time.”
Katz felt a savagely painful tug inside him. The end of the blood-covered mechadendrite
withdrew from his body, taking his heart with it. Blood pattered like rain on the ground. For the
briefest instant, Katz saw the wet heart held up in front of him, gripped by the sharp manipulators at
the steel tentacle’s tip.
Then true darkness closed over him, a darkness his augmented eyes couldn’t possibly pierce.
He didn’t feel anything when his body hit the floor.
The three tech-priests returned to the light and noise of the Cadian vehicles just as the preparations
to move out were drawing to an end. The wounded had been stitched and bandaged and gathered
into trucks. Those who were beyond medical help were given the painless death of lethal injection.
In a brief, hurried ceremony, their souls were commended to the Emperor’s side by a hard-faced
confessor from the 88th. The supplies freed up by their deaths would help the rest of the force last
that little bit longer. Vehicles were refuelled and rearmed. Troops were fed and watered, and the
whole expedition force awaited only the command of General deViers to leave the ruins of Dar Laq
behind them and head back to the surface, to the open air and the daylight.
For the most part, the troops were eager to put this unholy place behind them.
Only Gerard Bergen prayed for a delay. His ever-faithful adjutant had not returned from his
mission. When Bergen saw the three tech-priests walking towards their Chimera, he charged over to
them.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
Magos Sennesdiar turned to face him.
“Recovering samples of metal,” he said, lifting a piece he had taken from one of the derelict
towers. “I’m certain that a proper study of it will be of great benefit to the Imperium.”
Bergen squinted up into the shadows under the magos’ hood.
“You haven’t seen my adjutant?” he asked. “I sent him personally to bring you back. The
general will be issuing the order to move out any minute now.”
The magos bowed. “I am grateful that you thought of us. You are a man of fine character, major
general. Alas, we did not see your adjutant. We encountered no living soul during our explorations.
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Dar Laq is a dead place. There is much to study here. The Mechanicus may visit again once this
planet is returned to Imperial control, but, for now, we must prepare for our egress. Excuse us.”
Bergen watched the trio of cloaked figures move off.
Had Katz simply got lost? No. That couldn’t be it. Bergen had tried raising him on the vox, but
there was no response. Damn it all, he thought, there’s no way deViers will delay leading us out of
here for a single missing man. If I know the old bastard half as well as I think I do, he wouldn’t even
wait for Major Gruber.
Bergen turned and marched back to Pride of Caedus, determined to plead with the general
anyway. The Chimera’s engine was idling noisily, like those of the vehicles around her.
Sure enough, the general told Bergen he could not, and would not, order everyone to stand down
because of one missing man. Had it been Bergen out there, deViers insisted, it would have been
another matter entirely, but a mere lieutenant?
DeViers gave the order to move out. Drivers began revving their engines, filling the air with
blue clouds of exhaust. Then, one by one, they began to move off through the eerie, lifeless streets,
their headlights chasing off the shadows as they headed towards the tunnel on the far side of the
cavern.
Bergen stood in his cupola the entire time, eyes facing out into the darkness on the north side,
heart pounding in his chest, almost sick with emotion. It was far worse than grief. It felt like
betrayal.
“I’m sorry, Jarryl,” he muttered beneath his rebreather. “I’m so sorry, my friend.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It was two hours after dawn when the remnants of General deViers’ expedition force emerged from
the cool darkness of the tunnel into the baking heat of the Golgothan morning. They were halfway
up the east face of a mountainside, but the landscape beyond was largely shielded from view. Sharp
fingers of rock thrust upwards on every side, forcing the Cadians to follow a single treacherous path,
the only route wide and shallow enough to accommodate sixty-tonners like the Leman Russ tanks.
The clouds were low overhead, a churning mix of orange, red and brown. Gusting winds pulled
curtains of dust across the slopes. By midday, however, the winds dropped to a hot breeze. Tall
rocks and ridges still confounded the view. Privately, some of the Cadians almost regretted leaving
Dar Laq. Alien or not, the temperature had been more to their liking. The air there hadn’t seared
their lungs.
