[Imperial Guard 06] - Gunheads

by Steve Parker - (ebook by Undead)

  The 8th Mechanised Division and 12th Heavy Infantry Divisions were pressing the enemy from the north-west and south-west quarters, hemming them in and forcing them to fight on three fronts. The 10th Armoured Division had the middle ground. In terms of strategy, it was hardly elegant, but there hadn’t been time for much else.

  Van Droi heard Captain Immrich cutting across the 10th Company command channel with a priority message. “Immrich to spearhead. Drive straight over their infantry. Crush them under you. Once you’re through, I want you to light up that damned artillery. Destroyers, focus on their tanks. Everyone else, targets of opportunity. We can make all the difference here. Do it for Vinnemann!”

  For Vinnemann, thought van Droi resolutely. Throne, yes!

  Foe-Breaker bounced and shook as she rolled over scores of screaming greenskins, pulping their meaty bodies under her treads. They turned on each other to get out of her way, hacking in fevered panic at the backs of their kin, but they were too slow. More fell with every metre she gained. In her wake, the sand became a blood-sodden bog.

  Something slapped the turret hard, ringing the tank like a bell. The loader, Waller, cried out, “We’re hit.”

  “Damage report,” van Droi called back.

  “No breach, no breach,” reported Bullseye Dietz. “Anybody hurt? Any spalling?”

  They had been lucky. Looking through the vision blocks, van Droi saw a spiral trail of smoke hanging in the air between his tank and a rusty-looking dreadnought that was clanking its way towards him kicking ork infantry from its path. A rocket had struck Foe-Breaker’s gun mantlet, detonating with enough power to give the crew a nasty headache, but little else. Without needing to be told, Dietz traversed the turret and lined her up.

  “Brace!” he shouted.

  Foe-Breaker rocked. Her turret basket filled with stinking smoke. The dreadnought seemed frozen in time for a split second. A melon-sized black hole had appeared in its armour, transfixing it. Then it exploded outwards in a burst of white fire, raining debris on the howling orks around its feet.

  “Keep pushing her, Nails,” said van Droi to his driver. “If we let them slow us down, we’re done for.”

  Orks were clamouring at her hull as she rolled on, hacking futilely at her armoured sides with their big chipped blades. Another rocket arced in and smacked the hull. Van Droi saw a different dreadnought, this one almost twice as big as the last.

  “Damn it, Bullseye,” he called to his gunner. “Take that bastard out.”

  “I can only shoot one at a time, sir,” snapped Dietz, but he stamped on the floor trigger a second later. The breech slid back, dumping an empty brass shell casing. The dreadnought had its right leg blown off. It fell forward and landed on its face, bladed arms wheeling frantically, dicing ork foot soldiers on either side.

  “Nice shot,” said van Droi. He scanned the battlefield for the rest of his company. It was hard to see anything. Dark, billowing smoke rose everywhere and the horde was still pressing towards him on every side. Blades clanged relentlessly on the hull.

  “Foe-Breaker to all Gunheads,” voxed van Droi. “Call in.” Three of his tank commanders responded. One did not.

  “Van Droi to Holtz, respond.” Still nothing.

  “Old Smashbones, respond.”

  Van Droi knew Wulfe would be listening. They all knew what that silence would mean: another veteran dead. If van Droi had just let him stay on Wulfe’s crew…

  No, there was no use in thinking like that. A man could go mad on what ifs.

  Go with the Emperor, corporal, van Droi thought. From the looks of it, the rest of us will be following you soon. I don’t think anyone will be left to grieve, but we’ll hurt the bastards on the way out. I promise you that.

  “Nails,” he yelled over the intercom. “We need more speed, damn it. Give her all she’s got. Let’s get our treads bloody!”

  Pressing in on the orks from the south, the infantrymen of the 303rd Skellas Rifles fought valiantly without Colonel Meyers. The word was that he had been shot for cowardice. The remains of his regiment — some four hundred and sixty men — set out to prove that they were made of sterner stuff. They achieved exactly that, though there was little opportunity for anyone near them to truly notice in the dust-choked maelstrom of battle.

