too fast for that.
Foe-Breaker was flipped onto her back by the power of the explosion, crushing eight of the men behind her.
Then her magazine ignited, and her armour blew outwards as a million spinning shrapnel shards. No one within ten metres of her survived.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Orks were spewing out from buildings on all sides.
“We need to fall back right now,” Lieutenant Keissler voxed to Captain Immrich. “Draw them back into the narrower streets.”
“No,” snapped Immrich. “I will not disobey the general’s orders. We are to stand firm and engage. There will be no retreat. This is their last stand, and it is ours as well.”
“You’re a bloody fool, Immrich,” hissed Keissler. “I always thought so. Death or glory, is it?”
“What else is there?” Immrich replied and took aim.
General deViers could barely hear himself think over all the noise on the vox.
Killian was yelling for permission to pull his men out of the ork settlement. Rennkamp was calling on him to send everything they had in to support the Cadian tanks, and Bergen was raving about some monstrous ork battle tank five times the size of a Leman Russ that was ripping the forward elements of his armoured division apart.
In the general’s mind, there was only one pertinent fact. His prize was in there somewhere. The path was clear.
“Army Group Command to all units. This is General Mohamar deViers. In the name of the Emperor, I order you to move in. Converge on the east side of the settlement. Give your lives if necessary, but sell them dear. Our victory must be absolute. The Fortress of Arrogance is within reach. For Cadia and for the glory of all mankind, we will recover her this day. Fight hard, brave Cadians. The Emperor protects!”
The Emperor wasn’t doing a very good job of protecting the men of the 88th Mobile Infantry.
Wulfe had been attached to one of their platoons for the sweep eastwards, but the men were dropping like flies, hemmed in on all sides by savage aliens of simply breathtaking bulk and power. Lasgun blasts hardly seemed to affect the orks at all.
Wulfe’s stubber-fire was only marginally more effective. He did his best to keep the orks off the men around him, gunning them down mercilessly with enfilading fire from his cupola, but there were simply too many. They weren’t the worst of it, either, not by far.
Between them, the Cadian armour and infantry would have found a way to overcome the unmounted troops. It would have needed time, coordination, and a healthy serving of old-fashioned Cadian courage, but the orks had armour support of their own — a single lethal machine that nothing on the Cadian side seemed capable of damaging — and it was picking the 18th Army Group tanks off one by one.
Beans had fired on that clanking, rumbling, smoke-spewing monstrosity three times already, switching from high-explosive to armour-piercing when it was clear the former was utterly ineffective, but the armour-piercing shot hadn’t done much in the way of damage either. The other tanks had discovered this too. Their rounds either exploded without effect or lodged in metre-thick slabs of iron skin.
Some of the remaining Executioners and Destroyers had enjoyed slightly more success, managing to blast a few pieces off here and there, but the oversized lump of metal was still rolling forward, emerging into the daylight with aching slowness.
This was the monstrosity that had brewed up Foe-Breaker. Wulfe had heard it all over the vox, his gut knotting until it caused him actual physical pain. Seconds after the vox report, he and the other mixed units had arrived on the open ground before the big hangar. That was when the orks had poured out to surround them.
What in the blasted warp is it? Wulfe wondered, glancing in the direction of the ork machine.
Only half of it was visible so far, but Wulfe guessed its speed had nothing at all to do with an underpowered engine. It had been built by orks. Already its armour had proved superior to the Cadian weapons. It was most likely fitted with an insane excess of weaponry, too.
As he thought this, the machine’s main gun fired again, its thunderous roar shaking the hangar walls and the buildings on either side. The air trembled
. A Leman Russ Conqueror belonging to 2nd Company spun on a pillar of flame and crashed to the ground on its side.
Wulfe wondered darkly if Foe-Breaker had landed the same way.
The report of van Droi’s death had hit him with all the force of an Earthshaker round, harder, if he was honest, than the death of Holtz or Viess. He had known van Droi longer. The man had seemed immortal to a young Wulfe when he had first joined the regiment. He had been somewhat like Colonel Vinnemann in that regard. For Wulfe, Gossefried van Droi had embodied everything that was strong and true and noble about the Imperial Guard. He was a symbol. Gossefried’s Gunheads had been named for him. Symbols weren’t supposed to die. Only people died. People and orks.
