festooned with spikes, chains and skulls. The roar of their exhausts was like the bellowing of some impatient predator, and each
bucked madly, as though chafing at the delay enforced upon them.
Larana bit her lip hard enough to draw blood as the truck lurched forward, its wheels churning the dusty ground as its wheels
fought for purchase. Her vision spun crazily and she gripped the stock of her useless lasgun trying not to imagine the next horror
that awaited her.
GUNNER FIRST CLASS Dervlan Chu watched the approaching line of vehicles through the gunsight of his Basilisk artillery piece
mounted behind the walls of Tor Christo's Kane bastion with undisguised relish. The image was grainy and static interference
washed through the sight, but its beauty was unmistakable. It was an artilleryman's dream. He tried to get a count on the number
of targets approaching the fortress, dividing the approaching line in two and then halving it again. He made out roughly three
hundred trucks, no doubt laden with traitorous scum eager to dash themselves against the bulwark of Tor Christo, and perhaps two
dozen APCs.
These fools hadn't even bothered to commence their attack with an artillery barrage or under cover of smoke. If this was the
calibre of their opposition, then the warnings of their company commanders had been largely unnecessary. They would send these
incompetent idiots home in pieces.
Chu already had his zones of fire mapped out, he knew the precise ranges of his gun, and his loading team already had one of the
metre-long shells loaded in the breech of the massive artillery piece. He allowed himself a quick glance along the line of emplaced
artillery, pleased to note that every other gun appeared to be locked and loaded. Jephen, the commander of the next Basilisk in
line, gave him a smiling thumbs-up.
Chu laughed and shouted, 'Good hunting, Mr Jephen! A bottle of amasec says I tally more than you and your boys!'
Jephen sketched a casual salute and replied, 'I'll take that wager, Mr Chu. Nothing tastes as fine as amasec another man has paid
for.'
'A fact I shall no doubt rejoice in later, Mr Jephen.'
Chu returned to his gunsight as the line of vehicles rumbled closer, the roar of their engines little more than a distant growl from
his elevated position. Smoke and dust billowed behind the attacking vehicles and soon they would be in range.
Chu swivelled on his gun-chair to watch the senior officers of the Christo, together with the omnipresent priests of the Machine
God, gathered far behind the guns, consulting an attack logister that was no doubt wired into the gunsights of their artillery pieces.
A liveried aide passed round crystal glasses of amasec to the senior officers from a silver tray as another handed out ear
protectors. The officers laughed at some private joke and toasted the success of the venture, downing their drinks in a single gulp.
The officers removed their peaked caps and donned their ear protectors. One officer, who Chu recognised as Major Tedeski,
stepped towards the guns and raised a portable vox to his mouth.
The oil-stained speaker beside Chu hissed and Tedeski's harsh, clipped tones announced, 'My compliments to you, gentlemen, you
may fire when ready.'
Chu smiled and returned to his gunsight, watching the range counter unwind as the enemy approached.
HONSOU DUCKED INSIDE the crew compartment of his Rhino and spun the locking wheel of the hatch behind him. There was little
point in manning the bolters now, and he would only expose himself to unnecessary risk by riding with the hatch open.
He returned to his commander's seat as the Rhino bucked over the undulating ground, the driver easing back on its speed and
allowing the trucks carrying the prisoners to take the lead. There were sure to be minefields before the hill fort, and it was the
tracks' job to find them first.
The warriors accompanying him chanted a monotonous dirge - a prayer to the Dark Gods, memorised and unchanged these last
Graham McNeill ?Storm of Iron?
ten millennia. Honsou closed his eyes and allowed it to wash over him, his lips moving in time with the words. He clutched his
bolter tight, though he knew that it was not yet time to sate its battle hunger with the blood of traitors. The only deaths likely this
day were those of worthless prisoners, men who deserved to die anyway for their stubborn refusal to follow the only true path that
could save mankind from the multifarious horrors of this universe.
Where else but in Chaos could humanity find the strength to resist the implacable advance of the tyranids, the barbarity of the orks
or the nascent peril of the ancient star-gods that were even now awakening from their aeons-long slumbers? Only Chaos had the
power to unite a fragmented race and defeat that which sought to destroy it. The soldiers of the corpse-god only speeded the
ruination of that which they purported to defend by resisting Chaos.
