[Imperial Guard 06] - Gunheads Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  GUNHEADS

  Imperial Guard - 06

  Steve Parker

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants — and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  To Mum and Dad again, ’cos one dedication just isn’t enough.

  EXPEDITIO RECLAMATUS

  The Imperial Guard

  General Mohamar Antoninus deViers — Supreme Commander, 18th Army Group Exolon

  Major General Gerard Bergen — Divisional Commander, 10th Armoured Division

  Major General Klotus Killian — Divisional Commander, 12th Heavy Infantry Division

  Major General Aaron Rennkamp — Divisional Commander, 8th Mechanised Division

  Colonel Tidor Stromm — Regimental Commander, 98th Mechanised Infantry Reg. (8th Mech. Div.)

  Colonel Edwyn Marrenburg — Regimental Commander, 88th Mobile Infantry Reg. (10th Arm. Div.)

  Colonel Darrik Graves — Regimental Commander, 71st Caedus Infantry Reg. (10th Arm. Div.)

  Colonel Kochatkis Vinnemann — Regimental Commander, 81st Armoured Reg. (10th Arm. Div.)

  Captain Villius Immrich — Company Commander, 1st Company, 81st Armoured Reg.

  Lieutenant Gossefried van Droi — Company Commander, 10th Company, 81st Armoured Reg.

  Sergeant Oskar Andreas Wulfe — Tank Commander, Leman Russ Last Rites II

  Corporal Voeder Lenck — Tank Commander, Leman Russ Exterminator New Champion of Cerbera

  The Adeptus Mechanicus

  Tech-Magos Benendentius Sennesdiar — Senior tech-priest accompanying Exolon during ground operations on Golgotha

  Tech-Adept Dionestra Armadron — A subordinate of Tech-Magos Sennesdiar

  Tech-Adept Marthosal Xephous — A subordinate of Tech-Magos Sennesdiar

  Munitorum/Ecclesiarchy Personnel

  Confessor Friedrich Ministorum — Priest attached to the 81st Reg.

  Commissar Vincent “Crusher” Slayte — Political officer attached to the 81st Reg.

  PROLOGUE

  Calafran Creides had stopped believing he would wake up. The nightmare was real. The monsters that surrounded him were solid, living, breathing things; he’d found out just how solid when one of them had cuffed him for not working fast enough. The power behind the blow was terrifying. Cal had flown backwards and smashed into one of the ammunition crates he was supposed to be loading. He was sure his rib was broken. Breathing had been painful ever since, and sleep, when it came at all, was more of a struggle than ever.

  What was a broken rib, though, compared to the things they had done to Davran? Or to poor crippled Klaetas? Or to old Jovas, the pilot, when he’d collapsed from exhaustion? Best not to think about that. Wasn’t it enough that he saw it every time he closed his eyes? The images of sickening torment were practically laser-etched onto the backs of his eyelids. Most nights, after he and the others had been pushed and kicked into an empty cargo container and locked there to rest in the stifling dark, he would wake up screaming. Quick but gentle hands would reach out to reassure him then, one always closing insistently over his mouth. Nobody wanted the monsters to return and investigate the noise.

  Living in such a constant haze of fear, pain and misery, Cal had lost count of the days. How long had it been — ten? twenty, perhaps? — since the monsters had boarded The Silverfin. She and her crew had been contracted to scavenge naval wrecks from old war zones on the periphery of the Maelstrom. That hadn’t lasted long. Early in the first leg of the operation, a bizarre ship, its prow constructed in the likeness of a grinning, nightmarish beast, had ambushed her, shooting out her main thrusters and ramming her from the side. Captain Benin had recognised the profile of the attacking craft immediately. Aliens, he said, man-haters.

  Cal never imagined he would see the captain so afraid. Benin kept calling them greenskins, though their massive, leathery bodies were varying shades of brown. When they stormed the ship, the captain had ordered everyone onto the floor. “Don’t look up!” he had told them. “No eye contact!” he had said. “Fighting back will only get us killed.”

  It was the first time Cal had ever heard a quaver in the big man’s voice. Poor Nameth, never the sharpest tool in the box, looked up anyway, and died horribly for it. A glance was all it took — the briefest instant of gaze holding alien gaze — before one bellowing brute charged straight at him, its roar deafening in the tight confines of the ship. It tore Nameth’s head from his neck with a single huge hand. Cal had been lying close by. His friend’s hot blood had splashed over his back, soaking his clothes while the rest of the crew screamed and cried out for mercy. The monsters laughed at that, then bound the crew’s hands, fixed metal collars around their throats, and chained them all together. Minutes later, the captured humans were locked tight in one of the lower holds and the journey to this Throne-forsaken place had begun. They had been brought to this world to live and die as slaves, and Cal wished now that he and the crew had fought back. Most of them had already been worked or beaten to death anyway. What was the point of drawing it out like this?

