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Astra Militarum – Extract

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Prologue

Ascending

The creature climbed the shaft of its prison. Every step of the ascent was hard-won, and the creature’s breath rattled from its lungs in a feral snarl. The sound was swallowed by the splashes and struggles of the scavengers in the depths below. It became one more echo in an eternal, reverberating song of violence.

The journey was slow. The creature didn’t care, for time had no meaning in the well. Here were only darkness, the clash of tooth and claw, and the choking embrace of water thick with the decaying remains of the fallen. The creature was one of the victors. It had beaten down its rivals, always risen to be the predator and not the prey, and now it had risen again, using the bodies of its enemies to make its way up the shaft.

It had prepared its climb with a patience that had nothing to do with enduring the passage of time.

There was no time. There were only teeth. Claws. Meat. Bone. War.

Patience was the embodiment of necessity, of survival. It fought, killed, and worked in the unending night until it was ready and, by feel alone, began its journey.

The creature’s ascent was so painstaking, so gradual, that if it had been seen, it would not have been a threat. But it was not seen. It rose, metre by metre through Stygian black. It had climbed before. It had made too many attempts to count (and counting was meaningless), and on each occasion, it had reached a bit higher before it had had to return to the roiling depths. But this time was going to be different. This time, events would begin once again. The creature would reach the top, and it would bring with it the tearing and death from below.

Black became grey. Above, a circle of dim light grew wider and brighter. The creature’s breathing grew harsher from the strain of effort and the eagerness of rage. It no longer moved solely by touch. It could see. In jerking, spasmodic movements, clumsy but inexorable, it reached the lip of the well. There it paused. It waited, quieting its breath, holding back its snarl even as its killing impulse became so powerful that its entire frame vibrated. It listened to the guards. It tracked the sound of their movements as they strolled back and forth, trading bored insults.

The moment came. Time began. The creature surged out of the well. It roared as it plunged claws into flesh, and feasted on the panic of the guards.

Chapter One

The Grand Illusion

1. Yarrick

I should have expected the Stompa would charge. There were so many things I should have expected. So much for which I will have to answer, on the day the Emperor finally releases me from my service and calls me to His Throne. Most of all, I will have to atone for the sin of underestimating the enemy. This is the very sin I condemned so freely in others, the sin that had almost doomed Armageddon. How could I have failed to heed my own warnings?

I deserve no mercy. But I won’t be alone. There is very little mercy to be granted for the errors of that day.

The clouds were low over the Ishawar Mountains. The clouds were always low on Golgotha, but tonight they had an extra weight, and pressed down on the peaks like an upended sea of tar. They heaved and bulged with the sick promise of dreadful storms. They pulsed with a red glow, and their force was coming down to crush the army of Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka from above, just as mine would on the ground.

I rode in the open turret of the command Chimera. The wind had dropped, the atmosphere holding its breath in advance of the coming storm, and my rebreather was able to keep the worst of Golgotha’s crimson dust from my lungs. We were moving into the foothills of the mountain chain. We had been pursuing the orks for days, grinding at them, pushing them deeper into the Ishawar range, into ever narrower valleys and passes. Open terrain was where their numbers, still greater than ours, could be most effectively brought to bear against our armour. So we didn’t give them a chance. We blasted through the plains and plateaux, a storm of fire and steel that never stopped, never let up. We had the greenskins in retreat. I was coming for Thraka. Years after he had profaned Armageddon, I finally had him cornered. Years of searching, years of being just a step behind him, hitting planet after planet just days after he had departed, world after world that had nothing left to devastate. But I had caught up to him. He was here, on Golgotha, leading the routed horde ahead. I knew he was.

He had to be. This was my last chance to stop him.

He. Him. Thraka had long since ceased to be an it in my mind. To reduce him would be to underestimate him, and underestimating him had one guaranteed result: doom. I had seen what he was capable of on Armageddon. I had seen what he had done since, as I followed his trail of devastation through the galaxy. It was an article of faith that the orks were unthinking brutes. It was one of the human race’s sole consolations when faced with their numbers, their strength and their endurance: at least the orks were stupid. But not Thraka. The invasion of Armageddon had not been a simple-minded affair. Some of the strategies Thraka had employed had been brilliant. Inspired. And he had made moves since then that not only might as well have been signed, they had been aimed at me, personally.

