Golgotha until it was retrieved.
From a pre-expedition total of over one hundred, only twenty-six tanks remained in the ranks of the
81st Armoured Regiment. They moved slowly and deliberately through the twisting, junk-filled
streets of the ork camp, halting frequently to blast apart ramshackle towers and barracks buildings
from which ork rockets and stubber-fire stabbed out. Vox-chatter was terse, betraying the Cadians’
anxiety. No one liked moving through the narrow lanes. The shaky metal buildings on either side
looked ready to topple at any second. Their construction was almost laughable. Beams and girders
stuck out at every angle. Most of the corrugated metal walls looked set to tear away on the next
wind. It was a wonder any of them stood at all.
Again and again, the Cadians found themselves boxed in. Huge armoured orks, some of them
almost three metres tall, poured out from shadowed corners in a frenzy, screaming oaths in their foul
xenos tongue, bloodstained blades and hammers held high above their heads. The tallest were so
dark-skinned they were almost black, and they fought with ferocity of a different magnitude
altogether. It took twice as much fire to put them down as it did to slay the other members of the
squads they led.
If not for the tanks and their crews providing hard cover and fire support to the footsloggers, any
progress at all through the settlement would have been impossible. There were too many damned
178
bottlenecks. The Cadian armour made all the difference, but it wasn’t long before van Droi started
hearing voxed reports of tanks being lost.
The fourth such loss was Steelhearted II.
Captain Immrich had assigned Viess and his crate as armour support to a company of Colonel
Pruscht’s 116th Lasgunners. They were purging an avenue half a kilometre north of van Droi’s
position when rockets had shredded the tank’s left tread, rooting her to the spot. The infantry had
immediately moved forward to return fire, only to be cut down by ork heavy weapon teams perched
on the nearby roofs. Then the ork foot soldiers had poured in, dragging Viess and his crew out of
their hatches and hacking them to pieces on the street.
A few of the lasgunners had managed to break away from the fighting and report what had
happened. The commissars would probably execute them later on charges of cowardice.
The Gunheads were down to three tanks. Van Droi could hardly believe it. Soul-sapping misery
hovered over him, threatening to descend and engulf him at any second, but he fought hard to keep
it at bay. Other men were depending on him, now, a platoon of Colonel Stromm’s Kasrkin troopers.
They followed just behind his crate, hellgun stocks raised to their armoured shoulders.
He couldn’t afford to lose focus.
Van Droi looked out from his cupola, fists tight around the grips of his pintle-mounted heavy
bolter. His Vanquisher had already been stung twice — once on the glacis and once on the mantlet
— by rockets fired from blind corners. She had soaked up both hits, but how much more could she
take? Her hide was scarred silver by all the stubber-fire she had drawn, and stained black where the
rockets had struck.
Thinking that his remaining Gunheads deserved to know of the company’s latest loss, he hit the
vox-link button on his headset and said, “This is 10th Company Command. Listen up, Gunheads.
I’ve just heard from Colonel Pruscht that Steelhearted II is dead. Viess and his crew are gone. So,
keep your damned eyes open, both of you. If Yarrick’s tank is here, this will all be over soon. You
have to keep it tight until then.”
Two brief acknowledgements came back to him. One from Wulfe, one from Lenck. Van Droi
knew they utterly detested each other. They were just about as different as two men could be, but
they were both survivors. They had that much in common.
What was it about the character of each man, he wondered, that had got him this far when so
many others had fallen along the way? Was it Lenck’s self-serving ruthlessness? Wulfe’s rigid
honour code? Or his almost paternal concern for the lives of his crew?
If they both survived this, maybe van Droi could find a way to bridge the gap between them.
Troopers who disliked each other at first were often bonded by the trials they shared. He had seen it
before.
Then again, he thought, maybe not.
Up ahead, he noticed that the avenue was quickly widening. The ork structures were bigger and
more widely spaced apart. From some of the roofs, great crooked armatures reached up towards the
sky. They looked like construction cranes. Their heavy steel cables swung in the wind.
“Take it slow, Nails,” van Droi told his driver over the intercom. “It looks like we’re
approaching the eastern edge of the settlement. I can’t believe we’ve seen everything the orks have
left.”
Nails shifted down a gear, prompting a question from the Kasrkin lieutenant at the rear.
