“No they bloody well have not found it,” deViers practically screamed. Purple veins bulged at his temples and up the side of his neck. His eyes were wide, and Bergen saw for the first time that the whites had turned pink, just like everyone else’s had.
So, he thought, the old man is suffering the effects of the fines, too.
“Tell me right now, magos,” demanded deViers, “are we in the right place? Is this not the valley in your reports? These are the coordinates I was given!”
“This is the place, general. All our intelligence indicated that The Fortress of Arrogance was here.”
“Was being the operative word,” deViers exploded.
“Clearly, general,” said the magos with perfect self-control, “if it is not here, it must have been moved. Do not fret, however. We of the Adeptus Mechanicus come prepared for such a contingency. We have the knowledge and equipment that will allow us to track the movement of the machine. The Fortress of Arrogance was possessed of a unique and powerful machine-spirit. Through our ancient arts, we may still be able to commune with that spirit and learn where its vessel has been taken.”
DeViers looked far from placated by this, but his desperation seemed to bleed off a little. Bergen, on the other hand, didn’t know what to think. As a lifelong tanker, he had come to believe in the machine-spirits that inhabited each of the tanks he had personally commanded. He had seen how much better they functioned when one observed the proper rites. He had witnessed firsthand the peculiar techno-sorcery of the Martian Priesthood in action. There were so many things he would never understand about it all. Was Sennesdiar speaking the truth? Could he really commune with the spirit of the revered machine?
Tech-Magos Sennesdiar let out a piercing mechanical shriek, and his adepts immediately turned and stalked back to their idling Chimera where it sat atop the southern slope.
“My subordinates and I need to perform a ritual, general,” said Sennesdiar to deViers. “We shall consult the machine-spirit and bring you your answer. Have faith. I am no lowly enginseer. I would not have opted to join this mission in person had I harboured any doubts about its success. You will have your prize.”
DeViers’ jaw was tight. He didn’t answer. Bergen suspected that the old man was simply too damned angry for words. Sennesdiar didn’t wait for them anyway. With a swish of his robes, he turned his massive bulk and headed back to his Chimera, leaving deViers and his senior officers halfway down the hillside, looking up, watching him go.
“Damned tech-priests,” hissed Killian. He glanced over at Bergen, caught his eye, and said, “Sorry, Gerard. I know you tankers are close with them.”
Bergen shook his head. “Not really, my friend. They only let us know as much as they want us to. I don’t delude myself about that.”
“Do you think they really can perform some kind of sorcery?” asked Rennkamp. “If they can’t, we’ve come all this way, lost all those men, for absolutely nothing.”
Bergen shrugged. “I guess we’ll know—”
He stopped short of finishing his sentence. There was fresh chatter on the vox-bead in his ear. The others heard it, too. He saw the same expression steal over their faces as he knew must be present on his own.
“Throne curse it all,” spat General deViers. “Back to your machines all of you,” he ordered. “The tech-priests had better perform their rites damned quickly.”
The senior officers turned and marched at speed to their idling vehicles. The Sentinel pilots were reporting orksign. The greenskins were only two hours out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
added Armadron.
Armadron prefixed his sonic burst with a single tone that signified his lack of absolute certainty.
said Sennesdiar.
Armadron bowed.
Wulfe yawned. He was lying on the rear decking of his tank, cap pulled down across his eyes, but true rest seemed out of reach. Perhaps it was the dust. Perhaps he was sick and hadn’t realised it. There was an ache in his muscles that would not go away. It had dulled somewhat since he lay down, but it was still there, at the edge of his awareness.
Beans and Siegler were preparing rations of sliced meal-brick and water by the side of the tank. There was nothing else to be had, but at least they weren’t back to drinking purified piss.
Would they even live long enough for that to happen again? Wulfe wondered. It seemed to him that the 18th Army Group was practically broken already. Lifting his cap and looking around, he saw crewmen resting on rear decking or track-guards just like he was, but there had been significant losses. Van Droi’s 10th Company was down to just five tanks. The lieutenant’s crate, Foe-Breaker, was still in the game, though the man himself had become extremely quiet since the death of the colonel. Viess and his Steelhearted II had made it through. The man was a solid commander. Van Droi had made a good move, promoting him to sergeant on the voyage to Golgotha. Viess had justified that choice back at the wall, ta
king out his share of the ork armour, and Holtz seemed to be doing all right with Old Smashbones. It was a small miracle that he had survived when so many others had not. Perhaps it was beginner’s luck. In any case, Wulfe was damned glad van Droi hadn’t promoted Holtz just to have him die in his first firefight as a commander.