  Under their newly appointed commander, Major Gehrer, who led from the very front, waving the regimental banner in one hand and brandishing a bloodstained chainsword in the other, the 303rd railed hard against the ork infantry and momentarily managed to drive them back. It didn’t last long. At such close quarters and without adequate armour support, the Cadian troopers were simply out-muscled, and, all too soon, the orks closed around them and butchered them with heavy, rusting blades.

  Gehrer was the last to fall, protected to the bitter end by a swiftly shrinking circle of his strongest men. Even as the orks hacked him down and chopped at his fallen body, he fought to keep the banner upright, to stop its sacred cloth from touching the ground.

  Seconds later, greenskin feet trampled it into the dust.

  “Shore up the southern flank,” screamed General deViers. “Where the devil are the 303rd? And what’s wrong with our artillery? Gruber! Tell them to increase their rate of fire. That’s the worst excuse for a sustained barrage I’ve ever seen. Our men are getting slaughtered out there!”

  He sat high in the turret of his Chimera, hatch locked above his head, firing rapid multi-laser bursts at anything and everything that came into range. It had been too long, decades in fact, since he had led from the front. The sight of hideous greenskins being cut into smoking chunks by his own hand brought a murderous satisfaction that he had forgotten was possible. He revelled in it.

  There was no leading from the rear this time. He had known it the moment he had first laid eyes on the ork base. Every man, every machine, every bead of sweat and drop of blood would be needed to win this day. The only individuals not engaging in combat were those damned Martian priests.

  “We are not a combat unit,” Sennesdiar had said, as if it weren’t already obvious. “And we are not under the command of the Departmento Munitorum. We shall stay back with the artillery and offer technical assistance. Our servitor bodyguards will help to protect the Basilisks in the event that orks outflank your forces, general.”

  Outflank my forces, thought deViers? That Eye-blasted cogboy!

  The orks would not get through. To hell with the odds. Only in a crucible such as this could true legends be forged. The blessing of the Emperor had given him this chance, this shot at genuine glory. Every last one of his senior officers felt it, too, he was sure. They were out there now, Bergen, Killian and Rennkamp, leading their divisions from the front, turret guns blazing as their Chimeras pressed forward inch by inch.

  It was hard to see much, what with the clouds of dust and smoke that cloaked everything, but up ahead, just a little to his left, he glimpsed the tanks of the 81st Armoured Regiment roaring straight across the thick press of enemy infantry. Big alien bodies were being mashed into the sand, pulped by the rolling, grinding iron treads.

  Stubber-fire danced and sparked across hulls. Huge handheld blades clattered uselessly against armour plates. As he watched, two were struck with anti-tank rockets or perhaps some kind of limpet charge. DeViers couldn’t tell which. They stopped dead in their tracks, turned into blazing cauldrons, the men inside cooking to death.

  DeViers thanked the Throne that he couldn’t hear their screams.

  The other Cadian tanks were almost through. Their guns coughed. He could just make out the first of the enemy armour starting to burn up.

  “Gruber,” deViers yelled again, “what about my artillery fire?”

  “I’ve told them, sir,” replied the adjutant from the troop compartment at the back of the vehicle. “They say they’re firing at full capacity. And they’re worried about hitting our own troops now.”

  “Damn it,” deViers called back. “Get in touch with their commissar. Tell him to make an example
of someone. Then we’ll see what full capacity is!”

  He saw a massive black ork kick two others from its path and race towards the troopers in front of his Chimera with a chilling war cry. It was wielding a massive, whirring chainsword with both hands.

  “No you don’t,” said deViers.

  With a grin, he thumbed his butterfly-trigger and gunned the monster down.

  Holtz, thought Wulfe, by the blasted Eye!

  He kept repeating the name in his head, like a mantra against the truth of what he had just heard. He couldn’t believe he was gone. It hurt like a hot knife in his chest. He kept seeing Holtz’s face behind his eyelids when he blinked — not the disfigured face he had worn in recent years, but Holtz as he had been in the years before Modessa Prime. The man had changed a lot after that, everything but those ice-blue eyes.

