and the banner fell from his hands.
Lieutenant Kassel moved in a blur, catching the banner as it fell, hoisting it high, desperate not
to dishonour the regiment by allowing its sanctified cloth to touch the ground. He stabbed the base
of the haft into the sand, braced it with one hand, and crouched by his colonel, yelling his name.
“Are you alive, sir? Speak to me, colonel! Please!”
Groaning in agony and clutching his shattered arm, Stromm rolled, and, with Kassel’s eager aid,
struggled to his feet. He looked around to see men forming a defensive line around him, fighting
back desperately with bayonets, pistols, sharpened entrenching tools — anything they had to hand
— against the massive chipped axes and cleavers of the orks.
“For Cadia!” Stromm roared, leaving Kassel with the banner and drawing his hellpistol again,
this time with his left hand.
“For Cadia!” his men roared back.
They fought with everything they had, but the air suddenly filled once again with the deafening
boom of big guns. Stromm tensed, guessing the ork artillery crews had decided to fire after all,
whether they killed their foul kin or not. He girded himself for the explosive blast that would bring
an end to his life any second now.
Any second…
But it never came. There was no ear-splitting whistle overhead.
“Armour!” cried one of his platoon leaders over the vox-net. “In Terra’s Holy Name!”
43
“They’re fielding tanks, too?” asked another.
“No,” snapped the first. “Not the blasted orks, man! Imperial tanks! Leman Russ battle tanks
inbound from the west!”
Stromm heard a second stutter of booming fire and this time, to his utter astonishment, a mob of
orks pressing in on the left flank vanished, consumed by a great fountain of dirt and flame.
“Their artillery!” voxed another platoon leader. “The ork SPGs are burning. All of them.
Junked!”
Another sharp stutter sounded from the west, announcing death for more of the foe. The horde
was being blasted apart, knots of them disappearing in fountains of dust, raining back to earth as
burnt and bloody pieces. Those that weren’t killed outright by the high-explosive shells were
horribly maimed by flying shrapnel. They went down screaming and roaring as tank fire continued
to scythe into their ranks.
Even those orks engaged in close-quarters combat couldn’t help themselves. The sounds of
cannon fire reached them through their battle-lust. For just a second, they turned their heads towards
the source, and Stromm’s fighters pressed their momentary advantage, downing scores of them,
forging a gap across which they could once more employ their lasrifles and surviving heavy
weapons. The Kasrkin platoons took this opportunity to press in from the right, shifting closer to
Colonel Stromm, the better to protect him and react faster to his needs.
Through the space that had opened, Stromm could see the cause of his company’s unexpected
respite. There, on the western flank, a great dust cloud rose, churning up from the desert floor. At its
head, ten Cadian tanks charged forward in an assault wedge. Behind them, barely visible in their
dusty wake, came a line of Heracles halftracks filled to the brim with men and supply crates. It
looked like an entire armoured company. For a moment, Stromm thought he was dreaming.
“Colonel,” yelled Kassel excitedly, “there’s an urgent message coming through from… say
again… roger that… from a Lieutenant van Droi, sir.”
“Van Droi?” said Stromm. He didn’t recognise the name. Most of Exolon’s armour was with
10th Division. He and his men were with the 8th. “Well, don’t keep it to yourself, Hans. What’s the
message?”
Kassel beamed.
“To dig in, sir. Van Droi says the Gunheads are here.”
44
CHAPTER SIX
Gossefried’s Gunheads roared forward, guns booming like thunder, far more than simple
promethium fuelling their charge. Disgust, hatred, the desire for revenge, all of these things and
more filled the hearts of the men inside the massive, rumbling war machines as they surged on,
desperate to cut the foe down before it was too late for their fellow Guardsmen.
For Gossefried van Droi, the survival of the embattled Cadian infantrymen was paramount. Here
at last, after days travelling through the desert without any sign whatsoever that others had survived
planetfall, he had found welcome confirmation that his Gunheads were not alone. Someone else had
survived and, right now, that meant everything in the world to him. But they wouldn’t survive much
longer if they didn’t get the aid they so desperately needed.
It would be a close thing. He could see that from his cupola. Colonel Stromm’s footsloggers
were on their last legs. That much was all too clear, despite the dust and black smoke that shrouded
the chaos of the battlefield.
