Other great Warhammer 40,000 reads from Black Library

BRUTAL KUNNIN
Mike Brooks

THE BEAST ARISES: VOLUME 1
An omnibus by various authors
Features the novels I am Slaughter, The Emperor Expects,
The Last Wall and Predator, Prey

THE BEAST ARISES: VOLUME 2
An omnibus by various authors
Features the novels Throneworld, Echoes of the Long War,
The Hunt for Vulkan and The Beast Must Die

THE BEAST ARISES: VOLUME 3
An omnibus by various authors
Features the novels Watchers in Death, The Last Son of Dorn, Shadow of Ullanor and The Beheading

THE LAST CHANCERS: ARMAGEDDON SAINT
by Gav Thorpe

FARSIGHT: EMPIRE OF LIES
by Phil Kelly

LEGACY OF DORN
by Mike Lee

HONOURBOUND
Rachel Harrison

CADIA STANDS
Justin D Hill

CADIAN HONOUR
Justin D Hill

HAMMER OF THE EMPEROR
An omnibus by various authors
Features the novels Gunheads, Ice Guard and Desert Raiders

SHIELD OF THE EMPEROR
An omnibus by various authors
Features the novels Fifteen Hours, Death World and Rebel Winter

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Brutal Kunnin’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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 might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.

Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.

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. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.

This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.

There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

Chapter One

Trooper Hank Skelton’s boot collided with the steel door for the fifth time – a sound Sergeant Major Marcus van Veenan was finding increasingly irritating.

‘Emperor’s teeth, that one hurt,’ Skelton complained.

‘You know,’ van Veenan said as he sat up on his bunk, ‘there’s a simple solution to that. Stop kicking the fragging door.’

Skelton ignored him, slamming his boot into the door once again. Just like the last five times, it didn’t move. He let fly with another chain of expletives.

Van Veenan hardened his tone. ‘I said give it a rest, trooper.’

‘With all due respect, sergeant major, I–’

Van Veenan moved fast, pushing himself off the top bunk and landing with a thud on the floor. In two steps he was standing before the much taller Trooper Skelton. Skelton, like most Rotauri natives, was built solid as a rockcrete pillar and much taller than the galactic average. Still, it was the short and stocky sergeant major, with his scarred face and grizzled hair, who seemed to tower over the other man.

‘Let me stop you there,’ van Veenan said. ‘In my many years in the Astra Militarum it’s been my experience that when someone says “with all due respect”, they’re usually about to say something disrespectful. Is that what you were about to do, Trooper Skelton?’

‘No, sergeant major. It’s just…’ The large Guardsman pawed at the stubble growing on his square jaw as if trying to rub away his frustration. ‘We’re supposed to be killing greenskins, not sitting around like we’re their fragging guests.’

‘We tried to kill them,’ Corporal Alani Trotter said from where she sat nearby. ‘In case you missed it, it didn’t go well.’

‘Why are they even keeping us here? Let me out, you green bastards!’ Skelton’s frustration rose to the surface again, and he lashed out, kicking the – yes, still immovable – steel door.

‘Trooper Skelton.’ These words, thickly accented, rolled across the barracks like slowly approaching lava. ‘The sergeant major told you to stop kicking the door.’

‘Yes, commissar.’ Skelton looked immediately sheepish. ‘Sorry, commissar.’

Why, van Veenan wondered – not for the first time in his career – could a trooper not just do as they were told without the threat of a commissar to scare the breakfast out of them? Though, he supposed he couldn’t blame Skelton for reacting with quivering knees to Commissar Tarna Hardnuss. She had a reputation for being ruthless. Like van Veenan himself, Commissar Hardnuss, ‘Hard Nuts’ as she was known to the rank and file, was a relatively new posting to the Rotauri First Infantry. Rumour had it she was transferred after decimating her last company following a mass refusal to charge a t’au firing line. Van Veenan didn’t know how much stock he put in that, but Hardnuss certainly seemed the type to force her grandmother into battle at the business end of a bolt pistol.

The click-clunk of the door unlocking drew everyone’s attention.

‘There you go,’ Trotter said. ‘Good job, Skelton, you got it open.’

‘Shut up,’ Skelton replied with what van Veenan assumed was the most cutting retort in the enormous Guardsman’s vocabulary.

The door swung inward and slammed against the wall.

‘Holy Throne, that stinks,’ Skelton said, covering his nostrils with the back of his hand.

Any Guardsman who’s faced them on the battlefield can tell you plenty about the orks. They’ve heard the rapturous howls of joy the monsters make as they charge into combat. They’ve seen them rolling like a green tide over the crest of a hill followed by noisy, clanking, smoke-spewing machines. They’ve witnessed the bladder-loosening sight of them crashing into the first ranks, their choppas carving through armour and spraying arcs of Imperial blood in every conceivable direction. But there’s one thing you don’t notice about the greenskins when you’re only around them for those moments of battlefield terror, and that is the smell.

Van Veenan knew the smell of battle, the metallic tang of blood, the choking smoke, the heavy sweat of fear and exhaustion. But what floated through the doorway was different. This was the stench of fungal growth, mounds of rotten trash and the rancid scent of ork piss. These were the smells you only got to know when forced to live with orks. Though living with orks was not what the dogged survivors of the Rotauri First were doing. No, these men and women were prisoners. They had been since Rotauri had fallen to an ork invasion three days earlier.

Rotauri had been a quiet agricultural world until half a century ago when vast organic mineral deposits had been discovered beneath the planet’s surface. This led to the rapid establishment of several mines and promethium refineries. The Rotauri First was stood up in response to this shift from agrarian backwater to resource-rich backwater.

When the orks eventually invaded, the Rotauri fought with the fury of the Emperor to protect the planet’s largest promethium refinery. Unfortunately, having not seen much in the way of combat in the forty years since the regiment’s founding, they were unprepared for the sudden appearance of the greenskins. Their hasty defence held for a chaotic eight hours before being crushed, and the several hundred survivors were rounded up and kept captive in the buildings of a nearby Munitorum depot.

Almost every one of the thirty Guardsmen in this particular Munitorum storeroom-turned-barracks leapt to their feet as an ork thumped in through the open door. Stripped of their weapons, there was little they could do against the creature, yet their training as warriors of the Emperor and their instinct to abhor everything alien sparked them into motion. The ork was hunched over, but at full height it would have towered over the average human. Its long arms might have dragged on the floor had it not been carrying a cast-iron pot in front of it. The ork’s head moved lazily as it inspected the Guardsmen, pale red eyes piercing out from beneath its enormous, protruding brow. One of its long algae-green ears, which seemed coated with thin hairs, twitched like that of an equine bothered by an insect. The corner of its mouth hooked up in what could have been a grin or a snarl, its long lower fangs tilting in its crooked mouth.

‘’Ere,’ the ork said in guttural Low Gothic as it dropped the pot on the rockcrete floor, ‘grub.’

Judging by the smell, which was not altogether better than that from outside, the ‘grub’ the ork had brought in was the same they’d been served every meal. The orks’ attempt at ‘humie’ food was a light-green broth thickened with grains from Munitorum storage and occasionally garnished with floating pieces of indeterminate meat or fungus.

Trooper Skelton, constantly filled with a bravado that had surprisingly not yet seen him killed, stepped across to block the open doorway. Most young people of Rotauri joined the Astra Militarum to avoid a hard life of working in the fields, mines or refineries. Skelton had joined the Guard because he wanted to shoot aliens, preferably up close and in the face. The ork lifted itself to its full height as Skelton faced it.

‘Listen, you xenos scum,’ he said, ‘you’ve kept us in here for three days. What–’

The ork’s hand lashed out with impressive speed and shoved Skelton in the chest, sending him sprawling across the rockcrete floor. The ork grunted something incomprehensible and then left, slamming the door shut behind it. Even as he was recovering, trying to suck air into his winded chest, Skelton called after the ork. ‘Coward!’

Commissar Hardnuss walked forward and held her hand down to Skelton. Even stripped of her weapons and flak armour she still cut an imposing figure in her long black coat with its gold epaulets. Skelton took her hand and pulled himself to his feet. ‘No doubt the Emperor applauds your bravery,’ the commissar said, ‘but unfortunately our current circumstances preclude such a frontal assault.’

‘If I can, sir, we have a suggestion.’

The attention of the barracks turned to Corporal Amoa. Beside him was Corporal Amoa. Twin brothers with the same rank in the same company of the same regiment. That had caused van Veenan no end of confusion when he’d first arrived on Rotauri.

Hardnuss turned to the twins. ‘Any suggested course of action is welcome, corporal.’

‘The last two nights we’ve been working on a section of brickwork in the back wall,’ Corporal Amoa said. ‘These buildings were designed as stores, not prisons. We’ve chipped through the mortar and with a little more work we’ll be able to push free a section of bricks. We’re thinking we could sneak out tonight, see if we can’t make for Flaxton.’

‘Assuming it’s still standing, Flaxton is ten miles from here. You’ll have to move through the forest, stay off the roads,’ Hardnuss said.

‘We can make it, commissar.’

‘No, you won’t be doing that.’ Lieutenant Tam Pokato turned from where he’d been pacing, attempting to wear standard-issue grooves in the rockcrete floor. ‘It’s reckless and could bring retaliation down on us all. I have no doubt that the governor will have sent word for reinforcements. More Imperial forces will be arriving to crush the greenskins and liberate us. There’s no point making the situation worse. We shall sit tight and wait to be rescued.’

Lieutenant Pokato. Van Veenan had pegged this one within seconds of meeting him. Third son of the governor of Rotauri. Undertrained. Incompetent. Annoying. Van Veenan had seen countless junior officers like him over the years – completely unaware of their ineptitude, craven fools dangerous to the soldiers under their command. The only saving grace to having an officer like Pokato was that he’d likely get himself killed relatively quickly.

‘Lieutenant,’ Commissar Hardnuss said, ‘it is our duty as warriors of the Emperor to attempt an escape, pass word to Imperial forces and do everything in our power, despite our defeat, to harass the enemy.’

Pokato looked from the commissar back to the twins. ‘I am ordering you not to attempt an escape. We don’t know why the greenskins have taken us prisoner, or how they may react if you’re captured. They might kill us all. We will await reinforcements and then take the fight back to the enemy.’

‘You cannot order these men to act against their duty,’ Hardnuss said.

‘I am the ranking officer,’ Pokato said. ‘I decide what their duty is.’

Hardnuss moved closer to Pokato. Van Veenan could see the bulge in her cheeks as she clenched her jaw. She kept her voice low and spoke through gritted teeth. ‘You may be the ranking officer here but let me offer some advice from the Commissariat. I strongly advise you not to order your troopers to cower from the enemy, lest it appear that it is in fact you who are afraid. The last thing you want is the Guardsmen under your command to believe you a coward. Actually,’ Hardnuss tapped her lip as if in consideration, ‘the last thing you want is for a commissar to think you are a coward. That is, of course, punishable by death. But certainly, the second-last thing you want is for your troops to believe it.’

Pokato, seeming even paler than usual, took a long moment and then acquiesced. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘see if you can get word to Imperial forces from Flaxton.’