  There was no hope of escape. Where would he go? The slavers’ settlement sat high atop a plateau of solid black basalt. Beyond the plateau’s sheer sides, red sands stretched to the wavering horizon in every direction. There were a few sloping paths down to the desert floor, but, even if he got to the bottom, there was nowhere to hide out there. He would be spotted and slain in short order. He didn’t have the energy to run anymore. His aching body felt so heavy. Every motion, even the mere act of drawing breath, seemed to take so much more effort on this world. Why? Did anyone even know which planet this was? He had asked around, but none of the other human slaves seemed to have the slightest idea.

  There were hundreds of them. Some had arrived shortly after Cal, others had been here longer, but not by much. No one, it seemed, survived for very long. Those who had arrived before him had a dead look in their eyes, as if their souls had already departed, unwilling to stay locked within bodies forced to endure so much. Sometimes, though, when the monsters in charge were too busy fighting amongst themselves, or when the thick afternoon heat put them to sleep, a little glimmer of light would return and som
e of the older slaves would speak to the newcomers in hushed voices. They told of how they had been taken, their ships rammed and boarded just like The Silverfin. They told of those who resisted, and the cruel slaughter that followed. There were children here, too, they said, dozens of them starving to death in tiny cages. The monsters, communicating to their human slaves through crude mime, regularly threatened to devour them if their parents didn’t work harder.

  Children? Cal didn’t want to believe it. He hoped never to see those cages. He didn’t think he could bear it.

  A furious roar snapped him back to his senses, and he realised that his legs had stopped moving. He was so exhausted, he could no longer feel the festering cuts and scratches that covered his limbs. Not for the first time, he had almost fallen asleep on his feet.

  There was a sharp crack like a gunshot, and blazing pain lanced across his back. One of the brutish slave masters — a sadistic monster that the slaves called Sawtooth — stood ten metres behind him, bellowing hoarsely and brandishing a long, barbed whip.

  The whip cracked again.

  Drowning under a wave of sudden, intense agony, Cal felt the last of his strength dissolve. His legs buckled and gave way. He collapsed, dropping the crate of fat, gleaming bullets he was carrying. His back hit hard, dry rock. Bullets spilled from the broken crate, rolling to a stop against his body. Some of the smaller, skinnier aliens nearby — hideous creatures with leering faces and long, hooked noses — pointed down at him from atop a pyramid of stacked fuel barrels. They laughed and chittered to each other, eyes wide with anticipation.

  Cal felt the rock tremble under his body as Sawtooth stomped over, growling with rage. The alien’s massive, steel-booted feet halted on either side of Cal’s head, and Cal knew that the greatest pain of his short life was about to follow. He remembered the terrible screams of Davran and the others. He could hardly breathe with panic. His heart galloped. Distantly, he felt a warm wetness spreading through his ragged trousers, and realised that he had loosed the contents of his bladder. Fear overwhelmed any sense of shame.

  Sawtooth bent over him, assessing him, studying him closely with unsympathetic red eyes. Was this pathetic little human still capable of work, or only fit to be tortured and pulled apart as another warning to the rest?

  Thick strands of saliva dripped from the monster’s jaws onto Cal’s face. Its hot breath stank like vomit.

  Cal gagged. Bile burned his throat. This is it, he thought. This is how my life ends.

  He had never been a strong believer in the Imperial Creed. He’d attended weekly services with his parents, and learned the mandatory prayers and hymns under the stinging tutelage of a priest’s cane, just like every other resentful boy and girl in the Imperium of Man. But he had never really believed, not in any of it. The God-Emperor was just another old legend among so many. No, he was even less than that. He was a legend of a myth of a legend.

  All the same, as Sawtooth straightened and began bellowing to the other monsters nearby, calling them over for a bit of fun, it was to the Ministorum’s precious God-Emperor that Cal prayed and pleaded.

  Lord of all Mankind, Beacon in the Darkness, Master of Holy Terra and all the galaxy, let me die quickly, I beg you. Don’t let met suffer as Davran and the others did. I’ve sinned, I know it, and held no faith. But, in humble prayer, I ask this of You now.

  He expected no answer. It was terror alone that made him pray, but what happened next was a striking example of those coincidences that the faithful so often claim as proof of the Divine. Calafran Creides could not have known that a fleet of Imperial ships held position in high orbit directly above him. They had arrived that very day.

  Laughing at thoughts of the torture to follow, Sawtooth grasped Cal’s arms and hauled him roughly into the air. Cal’s limp feet dangled above the bullet-strewn rock. His undernourished bones cracked and splintered in the monster’s iron grip, but he didn’t scream. He didn’t even whimper. His attention was locked on the sky above.

  In it, Cal saw a glorious, blazing light that shunted the thick clouds aside. It was so bright that it hurt to look into it, but he couldn’t turn away. Tears of joy rolled down his cheeks. Could it truly be? Yes! The Emperor was real! He had heard Cal’s prayer, and He had answered it!

