heard hints of his own panic reflected in the broken sentences.
“…concentrated anti-aircraft… storm… below… off course and… down. All personnel… for
immediate…”
Suddenly, a great wave of nerve-searing pain blossomed in Wulfe’s head. The whole galaxy
seemed to roll over on its axis. Up was down, left was right. Then everything shifted again with
frightening speed. He shut his eyes tight, saw fireworks bursting behind his eyelids, felt his muscles
cry out in protest as his body’s limits were brutally tested, and then, with his heart battering the
inside of his chest like it wanted out…
Darkness. Thoughtlessness. Silence.
He sank into an unfeeling void in which even bad dreams ceased to exist.
Something stung Wulfe’s left cheek. The pain was sharp, and, slowly, though he struggled against it,
it dragged him back from the comfort of his dark oblivion. Half awake, he probed the inside of his
cheek with his tongue. The flesh was ragged. He tasted blood. His tongue played over nearby teeth
and… Damn it! Two of them were much sharper than before. They’d been broken. He wondered
idly if he’d swallowed the pieces and decided that he probably had.
Next, there came a shooting pain in his eyes. He wanted to shut them tighter, but the lids were
already squeezed together hard. Then a shadow fell across him, and the pain dissipated. Slowly,
carefully, he eased the lids apart and saw…
“Holtz? Is that—”
Waves of fire surged through his muscles as he tried to rise. He grunted in pain and sank back
down.
“Easy,” said Holtz, leaning over him. “Siegler’s gone to scare up a medic, but they’ve got their
hands full. There were deaths, sarge. Brebner and half his crew. Some of Fuchs’ men. Krauss and
Siemens both lost their drivers. A score of lads from the support crews bought it, too.”
Holtz paused for a second. Then, with sorrow giving way to relief, added, “By the bloody Eye,
sarge, we thought you were out of the game for good this time. Just lie still for a bit, will you?”
They were wasted words. Wulfe was already moving. With another grunt of pain, he rolled to
his left and braced himself with his right hand. His fingers pressed down into warm red sand and he
froze.
“Golgotha,” he whispered.
Holtz heard him. “Aye, sir. Golgotha, for better or worse.”
Wulfe paused, letting the sensation of the fine red grains filter up into his brain. He raised a
handful of sand up in front of his eyes and watched it pour like water from between his fingers. He
rubbed his forefinger and thumb together and noticed that the sand left a stain there, a thick smear of
dark red dust.
“Like blood,” he murmured.
17
Holtz caught only the last of these words and mistook Wulfe’s meaning. “No bleeding, sarge,
except your mouth. You feel like anything’s broken? If you’ll just wait for the medic.”
Again, Wulfe brushed off this advice. Injured or not, he didn’t have time to lie around on his
back. He lifted his head towards the horizon and, through his nose, drew a few deep, deliberate
breaths of the Golgothan air. He immediately wished he hadn’t. The air was thick, stung his nostrils
a little, and smelled like eggs. Is that sulphur, he wondered, or something worse? Open sands
stretched out all around him, flat and featureless, running all the way to the shimmering distance
where land and sky seemed to melt and flow together in a mirage line that hovered above the surface
of the desert.
He turned his face and looked directly up. The sky was heavily overcast with rich, swirling reds
and browns. Quite beautiful, he supposed, but oppressive, too. The cloud ceiling was very low, and
lightning flashed deep inside it, though no precipitation fell. He detected the muted glow of the local
star, directly above him, hinting at midday, its light barely managing to struggle through. Then he
realised how dark everything was. Even in the middle of the day, the ambient light was only a shade
stronger than twilight on Cadia.
Holtz followed his gaze. “According to the cogboys, we should be glad of them clouds, sarge.
They say one clear day is enough to kill a man.”
“A million ways,” Wulfe murmured.
“Again, sarge?”
“That Terraxian poet… I can’t remember his name. He said Golgotha has a million ways to kill
a man.” Wulfe pulled himself up into a sitting position, wincing as he did so. Holtz watched without
comment, giving up on trying to keep Wulfe still, merely shaking his head in frustrated disapproval.
“Is Siegler okay?” asked Wulfe. “Metzger? Viess and his men?”