  He had been a good friend. Wulfe promised to let the real pain in, to stop holding it at bay, if he lived through this. For now, though, he had to fight it off. There was no time to miss anyone out here in all this madness.

  “Incoming,” shouted Metzger over the intercom.

  Something hit the tank’s glacis plate with so much force that the back end lifted clear of the sand. Half a second later, it crashed down again. The treads bit into the dirt, and Last Rites II leapt forward, pulling more orks underneath her.

  Through his vision blocks, Wulfe saw a black shadow peel away in the sky above.

  “Damn and blast! Don’t we have anything that can take out their air support? How are we supposed to clear their artillery out if we keep getting bombed from the air?”

  Just as he finished his sentence, something small and bright screamed towards the jet and clipped its tail section. There was a burst of red flame and a puff of black smoke that quickly became an elegant curving trail. The ork fighter rolled slowly onto its back, and then slammed down into the horde. There was a mighty boom and a mushroom of dirt and fire. Wulfe judged that hundreds of orks must have been maimed or killed.

  “By Terra, yes!” he shouted. He couldn’t see the heavy weapons team that had fired the missile, but he saluted them anyway.

  He had enough to worry about without the damned greenskin fliers trying to blow up his crate. In trying to crush their way through the thickest press of orks, the Cadian tanks had been forced to slow down. That made them easier targets for the ork tanks that spluttered and rumbled at the rear of the horde. They were massive, lumbering junk heaps with far too much armour bolted on at all angles. They crawled forward on rusting treads, traversing their turrets almost in slow motion, trying to draw a bead on their faster Imperial counterparts. Every few seconds, they would fire a volley. Some of them had already exploded due to misfires, while others had killed scores of their own infantry, but the closer Wulfe got, the more he knew that, sooner or later, they would make a lucky shot.

  Captain Immrich must have thought so too, because, in addition to 6th Company’s Destroyers, he ordered his first and second companies to break off and attack the tanks while the others dealt with artillery and static defences. As soon as the 1st and 2nd Companies broke through, they roared straight past the enemy armour, turned their turrets one hundred and eighty degrees, and began blasting them to pieces from the rear.

  The Destroyers joined the attack from the front, the raw destructive power of their lethal beams cutting straight through hulls and turrets irrespective of armour thickness or density. They were a fearsome sight. Soon, most of the ork tanks were reduced to blazing metal heaps.

  With the exception of Lenck, who had been ordered to support Marrenburg’s mechanised infantry, Wulfe and the remaining Gunheads broke through the rear ork ranks just seconds later. The artillery pieces were only a few hundred metres away: rows of massive, thundering howitzers crewed by skinny gretchin. They struggled to lift shells the size of fuel drums into the breech of each monstrous weapon.

  From his left, there was a flash and a boom, and Wulfe saw that van Droi had opened up with Foe-Breaker’s main gun. Steelhearted II’s battle cannon coughed half a second later. Two of the ork artillery pieces came apart in great balls of orange flame.

  “Beans,” Wulfe called over the intercom, “light those bastards up. Don’t stop until there are none left.”

  “You’ve got it, sarge,” replied the gunner.

  Traverse motors hummed, and then stopped. The gun kicked hard. Extractors whined and sucked out all the smoke from the turret basket. Last Rites II had notched up another kill.

  Colonel von Holden’s 259th Mechanised Infantry Regiment held its section of the line with a mix of Chimeras, halftracks and troopers on foot. The vehicle gunners were charged with supporting the footsloggers by knocking out any ork vehicle that pushed in their direction. This they did with great success, pouring las and autocannon fire on them, turning a number of light, fast enemy buggies into spinning metal junk that scattered burning debris and dead bodies in all directions.

  Their weapons were far less effective, however, on the heavily armed and armoured trucks that the orks were using as frontline APCs and light tanks. Some of these machines mounted fearsome customised weapons that really belonged on a more stable firing platform. The orks didn’t care. Each time the trucks fired, they came dangerously close to toppling over, but the effect on the Cadians was devastating. The shots that missed the Chimeras hit the men behind them, killing dozens outright and fatally maiming scores nearby. The shots that struck managed to shred tracks and cause spalling, killing many of the men inside.

