bursts at anything and everything that came into range. It had been too long, decades in fact, since
he had led from the front. The sight of hideous greenskins being cut into smoking chunks by his
own hand brought a murderous satisfaction that he had forgotten was possible. He revelled in it.
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There was no leading from the rear this time. He had known it the moment he had first laid eyes
on the ork base. Every man, every machine, every bead of sweat and drop of blood would be needed
to win this day. The only individuals not engaging in combat were those damned Martian priests.
“We are not a combat unit,” Sennesdiar had said, as if it weren’t already obvious. “And we are
not under the command of the Departmento Munitorum. We shall stay back with the artillery and
offer technical assistance. Our servitor bodyguards will help to protect the Basilisks in the event that
orks outflank your forces, general.”
Outflank my forces, thought deViers? That Eye-blasted cogboy!
The orks would not get through. To hell with the odds. Only in a crucible such as this could true
legends be forged. The blessing of the Emperor had given him this chance, this shot at genuine
glory. Every last one of his senior officers felt it, too, he was sure. They were out there now, Bergen,
Killian and Rennkamp, leading their divisions from the front, turret guns blazing as their Chimeras
pressed forward inch by inch.
It was hard to see much, what with the clouds of dust and smoke that cloaked everything, but up
ahead, just a little to his left, he glimpsed the tanks of the 81st Armoured Regiment roaring straight
across the thick press of enemy infantry. Big alien bodies were being mashed into the sand, pulped
by the rolling, grinding iron treads.
Stubber-fire danced and sparked across hulls. Huge handheld blades clattered uselessly against
armour plates. As he watched, two were struck with anti-tank rockets or perhaps some kind of
limpet charge. DeViers couldn’t tell which. They stopped dead in their tracks, turned into blazing
cauldrons, the men inside cooking to death.
DeViers thanked the Throne that he couldn’t hear their screams.
The other Cadian tanks were almost through. Their guns coughed. He could just make out the
first of the enemy armour starting to burn up.
“Gruber,” deViers yelled again, “what about my artillery fire?”
“I’ve told them, sir,” replied the adjutant from the troop compartment at the back of the vehicle.
“They say they’re firing at full capacity. And they’re worried about hitting our own troops now.”
“Damn it,” deViers called back. “Get in touch with their commissar. Tell him to make an
example of someone. Then we’ll see what full capacity is!”
He saw a massive black ork kick two others from its path and race towards the troopers in front
of his Chimera with a chilling war cry. It was wielding a massive, whirring chainsword with both
hands.
“No you don’t,” said deViers.
With a grin, he thumbed his butterfly-trigger and gunned the monster down.
Holtz, thought Wulfe, by the blasted Eye!
He kept repeating the name in his head, like a mantra against the truth of what he had just heard.
He couldn’t believe he was gone. It hurt like a hot knife in his chest. He kept seeing Holtz’s face
behind his eyelids when he blinked — not the disfigured face he had worn in recent years, but Holtz
as he had been in the years before Modessa Prime. The man had changed a lot after that, everything
but those ice-blue eyes.
He had been a good friend. Wulfe promised to let the real pain in, to stop holding it at bay, if he
lived through this. For now, though, he had to fight it off. There was no time to miss anyone out
here in all this madness.
“Incoming,” shouted Metzger over the intercom.
Something hit the tank’s glacis plate with so much force that the back end lifted clear of the
sand. Half a second later, it crashed down again. The treads bit into the dirt, and Last Rites II leapt
forward, pulling more orks underneath her.
Through his vision blocks, Wulfe saw a black shadow peel away in the sky above.
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“Damn and blast! Don’t we have anything that can take out their air support? How are we
supposed to clear their artillery out if we keep getting bombed from the air?”
Just as he finished his sentence, something small and bright screamed towards the jet and
clipped its tail section. There was a burst of red flame and a puff of black smoke that quickly
became an elegant curving trail. The ork fighter rolled slowly onto its back, and then slammed down
into the horde. There was a mighty boom and a mushroom of dirt and fire. Wulfe judged that
hundreds of orks must have been maimed or killed.
“By Terra, yes!” he shouted. He couldn’t see the heavy weapons team that had fired the missile,
but he saluted them anyway.
He had enough to worry about without the damned greenskin fliers trying to blow up his crate.
