down at the water in his glass. “It was one of the factors in my decision to stay put, that and our
wounded.”
“Even if we had the transports,” said Kassel, “it’s not much good moving our people out of here
if we don’t have enough trucks to carry the supplies we’re going to need.”
“My support crews are pretty talented, colonel,” said van Droi. “The vehicles you say are
wrecked, are they still in the drop-ship?”
Stromm grinned. “Think your men can fix some of them up, van Droi?”
“Not like the cogboys could, sir, but I’d say it’s worth a try, wouldn’t you?”
“Get them on it right away, then. Kassel, make sure they get everything they need.”
“Of course, sir.”
Stromm stood and walked to the entrance of the tent. “We’ve got lots to do, gentlemen. Let’s be
about it.”
Having been dismissed, van Droi and Kassel followed the colonel out into the open air. Van
Droi judged that there were just a few hours of daylight left. His crews would have to work under
lamps. It would be a long night for them, but there would be time enough for rest once they were
under way again.
“If you’ll follow me, lieutenant,” said Kassel, “I’ll show you what there is to work with.”
“Lead the way,” said van Droi, and together, he and Kassel moved off, walking around to the far
side of the crashed ship to enter via the massive rent in its main hold.
With the two lieutenants gone, an exhausted Stromm let his facade slip, just for a moment. His
shoulders sagged and he blew out a deep, exhausted breath. His arm still hurt like hell despite
injections of anaesthesium. Sure that no one else was within earshot, he took a tiny, handcrafted
icon of the Emperor from a side pocket in his fatigues, raised it level with his face and said, “Light
of all Mankind, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. You know that. So do you think you might
get off your bloody Throne and help us out a bit?”
After checking Last Rites II for outer damage — her headlamps had been shot to pieces, some of her
vision blocks needed replacing, and the turret’s left-side external stowage boxes were riddled with
bullet holes, but these things were easily fixed — Wulfe found himself with a little well-earned
downtime. The support squads would take care of maintenance duties. Lieutenant van Droi had
ordered the tank crews to rest and recover, knowing they would be crashing hard after the fight.
Coming down off so much adrenaline was enough to knock some guys out, but Wulfe didn’t feel
ready to try for sleep yet. His throat was still itching, though whether it was because of his scar or
because of the damned dust, he couldn’t be sure. Sipping a little water — a little being all he could
afford himself — seemed to help. He pulled a rebreather mask over his mouth and nose and went for
a walk. If it was the dust that was bothering him, the mask would stop it getting worse.
Masked or not, his stroll was far from pleasant. The desert sands were cratered, fire-blackened,
and absolutely littered with bodies. At least all the bodies were those of the foe. Colonel Stromm’s
men had finished removing their fallen brothers from the field of battle. Wulfe was glad of that as he
weaved between piles of alien cadavers. Many of the bodies wore thick plates of black armour, iron
pitted with rust and scored by las-fire. Between the plates, Wulfe saw gaping wounds caked with
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blood-soaked sand. He was doubly glad of his rebreather now. The stench would have been
unbearable without the mask’s powerful filter.
Last Rites II had slain many of the beasts, surely over a hundred, though she wouldn’t be
wearing any new kill-markings for it. To an armoured company, infantry kills counted for little in
terms of prestige, even in such numbers. Armour kills were what mattered, the challenge of machine
against machine, crew against crew. Such were the fights a tank commander lived for. Until Last
Rites II bested another tank in combat, she had proved nothing to Wulfe, nothing at all.
Wulfe’s crew had a different outlook. After the battle, they had been quick to show their
gratitude to her, offering sanctioned prayers to the machine-spirit housed in her metal body.
Through the vision blocks, they had seen the Frontline Crusader brew up. They had seen Siemens’
body roasting in the red fire. Why was it always the most horrific images that remained so clear in
one’s mind? Wulfe wondered. Why could he never remember a pretty girl’s smile or a glorious
sunset in the same kind of vivid detail?
The Frontline Crusader had stalled and it was all down to the damned dust. In the days the
Gunheads had spent crossing the desert, eleven of their machines — five of the tanks, four of the
halftracks, and two of the rugged Thirty-Sixers — had suffered the same kind of sudden cutouts:
dust on the contacts, dust clogging the fuel lines. Clean the dust out and you were fine, good to go. It
just took a little work, a few minutes’ attention. Siemens and his crew had been dead men from the
moment it happened. They never stood a chance.
