by C. L. Werner
At first, the operation had a veneer of organisation about it. That illusion collapsed once the barrage stopped. The silence of the ork guns meant one thing: the main body of their force was now starting its advance on Gamma Five.
Slaves and soldiers alike fought for a place on the train. Taofang quickly lost count of the acts of murder and brutality he witnessed as order broke down. He thought of the rearguard, holding their positions in the ruins, trying to delay the ork assault. He wondered what they would think if they could see the selfish confusion they were giving their lives to protect.
Taofang shook his head sadly. He was no better than any of them, he reflected. As the motorman’s ‘escort’, he and Mingzhou had easily wormed their way onto the train. It was a shining example of Castellax morality. Survival at any cost. It was a maxim Colonel Nehring and his staff had certainly adopted. The officers made certain they were given the first car behind the engine, detailing an entire company of shock troops to secure the car against trespassers.
Sounds of explosions and a marked increase in gunfire rose from the distant battle line. Whatever their feelings might be, the rearguard was committed now. The orks were attacking the perimeter.
The sounds of violence threw the massed humanity within the station into a final excess of crazed panic. Soldiers and slaves rushed the cars, thrusting their bodies into doorways, scrambling up ladders and clinging to walls. Like a swelling tide, the frightened mob surged about the cars, darting from one to another in their search for escape. Taofang was forced to smash the butt of his lasgun into groping hands and crazed faces as terrified men sought to drag him down from the roof and take his place. From the front of the train, the sharp crack of shotguns sounded, Nehring’s shock troops ensuring the dignity of their officers with lethal efficiency.
Above the shouting mob, the vox-casters suddenly sounded, blaring an alarm across the length of the station. For a moment there was silence, then a shaky voice gasped the news from the speakers. The orks had penetrated the perimeter.
All pretence at discipline shattered. The mob clawed and fought their way to the train, the strong smashing down the weak. Shotguns fell silent as desperate men swarmed over the shock troops, crushing them beneath a flood of fear. Yet even as the first of the rioters scrambled onto the steps of the officers’ car, the train suddenly lurched into motion.
Aware of the threat, Nehring had given the order to leave, abandoning thousands of men to their doom.
Clouds of toxic dust billowed into the desert sky, churned from the sun-baked surface by the growling treads that gouged the earth. Through the bleached, polluted wasteland, seven armoured behemoths raced, the roar of their engines echoing across the desolation, blue smog spewing from their exhausts. At random intervals, flame would explode from the barrels of the guns embedded in the turrets which topped the hulking machines and some distant patch of desert would be blasted to oblivion.
Until a few weeks past, the tanks had formed the core of the Dirgas garrison’s armoured company. Abandoned by the fleeing humans, looted by the conquering orks, the war machines had been pressed into service by the xenos. The khaki and brown camouflage of the original paint was still visible beneath the crude graffiti and primitive symbols that had been scrawled across the hull. Slabs of sheet metal had been bolted to the original armour in a simplistic effort to break the regimented, organised appearance of the tanks, to lend them a more individualistic profile. Deranged arrays of weaponry had been fitted to the turrets and hulls, from pintle-mounted heavy stubbers to nests of rocket tubes and deadly arrays of plasma batteries. One tank crew had even removed their vehicle’s main gun in order to fit a lunatic amalgamation of boltguns, meltaguns and multilasers into a single piece of patchwork ordnance.
Around the tanks, clinging to their flanks like scavengers slinking behind a pack of steel sharks, was a motley confusion of warbikes and buggies, ramshackle vehicles slapped together with the wreckage of Dirgas. Goggled ork bikers circled around the tanks, impatient with the slower speed of the armoured giants while bored gunners in the beds of buggies fired bursts into the dingy sky. Occasionally, the growling head of an ork tanker would sprout from an open hatch to snarl abuse at the mob.
The aliens were unfocused and inattentive, too eager to locate some mining camp or settlement to attack to display any interest in the desolate terrain. A few catcalls and rude gestures was the only reaction from the crew of the nearest tank when one of the warbikes suddenly ploughed into a hole in the sand, the vehicle’s weight punching through a thin layer of silica dust. None of the ork mob stopped to render aid to the crashed bike, instead continuing to thunder across the desert, the accident already dismissed from their minds.
