pass that way.
Thirty-eight years, he thought. To imagine that she would still be there…
The moment General deViers closed the vox-link from the other end, Bergen sent out a call to
his regimental commanders. When he gave them their updated orders, all three sounded genuinely
glad to hear that they would be on the move again within hours. Colonel Vinnemann in particular
expressed his relief in no uncertain terms. Bergen had considered ordering the man to remain here,
convinced that it would be the best thing for his health. But he knew Vinnemann would only have
railed against him, seeing it as the ultimate betrayal. The man was a tanker through and through, just
as Bergen had once been, and Bergen knew that, for any real tanker, nothing beat riding out in your
crate, treads chewing up the dirt, the hearty roar of a promethium engine vibrating through your
whole body. So Vinnemann would stay in command of his regiment despite his suffering, and
Captain Immrich would be there to step in if needed.
The regimental commanders broke the link to pass the new orders on to their executive officers
and company commanders. From these men, the news filtered down to everyone in the base.
70
Soon, Karavassa was buzzing with preparations as the 10th Armoured Division prepared to roll
out once again.
In all the scurrying around, the loading, the refuelling, the last-minute checks, and everything else
that went on prior to deployment, few men spared a thought for the fate of those companies that had
mysteriously disappeared on that first fateful day. Some men did. Kochatkis Vinnemann was one of
them. Despite having troubles enough of his own, he prayed regularly for the souls of Lieutenant
Gossefried van Droi and his men, convinced that, after so many days without word or sign, they had
perished.
As he rolled out of Karavassa at the head of the 81st Armoured Regiment, the long-suffering
colonel could not have guessed that, just ten days’ journey to the southeast of his position,
Gossefried’s Gunheads were doing their best to avoid exactly that.
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CHAPTER TEN
Colonel Stromm was a man of his word. He embraced the Gunheads as if they had always been part
of his outfit, and it pleased Lieutenant van Droi greatly, because, though he admitted it to no one, he
had harboured grave doubts about placing his men and machines at the disposal of a man he had
only just met. There were those in the upper ranks who might have said he knew all he needed to
about the colonel. He had seen Stromm turn aside certain death, after all, and there were surely few
better measures of a man than that; but an officer’s performance in combat gave few clues, if any, as
to how he would command on the move. Then there was Golgotha herself to consider. She was an
enemy that couldn’t be fought. Her endless sands ground away at the Cadians’ morale, and the more
time they spent crossing them, the more they seemed to stretch forever.
Van Droi knew his tanks were slowing the whole column down. The Chimeras were much
faster, and the Thirty-Sixers were faster still at top speed, but without the tanks, the column would
have made an easy target for greenskin marauders. Colonel Stromm kept everyone moving together,
with the exception of the Chimeras he sent to scout ahead in shifts. Did it frustrate him that the
Leman Russ could barely manage thirty kilometres an hour? wondered van Droi. If so, he didn’t
show it.
For days, the tired, dirty, ragged column had pressed north-east over rolling dunes and,
gradually, the landscape began to change, becoming rockier and more uneven in stages. Was the
change in terrain a good sign? Van Droi wasn’t sure. If it meant they were nearing high ground, it
certainly didn’t show. The horizon to the north-east remained choked in a pink haze. He saw no
jutting spurs of rock, no distant hints of a towering mountain range.
The mood of the men was as dark as the mud-coloured sky and getting darker all the time. Little
communication passed from tank to tank. Almost a dozen of van Droi’s men had taken seriously ill,
and the number was three times greater among Stromm’s infantry. There were two medics with The
Fighting 98th, two who had survived the dreadful onslaught at the crash site. They took a look at
van Droi’s sick, consulted with each other, and told him that at least three of the twelve would be
dead within a day. Nothing could be done to save them. The dust had poisoned them. Liver, kidneys,
lungs, everything was shutting down. The other nine would almost certainly follow soon afterwards
if they didn’t get specialist medical care. With hopes of finding Exolon having dwindled to almost
nothing, that didn’t seem probable. Van Droi’s anger and frustration got the better of him a few
times, and he vented inside the turret of his tank, where his shouts and curses were drowned out by
the rumble of the engine.
