‘If you want me to look after him–’ Forjaz began, the dark intent in his voice unmistakeable. Carson cut him off.
‘That will not be necessary, sergeant,’ Carson said formally. ‘This is our last time, the last time for the whole regiment. We’ve done our job today. We’re done and he’s done. He’s no danger to us. Leave him be.’
‘And if he tries giving orders again?’
‘The men know who to follow, sergeant, just make sure he doesn’t see us leave.’
Carson left Forjaz to engage the major while he went off to meet Red. There was small chance that Stanhope wouldn’t notice his absence eventually, but he would not be able to prove anything. And, as sharp as he appeared today, everyone knew that his word could not be taken seriously. He could safely ignore him.
One person he could not ignore, however, blocked his path.
‘Lieutenant,’ she said.
‘Holder,’ he replied.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘Reconnoitre. I’m taking a small squad out of the fort. Vital part of a static defence.’
Carson watched her reaction. She let a half-smile play on her lips to show that she wasn’t fooled; but then, Carson reasoned, she was on their side, after all.
‘Good hunting,’ was all she said, and let him go.
Carson stepped beyond the battlements on the quiet south side of Acorn. Red was already waiting for him there in the shadow of a stake-wall.
‘You have it?’ Carson asked.
Red held it up.
‘You have any problems with Mouse?’
Red’s grim features turned even grimmer at the mention of the company rogue.
‘He said it cost him more money than expected, sah.’
Carson was not bothered. ‘I’ll settle up with him tonight,’ he said, and then saw a trace of pride emerge in his colour-sergeant.
‘I may have dissuaded him already, sah.’
Carson did not want to ask, and so didn’t. He inclined his head and the two of them started down Acorn and on their circular path towards Bitterleaf.
The first assault on Bitterleaf began within half an hour of the fall of Acorn. By that time, Brooce on the far right was already reporting multiple mechanical breakdowns amongst his Chimeras with a resulting delay of the attack on Endive. Drum’s tanks were suffering as well, and only two-thirds of armoured company were ultimately to lead the drive and clear the way through the settlement.
The ramshackle ork buildings, constructed from a mix of wood, mud and the more rigid fungi, proved little obstacle to tanks, however; they simply flattened and outright demolished whatever was in their path. The warriors of the Stone Smashas who were still milling in the settlement had nothing to oppose them and so could only hammer on the tanks’ hulls as they drove past. On those few occasions that tanks became wedged, the Stone Smashas emerged from the sides with heavy hammers and picks to try and bash them open, but Roussell’s infantry following close behind drove them off far enough for the vehicles’ battle cannons and close-quarter weaponry to be effective.
As the individual Stone Smasha bands found their instincts failing them, they looked for direction, and flocked to Bitterleaf where they saw the banner of the warboss flying. The warboss, of course, was not there, but his second had finally decided to seize leadership of the tribe and had chosen to make his stand there.
As it happened, there was more to Bitterleaf than it merely being the largest of the spoil-heaps. The Stone Smashas, in excavating the rok, had discovered huge cannons embedded on its surface. Most of these had been destroyed on impact, but a few of the smallest ones still appeared operational.
When first they had been found, none of the orks had known what they were. Most ignored them or tried to break them down to create more of the metal weapons that gave the Stone Smashas the edge over their rivals. Some, however, didn’t. In the days that followed, these orks drifted towards the cannon, obsessed with them to a fanatical degree. The other orks ignored them mostly, but left them food so that they could continue to tinker. The watershed day came when one of them, having been drawn deep inside the rok, emerged with a large hunk of metal which it proceeded to put in the nearest cannon’s barrel before pulling a lever it had found.
The resulting explosion wiped out the ork and all those who had crowded around him, but it fired the interest of a legion more who sought to be able to repeat such explosions and direct them against the enemy.
The smallest of these cannons to be recovered from the rok became known as the mega-bombard. It was light enough to be dragged with the Stone Smasha warriors to obliterate any of the other tribes that opposed them. The other three were larger and so were left on Bitterleaf to deter any from trying to take the valuable crater from its rightful owners.
