Astra Militarum

by David Annandale, Justin D Hill, Toby Frost, Braden Campbell (epub)

  ‘Commissar, I’m sorry, but we’ve run into bit of a delay.’

  Those words will never leave my dreams. They announced the loss of an entire planet.

  2. Rogge

  ‘If you can’t fix it, get it out of the way,’ Rogge told Captain Yann Kerentz. ‘Blow it up if you must.’

  Kerentz blinked at the suggestion of wilfully destroying a Leman Russ. ‘It’s only the treads–’ he began.

  ‘Which we can hardly take the time to deal with at this moment, and certainly not in this place.’ Did the man not understand the meaning of the word ‘urgency’? The Aumet Armoured had a mission, and it was not going to be stymied by the stupid mechanical failure of a single tank. Its treads had disintegrated at the worst possible moment. It was the lead vehicle of the lead column, and the route led through a narrow canyon pass before opening up again. There was barely room for two vehicles abreast, and this one had not only stopped right in the bottleneck, it had swerved sideways. ‘The wheels can’t find any traction at all?’

  Kerentz shook his head. ‘No, sir. We might be able to push it with a dozer blade–’

  ‘For the length of the pass?’ Rogge poured on the scorn. The defile was two kilometres long. ‘And then what? We’ll have to abandon it anyway. No. Destroy it now. I want us on the move again in five minutes.’

  From the turret of his Leman Russ Vanquisher, the Condemning Voice, Rogge watched Kerentz walk back towards the front of the line of vehicles. The captain’s gait was stiff with displeasure. Rogge grimaced. It was his duty to make the hard decisions. He had made the correct one. Every second, the main body of Yarrick’s force was widening the distance between them. The commissar had been clear: the advance would not stop, not pause, not even slow. The momentum was with the humans, victory loomed, but the orks would seize on the slightest hesitation. Rogge had his mission. It was his responsibility to complete it.

  So he would.

  Kerentz carried out the order. There was a distant crump of the tank’s destruction. But it was ten minutes, not five, before the tanks were moving forward. Rogge cursed under his breath. He did not drop down into the turret basket. He stared into the night ahead, at the vehicle lights turned into dirty smears by the billowing dust, and tried to master his fraying temper. He didn’t want his crew to see him off his stride. All he could think about was the lost time. They would have to step up the regiment’s speed by a large measure to catch up. The thought that he would be found wanting tortured him.

  There was also the terror of arriving to find the war finished. Son, his lord and father would ask, what role did you play in the Golgotha crusade? And he would answer, Father, I had a nice drive in my tank.

  His face burned with the anticipation of shame. He willed the regiment forward. Forward to Yarrick, forward to triumph and the glory of Aumet and the Imperium. Forward to the proof of his worth.

  The Condemning Voice emerged from the pass. Like all the regimental command vehicles, it was in the middle of the advance, so communication with the entire regiment was, if not assured, at least as solid as possible. There was still half the regiment back in the pass, and the leading units were slowing down again. Rogge pounded the roof of the turret with his fist, winced, then lowered himself into the basket. The interior of the tank was a din of engine roar and vibrating metal, but it was easier to listen to his ear-bead here than it was outside. He was about to bark for Kerentz to be put on the line when the captain addressed him first. ‘Colonel,’ Kerentz said, ‘we have just encountered a branching path going deeper into the mountains.’

  ‘How wide?’

  ‘Good for three vehicles, maybe four.’

  ‘Signs of activity?’

  ‘None, sir. But the pass makes a sharp turn. We can’t see very far down it.’

  Rogge hesitated, torn between two necessities. He couldn’t protect the army group’s rear if he didn’t catch up, but he wouldn’t be doing his duty, either, if he ignored the pass. The delay in following that route, and for the Emperor knew how long… ‘All engines stop,’ he ordered. ‘I want complete silence.’

  The convoy of tanks halted, coughing fumes as the engines shut down. In less than a minute, the entire regiment was motionless, and the only sound was the ticking of cooling metal.

  ‘Kerentz,’ Rogge voxed. ‘I want a full auspex scan, and I want you to listen. If there are greenskins up that way, we should be able to hear them.’