Colonel Stromm made a difficult decision regarding the seriously ill; he withheld their water and
provisions. There was nothing to be gained by spending scarce resources on men who simply
weren’t going to last much longer. This, of course, did not sit well with friends of the dying men.
There were sharp protestations that came near to violence, but the platoon leaders cracked down
hard.
Van Droi didn’t judge Stromm for the extremity of the measure. Stromm had given him a
chance to object, but, to a practical man like van Droi, it made perfect, if unpleasantly harsh, sense.
Ultimately, the two medics resolved the issue, administering large doses of anaesthesium to the
worst afflicted, letting them die peacefully in a drug-induced sleep.
With the column stopping only briefly, grim, hollow-faced troopers buried their dead comrades
in the sand. There was no Ministorum man to pray for them, but one of Stromm’s lieutenants, a man
72
called Boyd, had trained briefly as a confessor before abandoning the so-called Righteous Road in
order to enlist in the Guard. He said a few words for the souls of the dead, and the column moved
on, lighter in number, heavier in spirit.
The mood got even worse when Stromm had his lieutenants issue empty jerry cans and
additional water purification tablets to everyone. If they wanted to survive beyond the next few
days, he told them, they would have to drink the undrinkable. They would have to drink their own
urine.
As if the lost Cadians didn’t have enough problems, the dawn of the sixteenth day brought more bad
news. As the cloud-smothered sun rose once more, casting its dull red glow over the desert, the voxlink
began to erupt with anxious chatter. The intercom system aboard Foe-Breaker did likewise.
“There must be millions of them!” yelled Bullseye Dietz. “There’s no beating numbers like that,
sir. They won’t be on foot, not moving at that speed.”
Dietz wasn’t wrong. Orks were closing in on them. Judging by the dark line that had appeared in
the southeast with the coming of day, there were far too many of them to engage. Raising his head
so that he could peer through his tank’s vision blocks, van Droi looked again, hoping that somehow
his mind had played a trick on him, that it had exaggerated the size of the enemy force.
It hadn’t.
The horizon was seething with them. How close were they? Between the heat haze, the dust and
the mirage-line, it was practically impossible to tell. That they were visible at all, van Droi decided,
meant they were too damned close by far.
The greenskin host had moved up during the hours of darkness, unnoticed by exhausted,
overheated, dehydrated men more intent on fighting sleep and sickness than fighting the enemies of
mankind.
The Cadians were being chased down. Perhaps this greenskin war party had stumbled onto their
tracks, following them out from the drop-ship crashsite, easily tracing them by the deep furrows the
tanks made in the sand. Now, the prey was in sight.
“Nails,” said van Droi, “keep her bloody speed up. And I want to know the moment you feel
anything out of order, the slightest jink or engine stutter, any give in the shocks or the drive train.
You got that? Let’s not have a repeat of what happened to Siemens. We won’t have time to frak
about with repairs.”
“Don’t you worry, boss,” replied Nails. “We’re sympatico, this girl and me. She won’t let us
down. Sympatico, says I.”
It took a lot to faze Karl “Nails” Nalzigg. He had earned his nickname the hard way back in the
days before he had joined van Droi’s crew. He had earned a few medals to go with it, too. Van Droi
wished he shared his driver’s easy confidence, but Foe-Breaker had suffered engine trouble twice
already in the days since planetfall. Not her fault, of course.
Van Droi’s old girl was only as prone to stalling as any of the other machines. With every
passing hour, another would stop dead, refusing to start again until the contacts on its engines were
properly cleared of the red dust.
To van Droi’s knowledge, there was only a single exception.
Wulfe’s old crate hadn’t stalled once in all the time since the crash. She might look her age,
thought van Droi, but Last Rites II had already proved that she’d got what it takes under the engine
covers.
He hadn’t mentioned it to Wulfe, but, of all the tanks assigned to replace the losses from
Palmeros, van Droi had hand-picked the Mars-Alpha pattern Leman Russ out for the sergeant
personally. Wulfe had taken the loss of his old machine badly. What kind of tanker, after all, could
ride into battle time after time in the same tank, come out alive when so many around him died, and
not feel some kind of special bond with her? It was exactly the way van Droi felt about Foe-
Breaker.