In the hole, the ork biker had been slung into the handle-bars, the wind rushing from its lungs as its chest smashed into unyielding metal. Before the xenos could try to draw breath back into its body, a powerful arm was wrapped about its neck. The hole wasn’t some accident of nature and corrosion but a carefully prepared pit.
A pit that was far from empty.
Over-Captain Vallax held the stunned ork in one hand, with his other he thumbed the activation stud on his chainaxe. Gripping the weapon just behind the head, he pressed its churning edge into the face of the struggling alien, relenting only when he felt the ork’s thick skull split beneath the sawing blade.
Contemptuously, Vallax dropped the dead ork and pushed it to the far side of the pit. The ork’s stupid blundering would have been disastrous if the aliens had even a semblance of caution about them. Fortunately, they were as crude and mindless as they looked, not bothering to check on their comrade. The roar of the chainaxe was drowned out by the far louder roar of alien engines – the greenskins were so enamoured of loud noises they’d even stripped the mufflers from the exhausts on the tanks they’d captured. That obsession with noise was going to cost the aliens dearly.
‘Situation stabilised,’ Vallax hissed into his vox-bead.
‘Have you suffered injury?’ Uhlan’s voice crackled over the vox. The half-breed sounded more disappointed than concerned.
Vallax glared at the warbike, its treads still clawing at the wall of the pit, sending a spray of dirt into the air. The machine had missed crushing him by only a few centimetres when it had broken through the silica covering and plunged into the hole. He brought his chainaxe slashing into the vehicle’s engine, silencing it in a burst of sparks and smoke.
When he fell, it would be in full honour in battle, not the victim of some pathetic accident.
Ignoring Uhlan’s question, Vallax demanded reports from the rest of his Raptors. Each of the Iron Warriors was hidden in a pit like that which Vallax was in, separated from one another by a few hundred metres in a convex formation so that if one of them had been discovered by the orks, the others would still be in a position to retaliate.
The Space Marines replied, one after the other, each ready and eager to carry out their mission. Vallax’s scarred face twisted into a smile. Today, Squad Vidarna would earn new honours for him, and all at the expense of Skintaker Algol. It had been the Skintaker’s slave-officer who had failed to destroy the tanks before retreating from Dirgas. That failure had so incensed Algol that he hadn’t left a patch on the man’s body whole enough to stitch into his cloak.
Algol’s wrath amused Vallax. Let the self-indulgent sadist harbour his puny hate, his star was fading. The Third Grand Company had outgrown the need for such brutes and Warsmith Andraaz knew it. The future belonged to warriors like Vallax, not thuggish butchers like Algol.
The sound of las-beams and autoguns suddenly echoed from the distance. Again, Vallax smiled. The Flesh had started their diversion. The janissaries were positioned in a tank ditch a kilometre behind Squad Vidarna’s pits. They had been quickly assembled and dispatched from a nearby settlement. They lacked the numbers or equipment to seriously threaten the tanks, but the orks wouldn’t care about that. Vicious savages, all the xenos would care about was the fact they had be
en attacked. That would be enough to goad them into an immediate response.
While they were closing on the janissaries, the orks would be unaware of what was happening behind their backs.
Vallax climbed to the top of the warbike, crouching low so that the thrusters of his jump pack wouldn’t protrude above the lip of the pit. He glanced down at the ruined mush of the biker’s head. The orks had been fortunate thus far. They’d had only a few opportunities to learn why Vallax and his Raptors were called the Faceless.
‘Iron within!’ Vallax snarled across the vox-channel. ‘Iron without!’
On the Over-Captain’s command, the Raptors exploded from their pits, the mighty thrusters of their jump packs launching them hundreds of metres into the sky. As they reached the apex of their leap, the Iron Warriors stared down at the tanks far below. Each of them angled his body towards one of the armoured machines and began his descent.