“Siegler and Metzger are all right,” said Holtz, “not a scratch on either of them. Same goes for
Viess, though his driver is a bit messed up.” Absently, he reached up and rubbed the ugly,
discoloured mass of scar tissue that covered the left side of his face. Seven years ago on a world
called Modessa Prime, a secessionist guerrilla had hit Wulfe’s tank with a shaped-charge explosive.
Holtz had been in one of the sponsons. A fine spray of molten metal had turned him from a
handsome, confident trooper into one of the most bitter men Wulfe had ever known. Very
occasionally, however, Wulfe saw hints of the old Holtz shining through, a bit like the Golgothan
sun.
“Eye blast it!” exclaimed Wulfe suddenly. “Van Droi was up front with the pilot. He isn’t—”
“No,” said Holtz, cutting him off. “Chipped a tooth, though. Raging about it, he is. He was here
earlier with that damned soggy cigar sticking out of his mouth. Seemed to know you’d be all right.
Said you were to report to him once you were on your feet. You and the rest of the tank
commanders, that is.”
That prompted another question. “What about Lenck?” Wulfe asked, trying not to sound too
hopeful.
Holtz snorted. He had declared his own dislike for the new tank commander early on. Wulfe
guessed that Holtz’s feelings were based on envy more than anything else, though. Holtz had
enjoyed great success with the ladies before his face had been scorched and ruined. Lenck had
reportedly enjoyed comparable attention from some of the nurses and female naval officers aboard
the Hand of Radiance. From what Wulfe had heard, he wasn’t shy about sharing the details, either.
“First out the lander, that one,” said Holtz with a scowl. “He’s back inside it now, checking on
his tank.”
“Damn it,” muttered Wulfe. He looked up at the sky again, addressing the Emperor. “Was it too
much to bloody ask?”
Holtz gave a dry laugh.
“Look on the bright side,” he said. “If that Terraxian ponce was right, there’ll be plenty more
chances for him to snuff it before we pull out of here.”
18
Wulfe shifted his weight and struggled gingerly to his feet. He was a little dizzy, but he managed
to stand under his own power. Once he was up, he turned and cast his gaze over the wreckage of the
crashed craft.
It was a sorry sight. The desert was littered for hundreds of metres with fragments of every size
and shape. Black smoke poured from the aft section, churning on a hot breeze. Wulfe watched it
rise, climbing towards the clouds, and thought, frak! Talk about advertising our position. We won’t
be able to stay here long, not running a flag like that.
He looked back at the crumpled body of the drop-ship. Scores of sweating men moved around it,
carrying supply crates out from a tear in the hull. Others worked to manually widen the massive
emergency doors at the ship’s rear so that 10th Company’s vehicles could be extracted. They were
having a hard time of it, but there was little choice. There was no way to get the tanks out via the
loading ramp. The ship’s belly was pressed flat to the ground.
Another smaller group of men handled the grimmest task of all. They knelt in the sand, leaning
over lifeless bodies to pull dog tags from their necks.
Wulfe’s eyes lingered on the motionless form of a trooper not twenty metres away. The lad
looked barely out of his teens. The pale skin of his face was bright against the dark red sand on
which he lay.
Bugfood, thought Wulfe. He touched the silver aquila badge on the left breast pocket of his
tanker’s fatigues and whispered a quick prayer for the young trooper’s soul. Such pitiful sights were
something he had gotten used to after so long in the field. Life in the Guard: you either dealt with it
or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, the commissars would sort you out, permanently.
A million ways to die here, he thought, and we’ve already had the first. Welcome to Golgotha,
troopers.
“Right,” he said, facing Holtz. “I’ll see a medic later. For now, though, I’d better find van Droi.
Get Siegler and Metzger together and see about getting our old junk-heap out of the ship. Come find
me when it’s done.”
“Right, sarge,” said Holtz, “but do me one favour, will you? Go easy on the tank-bashing. You’ll
turn her against us if you keep that up. Besides, you can’t judge a tank on shipboard exercises, can
you?”
“Maybe not,” said Wulfe grudgingly. “Maybe not, but you and I both know she’s got a heck of a
lot to live up to.” He turned and limped off to find Lieutenant van Droi, determined to ignore the fire
in his joints and muscles as he went.
