The sergeant’s answers offered little comfort.
There were wildly varying levels of resistance between men. The hardiest would hold out for months, perhaps even a standard Imperial year, but the symptoms would steadily worsen throughout that time. Growing headaches and nausea could be dealt with easily enough; the pills to suppress these were plentiful. For the changes in skin and eye colour, and the damage to organs, nothing could be done with the equipment and facilities at hand. Despite Sergeant Behr’s insistence that it would make little difference, Bergen nevertheless issued new orders to his men: they must wear goggles and rebreather masks as much as possible.
If the able-bodied men of 10th Division were suffering, though, it was as nothing compared to Colonel Vinnemann’s pain. Day after day, Bergen marvelled at the colonel’s resilience. The man rarely uttered a word of complaint, at least not in company, but, between the dust and the higher-than-standard gravity, his augmetic spine was bothering him like never before. The Medicae augmeticist kept Bergen informed of Vinnemann’s condition, breaking his oath of patient confidence for the sake of keeping the divisional leader fully apprised. Colonel Vinnemann had been authorised to increase his self-administered injections of immunosuppressants and pain-mediators, but the drugs were problematic if taken in high quantities. Bergen, who held great affection and respect for the resilient little officer, began to offer daily prayers to the Emperor and His Saints that Operation Thunderstorm would come to a speedy conclusion. To lose Vinnemann prematurely would be a huge blow to the expedition. To lose him at all would be a huge blow to the men who knew him.
Finally, on the fifteenth day after planetfall, it seemed as if the Emperor might be listening to Gerard Bergen’s prayers.
Reports started coming through on the landline. With Karavassa and Tyrellis securely held and protecting Imperial supply lines, Killian’s 12th Heavy Infantry Division had pushed forward, storming the ruined fortress at Balkar, capturing it, and converting it into a front-line stronghold. The fighting had been heavy there, and the casualty figures were high, hinting at a much heavier ork presence closer to the site of the general’s ultimate objective. But Killian succeeded all the same, and the forward base so vital to supporting the final leg of the expedition was firmly and fully established. Those officers with a pessimistic bent predicted massive greenskin retaliation, but, for now, Hadron, Karavassa, Tyrellis and Balkar were all back in Imperial hands after almost forty years of enemy occupation. The final stage of the Operation Thunderstorm could commence at last.
Bergen received all this news with a feeling of great relief. He was even more relieved when the 10th Armoured Division’s new instructions came through from Hadron Base shortly after dawn on the sixteenth day. General deViers ordered Bergen’s forces — minus an adequate garrisoning force — to press east from Karavassa, heading straight for Balkar with all possible speed. Once there, they would link up with elements from the other divisions and await the general’s arrival. DeViers would personally lead them out into the Hadar region, to the foothills of the Ishawar range, for the final phase of the operation.
Talking directly to Bergen over the landline, the old man sounded practically ecstatic, like an over-stimulated child on the night before Emperor’s Day. Perhaps he sensed his long-sought immortality waiting just beyond his fingertips. He would find The Fortress of Arrogance, whatever was left of it, and the operation would enter its closing stage. The Mechanicus would fire a beacon into the upper atmosphere to signal their position. A lifter would then descend from The Scion of Tharsis to haul the holy machine from the desert sands and lift it back into space. Safely aboard the Reclamator craft, The Fortress of Arrogance would be restored to its former glory during transit to the Armageddon system. There, it would be presented to Commissar Yarrick, and he would ride it out onto the battlefields of Armageddon Prime, rousing the spirits of his tired soldiers, inspiring in them a glorious new strength. Thus uplifted, they would roll out to crush the foe.
It sounded wonderful, and in Bergen’s heart of hearts, he hoped it would be so, but the voice in his head still held to the certainty that it was nothing but a pretty dream. Things would not come to pass that way.