  “Ave, Imperator,” Cal gasped. Gratitude, relief, love, contrition: all these feelings and more swept over him. He took a deep lungful of hot, stinking air and, with everything he had left, shouted upwards, “Ave, Imperator!”

  The confused greenskins looked up, too, but there was nothing they could do. The blazing light struck the plateau, scouring it, purging it, erasing ork and human alike as if neither had existed there at all.

  Soon, hundreds of Imperial drop-ships would begin their descent.

  Operation Thunderstorm had begun.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Imperial spaceships, massive and ornate, comparable in size and baroque beauty to the largest cathedrals of Holy Terra, hung together in the infinite dark. They had slid from the warp almost forty days earlier, bisecting the orbits of the outer planets on trails of blazing plasma until finally closing on their ultimate goal. That goal lay somewhere below, on the world that spun beneath them, a world that glowed bright in the glare of the system’s harsh sun.

  Golgotha: a planet shrouded in thick, choking cloud, all reds, yellows and browns that swirled and bled together like so many spilled paints. In memoirs dating back thirty-eight years to the last Golgothan War, the celebrated Terraxian Guardsman-poet, Clavier Michelos, had remarked on the planet’s ominous beauty, and with good reason. From high orbit, at least, it was a stunning sight, but that beauty masked an uncompromising nature, for Golgotha was not a world that welcomed men. Michelos had died here, captured and tortured to death by orks. He wasn’t alone in that. The war had been a costly and embarrassing disaster. The orks had crushed everything in their path, and even Commissar Yarrick, the lauded Hero of Armageddon, had been unable to turn the tide of battle. He left Golgotha in bitter defeat with very few survivors at his side.

  That was almost four decades ago. Yarrick, now an old man, still fought for the glory of the Imperium. The war with his nemesis, the ork warlord Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, had taken him back to Armageddon, the world that had made his reputation, while Golgotha remained firmly in the hands of the enemy, a dark stain on his record that could never be expunged.

  So, why had men returned? The small fleet that hung above the orange sphere lacked even a fraction of the power required to take it back by force, but that was not their mission, not this time. There was something else down there besides orks, something important that had been lost on Golgotha during the last war, something that the Imperium wanted back. It was a holy relic, a symbol so potent that it might turn the tide of Yarrick’s new war. Its name was The Fortress of Arrogance.

  The fleet sent to recover it was a mixed force. In the centre, a ship far larger than any of the others dominated the formation. This was the Scion of Tharsis, a Reclamator craft of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the ancient and inscrutable tech-priesthood of Mars without whom none of the ships present would have existed at all. The Scion was flanked on either side by the Imperial Navy’s Tyrant-class heavy cruisers, the Helicon Star and the Ganymede, around which swarmed myriad smaller escort ships and armed transports. It was on one of these transports, an unassuming craft called the Hand of Radiance, that the men of the 81st Cadian Armoured Regiment, known less formally as Rolling Thunder, prepared for war.

  * * *

  “Form up, you greasy pukes!” roared an ugly, skin-headed sergeant with a pockmarked face. “You know the bloody drill. By the numbers, damn your eyes!”

  The floor of the starboard-side hangar clanged with the sound of men snapping to attention. The troopers stood in formation, company by company from the first to the tenth, while their sergeants prowled back and forth like hungry wolves, eyes sharp, hunting keenly for the slightest signs of sloppiness. Hulking drop-ships sat behind the ordered ranks of men
, their boarding ramps lowered, internal lights glaring yellow inside dark, gunmetal hulls.

  A loud, hydraulic hiss sounded on the right of the massive chamber, and a thick door split down the middle, each half sliding backwards into the wall with a cough of oily steam. The metal floor rang with the crisp, pleasing tattoo of dozens of booted feet marching briskly into the hangar.

  “Officers on deck!” yelled another of the sergeants. Thick veins throbbed at his temple with the effort of projecting his voice unaided to almost two thousand men.

  When the officers had halted and turned to face the assembled troops, the oldest of the sergeants — a stocky man with lumpy scar-tissue in place of his left ear — strode forwards and proudly stated, “All men present and accounted for, sir. Vehicles already onboard, lashed and locked. Flight and tech-crews ready for the go. Companies one to ten awaiting permission to load.”

  Colonel Kochatkis Vinnemann stood at the centre of the group of officers, hunched as ever, leaning heavily on his cane, but resplendent nonetheless in a smart uniform of deep green with glittering golden epaulets. Today was the last day that he would be able to wear the regimental colours for a while. The duration of the campaign would see everyone clothed in camouflaging fatigues of rust-red.

  Vinnemann nodded at the sergeant in front of him and was about to issue the boarding command when Captain Immrich — tall, dark and broad-shouldered — leaned close and whispered a few words in his ear. Vinnemann frowned a little at first but finally nodded his agreement. He stepped forward, accepted a vox-amp receiver from the adjutant on his left, held the mouthpiece in front of his lips, and cleared his throat. The sound echoed back at him from the vast bulkheads.