pictomag. “More stuff like this. They make a business of it, and the officers let it go on because the
men grumble a little less. Fewer fights break out. I can’t imagine Guard life without such guys, can
you? Well, that’s Lenck. If the price is right, he can get just about anything. He’s more like a hivegang
boss than a soldier. And he thinks you’re out to shut him down.”
Wulfe knew all this, of course. Beans was still a relative newcomer to the regiment, but he
clearly had a good handle on things. Everything he had said was true. Regiments needed their
hustlers and fixers. Things became unbearable all too fast without them. It explained a lot about
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Lenck’s mysterious popularity with the newer guys. Still, the idea that Lenck should be allowed
some slack on account of this alleged service to the regiment didn’t sit well. Wulfe huffed. “This is
the Imperial Guard, not the blasted underhives. Voeder Lenck is a cocky, jumped-up little arsehole
and, sooner or later, he’s going to wish he’d never met me.”
Beans looked uncomfortable as he said, “Um… Didn’t he save your life, sarge?”
Wulfe spat a curse. “He killed an ork that was about to kill me. Duty demanded it. Any trooper
would have done the same.” His voice had taken on an angry edge, all the harder because, in truth,
he was grateful and it bothered him immensely.
Beans raised a placatory hand. “I’m just saying what I heard.”
Wulfe muttered under his breath. Glancing up through his open hatch, he saw that the sky was
almost pitch black. Would old deViers have them pressing on throughout the night again?
Wulfe addressed his driver, “You need me to take a shift on the sticks, Metzger?”
“I’ll be fine for another few hours, sarge,” replied Metzger. “How about you take a shift then?”
In his long and bloody career, Wulfe had manned every single station aboard a Leman Russ
tank. He wasn’t nearly as talented a driver as Lucky Metzger, but he was more than capable of
keeping his crate in place while Metzger got some much-needed sleep.
“Fine,” said Wulfe. “Two hours. Let me know if you get tired before that.”
“Will do, sarge,” said Metzger.
Wulfe sat back in his command seat. He wasn’t feeling particularly sleepy right now. He mind
was running laps. He kept hearing Lenck’s words in his head. The old scar on his throat was
irritating him, too. He scratched it lightly.
The vox channels were mostly quiet. The only regular traffic was coming from the Sentinel and
motorbike scouts up front. After a minute, Beans’ voice broke in on his thoughts.
“Want a read?” said the gunner with a grin as he offered his sergeant his magazine.
“Not much reading in it,” Wulfe replied with a half-smile, but he took it anyway.
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
By the sixth day out of Balkar, General deViers had started to develop a dry, itchy cough. It wasn’t
nearly as bad as those of some of his officers, but it caused him a certain degree of panic because he
was so much older and, therefore, more vulnerable to Golgotha’s subtle assaults on his health. He
had seen what the red dust had done to some of his troopers. The damned medicae staff were being
about as much use as a paper lasgun, in his opinion.
Last night, the high canyon walls of Red Gorge had come to an abrupt end. The column had
made it through without incident and had set up camp briefly on the open sand at the canyon’s
mouth. Dawn had broken only an hour ago, revealing just how fortuitous the decision to halt the
column had been. His decision, of course. Had the men of Exolon continued pushing eastwards,
they would have run straight into the biggest ork fortification that deViers had ever seen.
He was looking at it now.
He stood just outside the doorway of a hastily-erected command tent, magnoculars pressed to his
eyes, scanning the massive ugly structure that seemed to run from one end of the horizon to the
other. Behind it, visible as little more than a faint silhouette in the morning light, he could see the
slopes of the towering Ishawar Mountains. Their peaks were invisible, lost in the bellies of bloodcoloured
clouds.
“Why in blazes wasn’t I told about this?” he raged. “It’s colossal. How could the probe-servitors
possibly have missed something like this? Get those tech-priests in here. Get Magos Sennesdiar. I
want some damned answers at once.”
The ork wall was easily a hundred metres tall. Throne knew how long it was. It was breathtaking
in its scale. It was plated with great metal slabs of armour painted red from top to bottom, and
decorated with oversized ork glyphs daubed crudely in white. There were sharp, uneven
crenellations all along the battlements, and the barrels of huge cannon could be seen thrusting
outwards from behind them. But was the wall manned? In the short time deViers had been watching,
he hadn’t witnessed any signs of life. Could he trust his eyes? The haze of dust and shimmering air
made it difficult to discern movement at this range. The gun-towers and battlements could, in fact,
be seething with the foe.