Well, the great work they undertook here would bring the ultimate victory of Chaos one step closer, and the Warsmith would
surely reward all those who aided in his victory with the patronage of the gods. Such a prize was worth any price and Honsou
knew he would risk anything to win such reward.
The roar of the Rhino's engine deepened, startling Honsou from his reverie and he knew that the time had come to implement the
next stage of the attack.
THE TRUCK BOUNCED over the uneven ground and Larana Utorian felt her legs sag as pain washed over her. She fell against the
side of the truck, sinking to her knees and slamming her face against its timber panelled sides. She tasted blood and felt a tooth
snap from her gums.
Larana tried to push herself upright, but the press of bodies was too great and she couldn't move. She was trapped by jostling legs,
her trousers soaking up the human waste swilling around the truck's floor.
Through a splintered plank, she watched the truck alongside them, the crimson overalled driver heedless of the human cattle in his
vehicle. She locked eyes with a young soldier across from her, his eyes wide in terror, tears streaking tracks down his dirty face.
The boy's eyes were full of mute pleading, but Larana could do nothing for him. As though in a race, the boy's truck began pulling
ahead and she watched as it bounced across a rugged patch of scrub.
A huge explosion lifted the vehicle into the air, spinning it onto its front section, the chassis breaking in midsection. Bright flames
and afterimages danced across Larana's eyes as she saw bodies flung in all directions. The buried mine threw out secondary
munitions - anti-personnel charges that exploded seconds later to shred anyone fortunate enough to survive the initial blast. She
lost sight of the boy as the wrecked truck was swallowed in the dust behind them, knowing there was no way he could have
survived.
She was thrown forward, the cries of terror growing louder as she heard more explosions. The truck skidded to a halt in a
billowing cloud of obscuring red dust. What was happening? She heard desperate shouting and screams as the tailgate of the track
was wrenched down and fiery light flooded the rear of the track. Snarling voices and barbed clubs hammered into the prisoners,
their captors were dragging them from the illusory safety of the trucks.
Larana was propelled to her feet by the mass of men debarking from the truck and fell to the hard-packed ground. Black smoke
billowed upwards from scores of wrecked vehicles, their twisted hulks broken by the detonation of mines. Bodies lay strewn about
and the screams of the wounded were ignored as the prisoners were clubbed forward. The spike adorned Rhinos ground to a halt
behind the smoking wrecks and, with practiced ease, the iron giants who had brought them to this slaughter emerged, weapons at
the ready.
A terrified man, his eyes wild, stumbled past her, heading in the opposite direction. Larana watched as one of the giant warriors
casually gunned him down, a single bolt from his weapon blasting the man's entire torso away. Larana rose to her feet, dazed and
blinded by dust and pain. Smoke stung her eyes and she could no longer feel her arm. She stumbled in the direction everyone else
was running. Was it to safety? She couldn't tell.
Howls of pain and confusion tore at her ears and she gripped the barrel of her impotent lasgun, vowing that she would use it to
crash an enemy's skull before the day was out. More gunfire sounded behind her. A body, gory holes torn in its flesh, fell into her
and streaks of bullets whipped by her head.
She pushed the body away and ran into the smoke.
DERVLAN CHU PRESSED the firing stud on the armament panel and closed his eyes as the Basilisk fired. The massive barrel's recoil
pushed almost its entire length into the track unit, the crack of the shell's discharge easily penetrating the ear protectors he wore.
Despite the bolted locking clamps, the track unit rocked under the force of the recoil. Even as the first shell arced through the air,
his loading team was ejecting the spent casing and unlimbering a fresh shell from the gurney beside the gun.
He pressed his eye to the gunsight, checking to see how much the recoil had caused the barrel to drift from its aiming position.
Not much, he saw, spinning the correction wheel, bringing the aiming reticle back to centre, and adjusting fire for the next shot.
'Loader alpha ready!' came the shout from below.
'Up!' answered the breechman.