Thirty-eight years, he thought. To imagine that she would still be there…
The moment General deViers closed the vox-link from the other end, Bergen sent out a call to his regimental commanders. When he gave them their updated orders, all three sounded genuinely glad to hear that they would be on the move again within hours. Colonel Vinnemann in particular expressed his relief in no uncertain terms. Bergen had considered ordering the man to remain here, convinced that it would be the best thing for his health. But he knew Vinnemann would only have railed against him, seeing it as the ultimate betrayal. The man was a tanker through and through, just as Bergen had once been, and Bergen knew that, for any real tanker, nothing beat riding out in your crate, treads chewing up the dirt, the hearty roar of a promethium engine vibrating through your whole body. So Vinnemann would stay in command of his regiment despite his suffering, and Captain Immrich would be there to step in if needed.
The regimental commanders broke the link to pass the new orders on to their executive officers and company commanders. From these men, the news filtered down to everyone in the base.
Soon, Karavassa was buzzing with preparations as the 10th Armoured Division prepared to roll out once again.
In all the scurrying around, the loading, the refuelling, the last-minute checks, and everything else that went on prior to deployment, few men spared a thought for the fate of those companies that had mysteriously disappeared on that first fateful day. Some men did. Kochatkis Vinnemann was one of them. Despite having troubles enough of his own, he prayed regularly for the souls of Lieutenant Gossefried van Droi and his men, convinced that, after so many days without word or sign, they had perished.
As he rolled out of Karavassa at the head of the 81st Armoured Regiment, the long-suffering colonel could not have guessed that, just ten days’ journey to the southeast of his position, Gossefried’s Gunheads were doing their best to avoid exactly that.
CHAPTER TEN
Colonel Stromm was a man of his word. He embraced the Gunheads as if they had always been part of his outfit, and it pleased Lieutenant van Droi greatly, because, though he admitted it to no one, he had harboured grave doubts about placing his men and machines at the disposal of a man he had only just met. There were those in the upper ranks who might have said he knew all he needed to about the colonel. He had seen Stromm turn aside certain death, after all, and there were surely few better measures of a man than that; but an officer’s performance in combat gave few clues, if any, as to how he would command on the move. Then there was Golgotha herself to consider. She was an enemy that couldn’t be fought. Her endless sands ground away at the Cadians’ morale, and the more time they spent crossing them, the more they seemed to stretch forever.
Van Droi knew his tanks were slowing the whole column down. The Chimeras were much faster, and the Thirty-Sixers were faster still at top speed, but without the tanks, the column would have made an easy target for greenskin marauders. Colonel Stromm kept everyone moving together, with the exception of the Chimeras he sent to scout ahead in shifts. Did it frustrate him that the Leman Russ could barely manage thirty kilometres an hour? wondered van Droi. If so, he didn’t show it.
For days, the tired, dirty, ragged column had pressed north-east over rolling dunes and, gradually, the landscape began to change, becoming rockier and more uneven in stages. Was the change in terrain a good sign? Van Droi wasn’t sure. If it meant they were nearing high ground, it certainly didn’t show. The horizon to the north-east remained choked in a pink haze. He saw no jutting spurs of rock, no distant hints of a towering mountain range.
The mood of the men was as dark as the mud-coloured sky and getting darker all the time. Little communication passed from tank to tank. Almost a dozen of van Droi’s men had taken seriously ill, and the number wa
s three times greater among Stromm’s infantry. There were two medics with The Fighting 98th, two who had survived the dreadful onslaught at the crash site. They took a look at van Droi’s sick, consulted with each other, and told him that at least three of the twelve would be dead within a day. Nothing could be done to save them. The dust had poisoned them. Liver, kidneys, lungs, everything was shutting down. The other nine would almost certainly follow soon afterwards if they didn’t get specialist medical care. With hopes of finding Exolon having dwindled to almost nothing, that didn’t seem probable. Van Droi’s anger and frustration got the better of him a few times, and he vented inside the turret of his tank, where his shouts and curses were drowned out by the rumble of the engine.
