With a dark look, he passed them to Riesmann, who accepted them with a smug grin, pocketed
them, and began to shuffle the cards again.
“You do realise, gentlemen,” said Wulfe sharply, “that the game of Heretic is banned by
Imperial edict.” The three men seated on the ground gave a start and jumped to their feet, scattering
cards everywhere. The lho-stick fell to the sand where it continued to burn, lacing the air with its
intoxicating fumes.
“Sergeant Wulfe, sir,” stammered Private Hobbs, the shortest of the men. “Wasn’t playing no
Heretic, sir. Just a harmless game of… er…”
Wulfe ignored him. He stepped forward, bent down, and picked up the burning lho-stick.
Sniffing it, he said, “Do I frakking look like I was born yesterday, Hobbs?” He held the lho-stick up
in front of the little man’s face. “This groxshit addles the brain, which would explain why you’d
think you could lie to me and get away with it.”
58
Lenck opened both eyes now, turned his head in Sergeant Wulfe’s direction, and, with an
exaggerated sigh, slid down from the side of the New Champion. Time to see if saving the
sergeant’s life was a mistake or not, he thought. “My fault, sergeant. My fault. Sorry.”
Wulfe’s eyes narrowed. “You’re accepting full responsibility for this, corporal? I find that hard
to believe.”
Lenck’s shirt had been tied around his narrow waist while he rested, but now he pulled it up,
shrugging into the sleeves and buttoning it over his chest. His dog tags clinked together as he did so.
“I taught them a new game while we were still in the Empyrean, sir. S’called… er… Ship-shape.
Yeah, that’s the one. Isn’t that right, lads? It’s a good game is Ship-shape. I’ll admit, though,
sergeant, it does look a lot like Heretic to the untrained eye. I can understand you figuring one for
the other.”
Wulfe glared. “Really, Lenck? Because I could have sworn I heard Riesmann say something
about the heretic having to pay up. But let’s just say I believe you. What do you have to say about
this!” For the second time, he raised the dubious lho-stick.
“Ah, now that one’s not down to me, sergeant,” said Lenck amiably. “No. That there was given
to us by one of Colonel Stromm’s lot. I thought there was something funny about it, to be honest.
Didn’t I say so, lads? Not like a bloody footslogger to go sharing his sticks with us tankers, is it,
sergeant? Suspicious bit of generosity, that. I told them not to smoke it, but it wasn’t an order or
anything.”
“And did this mysterious footslogger give you his name? Or any more of his smokes? Well?”
Lenck shook his head, unblinking, never breaking eye contact with his squadron leader. “Just the
one, sergeant. Honest. Look, you can have it if you want. Not my business if you like a little smoke
now and then.”
He watched Wulfe’s face change colour and knew he was stepping dangerously close to the line,
but he had to know how far he could push things now that this man, who clearly hated him, owed
him his life.
Wulfe dropped the lho-stick and ground it into the sand with his boot.
Private Riesmann winced miserably.
Wulfe stepped in close to Lenck and, in hushed tones, said, “You thought about it, didn’t you,
corporal? Earlier today?”
“Thought about what, sergeant?” Lenck replied innocently.
“Don’t play the fool. I saw it in your eyes after you killed that ork. Thought about putting a few
rounds in me, didn’t you? Dangerous weapons, heavy stubbers. They kick like an auroch. Not hard
for a few rounds to go wide in the heat of battle. Who knows? The others might have believed you.”
Lenck blinked, feigning a look of horror. Matching his voice to the low level of the sergeant’s,
he said, “You’re off your damned nut, Wulfe. I shouldn’t be surprised. You’ve had it in for me since
the day I joined this regiment. Damned if I know why. An inferiority complex, maybe? The only
thing I shot today was orks, a lot of them. But, if you want to tell me what your bloody problem is,
I’m all ears. If not…”
Wulfe stepped back, fists clenched, and Lenck readied himself to dodge a punch, but the
growling sergeant didn’t swing. Instead, he said one word. “Dunst.”
“What?” asked Lenck.
“Does the name Dunst mean anything to you, corporal? Victor Dunst.”
The sergeant was clearly expecting some kind of reaction, but the name meant absolutely
nothing to Lenck. He shrugged and said, “Should it?”
Wulfe stared back. After a moment, the cold rage in his eyes seemed to dim, and he said, “No, I
suppose not. Throne, Dunst would be twice your age by now.”