  Von Holden saw it all. It happened to a Chimera just ten metres away from him, and he ordered his driver to pull back immediately.

  “But we’ll crush the men behind us!” protested his driver.

  “Do it at once!” von Holden snapped. “Or I’ll have you shot for insubordination.”

  With a prayer for the Emperor’s forgiveness, the reluctant driver shifted the Chimera into reverse and began accelerating away from the oncoming ork trucks. Shots landed to the left and right, and the men that didn’t die instantly went down screaming for the Emperor and their home world.

  “Faster!” shouted von Holden, ignoring voxed demands, from Major General Rennkamp that he explain his impromptu retreat.

  One of the ork trucks spat a great gout of flame, and von Holden’s Chimera was knocked sideways, slewing to a halt. The high-explosive round had shredded her right tread.

  Von Holden checked himself for injuries.

  “I’m all right,” he gasped. “By the Throne, I’m all right!”

  He didn’t see the dark shadow in the sky above him. It dropped something small and oval. Seconds later, the burning debris of his Chimera rained back to the ground.

  Janz von Holden was dead.

  Without Katz, Bergen was having a hard time monitoring all the vox traffic from his regimental commanders. He had taken on a temporary aide by the name of Simms, a youngster from one of Captain Immrich’s support crews. All things considered, Simms wasn’t doing a bad job.

  Over the noise of stubber fire rattling off his Chimera’s armour, Bergen heard Captain Immrich’s voice in his right ear. Simms had patched him straight through. At least the boy was a quick learner.

  “We’ve practically wiped out their tanks, sir,” said Immrich. “They looked tough, but they were a bunch of junkers. Half of them blew themselves up. Just a few left now. Companies one through four are tackling the static defences. I’ve ordered them to ram the gun-towers rather than waste ammunition. Those things look ready to fall over in the next breeze anyway. There are other garrisoned structures here, so I’m hitting them with high-ex shells. Companies five to ten are already mopping up the last of the artillery pieces. However, six and seven took heavy losses on the way through the horde. The orks are employing short-range RPGs and magnetic mines. Warn the Armoured Fist units not to get as close as we did. I’m ordering my Exterminators and Executioners to push through and join us. With my armour on this side and the infantry on the other, we can really start to punis
h them.”

  Bergen was about to respond when a terrifying sound, halfway between a scream and a roar, cut across the noise of the battle.

  Captain Immrich had heard it, too. Then, apparently, he saw it.

  “Holy frak!” he voxed. “That’s big.”

  By the Golden Throne, thought Bergen. Don’t let it be what I think it is.

  “What can you see, captain?” he demanded. “What the hell is it?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Immrich was absolutely frozen in his seat.

  An armoured behemoth lumbered into view around a towering mountain of rusting scrap metal. It was easily twenty metres tall at the shoulder, almost thirty with its heavily armed howdah.

  This was no rickety ork contraption. It was a living thing, a member of the ork race, but so gigantic, so utterly different in physical form from its smaller kin that it seemed a different species altogether, unrelated in anything other than skin colour and temperament.

  “Squiggoth!” Immrich gasped.

  “Damn,” voxed Bergen. “Did you just say squiggoth?”

  “I did, sir. But I’ve never… It’s gargantuan, sir! And it’s not happy to see us.”

  With a calmness Immrich did not feel, he added, “You’ll have to excuse me, sir. I think my tankers and I are about to be very, very busy.”

  * * *

  Wulfe’s mouth hung open as the biggest living thing he had ever seen filled his forward vision blocks. It was a nightmare of armour-plated muscle and teeth. Its scaly skin looked as tough as rock. Each of the jutting lower tusks was easily as long as a Vanquisher cannon barrel and many times thicker, and its eyes, those giant glistening red orbs, burned with all the rage and insane bloodlust of its kind. The squiggoth shook its massive head and bellowed a challenge at the Cadian tanks. Wulfe felt his whole turret vibrating.