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《Gunheads（科幻战争）》
作者:[英]Steve Parker【完结】
Synopsis (英文书籍文案)
In "Gunheads" Sergeant Wulfe has a new tank; he is haunted by a psychic vision, and he has a new nemesis, one corporal Lenck. This time out the 81st Cadian Armoured is dropped onto Golgotha, a death world inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Orks. Their mission is to retrieve the "Fortress of Arrogance," a battle tank that belonged to Commissar Yarrick, hero of Hades Hive. Yarrick is an Ork fighter extraordinaire and, in fact, is one of the only humans to master the Ork language.
PROLOGUE
Calafran Creides had stopped believing he would wake up. The nightmare was real. The monsters
that surrounded him were solid, living, breathing things; he’d found out just how solid when one of
them had cuffed him for not working fast enough. The power behind the blow was terrifying. Cal
had flown backwards and smashed into one of the ammunition crates he was supposed to be
loading. He was sure his rib was broken. Breathing had been painful ever since, and sleep, when it
came at all, was more of a struggle than ever.
What was a broken rib, though, compared to the things they had done to Davran? Or to poor
crippled Klaetas? Or to old Jovas, the pilot, when he’d collapsed from exhaustion? Best not to think
about that. Wasn’t it enough that he saw it every time he closed his eyes? The images of sickening
torment were practically laser-etched onto the backs of his eyelids. Most nights, after he and the
others had been pushed and kicked into an empty cargo container and locked there to rest in the
stifling dark, he would wake up screaming. Quick but gentle hands would reach out to reassure him
then, one always closing insistently over his mouth. Nobody wanted the monsters to return and
investigate the noise.
Living in such a constant haze of fear, pain and misery, Cal had lost count of the days. How long
had it been — ten? twenty, perhaps? — since the monsters had boarded The Silverfin. She and her
crew had been contracted to scavenge naval wrecks from old war zones on the periphery of the
Maelstrom. That hadn’t lasted long. Early in the first leg of the operation, a bizarre ship, its prow
constructed in the likeness of a grinning, nightmarish beast, had ambushed her, shooting out her
main thrusters and ramming her from the side. Captain Benin had recognised the profile of the
attacking craft immediately. Aliens, he said, man-haters.
Cal never imagined he would see the captain so afraid. Benin kept calling them greenskins,
though their massive, leathery bodies were varying shades of brown. When they stormed the ship,
the captain had ordered everyone onto the floor. “Don’t look up!” he had told them. “No eye
contact!” he had said. “Fighting back will only get us killed.”
It was the first time Cal had ever heard a quaver in the big man’s voice. Poor Nameth, never the
sharpest tool in the box, looked up anyway, and died horribly for it. A glance was all it took — the
briefest instant of gaze holding alien gaze — before one bellowing brute charged straight at him, its
roar deafening in the tight confines of the ship. It tore Nameth’s head from his neck with a single
huge hand. Cal had been lying close by. His friend’s hot blood had splashed over his back, soaking
his clothes while the rest of the crew screamed and cried out for mercy. The monsters laughed at
that, then bound the crew’s hands, fixed metal collars around their throats, and chained them all
together. Minutes later, the captured humans were locked tight in one of the lower holds and the
journey to this Throne-forsaken place had begun. They had been brought to this world to live and
die as slaves, and Cal wished now that he and the crew had fought back. Most of them had already
been worked or beaten to death anyway. What was the point of drawing it out like this?
There was no hope of escape. Where would he go? The slavers’ settlement sat high atop a
plateau of solid black basalt. Beyond the plateau’s sheer sides, red sands stretched to the wavering
horizon in every direction. There were a few sloping paths down to the desert floor, but, even if he
got to the bottom, there was nowhere to hide out there. He would be spotted and slain in short order.
He didn’t have the energy to run anymore. His aching body felt so heavy. Every motion, even the
mere act of drawing breath, seemed to take so much more effort on this world. Why? Did anyone
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even know which planet this was? He had asked around, but none of the other human slaves seemed
to have the slightest idea.
