hold’s narrow length. Corporal Metzger, Wulfe’s driver, sat next to him, typically pensive, with
Holtz and Siegler — the latter being Wulfe’s long-serving loader — in the opposite seats.
This drop was different from the last, not just in terms of the nature of the mission, but for the
smaller crew with which Wulfe was rolling out. His previous tank had boasted sponsons on either
side of her hull, two protruding compartments, each housing a belt-fed heavy bolter that made
messy work of anything foolish enough to close with her. She had been an awesome war machine,
utterly unstoppable, and memories of abandoning her on a dark highway so many light-years away
filled Wulfe with genuine longing and remorse. He had mourned her loss every day since then, but
what choice had there been? Her top speed hadn’t been nearly enough. Leaving her behind, he and
his crew had boarded a much faster Chimera APC, and the lighter machine’s speed had saved their
lives. They had made it onto the last lifter into orbit just before the planet Palmeros was utterly
obliterated.
13
Despite the pain of losing his beloved tank, Wulfe knew he had a lot to be thankful for. Billions
of Imperial civilians had not been so lucky.
In any case, the new machine — hah! he thought. What was new about her? — lacked the same
potent defences. Her flanks were practically naked. Her side-armour might be one hundred and fifty
millimetres of solid plasteel, but there were weapons aplenty in the hands of mankind’s enemies that
could cut through it like butter. An attacker only had to close the gap. Without side sponsons, it
would fall to Wulfe to cover the tank’s blind spots from his cupola high atop the turret. There was a
box-fed heavy stubber there, pintle-mounted with a nice, wide arc of fire, for exactly that purpose.
He knew it was a good weapon, but he still lamented the absence of side sponsons.
A crackling voice sounded from speakers set in the ceiling. “Bay doors open. Locks released.
Engines engaged. Activating onboard gravitational systems in three, two, one…”
Wulfe felt his stomach lurch, a brief moment in which his body weight doubled as the grav-field
of the Hand of Radiance and the drop-ship’s field overlapped. Just as quickly, the feeling was gone,
and the drop-ship’s onboard gravity became the only force pulling him into his seat.
“Bay doors cleared,” reported the mechanical voice a minute later. “Firing thrusters. Beginning
descent. Breaching thermosphere in ten, nine…”
Wulfe tuned out the rest of the count.
“What’s a thermosphere, sarge?” piped a nervous-sounding trooper a dozen seats to the right.
“Stifle it, drop-virgin,” barked his sergeant. “How would I know? Do I look like a cogboy to
you?”
Wulfe grinned. New meat, he thought. This was the first drop for a good number of the men.
The 18th Army Group’s catastrophic losses on Palmeros had left it at less than half strength. Senior
cadets from the Whiteshields — the tough, teenaged Cadian training regiments — had been drafted
in to replenish the ranks, but most of those had been posted to regiments in the 8th and 12th
divisions. After promoting suitable men from the tech-crews and support squads, the Cadian 81st
had to make up the rest of their numbers with men drafted in from the 616th Reserve Regiment —
men who, in most cases, had never crewed a tank in their lives. Lieutenant van Droi had expressed
his grave concerns about this in private. He felt that most of the new men didn’t make the grade, not
by a long shot. The reserves were rarely employed at the front lines, tending instead to be used for
garrisoning duties and the like. Wulfe knew that their first taste of front line action would sort the
men from the boys.
Thinking about who made the grade and who didn’t, he cast an involuntary glance along the
opposite row of seats towards a man on his far left.
I’ve got my eye on you, squigshit, he thought.
The speakers crackled to life again. “Mesospheric penetration in ten, nine…”
“Sounds dirty, don’t it?” quipped a ruddy-faced trooper on the opposite row.
“You’re so full of crap, Garrel,” said the young man next to him with a mirthless laugh. He tried
to punch his comrade playfully on the arm, but the bars of his impact frame restricted his movement.
The anxious trooper who’d spoken up earlier opened his mouth to speak again, but he didn’t get
a word out before the same gruff sergeant cut him off.
“Go on, Vintners,” he barked, “ask me what a mesosphere is. I dare you.” Despite his manner,
there was an unmistakable tone of humour in the sergeant’s voice. “You’ll be on latrines for the
whole frakking op!”
Nervous laughter rippled along the rows. Vintners turned pale and clamped his mouth shut.