I had a nemesis. We were facing each other over a regicide board the size of the galaxy.

To admit this was disgusting. To deny it would be criminally foolish. And utterly political.

For the political mind, the years of my search had been an eternity. Attention is difficult to sustain, and easy to lose to the next new and urgent conflict. Each new emergency obliterates the memory of all others. Every year that passed without a new attack on Armageddon meant the danger was that much more remote. There were so many other urgencies of war calling. Spending time, treasury and men in the pursuit of a spent force was nonsensical.

It was perfectly true that there was no shortage of dire threats to the Imperium. I would never be so foolish as to minimise them. But it was perfectly false that Thraka was a spent force. It was suicidal to think so. He was a threat that was unlike anything else in the galaxy, and the fact that we had driven him away from Armageddon changed nothing. He had almost hammered a spike through the heart of the Imperium. That should have been reason enough to devote all necessary resources to his elimination. But what was worse, if such a thing were possible, was that if there was ever to be an ork warboss who could unite the entire barbaric species, then Thraka was that ork. As much as it disgusted me even to articulate the thought, there was a monstrous truth that had to be faced: Thraka had the potential to become the ork emperor.

That possibility should have been obvious to the greenest trooper. It probably was. But for too many in the high places, whether lords or admirals or generals, it seemed to be a possibility too awful to contemplate. Better to pretend it did not exist. Easier to believe it was impossible that the orks would ever follow a single leader, and so destroy us all. So much nicer to bury your head in the sand, and avoid all the fuss and bother of actually doing something about Thraka.

I had to fight tooth and nail for every tank, every rifle, and every man of my army, every single day since the enthusiasm for the crusade had evaporated in its second year. Somehow, I found men of will, intelligence and vision. But they weren’t enough. I also needed men of influence, and for the sake of a mission so important that no compromise should have been brooked, I had been forced to do just that. There were many – too many – colonels with me who held their ranks by the sole virtue of their noble birth. Our venture had been plagued by mistakes, accidents and idiotic judgement calls. But numbers, faith and weaponry had seen us through. Even Golgotha, which waged war against us with dust and storm as viciously as any greenskin horde, could not stop us.

Now the orks were running. Now Thraka was at bay.

Thunder, deep-throated as an earthquake, boomed in the distance ahead. The Baneblades were unleashing hell upon the orks. The flashes of their bombardment were bigger and brighter than the anger in the clouds. I wanted to be at the front with those magnificent tanks. When we had mustered on the Hadron Plateau, I had climbed on top of one of them to address the regiments. Vox-units relayed my words to the entire army, but the image I presented to all within viewing range was important, too. Throne, but I knew the importance of image. I also knew its curse and its weight. Doing what had to be done, I chose the Fortress of Arrogance as my pulpit. Even among the glories of the Baneblades, it stood out. It was a weapon of peerless art, a masterpiece of war. In keeping with its name, it disdained camouflage. Instead, it was black as the void. It was the very idea of power, summoned into material being and given metal form. It even had a true pulpit on its turret. When I stood there, I felt the strength of the tank surging through my blood. When I spoke, it was with the fire of true inspiration. I descended from the Fortress of Arrogance with a regret that bordered on bereavement.

Now I gazed with longing in the direction of the choir of tanks. But the Chimera had been outfitted for mobile command, and it was not strong enough to be at the tip of the spear. Communications on Golgotha were difficult at best, and I had to remain within the limited vox-range of as much of the force as possible. So I had to content myself with seeing the flashes of our strikes, and hearing the booming drumbeat of our advance.

I was not content. But I was satisfied. Baneblades were a rare prize, and the mere fact that we had more than one was a significant victory in itself. They more than justified every deal, compromise, and soul-wearying bargain I had made. They were turning Thraka’s army into pulp and cinder. The orks had nothing that could stand up to them. Not here, anyway. Not within useful range.