There were hundreds of them. Some had arrived shortly after Cal, others had been here longer,
but not by much. No one, it seemed, survived for very long. Those who had arrived before him had
a dead look in their eyes, as if their souls had already departed, unwilling to stay locked within
bodies forced to endure so much. Sometimes, though, when the monsters in charge were too busy
fighting amongst themselves, or when the thick afternoon heat put them to sleep, a little glimmer of
light would return and some of the older slaves would speak to the newcomers in hushed voices.
They told of how they had been taken, their ships rammed and boarded just like The Silverfin. They
told of those who resisted, and the cruel slaughter that followed. There were children here, too, they
said, dozens of them starving to death in tiny cages. The monsters, communicating to their human
slaves through crude mime, regularly threatened to devour them if their parents didn’t work harder.
Children? Cal didn’t want to believe it. He hoped never to see those cages. He didn’t think he
could bear it.
A furious roar snapped him back to his senses, and he realised that his legs had stopped moving.
He was so exhausted, he could no longer feel the festering cuts and scratches that covered his limbs.
Not for the first time, he had almost fallen asleep on his feet.
There was a sharp crack like a gunshot, and blazing pain lanced across his back. One of the
brutish slave masters — a sadistic monster that the slaves called Sawtooth — stood ten metres
behind him, bellowing hoarsely and brandishing a long, barbed whip.
The whip cracked again.
Drowning under a wave of sudden, intense agony, Cal felt the last of his strength dissolve. His
legs buckled and gave way. He collapsed, dropping the crate of fat, gleaming bullets he was
carrying. His back hit hard, dry rock. Bullets spilled from the broken crate, rolling to a stop against
his body. Some of the smaller, skinnier aliens nearby — hideous creatures with leering faces and
long, hooked noses — pointed down at him from atop a pyramid of stacked fuel barrels. They
laughed and chittered to each other, eyes wide with anticipation.
Cal felt the rock tremble under his body as Sawtooth stomped over, growling with rage. The
alien’s massive, steel-booted feet halted on either side of Cal’s head, and Cal knew that the greatest
pain of his short life was about to follow. He remembered the terrible screams of Davran and the
others. He could hardly breathe with panic. His heart galloped. Distantly, he felt a warm wetness
spreading through his ragged trousers, and realised that he had loosed the contents of his bladder.
Fear overwhelmed any sense of shame.
Sawtooth bent over him, assessing him, studying him closely with unsympathetic red eyes. Was
this pathetic little human still capable of work, or only fit to be tortured and pulled apart as another
warning to the rest?
Thick strands of saliva dripped from the monster’s jaws onto Cal’s face. Its hot breath stank like
vomit.
Cal gagged. Bile burned his throat. This is it, he thought. This is how my life ends.
He had never been a strong believer in the Imperial Creed. He’d attended weekly services with
his parents, and learned the mandatory prayers and hymns under the stinging tutelage of a priest’s
cane, just like every other resentful boy and girl in the Imperium of Man. But he had never really
believed, not in any of it. The God-Emperor was just another old legend among so many. No, he
was even less than that. He was a legend of a myth of a legend.
All the same, as Sawtooth straightened and began bellowing to the other monsters nearby,
calling them over for a bit of fun, it was to the Ministorum’s precious God-Emperor that Cal prayed
and pleaded.
Lord of all Mankind, Beacon in the Darkness, Master of Holy Terra and all the galaxy, let me
die quickly, I beg you. Don’t let met suffer as Davran and the others did. I’ve sinned, I know it, and
held no faith. But, in humble prayer, I ask this of You now.
7
He expected no answer. It was terror alone that made him pray, but what happened next was a
striking example of those coincidences that the faithful so often claim as proof of the Divine.
Calafran Creides could not have known that a fleet of Imperial ships held position in high orbit
directly above him. They had arrived that very day.
Laughing at thoughts of the torture to follow, Sawtooth grasped Cal’s arms and hauled him
roughly into the air. Cal’s limp feet dangled above the bullet-strewn rock. His undernourished bones
cracked and splintered in the monster’s iron grip, but he didn’t scream. He didn’t even whimper. His
attention was locked on the sky above.
In it, Cal saw a glorious, blazing light that shunted the thick clouds aside. It was so bright that it
hurt to look into it, but he couldn’t turn away. Tears of joy rolled down his cheeks. Could it truly
be? Yes! The Emperor was real! He had heard Cal’s prayer, and He had answered it!