The strangeness of their shapes, mixed in amongst the icon-towers and defences on Bitterleaf, along with the incongruity of such savages having such a level of technology, caused the Brimlock officers poring over the recording from Zdzisław’s Valkyrie to misidentify them, believing them to be makeshift cranes or counterweights used in digging out the pit.
And so when the tanks of the armoured company, who had hitherto been invulnerable to the primitive ork weapons, saw the first one fire at them as they approached Bitterleaf they were, somewhat understandably, surprised.
‘Blessed Mother Marguerite!’ Drum exclaimed, breaking off his latest rendition. The mega-cannon shot appeared like a meteorite burning through the atmosphere towards them. It struck short, ploughing through a line of ork hovels before finally coming to rest. Drum watched the dwellings catch fire. He had two choices: advance and gamble that his tanks could destroy that cannon with their own, or retreat and gamble that they could escape its range and keep their hides. He activated his vehicle’s vox and screwed the dial to transmit to his company.
‘Men of steel, slow and fire! Ork guns are only good for grabbing our attention,’ he signed off with a smirk. If there was just a single gun, his tanks could take it, if the orks themselves didn’t drop a shell and blow it up first!
But before the armoured company could respond, the rest of the Stone Smasha’s battery had their say. The second mega-cannon fired from amongst the structures on Bitterleaf, sending its shot high and scattering a squad of Roussell’s company following up behind. The third one, through fluke or skill, struck just in front of the armoured company’s line. The tanks were driving close together so as to clear the path and so, as the shot barrelled into the left-most tank, it clipped its neighbour as well. The stricken tank was crushed by the fireball, whilst the other blew off its tread and ground to a halt.
The remainder of the tanks fired their turret-weapons, the shots grouped around the site of the first mega-cannon. The shells flew true, but impacted against the maze of scaffolding and other constructs on the top of Bitterleaf.
Drum had seen enough. He did not care how the orks had managed it, but he had lost a third of his active force without scratching the enemy. He flicked the vox on again.
‘Armoured company, turnabout and retreat! Repeat, turnabout and retreat!’
‘Scratch that order,’ the colonel’s voice crackled over the vox. ‘Captain Drum, your company is to reverse only. All armoured units acknowledge. Reverse only. Don’t let these xenos filth see your backs.’
Drum twisted the vox to the private channel as he heard his tank commanders acknowledge the colonel’s orders.
‘Colonel, if we only reverse we’ll be as slow as–’
‘I comprehend the difference, captain,’ Arbulaster replied. ‘Do recall that I am out here as well. I have three companies of infantry here who are all now sprinting for their lives. The orks will counter-attack now they see us retreating and we cannot abandon them. Acknowledged?’
‘Acknowledged, sir,’ Drum agreed and turned his battle-hymn vox-amplifiers to maximum in th
e hopes that the noise itself would keep the orks at bay.
‘The armour, sah. It’s retreating,’ Red called.
‘What?’ Carson replied and leaned up to see. They were both hunched in the lee of an ork hut, covered by the shadow of another icon-tower bearing a leering orkish glyph. They’d spent twenty minutes carefully working their way across the settlement, hiding and scurrying through cover, to reach close enough to Bitterleaf’s slope to be ready when Arbulaster’s Salamander disgorged its passengers, and now the whole damn force was in retreat!
Red knew the obvious course of action – retreat with the rest of them – but he could also see that certain mood in the lieutenant: that strange determination which had destroyed his career and threatened his life over the years.
‘We can’t keep going back and forth, we’ll be spotted. They’ll be back here, Red. The colonel will be back here.’
As would the orks, Red knew.
The orks came, as both the colonel and the colour-sergeant knew they would. They had fallen back before the tanks’ irresistible advance and now emerged from the side-streets around Bitterleaf to snap at their heels. The heavy bolters affixed to the tanks’ hulls opened up, firing their explosive bolt shells into the most enthusiastic of their pursuers, whilst the tanks’ turret guns swivelled to keep pelting Bitterleaf.