In trying to crush their way through the thickest press of orks, the Cadian tanks had been forced to
slow down. That made them easier targets for the ork tanks that spluttered and rumbled at the rear of
the horde. They were massive, lumbering junk heaps with far too much armour bolted on at all
angles. They crawled forward on rusting treads, traversing their turrets almost in slow motion, trying
to draw a bead on their faster Imperial counterparts. Every few seconds, they would fire a volley.
Some of them had already exploded due to misfires, while others had killed scores of their own
infantry, but the closer Wulfe got, the more he knew that, sooner or later, they would make a lucky
shot.
Captain Immrich must have thought so too, because, in addition to 6th Company’s Destroyers,
he ordered his first and second companies to break off and attack the tanks while the others dealt
with artillery and static defences. As soon as the 1st and 2nd Companies broke through, they roared
straight past the enemy armour, turned their turrets one hundred and eighty degrees, and began
blasting them to pieces from the rear.
The Destroyers joined the attack from the front, the raw destructive power of their lethal beams
cutting straight through hulls and turrets irrespective of armour thickness or density. They were a
fearsome sight. Soon, most of the ork tanks were reduced to blazing metal heaps.
With the exception of Lenck, who had been ordered to support Marrenburg’s mechanised
infantry, Wulfe and the remaining Gunheads broke through the rear ork ranks just seconds later. The
artillery pieces were only a few hundred metres away: rows of massive, thundering howitzers
crewed by skinny gretchin. They struggled to lift shells the size of fuel drums into the breech of
each monstrous weapon.
From his left, there was a flash and a boom, and Wulfe saw that van Droi had opened up with
Foe-Breaker’s main gun. Steelhearted II’s battle cannon coughed half a second later. Two of the ork
artillery pieces came apart in great balls of orange flame.
“Beans,” Wulfe called over the intercom, “light those bastards up. Don’t stop until there are
none left.”
“You’ve got it, sarge,” replied the gunner.
Traverse motors hummed, and then stopped. The gun kicked hard. Extractors whined and sucked
out all the smoke from the turret basket. Last Rites II had notched up another kill.
Colonel von Holden’s 259th Mechanised Infantry Regiment held its section of the line with a mix of
Chimeras, halftracks and troopers on foot. The vehicle gunners were charged with supporting the
footsloggers by knocking out any ork vehicle that pushed in their direction. This they did with great
success, pouring las and autocannon fire on them, turning a number of light, fast enemy buggies into
spinning metal junk that scattered burning debris and dead bodies in all directions.
Their weapons were far less effective, however, on the heavily armed and armoured trucks that
the orks were using as frontline APCs and light tanks. Some of these machines mounted fearsome
customised weapons that really belonged on a more stable firing platform. The orks didn’t care.
Each time the trucks fired, they came dangerously close to toppling over, but the effect on the
Cadians was devastating. The shots that missed the Chimeras hit the men behind them, killing
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dozens outright and fatally maiming scores nearby. The shots that struck managed to shred tracks
and cause spalling, killing many of the men inside.
Von Holden saw it all. It happened to a Chimera just ten metres away from him, and he ordered
his driver to pull back immediately.
“But we’ll crush the men behind us!” protested his driver.
“Do it at once!” von Holden snapped. “Or I’ll have you shot for insubordination.”
With a prayer for the Emperor’s forgiveness, the reluctant driver shifted the Chimera into
reverse and began accelerating away from the oncoming ork trucks. Shots landed to the left and
right, and the men that didn’t die instantly went down screaming for the Emperor and their home
world.
“Faster!” shouted von Holden, ignoring voxed demands, from Major General Rennkamp that he
explain his impromptu retreat.
One of the ork trucks spat a great gout of flame, and von Holden’s Chimera was knocked
sideways, slewing to a halt. The high-explosive round had shredded her right tread.
Von Holden checked himself for injuries.
“I’m all right,” he gasped. “By the Throne, I’m all right!”
He didn’t see the dark shadow in the sky above him. It dropped something small and oval.
Seconds later, the burning debris of his Chimera rained back to the ground.
Janz von Holden was dead.
Without Katz, Bergen was having a hard time monitoring all the vox traffic from his regimental
commanders. He had taken on a temporary aide by the name of Simms, a youngster from one of
Captain Immrich’s support crews. All things considered, Simms wasn’t doing a bad job.