“Ave, Imperator,” Cal gasped. Gratitude, relief, love, contrition: all these feelings and more
swept over him. He took a deep lungful of hot, stinking air and, with everything he had left, shouted
upwards, “Ave, Imperator!”
The confused greenskins looked up, too, but there was nothing they could do. The blazing light
struck the plateau, scouring it, purging it, erasing ork and human alike as if neither had existed there
at all.
Soon, hundreds of Imperial drop-ships would begin their descent.
Operation Thunderstorm had begun.
8
CHAPTER ONE
Imperial spaceships, massive and ornate, comparable in size and baroque beauty to the largest
cathedrals of Holy Terra, hung together in the infinite dark. They had slid from the warp almost
forty days earlier, bisecting the orbits of the outer planets on trails of blazing plasma until finally
closing on their ultimate goal. That goal lay somewhere below, on the world that spun beneath them,
a world that glowed bright in the glare of the system’s harsh sun.
Golgotha: a planet shrouded in thick, choking cloud, all reds, yellows and browns that swirled
and bled together like so many spilled paints. In memoirs dating back thirty-eight years to the last
Golgothan War, the celebrated Terraxian Guardsman-poet, Clavier Michelos, had remarked on the
planet’s ominous beauty, and with good reason. From high orbit, at least, it was a stunning sight, but
that beauty masked an uncompromising nature, for Golgotha was not a world that welcomed men.
Michelos had died here, captured and tortured to death by orks. He wasn’t alone in that. The war
had been a costly and embarrassing disaster. The orks had crushed everything in their path, and even
Commissar Yarrick, the lauded Hero of Armageddon, had been unable to turn the tide of battle. He
left Golgotha in bitter defeat with very few survivors at his side.
That was almost four decades ago. Yarrick, now an old man, still fought for the glory of the
Imperium. The war with his nemesis, the ork warlord Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, had taken him
back to Armageddon, the world that had made his reputation, while Golgotha remained firmly in the
hands of the enemy, a dark stain on his record that could never be expunged.
So, why had men returned? The small fleet that hung above the orange sphere lacked even a
fraction of the power required to take it back by force, but that was not their mission, not this time.
There was something else down there besides orks, something important that had been lost on
Golgotha during the last war, something that the Imperium wanted back. It was a holy relic, a
symbol so potent that it might turn the tide of Yarrick’s new war. Its name was The Fortress of
Arrogance.
The fleet sent to recover it was a mixed force. In the centre, a ship far larger than any of the
others dominated the formation. This was the Scion of Tharsis, a Reclamator craft of the Adeptus
Mechanicus, the ancient and inscrutable tech-priesthood of Mars without whom none of the ships
present would have existed at all. The Scion was flanked on either side by the Imperial Navy’s
Tyrant-class heavy cruisers, the Helicon Star and the Ganymede, around which swarmed myriad
smaller escort ships and armed transports. It was on one of these transports, an unassuming craft
called the Hand of Radiance, that the men of the 81st Cadian Armoured Regiment, known less
formally as Rolling Thunder, prepared for war.
* * *
“Form up, you greasy pukes!” roared an ugly, skin-headed sergeant with a pockmarked face. “You
know the bloody drill. By the numbers, damn your eyes!”
The floor of the starboard-side hangar clanged with the sound of men snapping to attention. The
troopers stood in formation, company by company from the first to the tenth, while their sergeants
prowled back and forth like hungry wolves, eyes sharp, hunting keenly for the slightest signs of
sloppiness. Hulking drop-ships sat behind the ordered ranks of men, their boarding ramps lowered,
internal lights glaring yellow inside dark, gunmetal hulls.
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A loud, hydraulic hiss sounded on the right of the massive chamber, and a thick door split down
the middle, each half sliding backwards into the wall with a cough of oily steam. The metal floor
rang with the crisp, pleasing tattoo of dozens of booted feet marching briskly into the hangar.
“Officers on deck!” yelled another of the sergeants. Thick veins throbbed at his temple with the
effort of projecting his voice unaided to almost two thousand men.
When the officers had halted and turned to face the assembled troops, the oldest of the sergeants
— a stocky man with lumpy scar-tissue in place of his left ear — strode forwards and proudly
stated, “All men present and accounted for, sir. Vehicles already onboard, lashed and locked. Flight