Hungry for revenge, he loosed a battle cry and thumbed the trigger of his heavy stubber, sending another lethal torrent straight into a pack of orks that were hacking the arms and legs from an infantryman on the left. Wulfe couldn’t save him — it was too late for that — but he punished the soldier’s killers. Their grotesquely muscled bodies crumpled to the ground, torsos almost cut in half by the stubber’s high rate of fire. Their thick red blood mixed with that of the man they had just killed.
Wulfe heard Beans calling “Brace!” on the intercom just-before a tongue of fire flickered at the end of Last Rites II’s battle cannon. The sharp boom it made set his ears ringing.
The round went curving in towards the massive ork machine, striking a plate of red-painted iron bolted to the front. White sparks showered out as the round ricocheted and punched a hole in the corrugated surface of the hangar wall. After a second, the plate fell off and was pulled under a set of massive iron treads.
“Damn it!” cursed Beans over the intercom, but Wulfe wasn’t listening to him. He was listening to the divisional vox channel. The chatter there had suddenly intensified, for Beans’ shot had uncovered the forward edge of a massive black track-guard, on top of which sat an icon cast in bright, shining gold.
Every man on the battlefield recognised it. It hung from their necks, imprinted on one side of the dog-tags they all wore. Many had paid to have it tattooed on their bodies.
It was the holy aquila, two-headed eagle, icon of the Imperium of Man.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
General deViers felt his heart hammering in his chest as his Chimera raced in towards the battle. He ordered his driver to crash straight through the orks that filled the street up ahead. Beyond them, he could already see the ground where his forces were fighting for their lives. There was the massive hangar he had heard about on the vox, and, there she was: The Fortress of Arrogance.
There was no doubt it was her. Some tanker in the 10th Armoured Division had knocked off a piece of her disguise, and now everyone knew. They had found her. They had tracked her down at last, but what in blazes had the greenskins done to her? In all the general’s dreams of how this moment would unfold, he had never imagined this. In the ultimate act of sacrilege, the orks were using her to slaughter Imperial forces. His forces.
Even so, he had no choice but to give the order.
Through gritted teeth, he voxed, “This is Army Group Command to all units. Cease fire on the enemy superheavy at once. I repeat, do not fire on the ork super-heavy under any circumstances. Concentrate on the enemy infantry.”
Gerard Bergen wasn’t slow to respond. He didn’t bother with propriety, either.
“You’re out of your frakking mind, general,” he hissed. “Whether that abomination is Yarrick’s Baneblade or not, it’s devastating my armour. We have to take it out right now. Reverse that order!”
“Mind your damned tone, major general,” deViers barked back. “I will do no such thing. Ask Magos Sennesdiar; if a round pierces the onboard fuel or ammunition supplies, she’ll be beyond all hope of repair.”
“And if we don’t put her out of commission, there won’t be anyone left to claim her. Have you lost your mind, you old fool? You’re acting like a damned Mechanicus puppet. You know that?”
DeViers felt his face grow hot.
“I hope you live through this, Gerard,” he growled, “I really do, because if you ever speak like that to me again, I’ll see you swing from the gallows. Is that clear? The order stands. Anyone who fires on The Fortress of Arrogance will answer to me.”
“Fine,” said Bergen bitterly, “and may you answer to the souls of the men you’ve just condemned. Bergen out.”
“You have got to be bloody joking!” exclaimed Beans.
“I wish I was,” answered Wulfe. He turned to his left and fired on an ork wielding a bulky heavy flamer as if it were little more than a pistol. It had just finished roasting three Guardsmen to death at close range. When Wulfe’s stubber-rounds punched into its body, the ork threw up its hands. One of the rounds punctured the fuel tanks on its back, and it exploded in a fountain of bright fire and burning meat.
The bastardised Baneblade was almost fully out of the hangar. Wulfe could see an absolutely massive ork standing on top of it. It had to be the warboss. It wasn’t just the size of the creature, though it certainly made even the biggest of the black-skinned veterans look almost small. It was the massive suit of power armour that it wore. Energy crackled in blue arcs along its arms. It flexed huge blade-like claws and bellowed its war cry through some kind of amplifier attached to its shoulder.