“Spread out,” van Droi ordered his tank commanders over the vox. “Keep your main guns
blazing. I want secondary weapons on those hostiles as soon as you make range. Don’t spare the
treads! Our brother Cadians are dying out there!”
A stutter of cannon fire from the tanks on either side was answer enough for him. Up ahead, still
more than a kilometre away, but closer with every passing second, pillars of sand and gore burst into
the air. Firing on the move meant a big trade-off in accuracy for the gunners, but, given the sheer
number of gargantuan brown-bodies in front of them, they could afford to be sloppy. What they
couldn’t afford to be was slow.
No fear of that. Their engines roared, spewing thick black fumes out behind them, powering the
sixty-tonne war machines forward over the sand with surprising speed. Between the noise of his
engine and the booming of his powerful main gun, van Droi could hear nothing at all of the fighting
around the crashed drop-ship. He didn’t need to hear it to know how badly it was going. As his
tanks crossed the one kilometre line, he gripped the pintle-mounted heavy bolter in front of him and
made ready to open fire. Much of the mad alien horde had turned its aggression towards the tanks,
knowing they posed a far greater, more immediate threat than the infantry, and a better fight. His
eyes picked out the biggest orks, long-tusked, black-skinned abominations wearing huge suits of
armour and carrying ludicrously oversized blades. He saw them throw back their heads to bellow
battle cries as they readied the rest of the horde to charge.
Bring it on, you godless freaks, thought van Droi. You don’t stand a frakker’s chance in hell
against my 10th Company.
“Break them wide open, Gunheads,” he called over the company command channel. “Sword,
Hammer, move into line formation. Rhaimes, take your squadron out on the left flank. Angle in on
their rear. Wulfe, Richter, move your squadrons straight up. Keep the pressure on. Not one of those
alien bastards survives. No runners.”
“Spear Leader to company command,” replied Sergeant Rhaimes. “Read you loud and clear, sir.
We’ll make them wish they’d never crawled out of the dirt.”
“Sword Leader to command,” voxed Sergeant Wulfe. “Moving into formation.”
Sergeant Richter was the last to vox in. “Hammer Squadron confirming, sir. Moving up now.”
Van Droi looked to either side and saw his tanks fan out to form a broad fighting line abreast of
his machine. Old Smashbones, The Rage Imperius and The Adamantine pressed left, bearing north45
east so that they could swing in on the greenskin flanks and funnel them into the killing zone. As
van Droi watched, flame and smoke licked out from their barrels and the air shook with the sound of
exploding propellant.
On the right, the tanks of Spear and Hammer squadrons were also keeping the pressure on. Not
all of them were fitted with standard battle cannon, of course. Van Droi’s company was a mixed
force, glad to make do with whatever machines it could get its hands on. As he always impressed on
the new meat, what the Gunheads lacked in uniformity, they made up in versatility. Who gave a
flying damn if some of the other company commanders sneered? Czurloch and Brismund were the
worst for it, those stuck-up pricks. Let them have their nice, ordered companies of identical
machines. Specialise too much in one thing, van Droi knew, and you’d be properly stuffed when
some bastard suddenly changed the rules.
That didn’t happen to his Gunheads.
His machine, Foe-Breaker, was a rare and highly prized Leman Russ Vanquisher from the
forges of Ryza. She was hundreds of years old — the saints alone knew how many kills she’d made
since her inception — but she still excelled at taking out enemy machines with her 120mm smoothbore
cannon and its highly specialised, armour-piercing sabot rounds. No other Leman Russ could
fire as far and as accurately, and van Droi conscientiously prayed to her machine-spirit every single
day, making obeisance in the form of litanies approved by the regimental enginseers.
All this love and attention was repaid tenfold in her performance. She had added another
armour-kill to her tally today when van Droi’s gunner, “Bullseye” Dietz, had lit up one of the ugly
ork artillery pieces like a bonfire. It was still gushing red flame and thick black smoke into the sky.
Dietz hadn’t let up, either. Van Droi’s loader — a grumpy little short-arse by the name of Waller —
was still slamming high-explosive shells into the main gun’s breech with all the speed he could
manage, and Dietz wasn’t wasting them. Every time the gun belched, scores of orks disintegrated,
turned into a downpour of red rain that muddied the desert sand.
Seconds now, thought van Droi, his finger beginning to squeeze gently on the heavy bolter’s
trigger. Just a few more seconds.