73
His choice of replacement tank for Wulfe seemed to have backfired, though. The rugged
sergeant hadn’t taken to Last Rites II at all. In fact, he seemed to think van Droi had assigned him
the new tank out of spite. Van Droi wanted to believe it was simply a matter of time, that Wulfe
would come around soon enough, but, with the ork host tailing them, time looked like it might be
up. How fast were the ork machines chasing them? There would be buggies in their hundreds.
Assault bikes, too, perhaps. Might they even have air support? Bombers? Greenskins were certainly
insane enough to fly in such dangerous skies.
A red light began flickering on the vox-board by van Droi’s left shoulder. He turned in his
command seat, flipped the toggle that turned the light green, and said, “10th Company Command
here. Go ahead.”
“Tenth, this is Regiment,” said Colonel Stromm. “It looks like we’re caught between a rock and
a hard place. Have you looked south-east recently?”
“I have, sir,” said van Droi. “Don’t like the view much. Very difficult to estimate party strength
given distance and conditions, but I think it’s fair to say we’re a little outnumbered. Assuming the
majority of those green-skins are on wheels, they could well catch us by midday.”
“The galaxy does like to stack the odds against us, doesn’t it, lieutenant?” said Stromm.
“No glory in easy victories, sir. Still, a man should know his limits.”
“Or in this case,” replied Stromm, “the limits of his machines. I think… Hold on a moment,
lieutenant.”
Stromm cut the link. A few seconds later, the same light on van Droi’s vox-board started
flashing again. He hit the toggle. “Sir?”
“Sorry about that, van Droi,” said Stromm. “Just got word from our scouts. I’ll let you judge for
yourself whether it’s good or bad. He’s reporting a massive dust storm up ahead. Point your
magnoculars a few degrees east of our current heading. You can just about make it out.”
“It’s going to hit?”
“Soon, apparently. It’s moving fast. If we cut south-east we can probably escape the worst of it,
but—”
“But it’ll put us within easy striking range of the orks at our back, sir. By the blasted Eye!”
“You said it, lieutenant. I’m not about to order our lads into a battle we won’t survive without a
damned good reason. I say we head straight into the storm. Take our chances. If anything, it might
serve to cover our tracks. We might actually lose the bastards. What do you say?”
It’s a ballsy move, thought van Droi. There’s plenty that could go wrong. On the other hand…
“The machine-spirits aren’t going to like it, sir,” he said. “I’d put money on mechanical failures.
Any estimates on how long the storm will last? We won’t be able to see a damned thing while we’re
in there. If we move at all, it’ll have to be very slowly.”
“There’s no way to say how long, van Droi,” voxed Stromm. “The environmental summaries the
Mechanicus issued during warp transit painted a pretty bleak picture. Some storms last a few hours,
others last days, even weeks.”
“That’s one hell of a gamble, sir.”
“Are you much of a gambling man, lieutenant?”
“I guess I am today,” said van Droi.
“That’s what I thought. Let’s roll the dice and hope for the best. And may the Emperor’s luck be
with us. Stromm out.”
74
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Colonel Stromm ordered his column to a complete stop as it was hit by the fringes of the coming
dust storm. Visibility had dropped to about fifty metres already. The air around the Imperial
machines was dark with veils of gusting sand, and the wind howled, rocking the vehicles on their
suspension. The sky was gone from view. On the colonel’s orders, anxious men emerged from
hatches and cabin doors with their faces goggled and masked, their bodies covered as much as
possible against the stinging assault of the hard red grains.
Their voices didn’t travel far. Words already muffled by rebreather masks were snatched away
by the rising storm. Van Droi was forced to shout at the top of his voice. “Hurry it up. I want all the
tanks chained together before it gets any worse out here. Come on. Only a few minutes left. Work
faster.”
The Gunheads hauled heavy steel chains from the stowage bins on the rear of each tank and
worked hard to attach them to the towing pegs at the front and back of their machines.
“Twenty metres between each tank,” shouted van Droi. He wished he had a vox-amp handy. The
bead he wore in his right ear linked him to his tank commanders, but the crews didn’t wear such
advanced tech. They took their orders through their tanks’ intercom systems. There was no time for
van Droi to return to Foe-Breaker and dig out a vox-amp now, though. The winds were really
picking up. The men worked quickly despite their thirst and fatigue. Some struggled through bouts