It could have happened to any of them. Last Rites II could have stalled just as easily. He knew
that. It was a cruel thing that had happened to Siemens, but Wulfe couldn’t deny a guilty relief. His
crew was alive. He was alive.
His footsteps took him towards the wreckage of Frontline Crusader, and he stopped just a few
metres from her. She was nothing but a black husk now. Her machine-spirit was gone. She was a
corpse like the countless bodies that surrounded her. Thankfully, someone had removed Siemens’
remains from the turret. Wulfe hoped the bodies of the men inside had been removed, too. Throne
help the support crew who had taken care of that. It was a miserable business. Wulfe had seen some
terrible things in his time: turret baskets painted red with blood, equipment caked in bone fragments
and gore, blackened bodies fused together by flame so that you couldn’t tell where one man ended
and another began. Little wonder that infantrymen sometimes referred to tanks as “steel coffins”.
Years ago, Confessor Friedrich had taken it on himself to deal with that kind of mess as often as
possible, working quickly, quietly, and without solicitation or complaint. No one had asked him to
take on such a burden, but it wasn’t right, he said, for tank men to have to see such things. Wulfe
hoped the confessor had got down safely with the rest of the regiment. He was a good man. Given
the horrors he put himself through, it was no wonder he drank so much.
Moving closer to the black husk of the tank, Wulfe saw again the two great gouges in her side.
The armour plating had melted around the wounds, creating a jutting lip of metal under each. He
stretched out a hand and found that the metal was cool to the touch.
Walking around to her other side, he found another hole. She had been hit simultaneously on
both flanks with three separate impacts. The weapons that had killed her had been rocket-propelled
grenades with shaped charges. The implications were grim. Over more than two decades of battle,
Wulfe had faced the full gamut of antitank weapons, from magnetic mines to man-portable
lascannons. He had seen shaped charges employed by armies of rebels and heretics all too often, but
he had never seen orks field them. He had seen them use simple rockets sometimes, but this was
different. Here was a weapon that, with a jet of molten copper, made a mockery of armour up to two
hundred millimetres thick.
From now on, he and the other tank commanders would have to be extra wary. The orks had
always been dangerous at close quarters, especially to infantry. Now they were just as dangerous to
tanks.
56
Leaving the wreckage of Frontline Crusader behind him, he started walking towards one of the
wrecked ork artillery pieces that van Droi’s Vanquisher had taken out at long range. Ten metres
away, he stopped and stared at it, noting the bodies of the greenskin crew that lay around its
shredded tracks. They were little more than heaps of smoking bone and gristle. Even before it had
been turned into burning junk, the machine had been an ugly thing. It was often hard to believe that
these ork vehicles could function at all. Its massive gun was ruptured, peeled back like the skin of a
fruit, ragged metal ends twisted outwards from a blast within. Wulfe supposed a round had exploded
in the barrel when the turret had been struck. What remained of the track assemblies showed them to
be huge, almost as wide as Wulfe was tall, and cruelly spiked, though they hardly needed to be
given the nature of the terrain. Flat, open desert was ideal for treaded machines. Wulfe knew that
adding spikes was just something orks tended to do. There were other examples nearby, including
suits of body armour adorned in a similar fashion. Orks built everything that way: big, heavy, spiky
and loud. Laying waste to their misbegotten creations was a duty Wulfe relished.
“Showed the bastards this time, didn’t we?” said a rasping voice behind him.
Wulfe turned to see a Kasrkin storm trooper crouching on the sand nearby, leaning over a
lifeless greenskin, tugging hard on a pair of metal pliers that were clamped around one of the dead
monster’s jutting tusks. The Kasrkin had removed his helmet, laying it beside him on the sand while
he worked. Clearly, the stench from the ork bodies didn’t bother him much. He was younger than
Wulfe, though the profusion of criss-crossing scars that marked his hard face added a few years. His
skin was swarthy and his hair so blond it was almost white. A south-hiver, then, a Kasr Derth man,
or Kasr Viklas, maybe. Back on Cadia, men from the north and south didn’t always get on, but the
friction usually vanished the moment they got off-world. Cadians tended to stick together in the end,
whichever hive they originally came from.
“I reckon we did,” Wulfe replied.