If they were there at all, however, it seemed that they hadn’t spotted the 18th Army Group. Not
yet.
Their eyesight, thought deViers, isn’t as good as ours, but the longer we watch and wait, the
more time we give them to discover us. We can’t lose the element of surprise. A sudden thrust is our
best chance to get through, and we must get through. Glory and fame await, Mohamar. It won’t be
long now.
There were vast iron gates, as tall as the wall itself, spaced at intervals all along its length, but
none were open. They looked very heavy, very solid.
One of the major generals cleared his throat. DeViers couldn’t tell which one.
“And we’ve no idea how far it extends?” deViers asked. “No idea at all?”
Bergen, Killian and Rennkamp all stood a pace behind him, staring out at the ork wall through
their own magnoculars.
“There hasn’t been time to properly reconnoitre it yet, sir,” said Bergen. “The Vulcan pilots say
they’re awaiting your order to go up, if that’s what you want. There might be a way around it. Best
estimates at this time suggest it’s over a hundred kilometres long, though.”
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“By the Golden Throne,” hissed deViers. “Over a hundred kilometres.”
He wasn’t optimistic about finding a way around. A feeling in his gut, an instinct developed over
decades of battlefield command, told him this was all part of his great test. Here was an obstacle put
before him to see if he was worthy of everlasting fame. No, there would be no going around it.
There was nothing for free in this universe.
The sheer size of the wall suggested it might have been built to keep out Titans. A foolish
notion, of course. Nothing could keep out a Titan for long, but it probably made some kind of
rudimentary sense to the greenskins. Was the construction of the wall a reaction to Yarrick’s assault
on Golgotha? The mighty commissar had employed Titans throughout his campaign. Perhaps the
greenskins had anticipated an Imperial return all along.
“Gather the officers together,” deViers told his three major generals. “I want us through those
gates by the end of the day.”
“Sir!” protested Killian. “We have no idea of the enemy’s strength. We need full and proper
reconnaissance. At least let us get some idea of their numbers before we—”
“I didn’t ask for opinions, Klotus,” snapped the general. “You can see those gates as well as I
can, can’t you? Reconnoitre all we like, I tell you now, we’ll find no way around. We’ll have to
punch our way through one of them. I will not be stopped, not by a damned wall, not by anything.”
Bergen, Killian and Rennkamp dropped their magnoculars and shared a quick look that deViers
decided to pretend he hadn’t seen.
“Might we not send the Vulcans on a forward sweep, sir?” asked Bergen. “Order it now and
we’ll know what we’re dealing with. At the very least, they could give us some idea of what’s
beyond it.”
“We don’t exactly have air support to spare, Gerard,” said deViers. “You know that. They could
be cut to pieces by triple-A fire. I don’t suppose you’d like to explain that to Commodore
Galbraithe?”
“But surely just one, sir,” said Rennkamp.
“It would be better than charging in blind,” said Bergen.
“You know,” said Killian, “with luck and a prayer, the bloody orks might well have moved on. I
didn’t see any movement. No signs of occupation at all. I mean, who knows how old that thing is?”
DeViers shook his head. “No, Klotus. They’re there all right. It took a lot of work to make that
wall. Our prize lies behind it. And I’m damned sure that the xenos filth who made it are still behind
it, too.”
“Honestly, sir,” said Rennkamp. “A single Vulcan. Just one fast sweep and we’ll know for sure.”
“And put the whole damned greenskin horde on immediate high alert? No, Aaron. No aerial
recon. The Vulcans can’t fly high enough in this accursed weather to evade detection. Give me
something else.”
“A Hornet then, sir,” said Bergen. “A single Hornet reconnaissance bike might be mistaken for
one of the orks’ own at long range. That’s no guarantee they won’t fire on it anyway, of course, but
if we’re lucky, it’ll draw a lot less attention and still let us get a man close enough to make a
difference.”
DeViers nodded. “That sounds feasible. Make it happen. Get the best scout we have out there.
Someone with experience. I’ll want a full report, including a list of as many weak points as possible,
within the hour.”