An hour later, when darkness had fallen outside, van Veenan still lay on his bunk. He was tossing a ball he’d fashioned from his socks against the ceiling, aiming for a small crack in the rockcrete, and catching it on its way down, when Corporal Amoa – he wasn’t sure which one – announced they were ready to slide the section of bricks free and attempt their escape.

‘Do it,’ Commissar Hardnuss said.

Van Veenan tossed his sock-ball into the air and caught it one last time. He sighed. He’d tried to stay quiet, tried to keep out of it, but he couldn’t let these idiots throw their lives away. ‘Emperor damn it,’ he muttered before he sat up. ‘You aren’t going to make it.’

‘Sergeant major?’ Amoa said.

‘You won’t make it,’ van Veenan repeated.

‘What makes you say that?’ Hardnuss turned to him. ‘The Emperor will guide them.’

‘The orks obviously want us for something, otherwise they wouldn’t have kept us prisoner for three days,’ van Veenan said. ‘I’d be surprised if there aren’t guards and fences around us by now.’

Hardnuss narrowed her eyes at him. He could see that bulge in her cheeks again.

Van Veenan spoke louder, addressing the whole barracks. ‘Fifty thrones say they don’t make it. Any takers?’

‘Sergeant major, that’s enough,’ Hardnuss said.

‘Fifty thrones,’ van Veenan repeated.

‘Sergeant major!’

‘I’ll take that bet,’ Corporal Trotter said. ‘I think they’ll make it.’

The air in the barracks was thick with tension. Commissar Hardnuss sliced through it with her heavy accent. ‘It’s your decision, corporals.’

The twins looked at each other and then spoke in unison. ‘We’re going.’

‘Very well,’ Hardnuss said. ‘The Emperor protects.’

The two corporals nodded and moved off, others in the barracks patting them on the back and wishing them well. Van Veenan lay back on his bed, tossing his sock-ball at the crack in the roof, listening to the sound of the bricks in the far wall being slid free. The pair climbed through and moved outside.

Not long after they’d left, the residents of the barracks heard a series of dull thuds coming from the exterior walls.

‘What is that?’ Pokato asked, his voice wavering.

‘Bern,’ Hardnuss said, addressing a trooper near the spot where the Amoa brothers had worked the bricks free. ‘Can you see anything?’

Trooper Bern manoeuvred the loose bricks, opening a small gap to peer out. He fell back from the wall, shocked. ‘Emperor save us,’ he said, ‘it’s them. It’s the corporals. They’re throwing them at the barracks!’

‘What?’ Hardnuss said. ‘What do you mean they’re throwing–’

The barracks door burst inward. A single object hit the floor and rolled to a stop. It was the head of Corporal Amoa, though, once again, van Veenan couldn’t tell which one. It hadn’t so much been severed as ripped from his body. Long strings of muscle and sinew trailed behind it. It stared up through lifeless eyes at the occupants of the barracks. All the Guardsmen, even Commissar ‘Hard Nuts’, stared in horror at the head in the centre of the room. Outside, they could hear deep guttural chuckles. The greenskins seemed to find the whole thing immensely amusing.

Van Veenan sighed as he looked at the head. Sometimes he hated being right. ‘I guess I’ll take an IOU for those thrones, Trotter.’

Chapter Two

Van Veenan woke like a soldier, stirred by the sounds of orks shouting outside. He swung his legs around and dropped off his bunk. Here was one of the small things that revealed whether a Guardsman was a veteran or a green recruit: whether they laid their socks out to dry when they took them off, whether they wrote their blood type on their helmets and boots, and whether they woke instantly, clear-eyed and ready to fight.

The barracks door burst open. The ork that had brought their food the evening before stomped inside.

‘All right, you zoggin’ gits. Get outside, da boss is ready for ya!’

Nobody moved. Van Veenan surveyed the faces in the barracks. These troops wanted vengeance. Being taunted with the dismembered bodies of the Amoa twins had given them a reason to fight even beyond their sworn duty to Emperor and Imperium. Van Veenan could appreciate that. His allegiance had long since shifted from those giving the orders to those forced to follow them.

Time and time again, van Veenan had seen decisions made at the highest levels cause utter carnage on the ground. What had happened on Rotauri was yet another in a prestigious line of command catastrophes. He, and every one of the remaining Guardsmen from the Rotauri First, were in this position because of the mind-bogglingly stupid plan to assault the ork position before they could establish a secure staging base. Van Veenan had tried to tell headquarters that they should establish defensive formations, that the greenskins didn’t need a staging base to begin obliterating Imperial infantry. No one had listened. Now van Veenan’s only goal was ensuring that at least some of the troopers left might somehow survive ork captivity, despite the insurmountable odds.

Van Veenan had survived more than his share of insurmountable odds. He’d been told many times that the Emperor had a plan for him, but he was fairly certain the Emperor gave as much of a shit about any one individual as the captain of a battleship cares about a rat living in the lower decks.

The ork growled. ‘I said get outside!’

‘Frag off!’ Trooper Bern, proving himself as suicidal as Skelton, shouted at the ork.

The ork turned to loom over Trooper Bern, and Bern spat in the creature’s green face.

Well, that was just stupid, van Veenan thought.

The ork clamped its massive hands on either side of Bern’s head and lifted until Bern was hanging in the air, his feet kicking.

‘You want to fight Urzog?’ the ork said. ‘You fink you is ’ard? I is not allowed or else I would snap you in ’alf. Now get outside!’ The ork, Urzog, used his grip on Bern’s head to fling him towards the door. Bern hit the floor awkwardly and his head hung at an impossible angle, blank eyes staring back over his shoulder. For a moment the entire barracks, including Urzog, stared at Bern’s lifeless body.

Even as the war cries grew in the throats of the Guardsmen, van Veenan shouted, ‘No!’

Most of the troopers stopped, likely more from the tone of his voice than from any recognition of his authority, but five of them launched themselves at Urzog. The ork swung a heavy fist and battered the first aside. The second trooper threw a punch that connected with the ork’s massive jaw. Urzog barely seemed to notice and punched the trooper in the stomach, folding him in half and sending him flying. It was Skelton who struck next. The largest of the Guardsmen, he dropped his shoulder and charged into Urzog, causing the ork to stumble back against the wall. As Urzog shoved Skelton off him, Trotter took advantage of the ork’s distraction and slammed her boot hard into his groin. Her kick landed squarely between the ork’s legs with an impact that made every male Guardsman in the room wince in empathy. Urzog looked down and growled.

‘Wot?’ he said. ‘You fink that’s gonna ’urt one of the boyz?’

As Trotter moved to attack again, van Veenan grabbed her by the arm and held up his other hand to stop more Guardsmen getting involved. ‘Emperor damn it, I said no.’

‘Oi, what are you zoggin’ doin’ in ’ere?’

A new ork stood in the doorway. This one was over seven feet tall and broader in the shoulders than the doorway was wide. A nob, by the size of him.

The Imperium had long known ork hierarchy was dictated by size, something that seemed easy for the feeble-minded greenskins to grasp. It was also useful for Imperial snipers because they could immediately tell which orks were in charge – nobs, the orks called them. This nob had a distinctive metal dome on top of its head that looked almost like a steel helmet, but for the fact it was screwed and stapled into its green flesh. The nob looked at Urzog.

‘Big Nob ’Ardskull,’ Urzog said, ‘I is just gettin’ these humies outside.’

‘’Urry up. Da boss is waitin’.’

‘You ’eard ’im,’ Urzog growled. ‘Out!’

‘Do as they say,’ van Veenan said.

‘But, sarge–’ Corporal Trotter began, but van Veenan cut her off with a stern look.

‘Do as they say.’

The troopers made their way outside. Urzog grabbed Bern’s lifeless arm and dragged his corpse through the dirt after them. ‘Over there,’ Urzog said, pointing through the buildings of the depot to what had once been the transport yard. It was now full of hundreds of captured Guardsmen.

Van Veenan saw he’d been right about what the orks had done in the days they’d been inside. The Munitorum depot had been haphazardly converted into a prison camp. All around the perimeter the greenskins had constructed a fence from an assortment of rubble, wood, steel and even whole trees from the nearby forest. It varied in height from twelve or thirteen feet in some places to twenty or more in others. All along the top was an uneven tangle of razor wire, wrapped around jagged steel spikes.

A dozen or more open-sided guard towers had been built around the circumference too, each with a similarly ramshackle appearance and with little thought given to their structural integrity. Van Veenan could see two orks in each tower holding the guns they called ‘shootas’: horribly inaccurate but if the large-calibre rounds hit their target there was little left to ship home.

As van Veenan began moving through the depot, he realised the dozen or so other buildings used for holding prisoners had all been painted with tallied numbers, presumably so that the orks could differentiate between them.

He turned back to see five tally marks painted on the door of the building they’d spent the last three days in. Huh, he thought, I didn’t know orks could count that high.

Although van Veenan had to admit the greenskins were strange like that. They built their own weapons, manufactured vehicles and could even construct void ships, but most of the time they seemed like they wouldn’t know whether to hit a nail with a hammer or their forehead. How they waged interstellar war with their crude but effective technology was one of the great mysteries of the species.

Even the decision to use the Munitorum depot as the location for the prison camp was, if not total luck, strategically sound. It was isolated, but near enough to the promethium refinery that the orks could maintain control of the important resource.

Commissar Hardnuss moved up beside van Veenan. ‘You did the right thing in there, stopping them from attacking that ork. We need to pick our moment.’

‘I’m just trying to stop more idiots getting themselves killed,’ van Veenan replied.

The troopers from Barracks Five moved towards the mustering of Guardsmen in the transport yard. An enormous heavy-lift gantry crane loomed over them and an open-fronted parking bay held a row of Departmento Munitorum transport trucks. Some smaller greenskins – the ones they called gretchins, or sometimes grots – clambered over one of the trucks with blazing blue cutting torches spewing sprays of yellow-orange sparks as they hacked into the vehicle’s structure. There were only twenty or thirty of them, where van Veenan knew ork warbands usually had hundreds.

A single ork stood atop a stack of crates watching the gretchin swarming over the truck like flies on rotten fruit. All orks were bizarre, but this one even more so. It was small, probably even shorter than van Veenan, and had arms and legs far skinnier than orks he had met on the battlefield. It had a box-shaped contraption strapped to its back, with a pair of coils extending from the top that intermittently sparked and flashed with arcing bolts of electricity. Each time the bright blue discharge jumped between the copper coils, the ork’s drooping ears rose and fell with the buzzing electrical field. Van Veenan had never seen one before, but he’d heard about them – this was a mekboy, the closest thing the orks had to engineers.

‘Hurry up. I need these trucks stripped down to lighten them for optimal transport capability. We need to bring back all the gubbinz from the big factory,’ the strange ork said. ‘I need thermal conductors and those quantum power inverter wotsits, plus all the metal we can get.’

Van Veenan listened to the mekboy with interest. It didn’t sound like it’d been smashed in the head with a mallet like most greenskins. It sounded vaguely intelligent.

‘I said hurry up, you zoggin’ gits!’

Well, mostly.

‘’Ere,’ Urzog said to the troopers of Barracks Five, ‘get all lined up like you humies do.’

Van Veenan saw the eyes of the troopers fall on him. He nodded. ‘Fall in, parade formation.’