  ‘Sir, with respect, the wind and atmospheric conditions–’

  ‘Those are my orders, captain. Execute them.’

  Rogge waited, picturing the war he was missing, willing the orks to be sensible and be off with the rest of their fellows. The more he thought about it, the more he realised he was wasting time. Even if there were a few of the beasts hiding in ambush, what could they hope to achieve? The vast bulk of their army was in pell-mell retreat.

  Kerentz checked back in. ‘No readings, no sounds, colonel. But–’

  ‘Good.’ No orks. And even if there were, they were showing half a brain and staying put. And even, even if they were stupid and attacked, they couldn’t amount to a threat. It simply wasn’t possible. The decision was easy. There was only one to make. ‘Move on,’ he said. ‘Full speed.’ Risky, at night, but the way was clear, the rocky valleys giving them a clear shot toward the rest of the war.

  The eerie quiet of the stilled regiment erupted with the battle-hungry roar of a hundred tanks. The sound echoed off the surrounding cliff faces, turning into a massive, formless din. Aumet’s sons surged forward. Rogge climbed back up through the hatch. He sat behind the turret’s heavy stubber and watched the craggy landscape roll past. He saw the break on the right, in the north cliff. His gut churned, just a little, as he passed it. It was a passage into the empty, crimson night of Golgotha, and was swallowed by darkness after a few hundred metres. He stared into it with what he felt was righteous confidence. He had made the right and only choice.

  Still, as the gap fell behind, he turned and watched until it dropped out of his sight. He continued to face back until he judged that the last of the regiment had passed the defile. Then he turned to look forward again, and wish that anticipation alone could accelerate the armoured march. He should contact Yarrick, he thought. Let him know that they were coming.

  The vox exploded. Reports and curses came in at such a flood over his ear-bead that meaning broke apart, becoming fragments of panic. Rogge whirled around. At first, he could see nothing wrong. The line of tanks stretched out behind him into the night. But then he heard it. He heard the enormity of his mistake. Its sound was that of a mechanised avalanche, rising above wind and engine, clutching the entire regiment in its grasp. It filled Rogge’s ears and his mind. It filled his soul. And as it hammered at his chest, drawing closer and closer, it became visible. He saw the avalanche of metal and brutes chew its way up the regiment.

  As the horror drew closer, the din acquired meaning. The rampage of xenos and guns and machines sounded horribly like laughter.

  Chapter Two

  Trampled

  1. Rogge

  The force that stormed out of the pass and onto the Aumet regiment was no mere ambush party. It was a horde such as Rogge had never imagined. He had no idea of its full scale, but the war machines that led it would only be in the service of a full army. Brushing aside their smaller brethren, crushing any of their own infantry who didn’t move fast enough, were superheavy tanks. Battle fortresses. They were as large as the Baneblades, but were twisted, vulgar monsters. Bristling with secondary guns, they were also festooned with pipes belching oily black smoke, as if a manufactorum had turned itself into a rolling harbinger of doom.

  Lumbering behind the battle fortresses came worse monsters. Stompas. Rogge had heard the designation often enough, and laughed at it every time. He had seen hololiths of the machines, and laughed then, too, at the crude design: the slapdash overla
pping of the metal plates into a monstrous skirt, the redundant piling on of armament, the pitifully savage attempts at art that gave the things horned visages in the image of the greenskin gods.

  He wasn’t laughing now. Though the Stompas were smaller than the Gargants, he had only seen the truly titanic machines from a distance. The Stompas were close. They were here. And there were no Titans anywhere in sight.

  As the green tide clanked and roared toward him, a psychic wave of ork presence rushed ahead of it. It was overwhelming. It shut Rogge down. His limbs tingled, then went numb from anaesthetising terror. He seemed to float out of his head. He observed his reactions with a stupefied detachment. His jaw sagged open. His eyes widened. His hands hung limply at his sides. His strings were cut, and he could do nothing but watch as the greenskin wave washed over his forces. The night shook with the deep, battering rhythm of obliteration.