Bergen saluted and moved off to see it done.
It didn’t take an hour. It was only forty minutes later that the Hornet rider chosen for the
reconnaissance run reported back to Colonel Marrenburg. The colonel cut the scout’s verbal report
short, ordering him to save it for the general’s command tent where the army group’s senior officers
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— more than a dozen men ranking colonel and higher — awaited them. Marrenburg then led his
man over the red sand and in through the tent flap. The day was already baking hot.
In the cooler shade of the general’s tent, Marrenburg introduced his scout to the assembled
officers.
“Gentlemen,” he said proudly, “this is Sergeant Bussmann. He’s the best damned scout in my
outfit. You can have absolute confidence in his report, I assure you.”
Since Sergeant Bussmann belonged to Bergen’s division, deViers asked Bergen to conduct the
briefing, giving the general and the others a chance to concentrate on the details and any questions
they needed to ask. There wasn’t much good news. Judging by the sergeant’s account, the wall was
more daunting the closer one got to it. Whatever lay inside must have been of great value to the
greenskins, for they had expended tremendous resources in its construction, resources that might
otherwise have gone into the construction of hundreds, if not thousands, of their war machines.
This bothered Bergen on two counts. Firstly, it suggested that the orks had enough resources to
be able to afford such a grand static defence. This led him to suspect they had established ore
refineries somewhere. Were they close by? Golgotha had been selected for occupation by the
Adeptus Mechanicus centuries ago for the amount and variety of metals deep within its crust. It
wasn’t much of a stretch to believe the orks were taking similar advantage of the resources.
Secondly, the use of so much valuable metal in construction of the wall could only mean that
whatever lay on the other side was something the orks considered very important. Yes, they were
beastlike and savage, but they could be cunning, too. They weren’t nearly as mindless as men
believed. They had built a wall, and there had to be a good reason.
As he listened to Bussmann, Bergen found himself wondering if The Fortress of Arrogance
might not be the thing the aliens were trying to protect. Had they known all along that the Imperium
would come back to Golgotha to collect it? Had they planned and built the wall knowing that the
fight would come to them?
Bussmann reported large amounts of artillery present on the parapets. Some of the barrels he had
seen extending out from between the wall’s teeth were unnervingly broad, chambered for rounds of
such size they might have been more at home on the prow of an interstellar battleship.
That’s it then, thought Bergen. They must still be here. There’s no way the greenskins would
leave weapons like that behind. By the blasted Eye, we’ve got a fight on our hands.
It had been impossible for Bussmann to gauge the thickness of the wall and how well it would
stand up to the weaponry of the 18th Army Group, but it certainly looked like it could take a
beating. On the other hand, some of the plates were rusting, and orks rarely built anything with
consistent strength throughout. There would be irregularities in the structure that Exolon could
exploit if only they could find them.
The question was, would they have the chance? Bussmann had spotted numerous hinged plates
set in the wall at apparently random points. A few of them had fallen off, their bolts having rusted,
revealing the nature of the others. They were firing ports, and the cannon they hid were massive.
At the end of his report, Sergeant Bussmann cast a somewhat anxious glance at Colonel
Marrenburg. Then he took a deep breath and said, “In my opinion, sirs, a direct frontal assault on the
ork wall will result in very heavy losses. If it were up to me—”
“Sergeant,” snapped Marrenburg, cutting Bussmann off. “You will restrict yourself to answering
direct questions.”
Bussmann flushed and an angry look stole across his face, but he said, “I apologise if I spoke out
of turn, sir.”
General deViers cleared his throat and addressed the sergeant. “We’ll overlook it this time,
sergeant, but think on this: without hardship there can be no glory. Show me something worth doing
that doesn’t have its price.”
Bergen wanted to roll his eyes, and, judging by the sergeant’s sudden look of disbelief,
Bussmann felt the same. Before the scout could dig himself a deeper hole, however, Bergen jumped
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in and said, “Thank you very much for your report, sergeant. Your service today has been noted.
Unless the general wishes to ask anything else…”
DeViers shook his head.
“In that case,” continued Bergen, “you’re dismissed.”
Bussmann snapped out a sharp salute, turned, and marched out into the light of day.
“We need to focus on the gates,” said Killian. “From his report, it sounds like they’re hinged to