‘Excuse me, sergeant major,’ Lieutenant Pokato cut in, ‘I am the ranking officer here.’

Van Veenan looked at the man. Typical lieutenant. Greener than the orks. But, as a veteran sergeant, van Veenan knew how to play the game. He nodded. ‘Apologies, sir, please go ahead.’

‘Right,’ Pokato said, grabbing the front of his shirt and pulling it down. ‘Fall in.’

The troopers did so, most of them still looking towards van Veenan, who nodded as subtly as he could.

Big Nob ’Ardskull made his way front and centre of the gathered Guardsmen.

‘All right, you humie gits, shut ya gobs and listen. I is Grut ’Ardskull and I is big nob for the boss round ’ere. I is da boss’ most trusted advisor because I ’ave only tried to kill ’im one time. I is gonna keep all of you in line with no muckin’ about. From now on you is all prisoners of Waaagh! ’Eadbasha, so look proper smart. Boss!’

’Ardskull shouted towards the supply depot headquarters, a building now adorned with an enormous metal sheet etched with the image of what van Veenan was sure was an ork slamming its head against a wall. When the door opened, the ork that stomped out was even larger than ’Ardskull. Warboss Nok ’Eadbasha clomped down the steps and walked past the gathered Guardsmen. Each footfall seemed to shake the world.

’Eadbasha was the largest ork van Veenan had ever seen. The beastly warboss wore massive metal boots and his arms and legs were enclosed in steel frames, his movement assisted by pumping and hissing hydraulic rams. His armoured torso piece was painted bright red and adorned with an ork skull and crossed-axe motif. His right hand was sheathed inside a vicious power klaw.

More than anything it was the warboss’ head that drew van Veenan’s attention. It was enormous. His lower jaw was covered by a metal plate spiked into fearsome iron teeth and the top of his skull was horribly misshapen, bulging out in huge lumps and bumps like a sack of the tuberous vegetables they grew on Rotauri.

Warboss ’Eadbasha came to a stop before the assembled Guardsmen. He paused for a moment, his red eyes peering out from beneath that disgusting head, then his metal jaw dropped open.

‘WAAAAAAAAGH!’

Orks throughout the camp took up the bellowing call, until the buildings seemed to vibrate. When the war cry died off, van Veenan’s ears rang.

‘’Ow many?’ ’Eadbasha said to ’Ardskull.

‘Loads, boss.’

’Eadbasha smiled. ‘Loads is perfect.’

The warboss cast his gaze over the Guardsmen again. ‘I is ’Eadbasha.’ The ork’s voice boomed out effortlessly over the transport yard. ‘You probably think I got a name like ’Eadbasha because I bash ’eads. Well, I do! I bash humie ’eads, I bash ork ’eads and I bash tin can ’eads, but that is not why I is called ’Eadbasha. I is ’Eadbasha because I is blessed by Gork and Mork. If I bash me ’ead I get visions ’bout the future.

‘Gork and Mork ’ave told me to gather a Waaagh! The biggest Waaagh! you ever seen. Gork and Mork ’ave told me I ’ave to build a wotsit called, an effigee, and loads of boyz will come to join me Waaagh!

‘I ’ad ’eaps of stinkin’ grots to build this effigee, but one stupid weirdboy blows ’imself up and kills most of ’em. You humies are my slaves now. You humies are gonna build for me.’

’Eadbasha’s eyes fell on the Guardsmen from Barracks Five. He caught sight of Urzog still holding the arm of the recently deceased Trooper Bern and stomped towards him.

Urzog was visibly shaken by the sudden attention from the mammoth warboss. ‘Uh, hi, boss.’

’Eadbasha’s eyes thinned as he looked down at Bern and then back to Urzog. ‘Why dis humie dead? I told ya not to kill da humies.’

‘Sorry, boss, ’e wouldn’t come out so I grabbed ’im by da ’ead and ’is zoggin’ ’ead come right off.’

The warboss stared at Urzog for a long, tense moment and then a look of disgust crossed his features. ‘Puny humies. Dey die if ya pull their ’eads off. Dey ain’t tough like da boyz. Still, these are my humies. You don’t pull off their ’eads unless I tells ya to pull off their ’eads.’

‘Yes, boss. Sorry, boss.’

The warboss leaned forward. ‘Else I will pull your ’ead off.’

‘Yes, boss,’ Urzog said, his deep voice wavering in the presence of the larger ork.

’Eadbasha turned to the bizarre mekboy, who was still watching the gretchin dismantle the truck. ‘Mekboy Rukaz!’

The mekboy turned. He wore a pair of green-lensed goggles, one lens at least four times larger than the other. He pushed the goggles up and sat them on top of his head.

‘Yes?’

‘That’s yes, boss, you zoggin’ brainy git.’

Rukaz removed a spanner from his belt, shoved it into his ear and wiggled it around as if scratching an itch. He pulled it out and examined the end. Apparently satisfied with whatever he’d removed, he returned his attention to the enormous warboss. Van Veenan could tell ’Eadbasha was irritated by this obvious display of contempt. ‘Yes, boss?’

A throaty growl escaped ’Eadbasha’s clenched teeth. ‘’Ere is your new workers. Put ’em to good use otherwise I’mma ’ave to come back ’ere and give you a right krumpin’.’

Mekboy Rukaz lifted the spanner to his forehead and pulled it away in a salute. ‘You got it, boss.’

’Eadbasha growled again before turning away. ‘Zoggin’ smartboy git,’ he muttered before calling out orders. ‘You nobz get on back to ’eadquarters. Guards, stay ’ere with your humies. Don’t kill ’em.’

When ’Eadbasha and the larger orks had walked away, Mekboy Rukaz looked at the gathered Guardsmen. A large zap of blue electricity jumped between the coils on his back and the muscles in his face all seemed to momentarily contract. ‘I ain’t never used humies before but you must be smarter than the grots, and probably smarter than the other so-called smartboyz I ’ave to deal with.’

‘Oi!’ Another mekboy looked up from some contraption on the ground in front of him.

‘Quiet, Groblok,’ Rukaz said, ‘I’m the big mek and I’ll say what I like about your lack of smarts until you prove otherwise.’ Rukaz returned his attention to the Guardsmen. ‘What’s going to happen is simple. I is going to build the boss his Waaagh! machine and prove that I is the best mek there ever was, and then he can go off and have loads of fights.’ Rukaz waved dismissively, as if he didn’t care much for what ’Eadbasha had planned. ‘You lot just has to do what I says. First, we’re getting these humie trukks stripped of everything that don’t make ’em go.’

Rukaz started calling orders and soon each barracks had been organised into separate work details. They began climbing over the Munitorum trucks with whatever tools they were handed and started stripping them back to bare chassis and engine. There were several attempts by the more valiant troopers to refuse to work or to use the tools to attack the orks. These brief revolutions were quickly, and messily, put down by the ork guards, until the Guardsmen realised, as van Veenan already had, they weren’t going to fight their way out of this.

‘So what, sarge,’ Corporal Trotter said as she looked over at van Veenan, ‘just like that we’re not Guardsmen any more, we’re damn slaves for the greenskins? The Emperor would rather see us dead than working for the xenos scum.’

‘You listen to me, trooper,’ van Veenan replied. ‘Don’t be mistaken, you might be a prisoner but you’re still an Imperial Guardsman. We all are. But I’ve been around long enough to know that the chief duty of a Guardsman is keeping your arse alive. And that’s what we’re going to do.’

Chapter Three

Over the next few weeks the Guardsmen fell into as much of a routine as was possible amidst the anarchy of the orks. Some days they waited hours before Urzog came to collect them and take them to the transport yard. Other days they were in the yard before Rotauri’s red sun rose. Some days they received three square meals. Other days they received nothing. Van Veenan might have considered all this a deliberate confusion tactic by their captors had it not been obvious that mayhem was part of daily life for the greenskins.

Once the trucks had been stripped they were used to carry small groups of Guardsmen on heavily guarded convoy trips to the promethium refinery. There they would pillage power systems, turbines, pressurised tanks and whatever other machinery Mekboy Rukaz had demanded.

The remaining Guardsmen worked in the yard under the scattered direction of Rukaz and the other mekboys. They began bolting, welding and smashing together contraptions with little idea of what they were doing. There were mounds of twisted cabling snaking across the ground, strapped-together powercells humming disconcertingly and piles upon piles of sheet metal being bent and hammered into whatever shapes the meks could draw in the dirt or explain with cursing and wild gesticulation at the Guardsmen. All around them was a constant cacophony of shouting orks, the crashes of collapsing metal and the screams of humans as the greenskins’ construction process went horribly, violently wrong.

Van Veenan felt the kick of the rivet gun as he punched rivets into the join along two sheets of metal. For much of the last few weeks it had been easy to think Mekboy Rukaz and the other manic meks had even less idea what they were doing than the Guardsmen. Now though, van Veenan could see their mad vision taking shape. The metal curve he was securing in place was part of a large foot, the matching one being built across the yard. Cables were being laid out in long strands among large steel beams that would make up the legs. The greenskins meant it when they said they were building an effigy: what looked to be emerging from the bedlam was a crude but enormous statue of an ork.

‘Oi! Ogbrok! I know it was you wot stole me teef!’

Van Veenan looked up to see an ork storming across the yard. It was dragging a large-headed axe through the dirt behind it. The angry snarl on its face revealed a gummy mouth missing all but two teeth. An ork supervising a group of Guardsmen nearby turned.

‘You shouldn’t ’ave passed out and left ’em lyin’ around then, Rarzug,’ the ork, obviously Ogbrok, replied.

‘They was in me gob!’ Rarzug roared as he ran forward, raising his axe.

Every day van Veenan saw arguments like this break out between the greenskins and erupt into hand-to-hand combat or full-blown firefights; on one notable occasion he had even seen an ork ramming a live grenade down another ork’s throat.

Ogbrok reached down and yanked a hammer from the hand of a nearby Guardsman. He sidestepped and Rarzug’s wild swing missed, the axe head burying itself halfway into the dirt. Ogbrok swung his hammer, connecting with a brutal impact upon the other ork’s cheekbone. Rarzug’s face snapped to the side spraying dark crimson blood in a spatter that almost reached van Veenan five yards away. Rarzug stumbled but somehow didn’t drop from the blow. Ogbrok slammed into his stomach, tackling him to the ground. When Rarzug scampered to his feet, retrieved his axe and lopped Ogbrok’s hand off, the watching greenskins cheered. But it was when Ogbrok began hitting Rarzug in the face with his bare, bleeding stump that they really roared their approval.

With the guards distracted, van Veenan watched a group of half a dozen Guardsmen make a run for a low section in the orks’ crude fence. They’d chosen a spot midway between two of the guard towers where the poorly constructed barrier had sagged under its own excessive weight, no doubt gambling on the inaccuracy of ork weapons and hoping they could make it over the fence and into the forest before being unceremoniously blown apart by shoota rounds. Van Veenan had to admit they’d selected the best place to make such a brazen escape. That said, this brazen escape was still incredibly stupid. No doubt a commissar like ‘Hard Nuts’ had riled them up with nonsense about courage and duty.