The mountain trail took them down onto more manageable ground, and additional vehicles
moved up from the rear to support the vanguard. The column began moving in a meandering line
along a series of low rocky gullies. Sandstone hills rose on all sides, but it wasn’t long before the
Cadians noticed something amiss. The sky beyond the next rise was darker than it was elsewhere,
stained with copious amounts of smoke.
General deViers ordered scouts to investigate further, and small groups of Sentinels lurched off,
careful to keep low so that they presented no silhouettes above the hill-line. Minutes later, the scout
leader called back to recommend that the general halt the column and come in person to the forward
observation point. He had found the source of the smoke.
Bergen lay on his belly with his magnoculars pressed to his eyes, scanning the scene before him,
uncaring of the fact that his uniform was filthy with red dust. A dozen officers on either side of him
lay in similar positions, muttering and cursing at the focus of their attention.
Beyond the rise, the land was broad and open, gently curving upwards on either side. The
Cadians were looking down into a huge crater, a volcanic caldera ten kilometres across. The volcano
was long dead, but at its centre sat the source of the dark smoke.
“Millions of them,” said Killian, lying on Bergen’s right. “There must be millions of them.”
“A hundred thousand at the most,” said Rennkamp.
“Either way,” said Killian, “we’re still heavily outnumbered.”
Bergen couldn’t really decide what he was looking at. Either it was the ork equivalent of a town,
or it was simply the biggest collection of scrap metal he had ever seen. Finally, he decided it was
both, and in equal parts. Heaps of rusting armour plate and twisted girders rose a hundred metres
into the air, the most prominent feature of the scene before him. Here and there, ruined vehicles
poked their noses out, some recognisable as the crumpled remnants of Chimera APCs and Leman
Russ tanks, others not so familiar.
Wreckage from the Golgothan War, thought Bergen. For thirty-eight years they’ve scavenged
the old battlefields and brought it all back here. Was this the place where Thraka constructed his war
machines for the assault on Armageddon? Was The Fortress of Arrogance brought here?
He hardly dared to hope that it was still here today. The old certainty that deViers would never
find his prize was still strong. Peering hard through the lenses of his magnoculars, he struggled to
find anything even approximating the profile of the famous Baneblade.
No, nothing came close.
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Perhaps they took it off-world, he thought. Here we are desperately searching for her on
Golgotha so that we might repair her and ship her to Armageddon, and the blasted orks have
probably moved her there already!
He zoomed in on a pair of massive cylindrical structures at the southern edge of the ork base.
They appeared to be some kind of greenskin foundries. They were covered in snaking pipes and
valves, and were pouring smoke into the air, some of it black, some of it a noxious yellow-brown.
Now and then, great plumes of fire erupted from a series of thin, teetering chimneys. He saw
hundreds of beastly figures hefting scrap through massive doors. There were workshops attached
where the sharp white glare of promethium blowtorches could be seen. Showers of orange sparks
accompanied the harsh metallic banging sounds that rolled towards him across the floor of the
caldera.
In the centre of the base, surrounded by the mountains of scrap, there were hundreds of huts and
hangars, all made of corrugated steel and arranged in no particular order that Bergen could discern.
Unsurprisingly, every single surface was painted red and decorated with crude glyphs, the vast
majority of which seemed to be skulls or faces.
There were towers placed all around the perimeter, too, unsteady-looking frameworks of iron
and steel that rose as high as any of the mountainous junk heaps. Atop each of these, Bergen saw
observation posts boasting pintle-mounted heavy weapons. They were manned by members of the
smaller, skinnier greenskin slave caste. They were hideous, chittering things, known to the soldiers
of the Imperial Guard as gretchin — relatively weak at close quarters, but more capable of aiming a
gun than their bigger kin.
“What in the name of Terra is that for?” asked Colonel Graves. “There, on the north side. Is that
a cage?”
Bergen panned left and saw the structure Graves was talking about. It certainly looked like a
cage, but it stood well over fifty metres tall. What in the warp had it been built to contain? The bars
were thicker than an average steel girder. There was no sign of life inside, but the sight of great piles
of reddish-brown dung left Bergen with a distinct sinking feeling. He thought he knew the kind of
creature such a cage might have been built for. If they were lucky, the empty cage meant it was
already dead. If they were unlucky, it was out on patrol somewhere, perhaps on the far rim of the
crater.