Colonel Stromm made a difficult decision regarding the seriously ill; he withheld their water and provisions. There was nothing to be gained by spending scarce resources on men who simply weren’t going to last much longer. This, of course, did not sit well with friends of the dying men. There were sharp protestations that came near to violence, but the platoon leaders cracked down hard.
Van Droi didn’t judge Stromm for the extremity of the measure. Stromm had given him a chance to object, but, to a practical man like van Droi, it made perfect, if unpleasantly harsh, sense. Ultimately, the two medics resolved the issue, administering large doses of anaesthesium to the worst afflicted, letting them die peacefully in a drug-induced sleep.
With the column stopping only briefly, grim, hollow-faced troopers buried their dead comrades in the sand. There was no Ministorum man to pray for them, but one of Stromm’s lieutenants, a man called Boyd, had trained briefly as a confessor before abandoning the so-called Righteous Road in order to enlist in the Guard. He said a few words for the souls of the dead, and the column moved on, lighter in number, heavier in spirit.
The mood got even worse when Stromm had his lieutenants issue empty jerry cans and additional water purification tablets to everyone. If they wanted to survive beyond the next few days, he told them, they would have to drink the undrinkable. They would have to drink their own urine.
As if the lost Cadians didn’t have enough problems, the dawn of the sixteenth day brought more bad news. As the cloud-smothered sun rose once more, casting its dull red glow over the desert, the vox-link began to erupt with anxious chatter. The intercom system aboard Foe-Breaker did likewise.
“There must be millions of them!” yelled Bullseye Dietz. “There’s no beating numbers like that, sir. They won’t be on foot, not moving at that speed.”
Dietz wasn’t wrong. Orks were closing in on them. Judging by the dark line that had appeared in the southeast with the coming of day, there were far too many of them to engage. Raising his head so that he could peer through his tank’s vision blocks, van Droi looked again, hoping that somehow his mind had played a trick on him, that it had exaggerated the size of the enemy force.
It hadn’t.
The horizon was seething with them. How close were they? Between the heat haze, the dust and the mirage-line, it was practically impossible to tell. That they were visible at all, van Droi decided, meant they were too damned close by far.
The greenskin host had moved up during the hours of darkness, unnoticed by exhausted, overheated, dehydrated men more intent on fighting sleep and sickness than fighting the enemies of mankind.
The Cadians were being chased down. Perhaps this greenskin war party had stumbled onto their tracks, following them out from the drop-ship crashsite, easily tracing them by the deep furrows the tanks made in the sand. Now, the prey was in sight.
“Nails,” said van Droi, “keep her bloody speed up. And I want to know the moment you feel anything out of order, the slightest jink or engine stutter, any give in the shocks or the drive train. You got that? Let’s not have a repeat of what happened to Siemens. We won’t have time to frak about with repairs.”
“Don’t you worry, boss,” replied Nails. “We’re sympatico, this girl and me. She won’t let us down. Sympatico, says I.”
It took a lot to faze Karl “Nails” Nalzigg. He had earned his nickname the hard way back in the days before he had joined van Droi’s crew. He had earned a few medals to go with it, too. Van Droi wished he shared his driver’s easy confidence, but Foe-Breaker had suffered engine trouble twice already in the days since planetfall. Not her fault, of course.
Van Droi’s old girl was only as prone to stalling as any of the other machines. With every passing hour, another would stop dead, refusing to start again until the contacts on its engines were properly cleared of the red dust.
To van Droi’s knowledge, there was only a single exception.
Wulfe’s old crate hadn’t stalled once in all the time since the crash. She might look her age, thought van Droi, but Last Rites II had already proved that she’d got what it takes under the engine covers.
He hadn’t mentioned it to Wulfe, but, of all the tanks assigned to replace the losses from Palmeros, van Droi had hand-picked the Mars-Alpha pattern Leman Russ out for the sergeant personally. Wulfe had taken the loss of his old machine badly. What kind of tanker, after all, could ride into battle time after time in the same tank, come out alive when so many around him died, and not feel some kind of special bond with her? It was exactly the way van Droi felt about Foe-Breaker.