Catching sight of the attempt, another group of Guardsmen made a break for the same section of fence. Van Veenan could see the calculations running through the minds of the Barracks Five troopers around him. He reached out and grabbed the back of one trooper’s shirt just as they were about to take off.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

Meanwhile, some of the orks had noticed the escaping Guardsmen sprinting for the perimeter. ‘Oi! Humies are tryin’ to run!’

‘They’re going to make it, sergeant major,’ Corporal Trotter said. ‘Let’s go.’

‘No.’ Van Veenan looked at her. The orks in the guard towers hadn’t even raised their weapons. They seemed completely unconcerned. ‘Trust me.’

The first of the escaping Guardsmen reached the bottom of the fence and jumped onto it. He began scaling the fence, driven into a frenzied climb by panic and adrenaline.

‘See, sarge!’ Trotter said. ‘We should have gone.’ Van Veenan could see the disappointment in her eyes, disappointment that seemed to border on betrayal.

The next trooper planted his foot down to propel himself onto the fence and was met by a reverberating boom. The ground ballooned up under his feet in the black sooty explosion of a landmine. The Guardsman who had trod on the mine, plus the five or six nearest to him, vanished in the smoky burst. The explosion threw the remaining Guardsmen near the fence in all directions, most with fewer body parts than before. The air was full of sprays of gore and screams. The Guardsman on the fence was lifted into the air by the shock wave expanding beneath him. When he eventually fell back down, three of the steel fence spikes impaled him through the leg, stomach and chest. He didn’t have time to scream.

The sound of orks roaring in approval filled the camp.

Van Veenan turned his attention back to his rivet gun. Corporal Trotter and the other Guardsmen of Barracks Five watched him in silence before they too had no choice but to return to their construction. Commissar Hardnuss approached and crouched beside van Veenan, feigning working on the foot.

‘These troopers look up to you,’ the commissar said, keeping her voice low. ‘That coward Lieutenant Pokato is content to sit around and expect rescue to come for us. That may not happen. I know you’ve been protecting them in your own way but the troops need a leader willing to do more than wait around and, like it or not, that leader is you. I’ve given you three weeks, sergeant major, but you have done nothing.’

Van Veenan fired another rivet into the metal. ‘On the contrary,’ he said, admiring his handiwork, ‘I think my riveting skills have come a long way.’

‘You need to drop this act, van Veenan,’ Hardnuss said. ‘You cover it up with your sharp wit and cynicism, but you are afraid.’

Van Veenan looked at Hardnuss. ‘Commissar, I can assure you I’m not afraid of the greenskins.’

‘I didn’t say you were afraid of the greenskins. I said you were afraid. I know who you are, van Veenan, and so, I should remind you, do the troops. Sergeant Marcus van Veenan of the Talissian Guards, sent to the Second Rapture Penal Legion for insubordination after the disaster of Endota Prime. Yet here you are, still alive and back in the ranks of the Astra Militarum, and with a promotion no less. You have survived the penal legions, van Veenan – that is all but unheard of. You must be aware of the rumours that swirl around the regiment about you?’

Van Veenan shrugged as he fired home another rivet. ‘I try not to pay attention to regimental gossip.’

‘Most believe you blessed by the God-Emperor Himself. Many say you did something so remarkable they had no choice but to release you from the penal legions – single-handedly killed a tyranid queen or rescued a squad of Adeptus Astartes or destroyed an entire battleship of the Archenemy. Others say you escaped from the penal legions in an elaborate and daring scheme.’

‘I assure you, commissar, the only remarkable thing I did to earn a pardon from the penal legions was being lucky. I think I just stayed alive long enough that they got sick of me.’

‘That may be, but the troops won’t believe it. They want a hero. If you can make it out of a penal legion then you can make it out of this – and you can take them with you.’

Van Veenan closed his eyes and sighed. ‘Commissar–’

‘That,’ Commissar Hardnuss cut him off, ‘is what you’re afraid of. You’re afraid of caring about these Guardsmen. I do not presume to know what happened to you during your time in the penal legions but it has clearly warped your view of the Imperium. I could very well execute you for cowardice, but I do not believe you a coward. If duty alone will not convince you to lead these men and women, then do it because it will keep them alive. It doesn’t matter whether the rumours are true, sergeant major. They believe you are the hero that can get them through this.’

Van Veenan took a moment before answering. ‘Let’s say we managed an Emperor’s-own miracle and got out of this camp, and then somehow defeated the orks or got off this planet, what then? These troops would just end up chasing down another deadly foe on another worthless planet. I won’t lead more soldiers to their deaths, commissar. I’m done with that shit.’

The commissar stared at him.

‘I bet you wish you had a bolt pistol after all, don’t you?’ van Veenan said.

Commissar Hardnuss sucked in a deep breath but, saying nothing, she rose and walked away. Van Veenan began firing rivets into metal with decidedly more force than was necessary.

Chapter Four

With hundreds of Guardsmen working every day, the giant ork effigy soon came together. The feet, legs and torso went up rapidly, built from a frame of steel overlaid with an incongruous collection of metal sheets, the whole thing wreathed in rickety slopes of improvised scaffolding. As construction of the torso neared completion, the enormous ork was already taller than an Imperial Knight.

The men and women of Barracks Five had spent the last two weeks working on the upper section of the left arm and, having finished their labours, had been locked in their barracks early that evening. The arm would be craned into position the next day. Van Veenan lay on his bunk, tossing his sock-ball at the roof, listening to the troopers discussing the possibility of sabotage.

‘It’s likely Rukaz will get us to lift the arm,’ Corporal Trotter was saying. ‘Hook it up to the crane or something. It would be easy to ensure an accident happens.’

Skelton was nodding enthusiastically. ‘A little loose when we lock the hook in place, maybe we give the main pin a bit of a cut, and wham,’ he smashed a fist into his open palm, ‘that arm comes crashing down and stops construction. If we’re lucky, it might take out the whole bloody effigy and kill a few greenskins at the same time.’

‘No. No way. That’s too risky,’ Lieutenant Pokato said. ‘It’s possible we kill or injure Guardsmen, or the orks discover what’s happened and punish us. It doesn’t matter if we finish the effigy. You don’t really believe their insane superstitions?’

‘Sure,’ Corporal Trotter said, ‘’Eadbasha is a bloody nutcase but what happens to us when that thing is finished? You think we get retirement and a pension?’

‘We don’t act recklessly,’ Pokato said. ‘That will keep us alive.’

‘Maybe there’s a risk some of us will die, sir,’ Trotter said, ‘but that thing is being built quickly. It’ll be done soon and then we’re definitely dead. If you really believe Imperial reinforcements are coming then the longer we slow down construction, the better. My vote is with dropping the arm.’

‘I am the ranking officer, your “vote” means nothing,’ Lieutenant Pokato said. ‘I will make the final decision on any plan that puts the men and women of this barracks in danger.’

‘Lieutenant, Corporal Trotter is right. The longer the construction takes, the better – more time for reinforcements to arrive or more time to plan an escape,’ Skelton said. ‘Right, sergeant major?’

Van Veenan turned to see the Guardsmen looking at him. He thought back to what Hardnuss had said, that these troops wanted him to lead them out of this. What was holding him back? Sure, some of them would die, but Guardsmen died, countless thousands every day. It hadn’t stopped him leading troops into danger before. He’d stood beside them as they faced down multi-limbed aliens whose gaping mouths dripped with acidic saliva, he’d made them disobey orders at the risk of instant execution, he’d led penal legionnaires into suicidal charges against blood-soaked cultists. So why wasn’t he doing it now?

Because he was tired of never-ending war and he was tired of leading troopers like those around him to their deaths. How many had he seen slaughtered? And yet, he was still here. Guardsmen died. That’s what they did. But not Marcus van Veenan. He survived. Time and time again. What on Holy Terra did the God-Emperor want with him? What difference could he make in a galaxy like this?

Van Veenan looked from Lieutenant Pokato to Skelton. ‘The lieutenant is the ranking officer, trooper. It’s his decision to make.’

Van Veenan saw the disappointment on Skelton’s face. It was finally dawning on him, and on the rest of them, that Sergeant Major Marcus van Veenan would not be their hero. Skelton looked away in thinly veiled disgust.

‘Yes,’ Pokato said. ‘At least the company sergeant major is setting a good example by remembering the chain of command. Tomorrow, we lift the arm in place and there is to be no sabotage. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ the Guardsmen muttered.

‘Good then,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Now everyone get some rest.’

After the gathering split apart, Commissar Hardnuss wandered over to van Veenan’s bunk. Van Veenan caught his ball of rolled-up socks and looked at her. ‘I know what you’re going to say, commissar.’

‘And you know as well as I what will happen tomorrow,’ Hardnuss said.

‘What’s that?’ Van Veenan asked.

‘They will sabotage that arm anyway.’

‘That’s a fair possibility, yes.’

Hardnuss looked at van Veenan with that adamantine stare he was sure commissars practised in depth at the schola progenium. ‘You know what the greenskins are building.’

Van Veenan nodded.

‘Whatever happens,’ Hardnuss said, ‘remember that you could have helped these troopers.’

The next day, as anticipated, the troopers of Barracks Five were put to work readying the arm for its crane lift. They wrapped it in enormous slings secured with a U-bolt thicker than a person’s arm, a U-bolt that would carry the entire weight of the load.

Van Veenan watched them secure the lifting gear. They huddled together in a way that wouldn’t have seemed suspicious had van Veenan not seen Trooper Skelton slip a cutting torch into his pocket earlier. The Guardsmen had arranged themselves to block the view but van Veenan was certain Skelton was cutting through just enough of the U-bolt that it would give way and drop the arm in a cacophony of noisy destruction. When the Guardsmen drew apart, the cutting torch was gone, hastily hidden away.

Van Veenan scanned the yard but none of the greenskins seemed to have noticed. Mekboy Rukaz was busy yelling insulting instructions at a group of Guardsmen who were soldering a wild collection of coloured wiring onto what looked to be a helmet. The other meks were also busy either instructing Guardsmen or working on things themselves. Even Urzog, who was supposed to be watching the troopers of Barracks Five, didn’t appear to have seen anything. If there was one benefit of having ork captors it was that, if they weren’t engaged in fighting, they didn’t have long attention spans.

Van Veenan noticed someone watching though – Lieutenant Pokato. He was standing some distance from the other members of Barracks Five, tinkering with some small contraption, or at least pretending to. In fact, he was standing awfully close to Urzog. When Pokato covered his mouth with his fist and coughed three times, Urzog looked to him and then stomped towards the Guardsmen without hesitation.

‘Oi!’ Urzog called to them. ‘Wot are you humies doin’?’

‘Nothing,’ Trotter said, ‘just getting ready to lift this like Mekboy Rukaz said.’

Urzog’s eyes narrowed as he cast a suspicious gaze from the Guardsmen to the straps around the arm. He moved forward and pulled at each sling before he grabbed the U-bolt and looked at it.

‘Mekboy Rukaz!’ Urzog shouted.

‘I’m busy!’ Rukaz replied, not looking up from the Guardsmen working on the wired helmet.

‘Da humies ’ave been tamperin’!’

Rukaz, suddenly very interested, turned and walked to where Urzog stood holding the lifting lug.