19
CHAPTER THREE
Far to the north of Wulfe’s position, things were very different for those elements of the 18th Army
Group that had landed safely. Their fourth evening on Golgotha saw General Mohamar deViers
descend from orbit in his private aquila lander to personally oversee operations at the Imperial
beachhead, located, as the ork slavers’ base had so recently been, on the Hadron Plateau.
The preparatory stages of Operation Thunderstorm were already drawing to a close.
Construction of the new Army Group HQ was almost complete, well ahead of schedule thanks to
the contributions of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Their abundant technologies, the impressive
prefabricated structures they had provided, the unceasing toil of their legions of brain-wiped
biomechanical slaves, these things and more had seen the laser-blasted surface of the plateau
converted and fortified in record time. The 10th Armoured Division was preparing to roll out on the
morning of the following day, having been charged with securing the first of a series of outposts
critical to establishing key supply lines in the east. So, with his private rooms already constructed
and awaiting occupation, it was high time, in the opinion of General deViers, that the men on the
ground felt the presence of their leader among them. Time, he thought, to remind them just whose
show this was.
The sleek aquila touched down in the early evening, alighting on the base’s small rockcrete
runway without incident. The last of the day’s light was just visible as a ruddy glow in the far west,
and the base’s floodlights were buzzing to life one by one. The lander’s boarding ramp had barely
touched rock when the general strode down it and began barking orders. He was a thin man, taller
than average for a Cadian, clean-shaven with pomaded silver hair and sunken cheeks. At ninety-one
years of age, seventy-six of those spent in military service, he looked surprisingly young, no older,
in fact, than sixty. The treatments and surgeries he had undergone to achieve this were both
expensive and painful, but never unacceptably so.
He was a man who placed a great deal of value on appearances, an attitude reflected in the
tailoring of his immaculate uniform and in the polished sheen of the medals that glinted over his left
breast pocket. His voice, when he spoke, was sharp and clear, and he had a tendency to emphasise
certain words with little thrusts of his chin. The first order of business, he told his men, was a swift
round of interviews and inspections, and no, they could not wait until the following morning.
He initiated the inspections, beginning, significantly, with the massive tank-crowded motor pool
and progressing anti-clockwise through each area in turn. After two hours spent marching around
the base snapping out questions and comments, trying in vain to acclimatise to the thick, unpleasant
air, deViers confided to his long-suffering adjutant, Major Gruber, that he was deeply impressed.
Things had apparently been proceeding very well without him. With its high curtain walls, towers
topped with Manticore and Hydra anti-air defences, and the broad, extended parapets boasting row
after row of Earthshaker artillery platforms, Exolon’s new Army Group HQ represented a vital
bastion of security on an otherwise hostile world. DeViers was quietly convinced that it would hold
against even the most overwhelming ork siege. It would have to. In all likelihood, such an attack
was mere days away. The Golgothan orks would have seen lights in the sky as the drop-ships had
descended. Sooner or later, they would come to investigate. No matter how many came, the base
could not be allowed to fall. It was the lynchpin of deViers’ whole operation.
The plateau on which Hadron Base was being constructed measured over four kilometres in
diameter and lay almost directly on the line of the equator. It had been selected on the basis of two
20
critical factors. Firstly, with its sheer sides and few sloping access routes, it was, even without
fortification, eminently defensible. Secondly, and more significantly, at a distance of some six
hundred kilometres from the general’s ultimate objective, it was the closest suitable geological
feature to the last known position of The Fortress of Arrogance.
His base inspection over, deViers ordered a briefing session with his three divisional
commanders, Major Generals Rennkamp, Killian and Bergen. It was deViers’ intention to keep the
session short, for he had also arranged a rather splendid banquet to celebrate the auspicious
beginning of his ground operation. This beginning, he felt, was marked, not by the descent of the
first drop-ships, but by his own arrival planet-side, and he would not let the moment pass without
some kind of commemorative function. After all, Operation Thunderstorm, as he so regularly
reminded his officers, was a righteous quest the likes of which had rarely been seen in the recent
annals of the Imperial Guard. Why should the end of its opening phase not be celebrated in good
spirits?
That was the plan, at least, but deViers soon found his good spirits dampened.
“How many?” he hissed. His face was red with rage, and his fists were clenched on the surface
of his desk. “Tell me again!”