More war thunder, like an answer to the Baneblades, both larger and more distant, and this time from behind. I looked back the way we had come. Kilometres beyond the marching troops and growling vehicles, beyond the line of hills we had crossed hours before, visible only as blurred silhouettes in the grit of the Golgothan atmosphere, gods clashed. Our Titans grappled with their debased ork counterparts. The official designation of the ork machines was Gargant. The word was ugly, dismissive, and deliberately so. The Officio Strategos did not seek to dignify the enemy, nor should it have. But there was nothing to dismiss in the danger that the Gargants represented. They were colossal totemic monsters. As the Warlord-class Titans were to men – the human form rendered sublime in size and destructive power – so the Gargants were to the orks. They were tributes to the savage gods of the greenskins, towering, lumbering, barrel-shaped mountains of steel and cannon. They could have reduced all of our regiments to ash. The Titans had engaged them, and the giants had been locked in hellish stalemate for two days now. We had moved through that battlefield like a trail of ants. I had felt insignificant, my actions a trivial grace note to the awful symphony of the giants. I had been privileged to witness, once more, the struggle of myths, and had been humbled. To see the Warlords stride over our columns was to feel an awe so great, it moved many troopers to tears.

We had pushed past them. We needed momentum above all. If we could take out Thraka, the ork resistance would collapse. So we had left the god-machines behind. The fury of their war followed us, light and sound rolling over us like the death-cries of suns. But theirs was not the vital heart of the war. Their battle, in the end, was a parenthesis. Thraka was not there.

With me, backing up the Baneblades, were three regiments. Immediately behind the superheavies came the 52nd armoured regiment of Aighe Mortis. Following them, scouring the planet of any remaining xenos trace, were the 117th Armageddon mechanised infantry and the 66th Mordian infantry. Hundreds of vehicles, thousands and thousands of men, the pride of the Imperium marching with purpose and discipline, exterminating savagery with faith. They were a sight that could move a stone to song. When I close my eye, I can still see them with a clarity as sharp as pain.

The waste sickens me.

There was a tap on my lower leg. I dropped into the Chimera’s compartment. Space that would normally have held twelve troopers had been cut in half by vox-equipment and map tables. Even with the powerful units here, communications were hit-and-miss. Golgotha’s dust eroded transmissions the same way it did lungs and engines. Anything farther than a few thousand metres, perhaps a bit more with exceptional line of sight, was hopelessly unreliable. It had been necessary to establish a relay system stretching all the way back to the landing site on the Hadron Plateau. It was a precarious line, ridiculously stretched and vulnerable, but there had been no time to come up with an alternative. It was working, though. Imperfectly, but with just enough reliability to make coordination of the entire expedition possible.

‘It’s Colonel Rogge, commissar,’ vox-officer Lieutenant Beren Diethelm told me.

‘Here we go,’ Erwin Lanner, at the Chimera’s steering levers, called out.

I made sure the vox-unit wasn’t transmitting as I took it from Diethelm. ‘Sergeant,’ I told Lanner, ‘you are displaying appalling disrespect for a superior officer.’

Over the vibrating rumble of the engine, I couldn’t hear Lanner snort, but I knew he had. He was a short, squat man with arms whose strength and reach had been the doom of many an ork and unthinking sparring partner. His face was narrow, and his features had been sharp until accumulations of scar tissue had turned them into a gnarled fist. He had been with me since Armageddon, and his insubordination was matched only by his loyalty. I had never met anyone less intimidated by a commissar’s uniform. He had no reason to be. If every Guardsman were equal to Lanner in bravery, skill and faith, we would have cleansed the galaxy of our enemies centuries ago. He should have risen far beyond sergeant, but he had refused to leave my side. The idea of someone else driving my conveyance, whatever it might be, was, for him, a personal affront. He had turned down one promotion after another, and when he was not given a choice, he indulged in such egregious misbehaviour that not only did he ensure that he remained as he was, only my intervention saved him from summary execution. For my pains, my reward was a barrage of outrages too studied to be real. They were theatre for my benefit, and it was a theatre that I needed, especially since Armageddon. It was one thing to be aware of one’s own legend. Lanner made sure I didn’t believe in it.