‘Look ’ere,’ Urzog said, displaying the damaged U-bolt. ‘This ain’t supposed to be like this, is it?’

Rukaz bent closer to inspect the bolt. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes and muttered to himself. ‘High temperature cut through load-bearing structural element.’ He lifted his goggles and growled. His head twitched to the side as sparks jumped from the coils on his back. He looked at the Guardsmen. ‘Who’s tryin’ to break my gubbinz?’

No one answered.

‘Search ’em,’ Rukaz said.

Urzog moved between the Guardsmen. They stood tall, their heads high, staring at Urzog as he patted them down.

Van Veenan looked to where Pokato stood watching the situation unfold. Their eyes met briefly before Pokato looked away. Van Veenan’s knuckles grew white as he unconsciously squeezed his hands into tight fists. He looked back to the Guardsmen in time to see Urzog roughly patting his thick green hands down over Skelton’s torso.

‘’Ere we are,’ Urzog said, pulling the cutting torch free from where Skelton had stuffed it inside his jacket. ‘Wot’s this then?’

‘Proof,’ Rukaz said, reaching out and taking the torch. ‘That’s wot. Round up the humies. I’m gonna get the boss.’

Within minutes the Guardsmen were formed up in the yard. Mekboy Rukaz and Big Nob ’Ardskull stood before them. Warboss ’Eadbasha stomped back and forth, his hydraulically assisted limbs scratching and hissing as he paced. He was deep in whatever constituted thought for an ork. Eventually he stopped and spun to face the gathered Guardsmen.

‘I thought I’d been good to you humies. I ain’t let my boyz kill none of you ’cept the ones that tried to escape. It ain’t easy keepin’ boyz from krumpin’ you. Now you tryin’ to sabotage my effigee. I should just tell the boyz to smash you all.’ Van Veenan felt the buzz of excitement course through the orks gathered all around them. They grunted, fidgeted – some even let out whoops of joyful anticipation. They wanted nothing but permission to do exactly that.

‘I ain’t gonna do that though,’ the warboss continued, the orks’ anticipation turning to groans of disappointment. ’Eadbasha paused, scratching at his chin with the end of his power klaw. ‘Gork and Mork told me to build this effigee. They can tell me ’ow you should be punished. ’Ardskull!’

‘Ardskull sagged under the call of the warboss. When he approached, ’Eadbasha grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘Ardskull, with practised resignation, lowered his head and displayed his shining metallic scalp to the warboss.

’Eadbasha reared his head back and slammed his forehead onto ’Ardskull’s iron dome. The sound of the impact, which would have been enough to compress a human spine down to the size of an ammo box, resounded through the yard. ’Ardskull fell back, unconscious. Warboss ’Eadbasha was still standing, swaying gently in a circle. His red eyes had rolled back in their sockets. His drooping eyelids fluttered. He stayed in that trance-like state for what grew to become an awkwardly long time. The orks, accustomed to their leader’s odd decision-making strategy, waited patiently.

Eventually, as van Veenan began wondering whether the ork was permanently broken, ’Eadbasha’s eyes rolled forward again. He shook his misshapen head as if clearing away a daze and then spoke.

‘Gork and Mork ’ave spoken to me!’

The orks roared in approval.

‘Gork and Mork ’ave told me we need these humies to finish buildin’. We can’t krump ’em all but we is gonna teach them a lesson. The humies is gonna fight in the pit!’

The orks roared and began to chant. ‘In the pit! In the pit! In the pit!’

The pit, like most ork things, was not imaginatively named. Just outside the prison camp, the greenskins had dug a hole in the ground almost as big as Barracks Five and with walls high enough that it would be impossible to climb out. All around the outside, on storage containers stacked into tiered seating, the orks of Nok ’Eadbasha’s warband had gathered to watch the spectacle.

Under instructions from ’Eadbasha, the orks had selected two Guardsmen from each barracks. From Barracks Five they had picked Moko, a trooper van Veenan barely knew, and the giant Trooper Skelton, no doubt because it had been him wielding the cutting torch. Those two, and the other ten Guardsmen chosen to fight, fidgeted nervously under ork guard near the edge of the pit.

The remaining Guardsmen of the Rotauri First sat in a caged section of the seating, made to watch the fighting just like the orks around them – though the mood among the Guardsmen was far more sober than that of the greenskins. Grots with trays hanging from straps around their necks walked up and down the seating handing out refreshments, and the orks greedily grabbed cups of a thick, fermented fungus drink and began tearing into hunks of cooked squig flesh. Some orks had even painted their faces with blue and yellow warpaint and chosen which of the Guardsmen they would root for. They shouted out the number of ‘teef’ they were willing to wager, and a grot would run frantically over to collect and record the amount. Most of them bet on, as seemed appropriate for orks, ‘da biggest humies’.

‘All right, boyz,’ ’Eadbasha bellowed to the gathered horde. ‘I know we been buildin’ stuff ’stead of wreckin’ stuff but we gonna get some entertainment today. We gonna watch some humies krump each other!’

The orks roared and stamped their feet in a cacophony of appreciation.

‘Humies,’ ’Eadbasha said, turning to the selected Guardsmen, ‘dis real simple. Two of ya go in and one of ya comes out. You keep on killin’ each other till there’s one of ya left. Got it?’

The Guardsmen didn’t reply.

‘I said got it, ya zoggin’ humie gits?!’ ’Eadbasha roared.

The Guardsmen nodded.

‘Good.’ ’Eadbasha turned to the crowd of orks. ‘Let’s have some fightin’ then!’

The roar from the greenskins was even louder. ‘’Ere we go! ’Ere we go! ’Ere we go!’ they began to chant. ‘’Ere we go! ’Ere we go! ’Ere we gooooo-oh!’

Van Veenan sat in silence, staring down at the pit. He was tense, his breaths short and sharp, barely able to contain his outrage. There were two targets of van Veenan’s anger, and strangely neither of them had green skin. First, he was furious at himself because Hardnuss’ words echoed in his head like an annoying itch: remember that you could have helped. But most of his rage was directed at someone else. His eyes searched the crowd of Guardsmen and found him – Lieutenant Pokato, that slimy Cerillian mud serpent.

There was little ceremony to the beginning of the fights. The first two Guardsmen were simply kicked into the pit by their ork guards. Van Veenan knew one of them – Sergeant Tuhoe, a veteran with Second Company. The other was a young trooper he didn’t recognise. All around them the orks bellowed and roared and chanted. ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’

‘Oi!’ ’Eadbasha yelled. ‘You can zoggin’ start now!’

‘They can’t make us fight each other, son,’ Tuhoe said to the terrified trooper opposite him.

When it became clear the humans weren’t going to attack each other, the watching orks made their disappointment known. The roars and chants became boos and hisses. Empty drink cups and half-eaten squig legs were pelted down into the pit.

‘’Ere,’ ’Eadbasha said, ‘last chance, humies.’ He threw two long-bladed knives onto the dirt between their feet. ‘Maybe you need some cuttas coz of ya tiny pink hands.’

The Guardsmen remained unmoved.

‘You is my slaves!’ ’Eadbasha screamed at them. ‘You build when I tells you to build and you fight when I tells you to fight! Now, last chance or I’ll krump you meself!’

The warboss waited for a moment, tapping his steel boot impatiently on the ground, then, when Sergeant Tuhoe and his opponent did not leap into vicious combat, he growled, a deep rumble that rose angrily from his throat. He jumped into the pit, landing with a heavy thump.

Both Guardsmen stumbled backwards, but Sergeant Tuhoe showed the fighting spirit of a veteran warrior of the God-Emperor, recovering quickly and facing down the towering foe. The young trooper did not have such a strong resolve, and collapsed back from the nine-foot ork. ’Eadbasha reached out and caught the falling trooper by the front of his shirt. The Guardsman quivered in the ork’s grip, paralysed with terror, a wet stain rapidly covering the front of his trousers.

Sergeant Tuhoe moved forward, as if there was anything he could do, but ’Eadbasha reached out and grabbed him with his free hand, the three digits of his power klaw closing with mechanical force around the sergeant’s torso, pinning his arms to his sides.

‘I said dis was simple,’ ’Eadbasha roared to the Guardsmen still waiting on the edge of the pit. ‘One of you dies or both of you dies.’ And, with the assistance of the powerful hydraulic rams encasing his arms, he slammed the two Guardsmen together. They impacted face to face like high-speed mag-trains going in opposite directions on the same track. The Guardsmen’s heads didn’t crush so much as they burst like bags of bright red liquid. ’Eadbasha tossed the two headless corpses to the ground and turned his blood-covered face back to the Guardsmen. ‘Whichever of you humies is the last survivor gets to live – dat’s a prize to fight for, ain’t it? So fight!’

When the next two Guardsmen in the pit refused to fight as well, ’Eadbasha grabbed a burna from a nearby ork and sprayed them with superheated burning promethium. Their screams were short-lived but horrifying.

It was the third fight when things turned. Van Veenan watched as a Guardsman from Barracks Two – Ratley, he’d overheard Hardnuss say – was dropped into the pit to face off against Trooper Skelton. Both Guardsmen looked at each other and hesitantly glanced up at ’Eadbasha, who was readying the burna for another round of exterminations. Van Veenan could sense the desperation beginning to infect the two in the pit and spreading to those still yet to make their appearance.

Van Veenan leapt to his feet. ‘Stand your ground,’ he called into the pit. ‘Whatever happens.’

Skelton looked up and his gaze met van Veenan’s. There was sadness in the huge Guardsman’s eyes and something else – an apology maybe, perhaps disappointment. You’re no hero, sergeant major, he seemed to say, and neither am I.

Skelton reached down and picked up one of the long-bladed knives. He kicked the other across the ground to Ratley.

Van Veenan rushed down the tiered seating in long, loping strides, pushing and stumbling through the crowd of watching Guardsmen. He crashed into the cage separating them from the pit and slammed his fists against it.

‘Skelton! Don’t you fragging raise a weapon against a fellow Guardsman!’

An ork guard was swift to reach van Veenan, punching him right through the front of the cage, buckling the metal around the impact. Van Veenan was thrown into the front row of Guardsmen, his cut face leaking blood. Dazed, he shouted towards the pit. ‘Don’t do it!’

Skelton waited for Ratley to pick up the knife and then, ignoring van Veenan’s shouts of protest, charged at the smaller trooper. He dodged Ratley’s weak effort to defend himself and drove the blade hilt-deep into the other Guardsman’s stomach. And, in that moment, van Veenan knew the orks had broken them. The moment the soldiers in that pit turned on each other, the orks had won in a way they hadn’t even when they seized control of Rotauri: they had crushed the troopers’ humanity, reduced them to the same level as the barbaric xenos.

And so it went from then. Guardsman versus Guardsman to the roaring delight of the orks. Few resisted fighting any more and the orks received their entertainment. Guardsmen slashed at each other with the greenskins’ cuttas, losing chunks of flesh and entire limbs in the process. When one went down their opponent would leap, taking the fight to the ground and beating or hacking them to death in a brutal display of desperate viciousness. After hours of fighting it was Skelton who overcame all others and was ultimately the last one standing.