Over the noise of stubber fire rattling off his Chimera’s armour, Bergen heard Captain
Immrich’s voice in his right ear. Simms had patched him straight through. At least the boy was a
quick learner.
“We’ve practically wiped out their tanks, sir,” said Immrich. “They looked tough, but they were
a bunch of junkers. Half of them blew themselves up. Just a few left now. Companies one through
four are tackling the static defences. I’ve ordered them to ram the gun-towers rather than waste
ammunition. Those things look ready to fall over in the next breeze anyway. There are other
garrisoned structures here, so I’m hitting them with high-ex shells. Companies five to ten are
already mopping up the last of the artillery pieces. However, six and seven took heavy losses on the
way through the horde. The orks are employing short-range RPGs and magnetic mines. Warn the
Armoured Fist units not to get as close as we did. I’m ordering my Exterminators and Executioners
to push through and join us. With my armour on this side and the infantry on the other, we can really
start to punish them.”
Bergen was about to respond when a terrifying sound, halfway between a scream and a roar, cut
across the noise of the battle.
Captain Immrich had heard it, too. Then, apparently, he saw it.
“Holy frak!” he voxed. “That’s big.”
By the Golden Throne, thought Bergen. Don’t let it be what I think it is.
“What can you see, captain?” he demanded. “What the hell is it?”
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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Immrich was absolutely frozen in his seat.
An armoured behemoth lumbered into view around a towering mountain of rusting scrap metal.
It was easily twenty metres tall at the shoulder, almost thirty with its heavily armed howdah.
This was no rickety ork contraption. It was a living thing, a member of the ork race, but so
gigantic, so utterly different in physical form from its smaller kin that it seemed a different species
altogether, unrelated in anything other than skin colour and temperament.
“Squiggoth!” Immrich gasped.
“Damn,” voxed Bergen. “Did you just say squiggoth?”
“I did, sir. But I’ve never… It’s gargantuan, sir! And it’s not happy to see us.”
With a calmness Immrich did not feel, he added, “You’ll have to excuse me, sir. I think my
tankers and I are about to be very, very busy.”
* * *
Wulfe’s mouth hung open as the biggest living thing he had ever seen filled his forward vision
blocks. It was a nightmare of armour-plated muscle and teeth. Its scaly skin looked as tough as rock.
Each of the jutting lower tusks was easily as long as a Vanquisher cannon barrel and many times
thicker, and its eyes, those giant glistening red orbs, burned with all the rage and insane bloodlust of
its kind. The squiggoth shook its massive head and bellowed a challenge at the Cadian tanks. Wulfe
felt his whole turret vibrating.
“By the bloody Throne!” exclaimed Beans.
“You can say that again,” Metzger replied.
“Siegler,” said Wulfe, still unable to blink. “High-explosive. Load her up. Beans, draw a bead on
that thing and make it fast. You can’t miss.”
To the left and right, other turrets were already turning. Surely together, thought Wulfe, with all
our firepower combined, we’ll be able to put the bastard down.
It was Lieutenant Keissler, recently appointed second-in-command of the regiment, who was the
first to issue the fire command. Flame licked out from the muzzle of his tank, The Damascine. The
first shell struck the beast’s armour-plated shoulder with a burst of fire and smoke. The squiggoth
made an angry rumbling noise deep in its throat and turned to face Keissler’s tank full on. It wasn’t
even scratched.
“Frak,” muttered Wulfe. “That’s just made it angry.”
Over the intercom, he said, “Metzger, get ready to run. You understand?”
“Already ahead of you, sarge,” replied the driver. He began rotating the hull away from the
squiggoth, rolling one tread forward, the other one back.
“Beans,” said Wulfe. “Hit it somewhere soft.”
“Belly shot,” said Beans. “I think I can get one under the skirts of the howdah.”
Other tanks began blasting away. Most of the shells struck the howdah, and the orks onboard
began firing back with rockets and heavy stubbers. Their aim was terrible. Bullets stitched the dirt.
The rockets corkscrewed and exploded harmlessly in the air.
Then the howdah’s gigantic main gun fired.
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The sound made the squiggoth buck and rear, throwing off most of its passengers. They
plummeted, hit the sand hard, and lay there, twisted and unmoving.