“Trouble up ahead?” he voxed.
“Can’t be sure,” replied van Droi. “Come up and take a look.”
The Kasrkin officer, a rough-spoken man by the name of Gradz, clambered up the back of Foe-
Breaker and stopped close to van Droi. Despite their proximity, they spoke over the vox. The noise
of the engine was too loud for anything else.
“What do you think?” asked van Droi.
179
The Kasrkin took a moment to answer. “I think we’ve just found our warboss, armour. That
hangar dead ahead is the biggest structure I’ve seen so far. Twice the size of those ones to the side.
I’ll bet you ten bottles of joi the bastard is in there right now. The minute our lads move into that
open square, the orks’ll launch their last stand. The warboss will lead it.”
Van Droi nodded in silent agreement.
“Well?” asked Gradz. “You gonna take the bet?”
Something large moved in the shadowed mouth of the hangar. The muzzle brake of a massive
battle cannon poked out into the daylight. Van Droi and Gradz both saw it at the same time, but it
was too late to do anything. The gun belched fire and smoke. There was a clap of thunder.
They didn’t see the shell that killed them. It happened too fast for that.
Foe-Breaker was flipped onto her back by the power of the explosion, crushing eight of the men
behind her.
Then her magazine ignited, and her armour blew outwards as a million spinning shrapnel shards.
No one within ten metres of her survived.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Orks were spewing out from buildings on all sides.
“We need to fall back right now,” Lieutenant Keissler voxed to Captain Immrich. “Draw them
back into the narrower streets.”
“No,” snapped Immrich. “I will not disobey the general’s orders. We are to stand firm and
engage. There will be no retreat. This is their last stand, and it is ours as well.”
“You’re a bloody fool, Immrich,” hissed Keissler. “I always thought so. Death or glory, is it?”
“What else is there?” Immrich replied and took aim.
General deViers could barely hear himself think over all the noise on the vox.
Killian was yelling for permission to pull his men out of the ork settlement. Rennkamp was
calling on him to send everything they had in to support the Cadian tanks, and Bergen was raving
about some monstrous ork battle tank five times the size of a Leman Russ that was ripping the
forward elements of his armoured division apart.
In the general’s mind, there was only one pertinent fact. His prize was in there somewhere. The
path was clear.
“Army Group Command to all units. This is General Mohamar deViers. In the name of the
Emperor, I order you to move in. Converge on the east side of the settlement. Give your lives if
necessary, but sell them dear. Our victory must be absolute. The Fortress of Arrogance is within
reach. For Cadia and for the glory of all mankind, we will recover her this day. Fight hard, brave
Cadians. The Emperor protects!”
The Emperor wasn’t doing a very good job of protecting the men of the 88th Mobile Infantry.
Wulfe had been attached to one of their platoons for the sweep eastwards, but the men were
dropping like flies, hemmed in on all sides by savage aliens of simply breathtaking bulk and power.
Lasgun blasts hardly seemed to affect the orks at all.
Wulfe’s stubber-fire was only marginally more effective. He did his best to keep the orks off the
men around him, gunning them down mercilessly with enfilading fire from his cupola, but there
were simply too many. They weren’t the worst of it, either, not by far.
Between them, the Cadian armour and infantry would have found a way to overcome the
unmounted troops. It would have needed time, coordination, and a healthy serving of old-fashioned
Cadian courage, but the orks had armour support of their own — a single lethal machine that
nothing on the Cadian side seemed capable of damaging — and it was picking the 18th Army Group
tanks off one by one.
Beans had fired on that clanking, rumbling, smoke-spewing monstrosity three times already,
switching from high-explosive to armour-piercing when it was clear the former was utterly
ineffective, but the armour-piercing shot hadn’t done much in the way of damage either. The other
tanks had discovered this too. Their rounds either exploded without effect or lodged in metre-thick
slabs of iron skin.
Some of the remaining Executioners and Destroyers had enjoyed slightly more success,
managing to blast a few pieces off here and there, but the oversized lump of metal was still rolling
forward, emerging into the daylight with aching slowness.
181
This was the monstrosity that had brewed up Foe-Breaker. Wulfe had heard it all over the vox,
his gut knotting until it caused him actual physical pain. Seconds after the vox report, he and the
other mixed units had arrived on the open ground before the big hangar. That was when the orks had
poured out to surround them.