He stood in the centre of the pit, his chest heaving. His face and what remained of his once-proud Astra Militarum uniform was splattered with dark, drying blood. The dirt floor of the pit was slick with spilled ichor. Skelton looked up at the roaring orks and hung his head. He dropped to his knees as if the weight of realisation had fallen on him.

‘’Ere is da winning humie!’ ’Eadbasha shouted to the cheers of the ork crowd. ‘But before you get your prize dere’s one more opponent you get to face as a special bonus for being da toughest. Da ork pit-fightin’ champion, Mikrull da Greenest!’

Skelton, physically and emotionally beaten, barely looked up as an enormous heap of bright green muscle leapt into the pit, opened his arms wide and bellowed out an immense, ‘WAAAAAGH!’

Skelton grabbed the two cuttas and rose to his feet to face the ork gladiator, but it was evident he was struggling to stand. Wounded and exhausted, he had little fight left.

Unarmed, Mikrull stalked towards Skelton. Skelton swung a cutta at Mikrull’s throat, having to reach up at the target above his head, but Mikrull caught Skelton’s wrist in his thick fingers. Skelton wasted no time in swinging the second cutta but Mikrull caught that too. The ork held Skelton by both wrists, lifted him into the air and, with a flick of his arms, slammed Skelton face first onto the ground.

Skelton lay immobile in the blood-soaked dirt of the pit. Mikrull roared again and the watching greenskins joined him. He lifted his large foot and brought it down on the back of Skelton’s head. The Rotauri First stared in abject horror as Skelton’s skull was crushed beneath the ork gladiator’s heel. None of the Guardsmen could look away, none except van Veenan, who was staring only at Lieutenant Pokato.

When the Guardsmen returned to their barracks, van Veenan’s rage had not abated. He was seething with it, his jaw clenched hard enough that he thought he might crack teeth.

The troopers of Barracks Five entered their now depressingly familiar accommodations with their eyes down. Van Veenan, on the other hand, burst into the building and strode towards Pokato. The lieutenant’s eyes grew wide at the sight of the sergeant major, his bloodied face a storm of fury.

‘Sergeant major,’ Pokato said, retreating in panic. ‘What are–’

Van Veenan reached the lieutenant and interrupted him with a stinging right jab perfectly placed on his nose. Pokato stumbled back against the wall and slid to the floor in a jumble of arms and legs. The barracks was quiet, everyone trying to process the day’s events, but now it fell into shocked silence.

‘Sergeant major,’ Pokato whimpered, touching his nose and pulling away his fingers to inspect the blood flowing freely from his nostrils. ‘You have struck a superior officer!’

‘Oh, Emperor’s teeth,’ said van Veenan, ‘shut your prepubescent face, you treacherous little shit.’

‘How dare you! I am an officer and the son of the governor.’ Pokato turned to Commissar Hardnuss, who stood a short distance away. ‘Commissar, I demand you discipline the sergeant major. This is unacceptable.’

‘Ordinarily I would agree wholeheartedly, lieutenant,’ Hardnuss said. ‘Striking a superior requires severe disciplinary action.’ She walked over to where van Veenan loomed over Pokato. ‘However, regulations are non-specific about prisoner-of-war situations. Given the strain placed on all of us over the last month I think it’s suitable to let this go. Plus there are mitigating circumstances.’

‘And what are those?’ Pokato asked. ‘What possible circumstances excuse the breakdown of discipline within the Astra Militarum?’

‘Simple,’ Hardnuss said, ‘you are a treacherous little shit.’

‘Commissar!’ Pokato blustered. ‘This is a disgrace. I am the only officer–’

Van Veenan interrupted Pokato yet again by slamming his boot on the man’s neck and pinning him back against the wall. The lieutenant choked and gasped. ‘What… are you… doing?!’

‘Tell them what you did,’ van Veenan said, in a tone that would plant fear in the heart of just about anyone but a Space Marine.

‘Somebody… do something.’ Pokato’s eyes were panicked.

‘Tell them what you did.’

‘I… I don’t know what you’re… talking about.’

Van Veenan steadily increased the pressure. Pokato grabbed at van Veenan’s boot, but he had little hope of getting free of the veteran Guardsman. ‘Tell them you ratted them out. Tell them how you told the orks they were going to sabotage the lift of the arm.’

‘No,’ Pokato said, his face turning red, his voice mangled from the pressure van Veenan was applying to his voice box. ‘I didn’t.’

Van Veenan grabbed the uprights of a bunk for leverage and pressed more of his weight down. Pokato began to flail and hit weakly, now almost unable to breathe.

‘Tell them how you gave the orks a signal when Trooper Skelton started cutting.’

‘You what?’ Trotter said from nearby. ‘You told the greenskins?’

Pokato shook his head.

‘Tell these troopers the truth!’ Van Veenan roared, unleashing all the fury he’d carried back with him from the fighting pit.

‘Okay,’ Pokato rasped.

Van Veenan pulled his foot away. Pokato took a deep, ragged breath.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I told the greenskins… about the sabotage… I was trying to protect–’

‘Trying to protect what, you conniving bastard?’ Trotter said. ‘I had friends in that pit. Skelton–’ Her voice caught and she couldn’t go on.

‘You’re a fragging traitor is what you are,’ another said.

All the Guardsmen in the barracks were looming towards Pokato. His eyes grew even more terrified at the sight of the gathering mob. Van Veenan didn’t move. He let the troopers of Barracks Five stalk towards Pokato, who hurriedly stood. ‘Stop. Listen. I ordered you not to attempt that sabotage because I knew if you succeeded even more of us would be punished.’

‘You’re trying to act like you protected these men and women,’ van Veenan said, ‘but you turned on them.’

‘Maybe we should have a fighting pit of our own,’ Trotter said. ‘You can go first. Against all of us.’

Pokato stumbled as he moved sideways along the wall of the barracks, desperately trying to put some distance between himself and the Guardsmen. He rushed to the door and began banging on it with his fist. ‘Help! Let me out!’ He bashed the door as hard as he could. ‘They’re going to tear me apart!’

The door unlocked and swung open. Urzog was standing there. ‘Wot is all the zoggin’ racket?’

‘They’re going to kill me,’ Pokato said as he hurried out of the barracks, pushing past Urzog.

‘Oi!’ Urzog yelled. ‘Dis humie is runnin’!’

‘What?’ Pokato said, as he stopped and turned, his voice desperate. ‘No, I’m not running. They’re going to kill me in there.’

Two orks grabbed Pokato roughly by the arms.

‘I’m not trying to escape. I’m the one who told you about the sabotage, remember?’

‘You ain’t allowed out of your barracks after the door gets locked, humie,’ said one of the orks that had hold of him. ‘Da boss said it’s the only time we’s allowed to krump you.’

‘Please,’ Pokato said, ‘they’re going to tear me apart.’

‘They gonna tear you apart?’ the ork said.

‘Yes,’ Pokato answered. ‘Help me.’

‘Humies aren’t good at tearin’ apart. You ain’t got strong arms like us boyz. We’s show you tearin’ apart.’

‘No!’ Pokato pleaded. ‘Stop! You said you’d keep me alive!’

‘I never said dat.’

‘Urzog did,’ Pokato squealed. ‘Ask him. We had a deal.’

Urzog stared at the lieutenant and lifted his broad shoulders in a shrug. ‘Don’t remember.’

The orks holding Pokato looked at each other and also shrugged. They pulled in opposite directions, and with a pop and a squelching tear they ripped off both of Pokato’s arms. He screamed, howling in pain and terror and calling out desperately for mercy as blood spurted from each side of his torso. The orks looked at each other again, then beat Lieutenant Tam Pokato, son of the governor of Rotauri, to death with his own arms, howling joyously as they did so.

The Guardsmen from Barracks Five looked on through the doorway.

‘Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,’ van Veenan said. ‘At least he died like a Guardsman even if he never lived like one.’ He turned to look at Commissar Hardnuss. ‘Fine then, commissar, I guess you get your wish. I’m the ranking officer now. Let’s figure out how to get the Holy Throne out of here.’

Chapter Five

Van Veenan moved with the mass of Guardsmen making the daily trudge to the transport yard. Six weeks they’d been captives now. Six long weeks working as slaves for the greenskins. But at least van Veenan had focus. He had a mission and whenever he felt himself sliding back into despondency, he just had to remember the way Skelton had looked at him from the pit. That was enough to remind him that he couldn’t abandon these troopers, not the way the Imperium apparently had.

Van Veenan approached a group of Guardsmen from Barracks Five. On a nod from him they slowed, slipped their hands into their pockets and turned them inside out, emptying black dirt on the ground. Van Veenan’s original idea had been to stealthily dispose of soil by having Guardsmen sew secret pouches inside the bottoms of their trousers, which would be slowly emptied over the course of each day. But the orks had proved so unobservant that dumping pocketfuls of dirt and roughly kicking the piles around was plenty sufficient to remain undetected.

It was still tedious work as they could only move small amounts of dirt at a time, but they’d been doing it for a week straight and with the amount of Guardsmen now involved in van Veenan’s scheme, it was startling how much soil they could displace.

Planning for their elaborate escape had begun the night after the pit fights even while Lieutenant Pokato’s screams still hung in the air.

‘Okay,’ van Veenan had explained, ‘the concept is simple but will be difficult to pull off. We start a tunnel here in Barracks Five and go straight down, three yards at least. Then we dig a straight shot for a hundred yards before angling back up to the surface. That will bring the tunnel up in the forest beyond the fence. Three yards down should be deep enough that we don’t disturb any mines the orks have placed around the perimeter. We’ll keep the tunnel small but will still need to reinforce it with wood slats from the beds and shelves, plus whatever else we can take without it being too obvious. We’ll dispose of the soil in small batches, which will be the hardest part – other than avoiding certain death if we’re caught.’

Just as Commissar Hardnuss had said, most of the Guardsmen believed the stories about van Veenan and they followed his plan to the letter, completely confident that he was guided by the God-Emperor. He didn’t have the heart to tell them he was completely improvising. Still, that shouldn’t have come as a surprise; he’d been in a lot of unusual situations throughout his career and often improvisation had been the only way out.

After dumping today’s soil the Guardsmen entered the yard, walking into the long shadow of the enormous ork effigy that loomed over everything in the camp, a jumble of red and yellow metal panels cut from containers; green sheets pulled from Munitorum truck bodies; and dirty, blackened steel stripped from the promethium refinery. The towering idol was complete but for the lower arms. The angular head, a little undersized for the immense body, was hinged at the jawline and the face and top of the head was folded open. Inside the metallic skull was a chair. Two mekboys, one of which was Rukaz himself, and several grots moved around inside, securing the chair and working to connect and solder a veritable spider’s web of wires in place.

Rukaz leaned forward, hanging out of the open head, and yelled to the mekboys on the ground.

‘All right, you lot,’ he called, ‘tell ’em to bring up the weird ’un – and you better get the boss, ’e’ll want to see it fire up I ’spose.’