Their slow speed allowed their gunners to place their shots carefully, but unfortunately the same was true for the orks manning the mega-cannon. Most shots still flew wild, but a few landed too close. With shells of such size, even a near miss could cripple a vehicle and two more tanks were disabled, one even knocked onto its side by the force of the explosion. Both tanks were abandoned by their crews before their pursuers overwhelmed them.
The second mega-cannon demonstrated the dangerous temper of such war machines when operated by creatures working on programmed instinct rather than knowledge. An ill-handled shell detonated as it went into the weapon’s barrel and made a new crater in the side of the spoil-fort. The third mega-cannon proved deadly, however. Another tank had swerved beside the one the cannon had immobilised with its first shot in order to rescue its crew. The mega-cannon’s operators barely nudged it a fraction of a degree and fired again. The hapless crew running to safety suddenly dived away as the shot impacted, but the rescuers could not escape as the massive shell struck them dead-on. The sound of Drum’s battle-hymns cut off as he and his crew were obliterated.
Arbulaster saw the icon representing Drum’s tank flash and fade out on the hologram display inside the Salamander. He felt Reeve’s gaze bore into him from where the commissar sat, on the other side of the cabin. He resisted the urge to order the driver to turnabout and speed away. He could do nothing that smacked of cowardice, or even of hesitation. Reeve was looking for an excuse, any excuse, to prove that Arbulaster had failed.
‘An unidentified threat.’ Arbulaster addressed his words to no one in particular, but they were meant for Reeve to hear. ‘A minor set-back only. We will swiftly counter.’
He opened a new vox-line. ‘Major Rosa, acknowledge.’
‘Here, colonel.’ Even over the vox, it sounded as though the rotund major was unwrapping another ration bar.
‘Do you have your firing solution?’
‘We are offering it to the cogitator-spirits now, colonel.’
‘Keep this channel open. Confirm when ready to fire.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Rosa replied.
It would take Rosa a minute or so to confirm. Arbulaster looked down at the hologram. The three infantry companies were out of the confines of the settlement, out of immediate danger. The armoured company had chewed up the orks that had tried to counter-attack, but at a cost. Only one tank was still functional. Of the rest, all but two could be recovered and repaired, but for the objective of the push on Bitterleaf the armoured company was operationally eliminated. Arbulaster glanced at Reeve, sitting calmly, dressed in that ridiculous skull-robe he wore, no longer even looking at the map between them but looking only at him. He’d already made his decision, Arbulaster realised. Reeve was going to kill him. He was going to kill him today.
‘Fire ready, colonel,’ Major Rosa’s voice crackled back over the vox.
Arbulaster stepped out of the dark interior of the Salamander, taking the vox handset, and onto the open deck. He wanted to see this in person.
‘Fire. Fire!’
Major Rosa relayed the command to his Griffons, self-propelled heavy mortars with short, snub barrels large enough for a man to fit down them, and in each one the officer in charge gave the order to fire.
Arbulaster peered hard at the Griffons on the crest of the crater behind him. He did not expect to see much evidence of their firing, but hoped to see something just the same. The tell-tale smudge of smoke above each one was enough to inform him that their barrage was underway. He turned round to Bitterleaf, counting down the seconds he had estimated for the rounds to fly up, turn over and come crashing back down. He reached zero and a series of small, but visible detonations wracked the top of Bitterleaf. Inside the Griffons the crews would be watching for their strike, making minute adjustments before beginning their well-drilled routines to reload and fire, reload and fire, as fast as humanly possible.
Beyond Bitterleaf, Arbulaster fancied he started to see tiny strands of light on Endive. He went back inside the Salamander and confirmed that Brooce and Deverril were finally assaulting that fort. Brooce reported in that their opposition, as anticipated, was light. The bulk of the orks had bunched around Bitterleaf and Bitterleaf, Arbulaster reflected, was about to have the sky fall down upon it.
The mortar rounds fell upon the spoil-fort without respite. For a full half-hour, Carson and Red watched from their hiding place in the icon-tower where they had gone to ground. They said little to one another; Red knew that the lieutenant did not need reminding of how exposed they were.