Then, of course, there was Lenck.
Wulfe hadn’t given the bastard much thought during all the madness that had erupted since their passage through Red Gorge. Battle was good that way. One could achieve an almost peaceful state in the middle of all that mayhem.
Wulfe glanced over at Lenck’s tank, but if the crew was outside, they must’ve been lying low, because he couldn’t see them. Perhaps, like Metzger, they were all sleeping.
Wulfe sat up and swung around to watch the tech-priests. They were down on the valley floor performing some kind of arcane ritual he couldn’t begin to fathom. It looked different to the rites he had watched them perform on the regiment’s tanks but not much. Every tech-priest and enginseer attached to the expedition was down there, all dressed in the red robes of their cult, heads bowed in prayer. They moved in a clockwise circle, chanting and emitting strange mechanical noises that no human throat could have made.
Some of them carried censers that they swung back and forward, lacing the air with blue smoke that hung above them, gently shifting in slow motion. There was no breeze. The air was thick and warm. He looked up. The tall red peaks of the Ishawar rose so high in the near east that they pierced the bellies of the clouds like tusks.
Why did everything have to remind him of orks? He would be facing them again soon enough. Van Droi had voxed him just twenty minutes ago to say so. The orks were closing in on them, still pursuing from the west. The Sentinels had used long-range scopes to spot them well out from the valley, but, in a little over ninety minutes, the orks would be here, and the fighting would start all over again. Would deViers lead them in another run? Or would he have them turn and fight?
Wulfe would have preferred to fight. It had become increasingly clear to him that no one was going to make it out of this alive. The officers still talked of finding Yarrick’s lost tank, and they put a lot of faith on the tech-priests’ ability to signal for evacuation. A lifter would come for them when the time was right. At least, that was how Wulfe understood it. He just didn’t think it was going to be that easy.
The thought of dying here didn’t anger him. He had spent his whole life knowing that he would perish in the service of the Emperor. What better way was there?
None, he told himself, but Armageddon would have been preferable. There, at least, his last moments could have been spent fighting to protect Holy Terra, rather than to retrieve an abandoned relic. He told himself that any fight against orks was a good fight. If he and his crew were to die here today, so be it. He would meet his fate head-on.
He turned his attention back to the tech-priests. Their ceremony intrigued him. He was a firm believer in machine-spirits. Nothing strange in that, of course. All tankers came to feel that way, no matter their original outlook on the matter. Throughout his career, he had seen members of the Adeptus Mechanicus achieve things he couldn’t hope to explain. It wasn’t stretching credence to imagine that the senior cogboys down there might actually come away with some kind of answer.
The Fortress of Arrogance was gone, but how far had it gone? If it was still within reach, then he would like to see it before he died. It was a rare machine, after all, almost unique in the galaxy in that, since its loss thirty-eight years ago, it had been sanctified by both the Ministorum and the tech-priests, and those two august bodies almost never saw eye to optic sensor.
“Grub’s up, sarge,” called Siegler from the side of the tank. “You want to wake Metzger?”
Wulfe slid off the track-guard and landed on his feet by Siegler and Beans.
“Let him rest a little more,” he told them. “We’ll keep some for when he wakes up.”
The three men sat and enjoyed their small repast as chanting lifted towards them from the valley floor.
“I still don’t get it,” said Beans. “They think they can find out where it went?”
Wulfe nodded and spoke around a mouthful of tough, dry meal-brick. “You’d better hope they can. The orks will be on us soon. I think deViers will give the cogboys enough time to finish their little communion and then lead us off somewhere. He won’t give up looking.”
Siegler shook his head. “And people call me crazy,” he said. Wulfe grinned and clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Yes, they do.” Beans laughed.
A burst of vox-chatter from the bead in his ear made the smile suddenly drop from Wulfe’s face. He spat his mouthful of meal-brick onto the hard ground at his side.
“What’s up, sarge?” asked Siegler.
Wulfe stood bolt upright.