Once Rukaz’s order reached them, a group of orks opened the door to a rockcrete bunker ordinarily used to store highly volatile chemicals or ammunition. With a tentativeness rarely seen in the greenskins, four orks entered the bunker while two remained outside with shootas trained on the door. Moments later the four orks re-emerged literally dragging a fifth with them. They pulled it along the ground by chains that were wrapped around it what must have been twenty times, pinning its arms to its side and holding its legs together. The ork squirmed and fought but the heavy chains held tight so that it could do little but flop around like a fish pulled up onto dry land. The ork wore nothing but tattered yellow rags and strapped to its head with a dozen buckles was the colourfully wired helmet van Veenan had seen other Guardsmen making. When, in its desperate thrashing, the chained ork rolled to face the watching Guardsmen, van Veenan saw its eyes were ablaze with a phosphorescent green glow.

‘My ’ead!’ the ork called out in a pained cry. ‘I is gonna blow! Take this thing off so I’s can zap somethin’!’

‘Bring ’im up ’ere so we can wire ’im into the capacitive amplification unit,’ Rukaz called. ‘Quickly, you zoggin’ gits! Remember what ’appened last time!’

Van Veenan had seen psykers before. Once, when he was still with the Talissian 51st, he’d fought alongside a sanctioned psyker and had watched him manipulate immense towers of flame into swirling vortices and send them out to engulf hordes of slavering tyranids. This chained-up ork must be one of the greenskin psykers, the ones they called weirdboyz. But where the sanctioned psykers van Veenan had seen had been rigorously trained, constantly monitored and covered in holy seals to lend them the resilience of the God-Emperor against the dangers of the warp, the ork weirdboy was physically pulsating with uncontrolled power, ready, like an unpinned grenade, to explode at any moment. Hesitantly, the orks hoisted the weirdboy onto their shoulders and carried it up the scaffolding to the head of the massive construction.

It was hard to see the details from ground level but van Veenan heard Rukaz shouting orders through the screaming and moaning of the weirdboy. They forced it into the chair, strapping it in place with more buckled straps and extra chains. Grots scampered around soldering hanging wires to those spraying out from the helmet. When they’d finished, Rukaz flipped a large lever and with a hydraulic drone the skull of the monstrous ork effigy began to close. Rukaz, the mekboys and the grots hurried out as the face lowered, hiding the still-struggling weirdboy from view.

As Rukaz and his team of assistants descended the scaffolding, the enormous figure of Warboss Nok ’Eadbasha stomped into the yard, orks and grots scampering away at the sound of his hydraulically assisted footfalls. When he reached the ground Mekboy Rukaz completely ignored the warboss. He backed up, his face turned skywards to stare at the head of the giant ork, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

‘Rukaz,’ ’Eadbasha said with obvious impatience, ‘wot’s ’appening then?’

Rukaz turned to look at the warboss. ‘We’ve strapped the weirdboy into the phase-invariant amplifier.’

‘Wot?’ ’Eadbasha snapped. ‘Speak proper, you brainy git.’

He kept it hidden from the much larger ork, but van Veenan noticed the way the mekboy rolled his sharp red eyes. ‘The weirdboy’s energy is being ampli– made bigger and will shoot out into space so that orks all over the galaxy will feel it.’

’Eadbasha smiled. ‘And join my Waaagh! Right. Good. ’Ow is we gonna know if it works?’

Rukaz didn’t answer. He just stood watching. Then, the eyes of the ork effigy began to glow with that same light that had emanated from the weirdboy, a bright green illumination that suddenly gave this enormous conglomeration of mismatched metal the eerie sense of being alive. Crackles of energy in curling bolts of emerald ran from the head down the torso before earthing into the ground. The air filled with a faint buzzing and van Veenan felt the hair all over his body stand on end.

‘Haha!’ Mekboy Rukaz exclaimed. His body jerked with twitches and convulsions as the coils on his back picked up the energy being exuded by the effigy, firing zaps of green straight into his head. ‘That’s ’ow we know it’s gonna work! I told you I was the brainiest mekboy. I knew I could amplify spontaneous emissions out of a weirdboy’s ’ead.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Warboss ’Eadbasha said, ‘you is a right genius. Now wot?’

‘Now we wait,’ Rukaz said. ‘The signal is being sent out tellin’ more boyz to come ’ere, and while that’s happening we move on to stage two of construction.’

‘Stage two?’ ’Eadbasha asked. ‘Wot’s that?’

‘We need to complete the internal fit-out, control and propulsive systems,’ Rukaz said. When he noticed the way ’Eadbasha’s misshapen forehead furrowed in obvious confusion, he explained, ‘We need to make it move.’

There it was, van Veenan thought to himself, confirmation of his and Hardnuss’ fears. The ork effigy was not just some enormous statue designed to draw orks from across the galaxy – it was going to be a vast, ambulatory engine of war.

‘Yeah,’ ’Eadbasha said. ‘I know that.’

‘Plus we need to fit the weapon systems.’

The warboss’ thick green face broke into the widest grin van Veenan had ever seen, showing almost all his crooked teeth and yellowing tusk-like fangs. ‘The dakka.’

‘Yes,’ Rukaz said. ‘The dakka.’

While most Guardsmen were in the yard witnessing the ork effigy burst to life with weird energy, inside Barracks Five Commissar Hardnuss and a dozen other troopers worked on the tunnel. Most of the work took place at night, but van Veenan and Hardnuss had taken advantage of the greenskins’ inattention to keep a crew digging during the day.

The most difficult thing had been getting through the rockcrete floor. Corporal Trotter and Trooper Williams had been tasked with stealing whatever tools they could to assist with breaking through. They’d ended up with a large rotary-bladed saw and several heavy-headed hammers. The saw had no problem cutting rockcrete but it was slow work and it was loud. Luckily, as more time passed with the orks remaining here in ’Eadbasha’s camp and not out slaughtering their way across the galaxy, pit-fighting tournaments among the greenskins had become increasingly common. While the orks drank and roared at one of these pit fights, the residents of Barracks Five used the opportunity to cut through the rockcrete floor in a rear corner of the storeroom. The open square of soil could easily be hidden by dragging a bunk over the tunnel opening.

Tunnel construction was now well under way. Having dug straight down, the Guardsmen had begun work on the long horizontal section. Three troopers worked in shifts in the tight confines at the tunnel face, digging and clearing away the soil with handmade picks and shovels. They loaded a small wheeled cart – also handmade by the Guardsmen – with the dirt they removed. Two ropes were tied to the cart, one coiled up on the floor near the diggers and the other running back to the Guardsmen waiting at the tunnel entrance. When the cart was full, those at the tunnel face would tug on the rope running back down the tunnel. On that signal the Guardsmen at the entrance would pull the cart down to them, empty it out, and then signal for those at the tunnel face to retrieve it and continue.

In this way the tunnel had reached almost thirty yards long and while Guardsmen worked to dig and remove dirt as fast as they could, another group built and installed wooden supports along the tunnel to avoid the roof or walls collapsing.

Commissar Hardnuss stood in the vertical drop at the tunnel entrance, keeping watch and supervising construction. Hardnuss stepped back as the Guardsmen holding this end of the rope nodded and began to pull another cartload of soil down the tunnel. When the cart rattled out of the tunnel entrance, they tipped the load onto the ground and tugged the rope to send it back. Hardnuss set to helping pack the soil into the small pouches that would be distributed among the troops and disposed of during tomorrow’s march to the yard.

They were almost finished packing this load when a dull thump came from inside the tunnel, followed by muffled shouts of panic. Moments later one Guardsman, Corporal Tua from Barracks Three, emerged grimy and wide-eyed from the opening.

‘Cave in,’ he panted, out of breath from a desperate crawl back down the length of the tunnel, ‘about twenty yards in. Something gave way. Gemmell, Vercoe and Enoka have been buried.’

‘Throne,’ Hardnuss said, ‘get some shovels and come on.’

She shrugged off her heavy Commissariat greatcoat before grabbing one of the small hand shovels. She all but shoved Corporal Tua aside and dived head first into the tunnel, crawling on hands and knees as quickly as she could into the gloom. The Guardsmen had only managed to secure a handful of lumen globes and used them sparingly, so most of the tunnel was shrouded in darkness.

‘Commissar, is that you?’ she heard from ahead of her as she reached the location where a pair of troopers were working on reinforcing the tunnel supports. They had a lumen globe with them but the tunnel collapse ahead had filled the air with thick brown dust yet to settle.

‘It is,’ she responded as she approached. ‘What happened?’

‘We heard the wood splinter,’ one Guardsman said, ‘then it all came down.’

‘We were working our way along to add more support but we didn’t get there in time,’ the other added. ‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

She could have told them it was all right, that it wasn’t their fault, but she was a commissar and she’d learned long ago that it was best not to let any troopers get comfortable around you – even in this situation. Besides, she feared she was already too late and would not delay further with sentimental nonsense.

‘Give me your lumen,’ she said, holding her hand out, ‘quickly now.’

The Guardsman grabbed it from where it hung on a nail nearby and handed it to her. Without another word Hardnuss hurried into the pitch-darkness ahead. The Guardsmen digging at the tunnel face would have had a lumen globe with them too, but that was buried under collapsed soil now, just as they would be.

As she crawled ahead, the light of her lumen globe fell on the mound of soil marking the location of the collapse. Without hesitation she dropped the globe and began to dig. Corporal Tua was soon beside her, both of them shovelling soil. The dirt, freshly dropped to fill the tunnel opening, was loose and easy to displace, but there was a lot of it and in the tight confines they could only move so much at a time.

It took ten minutes before Hardnuss’ shovel blade came to a jolting stop against the brown boot of an Imperial Guard trooper. She and Tua worked frantically in the hot, sweaty tunnel to clear away enough dirt that they could pull the trooper free. But when they did, Hardnuss’ fears were realised. It was Trooper Enoka, a stocky woman who had proven a natural at digging tunnels. As they pulled her into the open, they found her eyes wide, brown and black spots of dirt stuck to her unmoving eyeballs. Her mouth was open as if gasping for breath, but all that had filled her throat was black soil.

‘Help!’

The call was coming from ahead, muted by the fallen earth but unmistakably originating from the other side of the collapse. Hardnuss shovelled as fast as she could, calling for Tua to hurry despite the fact he was working just as fast as she was. Eventually they broke through to another buried Guardsman, this time barely missing taking fingers off with the end of their shovels – fingers that squirmed, clawing for fresh air. They cleared soil up to the shoulders before grabbing the arms and pulling. Trooper Gemmell came out coughing and spluttering.

‘Vercoe’s still in there.’

It didn’t take long to locate Vercoe, who, luckily, had been on the other side of the collapse. She crawled through the hole Hardnuss and Tua cleared. Her face sank when she saw Enoka’s body nearby.

‘No,’ she said, crawling up beside her and laying her hand on her cheek. ‘No.’

Trooper Gemmell looked to Commissar Hardnuss. ‘They were… together.’

Vercoe turned to Hardnuss. Her eyes were glassy and red as she fought to keep the tears back. ‘This is too dangerous, commissar. We can’t keep going. We’re barely a third done and it’s starting to collapse.’

Hardnuss hardened herself. They all thought of her, as they did most of the Commissariat, as a cold-hearted, uncompromising disciplinarian. The truth was Hardnuss would have preferred to comfort Vercoe. But soft-hearted commissars led to disciplinary breakdowns and even though they were prisoners, she could not allow that. As a commissar she simply accepted that in order to keep humanity safe there were those in the Imperium who had to push more of their humanity aside than others; they had to be Hard Nuts.