The bestial roar swept over the battlefield, and the orks all around began fighting with fresh reserves of energy and zeal.
“Look,” said Beans, “I might just be a gunner, but I know that order is utter bloody ball-rot, sarge. If we can’t fire on it, we’re dead men.”
As if to prove his point, the Baneblade’s main gun fired again. The last surviving Leman Russ Executioner detonated in a spectacular burst of orange fire and glowing blue plasma.
“Throne damn it,” cursed Wulfe. “Listen, Beans, do you think you can hit the warboss without hitting the tank?”
About twenty metres behind Last Rites II, a Chimera exploded. Wulfe felt the intense heat of the blast on the back of his neck and turned.
A slavering black ork was hauling its way up the back of his tank with an axe in one hand and a rusty metal hook in the other. A suing of desiccated human heads bobbed around its waist.
Wulfe dropped down into the turret basket just in time. The beast’s axe clanged on the rim just as his head disappeared inside.
“By the Throne!” shouted Siegler. He began scrambling to unhook one of the lasguns from the fixings by his station. In the meantime, the ork had thrust its metal hook into the turret basket and was slashing backwards and forwards, trying to snag the crewmen it knew were inside.
Wulfe threw both his arms around the ork’s massive wrist, but the damned thing was so powerful it began battering him off the turret walls. In desperation, Wulfe let go with one hand and scrambled for his knife. He grasped the handle, drew it from its sheath, and stabbed it hard into the ork’s forearm.
With a roar of pain, the ork withdrew its arm, taking the knife with it, but the reprieve was only temporary. Seconds later, it thrust its massive head down into the turret and began snapping at Wulfe with its razor-toothed jaws. The stink of its foul breath filled the compartment.
“Down,” shouted Siegler, and Wulfe dropped his weight to the floor just in time. Tusks clashed an inch above his head. Then the ork turned to face the loader, drawn by his shout.
Siegler rammed the barrel of a lasgun into the creature’s mouth and yanked back hard on the trigger. The blast blew out the back of the ork’s head, spattering the wall of the turret basket and two of its occupants with blood and brain matter.
“By the bloody Eye of Terror,” shouted Beans. The back of his head was drenched in foul-smelling gore.
“Good work, Sig,” said Wulfe. He immediately set about trying to clear the cupola, but it wasn’t easy. Shifting the heavy corpse took all his strength.
When the hatch was free, he poked his head out to check for any other orks waiting to lop his head off. There were none. He stood an
d gripped the handles of his heavy stubber again. In the few seconds it had taken to deal with the hook-wielding ork, yet another Cadian tank had been reduced to a flaming black skeleton.
Something else had changed, too. There were more Cadians than before. The reinforcements from the rear had arrived. Chimeras were pouring laser and autocannon fire in every direction but that of The Fortress of Arrogance, and the foot soldiers were tapping in to some kind of hidden reserves. They fought back with a renewed sense of purpose. Wulfe decided it must be the sight, or perhaps the proximity, of the holy tank that had inspired them. If they could only stop it knocking out their damned armour…
Just as he was thinking this, the disfigured Baneblade fired again.
This time, the victim was Hal Keissler and The Damascine. The 2nd Company leader died instantly, blown apart with the rest of his crew. Wulfe swore, realising that he could count the number of surviving tanks on the fingers of two hands. To the right he saw New Champion of Cerbera and was amazed that she had stayed in the fight for this long.
Perhaps he had underestimated Lenck’s skill as a commander.
It hardly mattered. If The Fortress of Arrogance kept picking them off like this, none of it would mean a damned thing.
“Beans, you never answered my question.”
Having been denied the only armoured target on the field, Beans was strafing ork infantry with the co-ax. “What question?”
“Do you think you can hit the damned warboss?”
“I can try,” said Beans, “but if I hit his ride instead, the general will have me shot!”
“Do it anyway,” barked Wulfe. “I’ll answer for it, but you have to take the shot. That damned thing is getting ready to fire again, and we might just be the next target. Siegler? Load her up. High-explosive. Let’s blow that greenskin bastard into the next life.”
[Imperial Guard 06] - Gunheads Page 34