He revelled in the rush of hot desert air as it whipped at his collar. Adrenaline surged through
him, familiar and welcome. Two and a half decades of this, with combat experience spanning a
dozen contested worlds, and still it thrilled him like nothing else ever could. He would never tire of
it, never.
In lethal range, he pulled the heavy bolter’s trigger back and loosed a flood of explosive shells.
The noise was deafening, even with his ear-protectors firmly in place. The recoil was wicked, too,
despite much of it being absorbed by the pintle-mount. The gun kicked hard in his hands, pouring
spent cartridges from its ejector like brass rain.
He strafed the orks in front of him as their return fire danced and sparked on the thick front
armour of his tank. Dozens were struck, bolts punching deep into meaty bodies before detonating a
fraction of a second later with sickening, yet satisfying effect.
All along the line, his tank commanders were doing the same, manning the heavy stubbers and
bolters that graced the lip of each cupola. Those few tanks with sponson-mounted weapons
chattered and blazed even louder than the others. Hull-mounted weapons, too, spat deadly torrents
into the enemy force, leaving the orks nowhere to run to escape the slaughter.
Van Droi didn’t shout or growl or laugh madly like some men did while they fired on the foe.
That was for youngsters and fools, in his opinion. Instead, he let go of everything, losing his sense
of self, becoming part of a kind of gestalt entity that encompassed the tank and her entire crew. The
fighting always seemed to go so smoothly when this happened, as if each man instinctively knew
what needed to be done without having to ask. The mark of a good crew, he thought. No. An
exceptional one.
46
A sudden crackle of static on his intercom yanked van Droi from his almost trance-like state.
The gruff voice of his loader sounded in his ear. “Vox-panel’s flashing down here, sir. Looks like
you’ve got a call coming in from one of the footsloggers.”
Van Droi picked off a few more of the orks nearest Foe-Breaker and dropped down into the
turret. As he checked the board, he told Dietz, “Hostiles closing on our two. Get the co-ax on them.”
Then, he switched from intercom to vox, and said, “This is Lieutenant Gossefried van Droi, 81st
Armoured Regiment, 10th Company. Go ahead.”
The voice that came back had the sharp ring of the Cadian upper ranks, but it sounded tired and
more than a little desperate, too. “This is Colonel Stromm of the 98th Mechanised Infantry
Regiment. Can you hear me, van Droi?”
“I can, sir.”
“Emperor bless your armoured arse, man! You and your men got here just in the nick of time.
Bought us a bit of space to fight back, but not much. I’ve lost a lot of troopers, and it’s far from—”
He cut off mid-sentence to issue orders to his men. Van Droi could hear the sounds of intense
fighting from the other end. It sounded all too close to the colonel’s position.
“Van Droi, are you still there?” asked the gasping colonel a moment later.
“Yes, sir. What’s your status? I have a squadron flanking the orks from the rear and two
engaging from your left, but you’ll need to hold out a bit longer. I can’t risk firing any closer to your
position. It looked like one of our earlier salvoes was close enough to shave you.”
“I needed a shave anyway,” said Stromm. “But listen, it’s touch-and-go here. The loss of their
artillery turned their heads, as did your arrival, and we made them pay. They’re fighting on two
fronts, and that has split their forces, but there are still plenty of them hell-bent on bloodying us up
in a bit of hand-to-hand. I don’t need to tell you how long we’re likely to last at that range. They
grow the bastards tough on Golgotha, and our backs are to the wall, literally. Short of moving inside
what’s left of the drop-ship hull, there’s nowhere else for us to go, and I’ve no intention of getting
trapped in there. It’s suicide. If there’s any chance you can create a corridor for us, I have a few
platoons of Kasrkin that might be able to hold it open long enough to facilitate our escape.”
Van Droi nodded as he listened. “You’ll have your corridor, sir. I’ll send one of my squadrons
up flush with the drop-ship. They’ll cut a path in towards you. Keep your men back until the last
moment. There’ll be plenty of lead in the air, you understand.”
“The more the better,” replied Stromm. Grunting and shouting almost drowned out his words.
Chilling ork battle cries could be heard clearly in the background and, despite the security of his
tank, van Droi felt his blood run cold. He knew he had to order Wulfe’s tanks forward at once.
Sword Squadron fielded the company’s only Leman Russ Exterminator, New Champion of Cerbera.