All this was mere background noise to Wulfe. He was too busy watching the man on the far left,
studying the lines and angles of his hawkish face, watching the way he moved his lips as he talked
in an undertone with the crewmen seated around him.
His name was Corporal Voeder Lenck, twenty-eight years old and commander of the Leman
Russ Exterminator New Champion of Cerbera. He was a tall, slim, darkly handsome man, all poster14
boy good looks, easy smiles and warm handshakes. But Wulfe wasn’t fooled, not for a second, not
like the gang of doe-eyed sycophants that had surrounded Lenck since the moment he had
transferred in. Why the rookies all flocked to him, Wulfe hadn’t figured out yet. The man had been a
bloody reserve, for Throne’s sake. What was there to admire? Admittedly, he wasn’t typical of the
newcomers. He had some prior tank experience, for a start. Perhaps that was it: a combination of
being fresh to the regiment, like the rest of the new meat, but being an experienced tanker at the
same time. It was as good a guess as Wulfe could make.
The records showed that Lenck had been a sergeant earlier in his career, but something had gone
wrong. There had been a trial, a court-martial. He had been locked up for thirty days and demoted to
the rank of corporal. Only the commissioned officers knew why and, so far, they weren’t telling, but
Wulfe planned to find out sooner or later.
The day he and Lenck had first met aboard the Hand of Radiance, Wulfe had recognised an icy
cruelty behind the man’s purple-irised eyes. Lenck hadn’t done anything overt to induce Wulfe’s
dislike, not so far anyway, but Wulfe knew it would come sooner or later. It didn’t help that he was
the spitting image of someone else, a convicted Cadian criminal by the name of Victor Dunst. Dunst
and his gang of tattooed cronies had once tried to rob Wulfe in the under-streets of Kasr Gehr.
Wulfe had been a Whiteshield at the time, just a teenage cadet on leave before graduating from
basic. He had been heavily outnumbered but, like so many Whiteshields, his belief in his
invincibility was so complete that he hadn’t even thought to run. Instead, he had told the gang to
piss off, and Dunst had decided to kill him. Only the chance intervention of a patrolling Civitas
enforcer squad had saved Wulfe’s life that day. Dunst’s knife didn’t get more than two centimetres
into Wulfe’s chest. Wulfe had been very lucky.
As Wulfe looked along the row, Lenck seemed to realise that he was being watched. He didn’t
turn his head or shift his eyes, he just seemed to sense it. Wulfe saw a grin creep over the younger
man’s face and felt a tremendous desire to punch him. The feeling of Lenck’s bones cracking under
his fist would be supremely satisfying, he imagined. Wulfe was no brawler, not like some of the
men he knew, but he was no slouch, either. He was pretty sure he could take Lenck if it ever came
down to a fair fight, though Lenck didn’t seem the type to fight fair. Such an event was unlikely to
occur, of course. For Lenck, striking Wulfe would constitute a capital offence due to the difference
in rank. Still, thought Wulfe, if we were to put rank aside…
The ceiling speakers crackled again. “Particle shields holding at eighty per cent. Entering
stratosphere in ten, nine, eight…”
Any jokes or remarks that this announcement might have drawn died in the throats of the
troopers as the drop-ship began shaking and juddering. Most of the drop-virgins grimaced. A few
started to look peaky, as if they might begin to puke.
“Time to put them in, gentlemen,” said Wulfe to his crew. He reached into the right pocket of
his field trousers and withdrew a small, transparent curve of hard rubber. It was a gumshield, the
kind worn by troopers during hand-to-hand combat training. With a nod, Metzger, Siegler and Holtz
drew identical items from their pockets and fitted them securely between their teeth. All along the
facing rows, veteran tankers did the same thing. The new meat looked on with expressions of abject
horror.
“By the bloody Eye! Why didn’t anyone tell the rest of us to bring gumshields?” demanded a
round-faced trooper ten seats to Wulfe’s right. He was the newest man on Sergeant Rhaimes’ crew,
and it was Rhaimes — seasoned commander of the Leman Russ Old Smashbones — who answered,
removing his gumshield for a moment to do so.
“Company tradition, bugfood,” he said. He grinned, creasing the skin around the deep scar that
ran from his left eye to his left ear. Bugfood was his personal term of affection for the new guys and,
whenever he said it, he managed to make it sound like idiot or arsehole. Recently, a lot of the
veterans had started using it, and not just in 10th Company. “You’re still a drop-virgin till you break
a tooth on the way down.”