They were hundreds of metres ahead of the Brimlock line and just as likely to be struck by their own side as the enemy, as no one knew they were there. Carson held the rifle close. It was not a lasrifle, and certainly not of Brimlock design. He could not use a las-weapon to kill Reeve: the effect would be unmistakable and worse, sharp eyes would spot his position. So Carson had asked Mouse to procure this, and Mouse had acquired it from one of the Voorjer scouts, no questions asked.
Had the Voorjer known what Carson intended to do with it, he may have been more cautious, for Carson was going to implicate him and his comrades in the death of an Imperial commissar. But Carson knew that Arbulaster had no love for Reeve and would not investigate too thoroughly. He hadn’t for Blunder after all. All he needed was a convincing story as to why a Voorjer bullet might have struck Reeve, and Van Am had, unsuspectingly, given it straight to him. These were the same rifles that the first expedition had carried to the rok and had been lost there. Unlike the lasguns, the orks had already captured several Voorjer rifles, and that would be story enough.
The two of them watched the remaining mega-cannons as they were abandoned by their crews and then destroyed by the mortar rounds. The first toppled over forwards, ploughing through the defences in front of it before it crashed to a halt at the bottom of the spoil-heap. The second’s ammunition detonated, scything the area around it clear of all other structures and life, leaving a scorched bald patch as the only evidence of its existence.
Bitterleaf was ready for a second assault, but still the Griffons fired, adjusting their aim to a target behind the fort where the orks must have believed they were safe. Ledbetter’s cavalry had appeared just as the Griffons began their firing, but they had held themselves apart from the rest of the regiment, refusing to acknowledge any orders they were sent or budge from their position.
As the full hour approached, Carson was suddenly struck by doubt. What was the colonel doing? The light was already dimming; he had to advance. He had to take Bitterleaf and then the rest of the crater
before night fell.
What the colonel was doing was waiting for the orks’ natural instincts to resurface. They had been forced from Acorn and Endive, Bitterleaf was no longer defensible, and they had lost their mega-cannon. Other races would have withdrawn to their final bastions at Chard and Drumhead, held there, and used the night to slip away. But orks were not like other races. When no other options presented themselves, orks, being orks, simply charged.
This was the Stone Smashas’ last gasp. Their leaders had finally marshalled all the forces they could and were throwing them all into the fight. The green tide poured from the pit behind Bitterleaf, growing as it spread, and absorbed the smaller warbands that had scattered throughout the settlement. It emerged as one giant pincer, the orks avoiding the flattened trail left by the armoured company and advancing as far as they could using the settlement for cover. On the Brimlock right, the orks ignored the troops quietly holding Endive in favour of the large mass of enemy deployed in front of the hated Griffons. Arbulaster saw the threat and formed up four of his infantry companies. On the Brimlock left, the orks would have to run straight past the defences on Acorn and so he allocated only a single company, Gomery’s, and also, puzzlingly, himself to defend that flank.
‘What in damnation’s name?’ Carson exclaimed as he saw the command Salamander lead Gomery’s company into the shadow of Acorn. He and Red desperately shuffled around in their hiding place to turn their firing position around.
‘Do you still have the range?’ Red asked.
In all honesty, Carson didn’t know. He looked down the sight, recalibrating for the distance.
‘I believe I can,’ he said finally, slowly shifting to cover the Salamander’s advance. That was true; he could make the shot, given enough time. The time he had, though, was only as long as it took Gardner to realise the golden opportunity Arbulaster was offering him.
Gardner pulled the trigger and his target blew back, knocking down its fellow warriors climbing behind. The orks’ pincer focused first on Acorn and, for the second time that day the orks tried to scale a contested slope. Carson’s men had responded with full force, cutting down the first wave with ease. Now the second had to clamber over their dying fellows. They bellowed their defiance to no avail. For all their determination, their savagery, they simply could not scale the slope with such firepower ranged against them.
Imperial Glory Page 20