Hurtling through the polluted sky, Vallax kept his gaze locked upon the hull of the lead tank. He watched the ork crew as they manned pintle-mounted stubbers and fired at the distant ditch. He didn’t care about the Flesh being gunned down by the steady stream of automated fire. The janissaries were obeying their command, that was all he expected of them. Keep the orks’ attention fixed upon them until the Iron Warriors could strike.
The Space Marine came slamming down against the engine block behind the tank’s turret, the report of his violent impact sounding like the crack of a cannon. The ork sitting in the turret shifted around at the noise, its jaw dropping in a surprised howl. Before the brute could think to train its weapon on the Iron Warrior, Vallax sent a burst of bolt-shells punching through its head. The gory mess slumped in the hatch and disappeared as it slipped down inside the turret.
Furious roars echoed from inside the tank, but Vallax didn’t have the moment needed to attend his enemies. Letting his pistol drop and dangle from the chain which fastened it to his wrist, he reached to his belt and withdrew the blocky mass of a melta-charge. Thumbing the activation rune, the Raptor slapped it against the tank’s engine.
Bullets ricocheted from the hull at his feet, shells glanced from his armour as Vallax rose from his task. Another burly ork had appeared in the turret, shooting at the Space Marine with an oversized stub pistol. A second ork had climbed out from one of the drivers’ hatches and was dragging itself along the hull with one paw while firing at him with the bolter clenched in the other.
In what seemed a single motion, Vallax brought his pistol back into his hand with a flip of his arm and fired at the aliens. The brute in the turret yelped in surprise and ducked down, part of its jaw shot away. The ork crawling across the hull screamed as Vallax’s shells blew off the fingers of the hand clutching the hull and sent the xenos tumbling away from the tank to be splattered across the desert landscape.
More bullets slammed into Vallax’s armour, scratching the ceramite casing. Two of the buggies had turned their guns on him, opening fire without regard to their comrades in the tank. As the machines closed, Vallax activated his jump pack, launching himself hundreds of metres into the air.
It wasn’t fear of the approaching enemy that motivated the Raptor but rather the steadily-declining countdown of the melta-charge. As he soared into the sky, the rear of the tank burst into flame, sending a cloud of smoke and shrapnel scything into the nearby bikes and buggies. Fire belched from the tank’s hatches and burning orks struggled to escape the armoured giant, whose insides had become a furnace.
Across the desert, Vallax could see four more tanks blasted into ruin, testament to the prowess and efficiency of Squad Vidarna. Only the best Iron Warriors became Raptors. Only the toughest Raptors were allowed to survive among the Faceless.
Over-Captain Vallax angled his descending body towards one of the surviving tanks. The ork in the turret hatch saw him, using a pintle-mounted heavy bolter to send a stream of shells screaming up at him. The beast had neither the discipline nor the accuracy to hit a fast-moving target like the plummeting Raptor.
There was nothing it could do to prevent what was coming.
Vallax’s fingers tightened about the heft of his chainaxe. He could already see the churning blade slicing through the ork’s flesh, stripping skin from skull. It was already another victim of the Faceless, it just didn’t know it yet.
Taofang felt a sense of nausea as the armoured train picked up speed and hissed down the magnetic rails. On every side, frantic men raced after the train, making wild grabs for the cars. He could see a half-dozen uncoupled ore-cars still standing on the siding, their holds packed with masses of screaming humanity, cheated at the last moment of the escape they believed they had won.
Over his shoulder, Mingzhou’s cold voice spoke. ‘Here they come,’ she said. Taofang didn’t need the las-
rifle’s scope to see the orks this time. From the station’s entrance, a motley array of rude vehicles roared into the building, black fumes belching from their exhausts. The screams that greeted the appearance of the aliens were quickly lost beneath the chatter of autoguns, bolters and stubbers. Every ork machine that drove into the station was fitted with some manner of weapon, weapons that were now turned loose upon the hopeless humans. Those not cut down by gunfire were run over by the ork machines, crushed beneath their tyres and treads. Taofang watched in horror as an ork warbike rode down a fleeing janissary, the man’s body becoming caught in its treads. The ork glanced back at the gruesome obstruction, then revved its engine until the steel treads churned the soldier’s body into pulp.
