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Iron Devil – Extract

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Iron Devil

C L Werner

The crump of artillery, the shriek of rockets and the murderous rattle of heavy stub guns melded into a single thunder of violence as the enemy assaulted our position. The treads and tyres of the advancing orks ripped at the dunes as they howled across the desert.

Against the onslaught of the orks, the four hundred men of the 267th Cadian Infantry Regiment retaliated with everything we had. Krak missiles slammed into the carriages of vicious wartrakks, tossing them through the air in burning twists of wreckage. Plasma guns blazed into the ugly hulls of battlewagons, slicing through the crude armour plating to vaporise the mobs of brutish aliens packed onto their decks. The sharp snap of lasguns rang from every corner of our position as we tried to blunt the rush of alien infantry swarming behind their crude machines.

Then, from the left flank, what I had dreaded most came to pass. ‘They’re through! They’re out of the sand!’ The cries echoed across the regimental vox. The howls and roars of the orks as they came lunging up onto the plateau added a still more bestial and savage tonality to the violence.

‘Withdraw!’ I ordered, signalling the regiment to fall back to the ring of bunkers that formed our final line of defence. The troops of the 267th began to detach themselves by squad and platoon, extracting themselves from their forward positions in a remarkable display of efficiency and discipline. Even in the very face of their inhuman enemy, they were acquitting themselves as befitted men of Cadia.

‘Fall back to the bunkers!’ I repeated, but I almost choked on the words. A dark pall had spread across the battlefield, an atmospheric blemish that seemed to spread with cancerous rapacity. I knew that phenomenon, as did every man in my command.

‘Cinder-fall!’ the cry went up. Men began to race for their bunkers, seeking the protection of those thick titanium walls against the malignant desert storm that was about to engulf the plateau. The rearguard, those maintaining the forward positions, held their ground, appreciating that they were dooming themselves to inescapable death but refusing to risk the lives of their comrades by disengaging from the advancing orks.

‘Captain Drakkan, you need to get to the bunker,’ my adjutant Sergeant Vane advised me when I lingered to watch the rearguard defend their line. Firmly, Vane turned me about and hurried me to the bunker.

‘Sir, the cinder-fall is liable to hit us any second,’ Corporal Huller, my vox specialist reported as I dashed inside the bunker. Vane dragged the heavy door close with the help of two Guardsmen. As the portal slammed shut, it sent a dull boom through the bunker. I couldn’t shake the eerie sensation of being walled up inside my own tomb.

‘These walls will resist the storm,’ I told my men. ‘The Ad-Mech has tested these alloys against just such conditions.’

Outside, the sounds of guns and artillery were becoming muted, drowned out by the loud, elemental roar of the storm. Faintly, the howls and roars of the orks could still be heard. After a moment, the alien voices rose in grunts of pain and terror. The cinder-fall had struck in earnest now and the greenskins were discovering that their greatest obstacle in conquering the planet Sanzu wasn’t the Imperial Guard, but the ghastliness of the world itself.

‘The storm will finish them,’ Huller asserted.

Vane looked anxiously at the walls of the bunker, listening to the raging tempest outside. ‘Let’s just pray it doesn’t finish us too.’

It was two solar cycles before the toxicity levels outside the bunker were reduced enough that we could dig ourselves out.

The heavy titanium roof hatch was our only means of egress; the shifting sand had all but entombed the rest of the bunker. My adjutant wrenched the portal open by main force and I followed him up into the orange glow of Sanzu’s daylight. Sergeant Axis Vane was a burly, grox-necked brute of a man, a veteran with more than thirty years in the 267th. The claw of a tyranid beast on Iolas IX had torn away most of his right shoulder and the augmetic replacement sometimes pained him if he put too much strain upon it. I was quite indebted to Vane – the claw that had ripped his shoulder could just as easily have taken my head.

The sight that greeted our eyes was as bleak and desolate as anything I had ever seen. The long line of bunkers and tank emplacements was virtually obliterated, buried beneath tons of sand and dust. Here and there a roof hatch disturbed the dunes. Otherwise there was no trace of our fortifications. Of the orks, of that titanic armada of beasts and machines, only the corroded bulks of a few of their biggest constructions remained – reduced to little more than shapeless mounds of pitted metal by the cinder-fall’s caustic wind.