Lenck stared back. This bastard has a screw loose, he thought. Rattling around inside a tank for
so long has damaged the man’s brain. He’s no better than that idiot loader of his.
59
“I’ll forget what I saw here just this once,” said Wulfe, “because of what happened today. But
now we’re square. Got it? You and your men had better shape the hell up, Lenck. Maybe life was a
bit more relaxed in the frakking reserves, but let me tell you something about Gossefried’s
Gunheads. We do our duty. We work for our chops. Start toeing the line or, Throne help me, I’ll
make it my personal mission to help you regret it.”
The sergeant kept his eyes locked with Lenck’s, as if daring him to say something smart, but, if
Wulfe had been hoping to see fear in them, he was out of luck. Lenck stared back with a barely
suppressed grin. “You’re an example to us all, sergeant. Gentlemen,” he called to his crew. “Thank
the sergeant for putting you straight and saving you from the potential dangerous of suspicious gifts
and unsanctioned card games.”
As one and without any trace of sincerity, Lenck’s crew shouted, “Thank you, Sergeant Wulfe!”
Wulfe’s gaze didn’t shift. “And you, corporal?” he asked.
“Me, sergeant?” said Lenck, overplaying the innocent. “I was asleep on the tank. I wasn’t
playing cards, and I’ve never smoked a lho-stick in my life, laced or otherwise. That’s the
Emperor’s own truth, I swear.”
Wulfe sneered, but he apparently had nothing more to say. He turned and stalked off, fists still
clenched at his side.
Lenck watched the sergeant’s back receding for a moment, wondering who in the warp this
Victor Dunst was, and thinking that it might be useful to find out.
He drew a lho-stick from the breast pocket of his shirt and flipped it into the air, catching it
between his lips. Then he pulled a lighter from another pocket, lit the end of his smoke, and drew in
a deep, pungent lungful.
“Have a nice day, Sergeant Arsehole,” he said and turned to join the next hand of cards.
60
CHAPTER EIGHT
The low clouds overhead flickered like broken lamps, such was the intensity of the fighting outside
the walls of Karavassa.
“Watch those gullies to the south-east,” yelled Bergen into the tiny microphone of his vox-bead.
“Don’t let them flank those armour companies on the right!”
Basilisk mobile artillery pieces boomed all around his Chimera APC, vomiting clouds of black
smoke into the air with every ear-splitting shot. Through his field glasses, the major general watched
great spouts of fire and sand burst upwards wherever the massive shells struck. Currently, they were
wreaking terrible destruction on the ork foot soldiers.
The 10th Armoured Division had reached the rocky hills around the former Imperial outpost an
hour after dawn. It was the eleventh day since planetfall, and Bergen’s forces were running two
whole days behind General deViers’ demanding mission schedule. The conditions on Golgotha were
beyond frustrating. Hour after hour, his forces had been forced to interrupt their journey eastward to
facilitate repairs. The damned dust was playing havoc with the Imperial machines. It wasn’t doing
the men much good either. Dozens were sick. Bergen had developed a scratchy cough himself, and
his spit was tinged with red.
When 10th Division had left Hadron base six days ago, the major general had been unsettled by
the last-minute addition of Tech-Adept Armadron among their number. To his knowledge, no one in
the 18th Army Group had petitioned the Adeptus Mechanicus for such an honour. Bergen took it as
another indicator of the hidden agenda he was convinced they were following. So far, nothing
Armadron had said in their limited conversations had managed to convince him otherwise. The techpriest
insisted that his superior had ordered him to accompany Bergen’s division purely out of
concern for their success. Groxshit. The Machine Cult had manoeuvred Imperial forces here, and
sooner or later, Bergen intended to find out why. Even so, Bergen had cause to be glad of
Armadron’s attendance. Despite his unsettling presence, the tech-adept had proved to be a particular
asset. He was a member of the priesthood’s technicus arm and, working closely with senior
enginseer Aurien, he had done much to keep the tank columns moving. Without his tireless efforts
and expertise, Bergen doubted his division would have made it here for many more days yet. That
would really have given old deViers something to rage about.
Despite being fraught with problems, the journey here was still the easy part. Now that they had
engaged the orks — whole regiments rushing forward to clash with them as they poured from the
outpost’s towering iron gates — the damned dust was proving just as problematic in battle as it had
been on the move. Since the fighting had begun, a number of Colonel Vinnemann’s tanks had been
forced to fight from static positions, immobilised early in the assault by engine stalls. The fines
penetrated everything. If the brave crews of the Atlas recovery tanks hadn’t risked enemy fire to pull
those tanks out, the crews would have died where they sat.