A thousand scenes of similar havoc played out behind the train as it picked up momentum and raced away from the burning wreckage of Gamma Five. A motley pack of buggies, perhaps desirous of bigger prey than the forsaken men left behind, sped away from the station in pursuit.
Now the lack of foresight by those soldiers who had cast aside their weapons came back to haunt them. From the rearmost cars, only a feeble, sporadic fire challenged the oncoming greenskins. The withering roar of heavy bolters answered the desultory opposition, the explosive rounds chewing through the hindmost ore-car in a spray of torn metal and shattered flesh.
Mingzhou sighted down the scope of her rifle, picking off the driver of a gaudily painted warbuggy. The vehicle careened wildly as the ork slumped at its controls, the gunner in the carriage behind it roaring in panic as it realised what had happened. The monstrous alien had just started to climb out from the carriage in an effort to reach the steering wheel when the machine struck a rail tie and went spinning end over end through the air, throwing the gunner ahead of it to slam into the desert floor with bone-shattering force.
The beleaguered rear car suddenly broke away, receding into the distance as the rest of the train sped onwards. Observing its peril, the officers in the advance car had uncoupled it by remote signal to its cogitator. The callous tactic bore only meagre fruit, just a handful of the orks remaining behind to finish off the abandoned car while the rest maintained their pursuit of the train.
A precedent had been set, however, and through the long hours of the chase, the scene was repeated at intervals. Embattled car after embattled car was detached from the train, left behind as a distraction for the pursuing orks. By gradual attrition, the train became slimmer and sleeker, picking up speed with each discard.
Finally, Taofang found himself watching the sixth ore-car recede into the distance. His own refuge now formed the tail of the train, the unenviable post of next to be martyred. He scowled at the advance car. For a brief moment, he considered his chances of climbing over the intervening roofs. Quickly he dismissed the idea. He had watched too many men try to cross the roofs of the cars that had been behind him only to be swept away by the train’s momentum. The lucky ones had been killed outright by the fall. He didn’t like to think about the unlucky ones.
Only a dozen or so vehicles were still following the train, the others having fallen away to allow their passengers to deal with the abandoned cars or to attend to some malfunction of thei
r ramshackle machines. There was small comfort in the fact, however. Each of the pursuers boasted weaponry heavier than anything aboard the train, capable of slaughtering an entire ore-car of men.
Taofang ducked down against the roof as a wartrak turned its heavy stubber loose against the car. The bullets rattled against the titanium wall, denting it with each hammer-like blow. An ugly wartrike, a side-car bolted to its frame, brought the nozzle of a flamer around to bathe the side of the car in a blast of searing promethium. The passengers aboard a wide-bodied battlewagon opened up with a riotous array of sidearms, howling with brutal glee.
It could only be a matter of moments before the aliens would close upon their prey and the callous officers in the advance car decided to cut loose the embattled men.
Taofang glanced at Mingzhou, his gaze telling her what words would not. He knew he was a dead man, but he was determined to go down fighting, to send as many aliens into the darkness ahead of him as it was within his power to do. He saw the same grim intent in the sniper’s eyes. She favoured him with a sombre nod, then slapped a fresh power pack into her lasrifle.
Suddenly, the crump of artillery roared overhead and the desert exploded in a burst of sand. Another loud boom, a second explosion of sand, this time right behind one of the pursuing warbuggies.
At first Taofang wondered if the train’s speedy retreat had accomplished nothing more than to draw them into another nest of orks. Then, as the barrage intensified, as shells peppered the landscape behind the train, the truth dawned on him. It wasn’t ork artillery he was witnessing, but a barrage from friendly guns.
The concentrated barrage only drove the orks closer to the train, the aliens recognising the position of their enemy as the only safe place to be. Taofang wondered if they were wrong, if the artillerists behind the barrage might not prove as callous as Nehring and his officers, willing to sacrifice their own.