15
The trooper gaped in disbelief for a moment and then fished in his pocket for something. He
pulled out a wadded piece of rag, the type of cloth used to shine boots or buttons before inspection,
and stuffed it into his mouth. With a miserable expression, he bit down on it. Wulfe guessed it must
taste strongly of polish.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Rhaimes nodding at the young trooper. “Good thinking, son.
Good thinking. We’ll make something of you yet.”
“…three, two, one,” buzzed the voice from the ceiling. “Tropospheric entry achieved. Height,
nine thousand metres. All personnel brace for increased atmospheric buffeting. Touchdown in
approximately nineteen minutes. Disengaging onboard gravitational systems. Switching to local
gravity in three, two, one…”
For the second time since he had come aboard, there was an instant of gravitational overlap that
made Wulfe feel twice as heavy as he normally did. Some of the men grunted as their bodies
protested against the sudden strain but, once the grav-plates below their feet went dead, they hardly
noticed the difference.
According to the thick wad of briefing papers that everyone had been issued — though few but
the guys in recon, as usual, had bothered to read — Golgotha’s surface gravity was a fairly
manageable 1.12Gs. Wulfe, who typically weighed around eighty-five kilograms, now weighed
twelve per cent more, a little over ninety-five, but the increase didn’t bother him. The tech-crews
onboard the Hand of Radiance had taken care of that. Since leaving Palmeros, they had
incrementally increased the shipboard gravity each day, subtly preparing the troops for their
eventual ground deployment. Men like Siegler and Sergeant Rhaimes, usually a little soft around the
middle, had hardened up a lot over the last few months. Wulfe had felt his appetite increasing little
by little, and had noticed his clothes tightening around his arms, legs and chest. His body had
adapted. Now, with the planet’s local gravity acting on him directly, he didn’t feel any heavier than
normal. It would make a big difference to the tanks, though; fuel efficiency, firing distance,
trajectory, speed, wear and tear. All of these were matters of serious concern. The enginseers in
charge of the regimental tech-crews wouldn’t be getting much sleep.
Thinking of the strange cybernetic tech-priests, Wulfe decided they probably didn’t need much
sleep anyway. Maybe they just popped in some fresh batteries. The image that formed in his mind
was, in equal parts, both amusing and disturbing.
The drop-ship was really bouncing around. Golgotha’s atmosphere was thicker than most
populated worlds, and the pressure differentials between the planet’s hot and cold zones reportedly
made for some truly ferocious storms. Some of the rookies looked set to soil themselves as the craft
was tossed this way and that.
Wulfe fought an instinct to tense his muscles. It was far smarter to relax if one didn’t want to
suffer torn tendons and the like. Such injuries were all too common during a drop.
“Altitude, seven thousand five—”
The static-ridden voice was suddenly drowned out by the most awful, ringing screech. Wulfe
pressed his hands to his ears. He knew that sound, knew it never heralded good news. It was the
sound of tearing metal!
The drop-ship suddenly rolled hard to the right. Wulfe’s head flew backwards and struck the
padded surface of the seat. His stomach felt like it was doing backflips. His vision dimmed. He saw
stars. Some of the men on the opposite row were thrown so hard against their restraints that their
gumshields flew out. Yelled curses filled the air.
“We’re frakkin’ hit!” shouted a young trooper in a panic. Wulfe’s heart felt like it was stuck
somewhere up by his throat.
“We’re not hit, Webber,” barked another. “Don’t say that!”
“What the hell was it, then?” demanded someone else. “By the bloody Eye!”
16
“Quiet!” Sergeant Rhaimes yelled at them around his gumshield. “That’s enough of that! It’s
turbulence, you kak-eating dung-worms. You heard the cogboy. Buffeting, he said. Now, pipe
down!”
Rhaimes’ lie was all too obvious. He was trying to keep them calm, but no one was buying a
word of it.
The ship rolled hard in the other direction and righted itself, though the juddering was so severe,
now, that it was painful. The men gripped their impact frames with white-knuckled hands.
Wulfe chanced a look up the row at Lenck and was irritated to see him sitting quietly, lips
bulging over the tell-tale bump of a gumshield, apparently unfazed. The cocky upstart only jumped
when a noise exploded from the vox-speakers. It was a deafening, high-pitched whine that cut off
suddenly to be replaced by the cold flat tones of the cogboy addressing them once again. This time,
the voice was amplified to ear-damaging levels and, whether Wulfe simply imagined it or not, he