He saw dozens of smaller pens around the cage, filled with the vicious-looking ovoid creatures
that orks were known to eat. These were called squigs. Just over a decade ago on Phaegos II, Bergen
had witnessed them being fired into the midst of a Mordian infantry regiment via a kind of crude ork
catapult device. It was one of the strangest tactics he had ever seen the greenskins use. Strange, but
effective. The result of such voracious and aggressive creatures landing smack in the middle of
tightly packed troops was absolute panic as the squigs attacked everything they could get their
razor-like teeth into. His tanks, moving up in support of the Mordians, had destroyed the catapults,
but not before a good many men had died.
“That’s a lot of armour they’ve got sitting around,” said Captain Immrich. “And they’ve plenty
of light vehicles, too. They’ll give your infantry something extra to worry about, colonel.”
Graves grunted something by way of reply. Bergen didn’t catch it.
Immrich was a few metres away on Bergen’s left. He seemed to be managing well in his new
position as leader of the 81st Armoured Regiment, but Bergen had been a little stunned at the
physical change in him. He looked a lot less robust than Bergen could ever remember him being.
Then again, they all did. Bergen had studiously avoided looking in a mirror recently. The reddish
tinge of his flesh was warning enough that Golgotha was taking its dreadful toll.
As Immrich had pointed out, ork vehicles were everywhere. Bikes and buggies roared back and
forth as if their drivers were engaged in some kind of game. They hooted and hollered, and their
passengers lashed out with hammers and blades every time they came within a few metres of each
other. Bergen saw one ork beheaded in such a pass. The others howled with laughter as its lifeless
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body tumbled from the back of the buggy it had been riding. Seconds later, a trio of bikes ran
straight over the corpse.
Mad savages, thought Bergen, but his revulsion was nothing to the apprehension he felt as he
panned his gaze over the disorganised ranks of the greenskin armour. There were literally hundreds
of tanks, halftracks, APCs, artillery pieces, dreadnought walkers and more. Each looked just as
likely to fall apart as to put up any kind of fight, but Bergen wasn’t fooled. Ork machinery could be
deceptively effective. Whichever Eye-blasted warboss ruled here, he was certainly well equipped.
“I’ve seen enough,” said a sharp, clipped voice.
Bergen heard shuffling to his left and lowered his magnoculars. General deViers was moving
backwards down the slope. When he was below the ridgeline, he rose to his feet and dusted himself
off.
“The scouts say there is no other way forward,” he said, addressing them all at once. “We’ll
have to wipe them out. We’ll need time to search all those mountains of scrap for The Fortress of
Arrogance.”
Other officers had begun shuffling backwards down the slope. Many of them stopped at his
words and turned to gape at him. Judging by the look on Colonel von Holden’s face the man was
just about ready to explode, but Pruscht, who had always seemed such a pragmatic and level-headed
officer, beat him to it.
“You can’t be serious, sir,” he hissed. “In the name of Terra, think of the numbers. It’ll be a
massacre and we’ll be on the wrong side of it, mark you.”
DeViers looked around, eyes suddenly hard, and Bergen had the distinct impression he was
searching for a commissar. Fortunately, they had been left to watch over the troopers while the
senior officers moved up to observe.
“It will be massacre,” the general snapped. “A massacre of orks. The Fortress of Arrogance must
be out there. Any coward who turns from our glorious path will be shot dead. There will be no trials.
Our very fingertips brush the prize. Today, we seize it.”
Emboldened by the dismayed looks of the others, Colonel Meyers of the 303rd Skellas Rifles
added his voice to the protest. “But there’s no evidence that—”
The crack of a bolt pistol cut his sentence short. His skull detonated, spraying Colonels
Brismund and von Holden with a fine shower of gore.
“In the name of Terra!” exclaimed Colonel Marrenburg, turning suddenly pale.
“That man was a senior officer!” gasped Major General Killian.
“Sir,” hissed Major General Rennkamp, “are you trying to get us all killed? If the orks heard that
shot…”
DeViers’ voice was utterly level. He eyed each of the men before him. “Does anyone else wish
to meet the Emperor’s judgement as a coward and a traitor? If so, step forward.”
No one moved.
“Our mission has but one goal,” he continued. “All else is irrelevant. Whether we live or die,