“Get your arses into the tank,” he told them, “and wake Metzger at once.”
All around them, the air shook with the rumble of engines being turned. A Chimera just ten metres away rumbled noisily to life, coughing blue-black fumes from her exhausts. Siegler and Beans jumped to their feet.
“That was van Droi,” said Wulfe, picking up the remains of his meal and stuffing them into a tin box. “The tech-priests say they got their answer. We’re moving out.”
“But where to, sarge?” asked Beans.
Wulfe had turned and was already clambering up the side of the tank. He didn’t stop climbing, but called over his shoulder, “To the mountains, trooper. We’re going into the mountains.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The path the 18th Army Group took from the valley up into the Ishawar Mountains soon became treacherous, especially for the tanks, most of which weighed over sixty tonnes, but there was no time to be careful. The orks were less than an hour behind them. They had spotted the Cadians rising up into the hills and had turned on a burst of speed. Bergen didn’t know how long it would be before the orks caught up to them, but he knew the machines at the rear of the column would soon face the threat of ork bikes and buggies. The light, speedy greenskin machines were far more adept at handling rough terrain like this. The steep gradients and narrow trails that Exolon found itself forced to follow were really challenging the heaviest of the Cadian machines.
For now, though, there was little choice but to push on with all the speed they could muster. General deViers was taking Tech-Magos Sennesdiar extremely seriously. The magos claimed that the almighty Omnissiah, tech-aspect of the Divine Emperor of Mankind, had been roused by their ceremony and had spoken to them directly through their most powerful and sophisticated auspex scanners. The data was irrefutable, the tech-priests insisted. The Fortress of Arrogance had indeed lain in the valley for many years, but had been moved in the recent past. Even now, Sennesdiar told them, the orks that had taken it were within striking distance, if only the general would lead his forces up into the mountains exactly as the magos directed.
It sounded entirely too convenient to Gerard Bergen. He was sure the tech-priests had known from the start that Yarrick’s lost tank was no longer in the valley. DeViers was still in charge, however, and the old general had become so frantic, so desperate, that he might believe just about anything he was told. Whether deViers was mad or not, Bergen and the other divisional leaders weren’t about to protest. Not now. What was the point? Rennkamp and Killian both seemed to feel as he did. Cut off from the rest of the Imperial forces with little hope of ever returning, there was little choice but to follow the path they were on and see where it led them in the end.
Bergen rode high in the cupola of his Chimera, a habit he had developed over his long years as a tank commander. He remembered those times fondly, times before he had been singled out for greater things.
Greater things? That was a laugh. Operation Thunderstorm had gone to hell. The Munitorum wouldn’t want to lose face. They’d expunge it from the Imperial records once it was clear how spectacularly it had failed.
It hasn’t failed yet, said a
tiny voice in the back of his mind, but another, louder voice at the front said, hasn’t it?
Bergen tried to ignore both and looked up at the sky.
The cloaked Golgothan sun was close to its zenith, judging by the bright patch in the thick red clouds overhead. At this altitude, the clouds seemed so low they might choke him, and he automatically checked that his rebreather mask and goggles were firmly in place.
The expedition force had ascended over a thousand metres already.
Where in the blasted warp are the cogboys taking us, he wondered?
He tried to look back down the mountainside along the route they had followed, but all he could see was the clouds of dust kicked up by the line of coughing, spluttering vehicles behind him. The column was significantly shorter than it had been when it had set out from Balkar. He still didn’t know exactly how many had died rushing the ork wall.
He felt two sharp tugs on his trouser leg and dropped back down into the Chimera’s passenger compartment. His adjutant indicated a flickering light on the vox-caster.
“Major General Killian wants a word, sir,” he said.
Bergen told his adjutant to patch Killian through, and then spoke through the tiny vox-mic built into his rebreather mask.
“Bergen here,” he said. “Go ahead.”
“Gerard, this is Klotus. I’ve just had a vox from my scout captain. Something you should definitely hear.”
“Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“It’s about the trail we’re following,” said Killian. “We’re not the first to tread it.”
“So the orks did bring The Fortress of Arrogance this way?” said Bergen in genuine surprise. Whatever he had expected, it hadn’t been that the tech-priests might be telling the truth.
[Imperial Guard 06] - Gunheads Page 26