Chu smiled. Their first shell hadn't even impacted yet and they were ready to fire again. He and his crew had trained hard for just
this kind of fight and now that training was paying off.
He centred the aiming reticle on a smoking track with scores of men milling in confusion around it and pressed the firing stud
again.
EVEN OVER THE screaming and confusion, Larana Utorian could hear the shriek of the incoming shell and recognised it for what it
was. She hurled herself flat, screaming as her arms jarred on the hard earth. The ground whipped upwards, tossing her through the
air as the first Basilisk shell impacted, blasting a crater fifteen metres across and obliterating a dozen men in an instant. Shrieks
sounded as further shells struck the ground with thunderous hammer blows. Huge chunks of rock and dust were blasted skyward
as the first volley hit. Larana slammed back to the ground, the impact driving the breath from her lungs. She rolled over, across
Graham McNeill ?Storm of Iron?
the lip of a crater, and flopped to its smoking base.
Scraps of flesh and bone spattered the interior surface of the crater, the stench of scorched human meat and burning propellant
filling her nostrils. Another prisoner sheltered in the crater. His mouth was open, stretched wide as he screamed in terror, but
Larana could not hear him, her skull filled with an all-encompassing ringing.
She felt wetness seep from her ears.
The man sheltering in the crater stumbled over to her, his mouth working soundlessly up and down, but Larana ignored him,
crawling to the lip of the crater, clutching her lasgun like some kind of protective talisman. The man was insistent though and
clawed at her uniform. Larana pushed him away, shouting something incoherent over the whoosh of displaced air as another
volley of shells screamed in. The man rolled into a foetal ball, rocking back and forth in terror.
Larana buried her head in the ground as she felt the awful vibrations of the shell impacts hammer the ground. With her good arm
she clutched the soil. Dust filled her mouth and the Shockwaves from the explosions threatened to pulp her bones to jelly.
She knew she couldn't stay here. She had to get back. But which direction to go? One place was as likely to take a hit as another
and the smoke and disorientation had made a mockery of her sense of direction.
She scrambled to the weeping man at the crater's base, and dragged him by the collar towards the rear edge of the crater.
'Come on! We have to get back!' she yelled.
The man shook his head, fighting Larana's grip with the strength of a madman and pulling free of her grasp.
'You'll die if you stay here!' she shouted. The man shook his head and Larana was unsure whether he'd even heard her or she'd
made any kind of sense. She'd tried her best, but if the idiot didn't want to move, there was nothing she could do to make him. She
dropped flat as another thunderous detonation rocked the ground, the impact throwing her from the crater.
She landed on something soft and yielding, and rolled clear with a terrified cry as she saw that she was lying on shredded flesh
and mangled limbs. Shapes ran through the smoke, but where they were going or who they were, she couldn't tell. She could see
nothing more than a few metres away, the drifting smoke and dust rendering everything beyond invisible.
A smoking wreck lay on its side, belching black clouds just at the edge of her vision and she began crawling towards it over tornopen
corpses and crying men with no legs or arms. One man was on his knees, vainly trying to gather up his looped entrails and
push them back into his raptured belly. Another stuffed his severed arm into his jacket, beside a man vomiting thick ropes of red
gore. Each few paces brought fresh horrors and Larana wept as the ground continued to shake as though in the grip of the most
violent of earthquakes.
She reached the blazing track, weeping and laughing hysterically at this small victory. A blackened corpse lay under the shattered
cab of the vehicle, severed through the torso by the track's fall. Larana could see the corpse wore the crimson overalls of their
captors and felt a burning hatred light in her belly. She snarled in fear and anger, pounding her rifle butt against the corpse's skull,
smashing it to destruction, fresh sobs bursting from her lips with every blow. She threw aside the bloody weapon and took what
shelter she could from the burning truck. Tyre tracks from the vehicle led back through the smoke towards the place where -
presumably - this insane venture had begun. Taking a deep breath she waited until another barrage of shells landed.
Knowing that there was no way she could survive, but unwilling to give up, Larana Utorian set off to find a way out of this hell.
ACRID PROPELLANT FILLED Kane bastion, but Dervlan Chu was exultant despite the sting in his eyes and the ringing in his ears.