The sergeant had no faith in Colonel Kelner Rogge. I understood. Rogge commanded a fourth regiment, the rearguard of our principle advance. The Aumet 23rd Armoured had been acquired at a price, and being saddled with the inexperienced sixth son of High Lord Gheret Rogge of Aumet was that price. Colonel Rogge had been with us a year and he had, to my pleasant surprise, acquitted himself well. Lanner remained sceptical, but I knew he would never forgive Rogge the sin of his noble blood. What even Lanner could not take from Rogge was his commitment to our cause. I had assumed, during the negotiations with the father, that the Lord of Aumet’s goal had been the prestigious placement of a son who was far enough down the line of inheritance that his loss could be risked, but whose path still had to bring honour to the family name. Within minutes of meeting the colonel, I realised that I had been wrong. He wanted to be part of my crusade as much as I needed Aumet’s tanks. Kelner Rogge believed in what we were doing. He didn’t have the experience, but he had the fire.

The rearguard mission might not have been the sort that would stoke that fire, but it minimised the risk that a novice colonel presented to the rest of the army. We had a large reserve of Leman Russ battle tanks to draw upon, and all I asked of Rogge was that he keep pace and protect our rear. Lanner, I knew, was expecting Rogge to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at the earliest opportunity. He hadn’t yet. But the sergeant’s view of things was, on a number of fronts, so close to my own that I couldn’t avoid a slight wave of apprehension as I spoke into the vox. ‘Go ahead, colonel.’

‘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 overlapping 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 valleys 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.

We began to move forward, and we were marching into the jaws of a meat grinder. But the choice now was to advance and die, or wait and die. We advanced, the only route of honour, and the route of our only hope.

A hope that took us through battle fortresses and Stompas. I had to stifle bitter laughter.

‘If we find Colonel Rogge,’ Lanner’s voice crackled on my ear-bead, ‘please grant me the privilege of killing him myself.’

‘That honour will be mine,’ I snapped. We needed armour to fight armour, and we had already lost the regiment that should have been, at the very least, holding back the orks long enough for the Baneblades to arrive. Mechanised infantry was nothing against what Thraka had unleashed.

And still we headed for the slaughter, picking up speed. Within minutes, I could see the shapes of our destruction. The Stompas towered over our forces. A Titan would have blasted the monstrosities back to scrap metal, but our god-machines were still distant, still caught in unwavering stalemate. And here, the Stompas were the kings of the battlefield. They were horned beasts, with pipes jutting up from their shoulders, spewing smoke. At irregular intervals, taking turns, they would shake the valley with a deafening sound, part howl, part furnace roar, part raging horn. Every time a Stompa roared, the swarming foot soldiers took up the cry and hurled themselves at us with renewed war-fever.

My Chimera reached the fullness of the chaos. The green tide lapped at the vehicle’s treads. I manned the turret’s stubber. I was an awkward gunner, with only one arm, but with the harness holding me firmly to the gun, it turned where I did, and it was impossible to miss. I pulled the trigger and scythed down the rushing beasts. My body shook with each shell, the rapidly heating gun burned my hand, the acrid stink of fyceline fumes stabbed my nostrils, and it was all good pain, honest pain, the purging hurt of war that meant my enemies were dying. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an ork boss flank the Chimera and launch himself towards the roof. A quick twitch to the right and I would have cut him in half. But suddenly that wasn’t good enough. I was thrumming with hatred for Rogge, for myself, for the orks. The xenos filth were revelling in their triumph, and I would be damned if I did not make them suffer. So I let the boss land. I unhooked myself from the harness as he took a step towards the turret. Then I jumped up from the hatch and stood on the roof, too, making myself as visible as possible. I raised my right arm, brandishing the battle claw that had been mine since Hades Hive. ‘You dare?’ I shouted. ‘Do you know who I am?’ I was Yarrick, who had sent the orks fleeing from Hades. I was Yarrick, who killed with an evil eye. And so I did.

The ruby laser from my bale eye pierced upward through the ork’s gaping maw and blew off the top of his head. The beast’s jaw sagged with idiot surprise and the body twirled heavily before toppling from the Chimera. I turned my gaze on the orks below. They knew me, and they hesitated. Lanner drove through that hesitation, crushing greenskins to paste beneath our treads. I took the stubber again while the gunner, a trooper by the name of Koben, opened up with the cannon. We blasted our way clear. We created a path to our doom.