Squinting through his magnoculars, Bergen saw greenskin reinforcements pushing and jostling
in their eagerness to join the fray.
“Get some fire on the main gates,” he voxed to his artillery commander. “Hit them while they’re
bunched up. But don’t damage the superstructure! Remember, we need to take the outpost intact.”
His division had been unable to surprise the orks, but then, he hadn’t really expected to. The
thick sandstone watchtowers of Karavassa had a commanding view from their seat on the basalt
bluff up ahead. It wasn’t the towers that had raised the alarm first, however. His armour columns
61
had been sighted when they were still about thirty kilometres out from the target. Ork bike patrols
had been roaming the area, their powerful headlamps throwing broad cones of light out into the
darkness. Some of these patrols had roared out from between high dunes and almost run into the
leading Imperial machines. A sudden stutter of gunfire had lit the sands as both sides leapt into
action. The bikes were noisy, oversized things with huge wheels and more growling exhaust pipes
than they could possibly have needed, but they were certainly fast. Their riders had shown
surprising sense for orks, quickly turning tail and racing back the way they had come to alert the rest
of the horde. Vinnemann’s tanks had managed to take out most of them as they showed their backs,
but a few had gotten away.
As the division had closed on the occupied outpost, with the cloud-smothered sunrise lending
the scene a hellish red glow, Bergen had looked out from his cupola to see a huge ork force: a horde
of greenskin infantry, numbering in the thousands, supported by tanks, artillery, light armour, and a
good number of those ridiculous lumbering contraptions that the orks so loved to build. These
dreadnoughts looked like oversized red buckets on piston legs. Their wicked arms flailed to and fro,
blades whirring, claws clashing, eager to begin the bloodshed. They were covered in other weapons,
too: flamers, rocket launchers, heavy stubbers and anything else that could be bolted to them. They
were utterly lethal to infantry, but they were no match for Imperial tanks. Vinnemann’s crews had
already gunned down at least thirty of them at long range, turning them to burning scrap that rained
down on the heads of the orks around them.
“Infantry, keep up the advance!” Bergen commanded. “Colonel Vinnemann, have three of your
companies move forward in support of the infantry on the left flank. Send the rest straight up the
middle. We need to knock out their armour support to give our boys a fighting chance. We have to
drive a wedge into them.”
Bergen’s command Chimera, Pride of Caedus, had taken up position on a spur of rock just a few
kilometres southwest of the outpost’s walls. Even sitting hull down, it was a risky place to perch.
Had he been the defender instead of the attacker, he would have put some artillery on the spur, sure
that the enemy commander would have chosen this spot from which to oversee his forces. Did such
things occur to ork leaders? Bergen didn’t know, but his need for a good view of the battlefield
overrode his concern.
A series of rippling explosions north-east of his position caused him to turn. One of
Marrenburg’s mechanised infantry companies, ten Chimeras each carrying a squad of hardened
infantrymen, was trying to press forward in support of the troopers on foot. But a phalanx of ork
tanks — looted Imperial machines from the last war, disfigured almost beyond recognition by the
addition of spikes and strange armaments — had broken free from their engagement with a
company of Vinnemann’s Leman Russ and were speeding towards the Chimeras with cannons
blazing.
Bergen saw two of the Chimeras struck head on, one of them hit so hard that it flipped onto its
back. He saw the rear hatch open. Dizzy men began stumbling out, desperate to be away from the
burning machine before its ammunition and fuel stores exploded. Most were injured. They fell.
Their shaking legs wouldn’t carry them. They scrambled desperately to get up again.
Too late. With a great boom and a mushrooming of fire and smoke, the Chimera lifted into the
air. Only two of the troopers managed to escape the blast. Bergen cursed and turned his eyes from
the sprawled, burning figures that hadn’t.
The other Chimera was luckier. The cockpit was aflame, the driver certainly dead, but the hatch
at the back had been thrown wide, and the soldiers within were pouring out, lasguns up and ready.
Bergen knew those lasguns wouldn’t do a damned thing against the ork machines.
He was about to vox Vinnemann for support when a trio of Leman Russ tanks crested a rise just
north of the burning Chimeras. They traversed their turrets right, in unison, and blasted the ork tanks