On Sanzu, a world scarred by the craters of a millennium of mineral exploration, a planet with its soil diseased and polluted by industrial run-off, the deserts of the Blight were especially feared. Great storms periodically raged across the trackless waste. A cinder-fall was composed not of dirt and sand, but toxic grains of pollution. Swirling and mixing in the violence of the storm, the pollutants became a tide of burning acid. Centuries of these storms had obliterated entire hive cities. Only a few hours had served to wipe out nearly every sign of the battle that had been fought here.

‘Sanzu’s biggest graveyard,’ Vane said as he scowled across the sand dunes that now covered the entire plateau.

‘The orks didn’t get past this point,’ I said. ‘The dead can rest knowing their sacrifice wasn’t futile. It’s by the grace of the Emperor that the cinder-fall came when it did.’

Vane gestured to the closest of our neighbours. The crack in the bunker’s roof was easily apparent, the result of an ork cannon. ‘The greenskins knew the only protection they could find was our bunkers. ‘It’s by the Emperor’s grace that they didn’t try to crack open our bunker and crawl inside.’

I turned to the soldiers climbing out from the cramped confinement below to join us on the roof. My gaze settled on the vox operator. ‘Corporal Huller, have you been able to raise anybody?’

‘There was no response to my hails,’ Huller answered. ‘The metallic sediment stirred up by the cinder-fall will make it hard to transmit any distance…’

‘Get back below and keep trying, corporal,’ I told him. ‘I want to know if we still have men out there.’

Vane waved his hand at the nearest bunker. ‘If we do, they aren’t in there, sir. Look at the sand spilling down into that hole. When these storms hit, the dust settles into the low spots. Any bunker the orks managed to crack open won’t have anything inside that’s still alive.’

‘Guardsman Weir,’ I called to the trooper who had been entrusted with stewardship of the regimental maps. The soldier hurried forwards and handed the sealed canister over to me. Unscrewing the top, I removed each map and made a careful study of it. I could feel the eyes of my men on me, expectant – wondering if it was hope or doom that was written on those maps.

‘We can’t stay here,’ I said, raising my voice so that all of my men could hear me. I gestured to the almost-buried roof upon which we stood. ‘One more storm and we’ll be buried so deep a Titan couldn’t dig us out. Without reliable communication to headquarters, waiting here to be lifted out isn’t an option either.’

‘What are your orders, captain?’ Vane asked.

‘We do what the men of the Imperial Guard have done since the God-Emperor walked among mortals,’ I told my soldiers. ‘We march. If we strike out to the east, we should come upon a mineral outpost within eight solar cycles. I want this fortification stripped of ration packs, water flasks and as much man-portable ordnance as we can carry.’

‘Ordnance, sir?’ Weir asked.

Vane snorted with a derisive laugh. ‘You want to trust that the cinder-fall buried all the orks? Because I don’t. Anything that made it through the storm is probably armoured like the engine core of a battle-barge, so get those krak mines in the sub-stores. We’ll establish a rotation on who gets to lug them around, but I don’t want a single one left behind.’ He cast his fierce gaze across the troopers. ‘Get moving, you dogs!’ One bark from the sergeant had the men clambering back down into the bunker.

‘I’ll keep these,’ I told Weir as he waited to recover the map canister. ‘You’ll have enough to carry.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Weir said, snapping a salute and hurrying down into the bunker.

‘It’ll take more than a dust storm to make them forget their discipline,’ Vane said.

I stared out towards the eastward horizon. Even with magnoculars, I could see nothing but the shifting dunes of the Blight. ‘That’s good. Because a lot more is going to be asked of them. The desert has no mercy in it. It will forgive no mistake. It will punish every error.’

‘Captain,’ Vane asked, following my gaze. ‘Exactly how far is this outpost?’ The question was so dire that he could only voice it in a whisper. ‘It’s more than eight days away, isn’t it? That’s why you’re keeping the maps. You don’t want anyone to know.’

I nodded. ‘Ten days is about the limit for how far we can get with the water we can carry. That outpost is at least twelve days’ hard march. But there’s something between us and the outpost, about eight days from here. It’s just a mark and a number on the map, but it’s something man-made,’ I said. ‘Whatever it is, I’m gambling it has some source of water.’

‘The men will march all the harder if they think there’s a living outpost at the end of the line,’ Vane said. ‘Discipline and duty will carry a Guardsman until he drops, but a dash of hope will push him even further.’

‘At any rate, we’ll have nine, perhaps ten days before the men start to lose faith,’ I stated.

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A Black Library Publication

First published as an audiobook in Great Britain in 2014.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Jon Cave.

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ISBN: 978-1-78030-895-1

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