His choice of replacement tank for Wulfe seemed to have backfired, though. The rugged sergeant hadn’t taken to Last Rites II at all. In fact, he seemed to think van Droi had assigned him the new tank out of spite. Van Droi wanted to believe it was simply a matter of time, that Wulfe would come around soon enough, but, with the ork host tailing them, time looked like it might be up. How fast were the ork machines chasing them? There would be buggies in their hundreds. Assault bikes, too, perhaps. Might they even have air support? Bombers? Greenskins were certainly insane enough to fly in such dangerous skies.
A red light began flickering on the vox-board by van Droi’s left shoulder. He turned in his command seat, flipped the toggle that turned the light green, and said, “10th Company Command here. Go ahead.”
“Tenth, this is Regiment,” said Colonel Stromm. “It looks like we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Have you looked south-east recently?”
“I have, sir,” said van Droi. “Don’t like the view much. Very difficult to estimate party strength given distance and conditions, but I think it’s fair to say we’re a little outnumbered. Assuming the majority of those green-skins are on wheels, they could well catch us by midday.”
“The galaxy does like to stack the odds against us, doesn’t it, lieutenant?” said Stromm.
“No glory in easy victories, sir. Still, a man should know his limits.”
“Or in this case,” replied Stromm, “the limits of his machines. I think… Hold on a moment, lieutenant.”
Stromm cut the link. A few seconds later, the same light on van Droi’s vox-board started flashing again. He hit the toggle. “Sir?”
“Sorry about that, van Droi,” said Stromm. “Just got word from our scouts. I’ll let you judge for yourself whether it’s good or bad. He’s reporting a massive dust storm up ahead. Point your magnoculars a few degrees east of our current heading. You can just about make it out.”
“It’s going to hit?”
“Soon, apparently. It’s moving fast. If we cut south-east we can probably escape the worst of it, but—”
“But it’ll put us within easy striking range of the orks at our back, sir. By the blasted Eye!”
“You said it, lieutenant. I’m not about to order our lads into a battle we won’t survive without a damned good reason. I say we head straight into the storm. Take our chances. If anything, it might serve to cover our tracks. We might actually lose the bastards. What do you say?”
It’s a ballsy move, thought van Droi. There’s plenty that could go wrong. On the other hand…
“The machine-spirits aren’t going to like it, sir,” he said. “I’d put money on mechanical failures. Any estimates on how long th
e storm will last? We won’t be able to see a damned thing while we’re in there. If we move at all, it’ll have to be very slowly.”
“There’s no way to say how long, van Droi,” voxed Stromm. “The environmental summaries the Mechanicus issued during warp transit painted a pretty bleak picture. Some storms last a few hours, others last days, even weeks.”
“That’s one hell of a gamble, sir.”
“Are you much of a gambling man, lieutenant?”
“I guess I am today,” said van Droi.
“That’s what I thought. Let’s roll the dice and hope for the best. And may the Emperor’s luck be with us. Stromm out.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Colonel Stromm ordered his column to a complete stop as it was hit by the fringes of the coming dust storm. Visibility had dropped to about fifty metres already. The air around the Imperial machines was dark with veils of gusting sand, and the wind howled, rocking the vehicles on their suspension. The sky was gone from view. On the colonel’s orders, anxious men emerged from hatches and cabin doors with their faces goggled and masked, their bodies covered as much as possible against the stinging assault of the hard red grains.
Their voices didn’t travel far. Words already muffled by rebreather masks were snatched away by the rising storm. Van Droi was forced to shout at the top of his voice. “Hurry it up. I want all the tanks chained together before it gets any worse out here. Come on. Only a few minutes left. Work faster.”
[Imperial Guard 06] - Gunheads Page 14