The Kasrkin didn’t look up. He yanked hard on his pliers, and the ork tooth came loose with a
spurt of thick red blood. He transferred the pliers to his clean hand and shook red droplets onto the
sand, muttering an oath.
“Which one is yours then?” he asked.
“Sorry?”
“Which tank?”
“Last Rites II. She’s a standard Leman Russ.”
“Is that right?” asked the Kasrkin, not looking up. “What number?” He fixed his pliers to the
dead ork’s other tusk and began working them backwards and forwards, trying to free the roots from
the massive jawbone.
“Nine-two-one,” said Wulfe, slightly suspicious of the soldier’s interest. Kasrkin weren’t known
to be garrulous. Conversation with them was rare.
“Nine-two-one,” the storm trooper repeated between grunts. The corpse’s remaining tusk was
putting up a bit of a struggle. “Yeah, I saw you. Carried some of our wounded out, right?”
There was a sharp cracking sound. Wulfe winced as he saw the tusk come free with a gush of
crimson. Grinning, the Kasrkin held up his prize so that Wulfe could see it, white as bone, as long as
a man’s middle finger, and tapering to a nasty point. He dropped the excised tooth into a darkly
stained canvas bag by his right knee, and said, “I saw that one over there brew up. He was your
mate, was he? No way to go, burning up like that in a big tin box.”
Right, thought Wulfe bitterly, thanks for that. “They were good men. They’ll be with the
Emperor now.”
The Kasrkin didn’t speak. He picked up his bag of teeth, rose to his feet, and moved to the next
greenskin carcass.
Wulfe didn’t need to ask why the soldier was pulling teeth. He had seen it done before. Some
said that the orks were superstitious and that finding their dead kin with tusks removed put a terrible
fear into them. He doubted that. Fear wasn’t something orks seemed prone to. On the other hand, he
57
knew troopers who traded the tusks for packets of smokes and bottles of alcohol. There was usually
at least one man in a regiment who could fashion them into charms or trinkets. Sometimes,
depending on the planet, civilian traders would offer a high price for them. It was illegal, of course,
under the alien artefact laws. Commissar Slayte had executed two men for it a few years back.
Repeat offenders. Rather than shoot them, he had chosen to snap their necks. It hadn’t helped his
popularity much.
The Kasrkin was focused on his morbid dentistry, and Wulfe decided to head back to his crew.
Maybe van Droi had new orders for them. The sooner they left, the better.
Without saying another word to the Kasrkin, he turned and began walking, weaving his way
between the heaped corpses, but he hadn’t gone ten metres when he heard a shout.
“Hey! Nine-two-one!”
Wulfe turned.
“Souvenir!” called the Kasrkin, and he threw a shining object into the air. It curved towards
Wulfe, who reached out a hand and caught it. Opening his fingers, he saw a long, curving tusk with
four pointed roots. It was still sticky with blood.
He looked up, expecting some explanation, but the Kasrkin was already moving off towards
another corpse, happily humming a tune.
Wulfe rubbed the ork tooth clean on his rust-coloured fatigues, stuffed it into his thigh pocket,
and moved off. The muted glow of the sun was nearing the western horizon. There was perhaps
another hour before nightfall. He hoped van Droi had a plan. Then again, he thought, maybe the
lieutenant was no longer in charge.
Voeder Lenck was lying back, relaxing on one of his tank’s track-guards after a good smoke, when
Sergeant Wulfe walked by. The rest of the New Champion’s crew were sitting on the sand, playing
cards and passing around a lho-stick that contained a few ingredients which were not exactly
standard.
Lenck heard the sergeant’s footsteps in the sand as he approached and raised one eyelid. Here
we go, he thought. The uptight prick won’t be able to help himself.
Sure enough, the sergeant’s nose crinkled and he stopped dead in his tracks, looking down at the
gambling crewmen. With their senses dulled by the smoky narcotic, and with the game absorbing
their full attention, they didn’t even notice him.
“Haha! Frak you, Varnuss,” said a jubilant Private Riesmann. “That’s twice I’ve had you with
the same damned hand. Heretic’s gotta pay up, you big grox’s arse.”
Private Varnuss, a thick-necked, low-browed man with a shock of bright orange hair, growled
and said, “If I find out you’re cheatin’, Riesmann, I’m gonna bite your nose off and spit it in your
face.”
Despite the threat, he thrust a big hand inside his fatigues and drew out two vials of clear liquid.