What in the blasted warp is it? Wulfe wondered, glancing in the direction of the ork machine.
Only half of it was visible so far, but Wulfe guessed its speed had nothing at all to do with an
underpowered engine. It had been built by orks. Already its armour had proved superior to the
Cadian weapons. It was most likely fitted with an insane excess of weaponry, too.
As he thought this, the machine’s main gun fired again, its thunderous roar shaking the hangar
walls and the buildings on either side. The air trembled. A Leman Russ Conqueror belonging to 2nd
Company spun on a pillar of flame and crashed to the ground on its side.
Wulfe wondered darkly if Foe-Breaker had landed the same way.
The report of van Droi’s death had hit him with all the force of an Earthshaker round, harder, if
he was honest, than the death of Holtz or Viess. He had known van Droi longer. The man had
seemed immortal to a young Wulfe when he had first joined the regiment. He had been somewhat
like Colonel Vinnemann in that regard. For Wulfe, Gossefried van Droi had embodied everything
that was strong and true and noble about the Imperial Guard. He was a symbol. Gossefried’s
Gunheads had been named for him. Symbols weren’t supposed to die. Only people died. People and
orks.
Hungry for revenge, he loosed a battle cry and thumbed the trigger of his heavy stubber, sending
another lethal torrent straight into a pack of orks that were hacking the arms and legs from an
infantryman on the left. Wulfe couldn’t save him — it was too late for that — but he punished the
soldier’s killers. Their grotesquely muscled bodies crumpled to the ground, torsos almost cut in half
by the stubber’s high rate of fire. Their thick red blood mixed with that of the man they had just
killed.
Wulfe heard Beans calling “Brace!” on the intercom just-before a tongue of fire flickered at the
end of Last Rites II’s battle cannon. The sharp boom it made set his ears ringing.
The round went curving in towards the massive ork machine, striking a plate of red-painted iron
bolted to the front. White sparks showered out as the round ricocheted and punched a hole in the
corrugated surface of the hangar wall. After a second, the plate fell off and was pulled under a set of
massive iron treads.
“Damn it!” cursed Beans over the intercom, but Wulfe wasn’t listening to him. He was listening
to the divisional vox channel. The chatter there had suddenly intensified, for Beans’ shot had
uncovered the forward edge of a massive black track-guard, on top of which sat an icon cast in
bright, shining gold.
Every man on the battlefield recognised it. It hung from their necks, imprinted on one side of the
dog-tags they all wore. Many had paid to have it tattooed on their bodies.
It was the holy aquila, two-headed eagle, icon of the Imperium of Man.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
General deViers felt his heart hammering in his chest as his Chimera raced in towards the battle. He
ordered his driver to crash straight through the orks that filled the street up ahead. Beyond them, he
could already see the ground where his forces were fighting for their lives. There was the massive
hangar he had heard about on the vox, and, there she was: The Fortress of Arrogance.
There was no doubt it was her. Some tanker in the 10th Armoured Division had knocked off a
piece of her disguise, and now everyone knew. They had found her. They had tracked her down at
last, but what in blazes had the greenskins done to her? In all the general’s dreams of how this
moment would unfold, he had never imagined this. In the ultimate act of sacrilege, the orks were
using her to slaughter Imperial forces. His forces.
Even so, he had no choice but to give the order.
Through gritted teeth, he voxed, “This is Army Group Command to all units. Cease fire on the
enemy superheavy at once. I repeat, do not fire on the ork super-heavy under any circumstances.
Concentrate on the enemy infantry.”
Gerard Bergen wasn’t slow to respond. He didn’t bother with propriety, either.
“You’re out of your frakking mind, general,” he hissed. “Whether that abomination is Yarrick’s
Baneblade or not, it’s devastating my armour. We have to take it out right now. Reverse that order!”
“Mind your damned tone, major general,” deViers barked back. “I will do no such thing. Ask
Magos Sennesdiar; if a round pierces the onboard fuel or ammunition supplies, she’ll be beyond all
hope of repair.”
“And if we don’t put her out of commission, there won’t be anyone left to claim her. Have you
lost your mind, you old fool? You’re acting like a damned Mechanicus puppet. You know that?”