But I would not accept that conclusion. Nor would my crew. Nor would any of the men who marched with us. We were not Space Marines. Individually, we were nothing. Collectively, we were the will of the Emperor, and His will acknowledged no obstacle. We would smash through the orks.

That is, if will alone were enough.

We closed in on the full crush of the battle, and it spread to envelop us. I was surrounded not just by the green tide, but by the rising, turbulent flood of war itself. In that vortex, organisation broke down, giving way to the random, the chance, the improvised, the chaotic and yes, sometimes, the fated. But the vortex didn’t mean the abandonment of strategy. I looked ahead, at the reality of the orks’ giant war machines, and sought my strategy, because, by the Throne, I would find one.

I saw it. The exit from the valley, the route we had to follow, lay to the east. A Stompa, striding off the pace from the others, blocked the path. Between it and the Chimera, there was a company of Basilisk mobile artillery platforms. Their earthshaker cannons might penetrate the Stompa’s armour. But they weren’t tanks. Their own armour wasn’t designed for front-line combat, and they were open-topped. I could see that their crews were trying to manoeuvre them into firing positions, dropping the cannons for short-range destruction, and the orks were hitting them hard before they could become a threat. The air was thick with rockets. Several of the vehicles were already burning wrecks. The crews of many others were being cut to pieces.

‘Make for the Basilisks,’ I told Lanner. ‘To all within reach,’ I spoke on the regimental channels, ‘protect the artillery crews. Give them the chance to save us all.’

Infantry and Chimeras converged on the Basilisks. Men ignored their own safety to gun down the orks clambering over the gun crews. But the orks were numberless, and a cannon-boasting battlewagon smashed into the fray. In the time it took our vehicle to arrive within range, the artillery company had been decimated. Vehicles, the battlewagon among them, were massive, twisted metal corpses. The shafts of the guns reached, useless and mute, for the blind heavens. Ahead of us, the men of one of the last Basilisks grappled with the orks, their doom a simple matter of seconds away.

Koben fired. The Chimera’s main gun was as nothing beside a Leman Russ’s battlecannon, but it still packed an explosive punch, and the shot was a colossal risk. He could have finished the orks’ job for them. But he placed the shell with a precision that showed there had never been a risk after all. There was a geyser of shredded greenskin bodies a few metres from the rear of the Basilisk. The orks just beyond the explosion staggered, stunned. The artillery crew pushed their besiegers back. Stubber rounds and las-fire slashed in from all sides and cut deeper into the ork assault. Then the Basilisk’s gun was trained on the Stompa.

The report was deafening. The recoil was a giant’s blow on the ground, and the Basilisk jerked back a few metres. The shell was designed to shatter bunkers. Even so, against this kind of a foe, we needed something very close to a miracle. We received one. The Emperor’s hand guided that shell. It hit the Stompa, and I blinked as day seared the night. There was a gigantic bloom of fire, as if a volcano had erupted over the battlefield. The upper half of the Stompa vanished. Chunks of metal, and some of flesh, rained down. I called for a concerted rush at the gap we had created. The order was hardly necessary. The moment of victory called all eyes and hearts. A roar of hope and faith louder than the orks’ rabid howling came from the men of Armageddon and Mordian and Aighe Mortis. With the strength of desperation and renewed purpose, we pushed the larger ork army back. We pushed through the orks. The speartip of the infantry reached the mouth of the valley.

And ran straight into a battle fortress.

The ork superheavy’s arrival had all the grotesque flair of that race. It charged in from the pass faster than any tank should move. It was as if a voidship engine had been mounted in the vehicle. Its front actually rose in the air as it crested a low rise, and didn’t descend before the fortress had raced over another several dozen metres. Men vanished beneath it and were smeared over the crude teeth of its front armour. I found myself staring straight at the mouth of its immense turret gun. The cannon dwarfed the Basilisk’s weapon, and it gave us the ork answer to our blow.

Day again, much closer. I was in the heart of day, and the boom of the cannon was so huge it seemed to issue from inside my head. The blow felt like air that had turned to granite. I was flying. The world spun. I couldn’t think. Everything was fire and wind and hammering. I hit the ground as if dropped from space.

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