  There was another noise, much smaller, but somehow more irritating. Rogge realised it came from his ear-bead. The vox-network was screaming. Orders to retreat collided with orders to counter-attack. He heard his name over and over again, in transmissions that were first questions, then pleas, then curses. He blinked several times, reintegrating himself. He shook away the lethargy. ‘All units,’ he began. He found the steel and determination his voice needed. He did not find the decision he needed even more. ‘All units,’ he said again, with such force that a command must surely follow.

  He saw three tanks attempt a coordinated response to the nearest Stompa. They were the Extirpation, the Final Toll and the Advent of Silence. He knew the crews well. They were all far more experienced than he was. He had worried they resented his command. Now he blessed their initiative. They were still moving away from the ork forces, but had swivelled turrets to the rear. They fired in such close succession, it was as if the shells were a single blow against the greenskin machine. The Stompa rocked back a single step. Its front armour dimpled. Then it moved forward again, shaking the earth with its steps. Its left arm was a cannon, and it now spoke its fury. The shell punched through the top of the Final Toll. The interior explosion was followed by an even bigger blast as fuel and ammunition cooked off. The tank blew apart.

  Even as it fired its cannon, the Stompa swung its right arm at the Extirpation. At the end of the arm was a chainfist larger than a Space Marine. It sliced into the flank of the Leman Russ. The shriek of metal cutting metal scraped the night raw and bleeding. Rogge gazed in horror, his reactions slowing to a crawl as the images of war overloaded his senses. The Stompa butchered the Extirpation as if it were a living thing. The tank shuddered and bucked as though in pain, and then the chainfist found the flesh inside. The screams of men joined the choir of tortured metal. Blood splashed out of the vehicle.

  The Stompa didn’t bother with the third Leman Russ. An onrushing battle fortress had rammed it with such force, it had knocked the Advent of Silence on its side. Ork infantry swarmed over the crippled tank, bashing futilely at its armour until one of them arrived with an armour-piercing rocket.

  ‘All units,’ Rogge said again. His throat was dry. He was whispering. ‘All units…’ He trailed off. He had nothing to say.

  It didn’t matter. There was nothing to say. The horde rolled over the regiment, crushing, annihilating, as if the Ishawar Mountains themselves were delivering the blows. Rogge pulled the vox-bead out of his ear, blotting out the cries and demands. Resistance to the orks sprang up at the company level, but it lacked coherence. Those companies were stones against the tide. They could not stop the flood. They simply survived a bit longer.

  The storm surge reached Rogge. He was distantly aware that his crew was firing the Condemning Voice’s gun. He didn’t care. As a shambling monster twenty metres high loomed over him, he was granted a sliver of grace: he was too numb to feel shame.

  2. Yarrick

  Our advance slowed. For less than one minute, I had the luxury of believing that we had the greenskins boxed in, and that the end was on the horizon. Then vox-traffic from Rogge’s regiment turned to chaos. And then we stopped.

  The vox-unit convulsed with static and cacophony. The messages, each more urgent than the others, smeared into white noise. I let Diethelm do his job, a sick certainty growing in my chest. The word from the forward regiments was easy to sort out. The orks had stopped running. At the precise moment of the vox meltdown at Rogge’s end, the orks had turned and hurled themselves back against us.

  Colonel Sinburne, commanding the Mortisian 52nd, tried to sound hopeful. ‘It’s a final stand, commissar,’ he voxed. ‘They’re desperate. They know this is the end.’

  ‘Is it?’ I asked. I wanted the truth, not a fantasy.

  ‘They’re hitting us hard,’ he admitted, ‘but–’

  I cut him off. ‘Listen to the foe, colonel. What do you hear?’

  He came back after a few seconds with the answer I expected and dreaded. ‘They’re laughing,’ he said.

  The situation to our rear took longer to establish. ‘Colonel Rogge is not answering, sir,’ Diethelm reported.

  That, in itself, told me that things had gone awry. But I needed to know why and I needed to know how. ‘Then find me someone who is.’

  Diethelm did. He performed well, and there were enough officers with the Aumet 23rd who knew their sacred duty. Many of them died letting us know what was happening. Their transmissions were fragments of tragedy.

  ‘… we don’t know if we’re retreating or counter–’

  ‘… multiple Stompas and battle fortresses, we can’t–’

  ‘Who is in command? Who is in command?’

  ‘There’s nothing left! Throne take that bastard! I’ll feed him his–’

  I stared at the map table as Diethelm called out the updates. Like a hololith gathering dimension and resolution, the picture formed in my mind’s eye. I felt my lips pull back in a grimace as I realised how badly we had erred. The force that was tearing up the Aumet tanks was an army fully as large as the one we were chasing. Thraka had managed to keep this second deployment hidden in the mountains, secret from us. We had blundered into one of the greatest ambushes in the history of the Imperium. For all my preaching, for all that I knew better, I had underestimated Thraka. Once again, the ork had outplayed, had out-thought, we humans.

  We were caught in a pincer manoeuvre. The valley in which the bulk of our forces now advanced was long and wide, but it was still a valley, with orks coming at us from both ends. Even the foothills of the Ishawar were high enough that we couldn’t go over them. We were boxed in. Thraka had done to me precisely what I had thought I was doing to him.

  We had a chance only if the frontline units could bring the war to an immediate end. I could read the signs, and knew the odds were the same as my growing a new right arm, but I spoke to Sinburne all the same. ‘Colonel, do you have any expectation of being able to kill Ghazghkull Thraka in the next few minutes?’

  ‘With the blessing of the Emperor, there is no telling what we might–’

  ‘Do you even know where he is?’

  ‘No,’ Sinburne admitted.

  I could hear how frustrated he was. He was grief-stricken at the idea of having to give up so close to the goal. But the reality was this: we had not been pursuing Thraka. He had been reeling us in. Unless Sinburne had the ork lined up within the sights of a dozen tanks, there would be no defeating him this day. ‘Disengage, colonel,’ I said.

  ‘Commissar,’ he began.

  ‘We will need you here.’

  There was no response. Static scraped at my ear, formless sound shaping a bad truth. I had Diethelm search channels until he found me a tank company captain. It was Captain Hantlyn, and he rode the Baneblade Fearful Sublime. ‘Captain,’ I said, ‘you now have command of the armoured regiment.’ And I gave him the last orders any soldier wanted to hear.

  There was no choice. Going forward was suicide: the chain of val
leys led only to a cul-de-sac, the end-point where we thought we had cornered the orks. We had to retreat, and we had to punch our way through the second army. There was no question of hope, only of necessity.

  Gather our strength, then. By now, Diethelm had all the regimental commanders on the vox. ‘This is no fighting retreat,’ I told them. ‘You are to return with all speed and prepare to re-engage at the rear.’ With the Baneblades, we might stand a chance, not of victory, but of successful retreat.

  Might.

  We began the murderous process of reversing the direction of an entire army. Thousands and thousands and thousands of men and vehicles, a sea of war power that would stretch to the horizon on an open plain, now had to arrest all momentum and turn back the way they had come. The perfection of discipline kept the disorder to a minimum. Unforgiving reality meant there was still plenty to go around. The worst was the vehicles. Leman Russ and Manticore, Chimera and Basilisk, they all had turning circles and little room in which to make them. Even with the priority being granted the HQ Chimera, it took us a full minute to re-orientate. Where before the Imperium’s might had flowed across Golgotha like a roaring cataract, now there was nothing but eddying molasses.

  I knew that my commands had been death sentences for countless loyal Guardsmen as the greenskins pressed their advantage. I wished again to be at the front. Before, I had wanted to witness Thraka’s end. Now, I would have shared the awful moment of retreat with men who had given everything to this cause. I owed them that much.

  I owed the Imperium more, though. Every human alive did. And at this juncture, my sacrifice would serve no purpose. I would be failing in my duty to serve the Emperor. The romantic gesture, then, would be nothing less than treason.

  We were disciplined but slow. The orks were beings of speed. Discipline was a barely grasped concept for them. There was nothing to slow their advance except the mire of human blood beneath their feet. And so it happened. The armoured regiment had not reached the new front line yet, the rest of the army had not even begun to march in its new direction, and the ork onslaught fell on us. I had climbed through the Chimera’s hatch again, and though I was thousands of metres from the initial collision of the armies, I heard it. I felt it, too: the entire floor of the valley vibrated from the shock of the impact.