She thinned her eyes at Vercoe. ‘Unauthorised fraternisation within a regiment is against regulations, trooper. It leads to loss of focus. Now pick up your shovel and keep digging.’

Chapter Six

In retrospect, thinking the orks would build anything this big and not fit it with enormous, bowel-loosening guns was extraordinarily short-sighted. What sort of effigy would the greenskins consider fit for their gods other than one that could be used in war? Two days after the mammoth ork had lit up with glowing green energy, ten greenskin trukks had driven into the camp spewing pillars of grey smoke into the air. Two of them were loaded with smaller equipment while the remainder drove eight abreast, the barrel of an enormous cannon laid across their flat trays. After they were unloaded the trukks left and later returned with the barrel of a second cannon. They returned a third time with housings, support structures and pieces of an immense firing mechanism. Here, van Veenan realised, were the lower arms of the ork.

‘It’s as we suspected,’ Commissar Hardnuss was saying to van Veenan as they stood side by side in the yard watching the trucks roll in. ‘This isn’t just a transmitter, it’s a Gargant – an ork war machine on par with the Titans built by the tech-priests of Mars.’

‘I don’t imagine the Adeptus Mechanicus would care to have their work compared with that,’ van Veenan said.

‘No,’ Hardnuss agreed. ‘But it’s certainly of a similar size.’

Van Veenan sighed. ‘Yes, and I can’t say I’m reassured by the glowing green eyes either.’

Before Hardnuss could reply, a rumbling roar filled the air, louder than thunder and rolling on and on. The sky above them was suddenly alight with an orange glow and the thin wispy clouds began to churn. A void ship was entering the planet’s atmosphere – a void ship large enough that it had no business entering the atmosphere at all.

The entire sky appeared to be tearing open. Eventually the roaring, boiling fire parted and the shape of the ship became clear. It was descending to the planet’s surface some distance beyond the confines of the prison camp. In the void of space it was easy to forget the scale of the ships crossing against the black, but here, as one attempted to land on the surface, it was a stark reminder of their sheer size. It must have been close to two and a half miles long and resembled an Imperial light cruiser, the long body peppered with arched windows and bearing a distinctive scooped plough at the front. But this was no Imperial ship, at least not any more. The front had been converted to approximate a blue ork skull with its mouth wide open, a gaping maw filled with teeth and two enormous curving tusks. Across the hull were other colourful additions: armour and cannons and skull motifs that could only be the work of the chaotic minds of ork mekboys, minds van Veenan was now all too familiar with.

‘’Ere comes a kroozer of Deathskull boyz for me WAAAAGH!’ ’Eadbasha roared in delight as he emerged from his headquarters.

The massive ork ship dropped towards the surface of Rotauri, the forest below bent under the blast of the descent thrusters, centuries-old trees snapping like twigs beneath a boot. They were here. Whatever fringe science Rukaz had cooked up in his xenos brain had worked and it had brought a massive ork kroozer here in only days.

Van Veenan looked at Commissar Hardnuss. They both knew the situation had escalated. As much as van Veenan was loath to admit it, this had become about more than escape. The wider Imperium needed to know what was happening on this backwater planet. What had started as a relatively small-scale ork invasion had blossomed into the beginnings of a major threat.

‘We need to speed up tunnel construction,’ van Veenan said to Hardnuss. ‘We’ve probably only got a few weeks until the Gargant is finished and now ’Eadbasha’s plan is actually working. We need to work around the clock.’

‘We’ve already had multiple cave ins,’ Hardnuss said, ‘one of which I had to dig troopers out of myself. We haven’t got enough material to reinforce the tunnel.’

‘Get each barracks to strip everything they can. We’ll build more tunnels and start moving material into Barracks Five.’

‘That’s a huge risk,’ Hardnuss said.

‘Yeah, well, I guess it’s time to find out whether I really am blessed by the Emperor.’

It was early morning and van Veenan’s eyes stung with lack of sleep. One of his eyelids had been twitching for eight straight days and his head had been pounding almost as long. He knew he was at the limit of physical endurance. He’d slept maybe ten hours over the last week and saw from the deep black rings under the eyes of the surrounding Guardsmen that they too were reaching breaking point. But they were close now. So close.

Van Veenan stood at the entrance to the main escape tunnel, helping to pass along planks of wood being brought in from the side tunnels. The escape tunnel now extended about eighty yards out from Barracks Five. Van Veenan had enlisted the help of troopers who’d served as a Basilisk artillery crew to perform range estimation, and their approximation put the tunnel out past the fence but not yet into the forest. Smaller passages had been dug between the barracks until a network of tunnels criss-crossed underneath the camp, allowing transport of material and Guardsmen from any barracks to any other and ultimately into Barracks Five and the main tunnel. ‘Honouring the Emperor’ was the code for their escape attempt and it would hopefully take place within the week.

Two more ork craft had arrived since the first. One had been another light cruiser, the other a rok – a greenskin ‘ship’ constructed by hollowing out an asteroid and outfitting it with engines and as many guns as the orks could fit on the available surface area. The rok hadn’t so much landed as it had plummeted in barely controlled atmospheric entry, slamming into the surface with a devastating impact. It had come down several hundred miles away at least, keeping the prison camp safe from the shock wave and resultant shower of debris.

Even having made planetfall so far away, the orks of the rok were slowly making their way towards the monstrous Gargant like a teeming mass of pilgrims approaching a holy site. With that, and the other two ships, the population of greenskins had swelled. Most of them stayed out of the prison camp on the orders of Warboss ’Eadbasha, who van Veenan was sure had grown bigger since so many orks had flooded to join his Waaagh! The recently arrived xenos had established a settlement nearby that was rapidly turning into a sprawling shanty town, adding to both the overpowering smell and the amount of conflict breaking out between orks of different clan affiliations.

The eyes of the massive Gargant still glowed and bolts of green lightning regularly shot down its height or arced off to hit the roofs of nearby buildings, or ground out through nearby orks causing them to pop like oversized green pimples. The construction efforts had now moved to the interior of the machine, the massive cannons had been attached to the arms and heavy motors were brought across from the refinery to act as propulsion. Huge electro-magnetic pistons, also pilfered from the promethium refinery, were positioned inside the legs and arms where they connected to massive gears at the joints. A control room was established in the chest section and stairs and ladders were being erected throughout the inside. It would soon be operational.

‘All right,’ van Veenan said to the Guardsmen working around him, ‘let’s close up the tunnels for the morning. Pass the word to rotate the day shift in. Twenty pouches of soil back to each barracks and remind them to at least spread it out. I saw half a dozen dirt piles yesterday morning. Let’s not get complacent this close to the end.’

The Guardsmen moved back through the tunnel system to their own barracks, where they covered the tunnel entrances, cleaned themselves up as best they could, filled their pockets with soil and waited innocently for the ork guards to lead them to work.

When he arrived at the yard, van Veenan saw Rukaz approaching. The mekboy had his goggled eyes fixed on him and was moving with determined haste. Van Veenan, having never had much to do with the head mekboy, stopped, a little taken aback by the sudden attention.

‘You,’ Rukaz said when he reached van Veenan, his head twitching as energy jumped between the coils on his back. ‘You are some kinda nob for the humies, aren’t you?’

‘Company Sergeant Major Marcus van Veenan, Rotauri First Infantry, First Company.’

Rukaz lifted the green-lensed goggles up and rested them on his forehead. He stared at van Veenan as he jammed his finger in his ear, wriggled it around and then smelled it with an oddly satisfied look on his green face. ‘Long name,’ he said.

‘You can call me van Veenan.’

‘Right, well you listen to me, humie nob van Veenanz, I know you sneaky humies are up to somethin’. The others are too thick to notice but I see you lot skulkin’ about with dirt in your keks.’

Van Veenan’s heart froze.

‘Oh,’ Rukaz said, slapping his hands on the sides of his face in mock surprise. ‘Da humie is shocked. You think you is real smart but I is the smartest mekboy in the whole galaxy and that makes me proper brainy.’ He pointed back towards the Gargant. ‘I built that.’

‘Well, actually us humies built it,’ van Veenan said.

Rukaz growled. ‘You know wot I mean. I imagined it up.’

Van Veenan looked at the Gargant. ‘Bit small, isn’t it?’

‘Wot?’

‘I don’t know, I was just expecting it to be bigger. More guns at least.’

Rukaz growled again. ‘You think I’m not smart enough to notice you sneakin’ about. I been watching you, van Veenanz. I could tell Warboss ’Eadbasha to go lookin’ for your tunnels right now.’

Van Veenan raised an eyebrow. ‘But you’re not going to?’

Mekboy Rukaz sniffed. His face twitched. He shrugged. ‘You better ’urry up and get to the yard, humie nob van Veenanz. You and your humies got to finish my Gargant before you get about your sneakin’.’

Van Veenan stared at the mekboy as the ork turned and walked away. He had the distinctly unpleasant feeling he was now engaged in a battle of wits with a greenskin and was somehow losing.

He thought about his encounter with Rukaz all day. No ork guards came to tear his limbs off or drag him to the fighting pit or toss him over the fence to the gathering orks of the Waaagh! By late afternoon he’d almost driven himself crazy trying to decide what Rukaz’s game had been: was he trying to goad him into launching an escape so they’d be caught? Or was he hinting they should escape, helping him because he was pursuing his own scheme against the warboss? Still, by the time the red sun of Rotauri began to set and the sky slowly blended from the white-blue of the day to the pink of evening, van Veenan had decided. He moved among the Guardsmen as subtly as he could and gave them a simple message to spread. Tonight, a full week early, they would honour the Emperor.

Chapter Seven

‘We’re only at eighty-five yards,’ said Corporal Roha, one of the Basilisk crew who seemed to see distance markers everywhere they looked. ‘If we bring the tunnel up we won’t have reached the forest.’

Van Veenan knew the thick forest would provide much-needed cover for their escape; having the tunnel exit in open ground was a huge risk. He rubbed his stinging eyes and looked around at the gathered troops, Commissar Hardnuss, Corporal Trotter, Corporal Tua and others who had been instrumental in the execution of the escape plan. He realised something then that he hadn’t appreciated during his career as a front-line Guardsman. Something that made him – at least partially – reconsider his attitude towards those in command. The orders that came down from the captains and the colonels and the lord militant generals that had seemed so ludicrous to those on the front lines must have been made under circumstances very similar to this. Risk versus reward. Cost versus benefit. Impossible choices. Did they go now and risk being seen during their desperate dash for freedom, or did they wait, knowing that at least one of the orks was well aware that they were building an escape tunnel?

‘We just have to hope the darkness is enough,’ van Veenan said. ‘Pass the word along, we’re bringing up the tunnel.’

And that was what they did. Despite the hesitation he knew they felt, each of them nodded and moved off. The order was passed to the Guardsmen in the tunnel to start digging upwards and breach the surface. Trotter and the others used the minor tunnels to move off to the other barracks, spreading the word that it was time to prepare for the escape.

Commissar Hardnuss turned to look at van Veenan, who obviously wore his concern on his face.

‘They know what to do, sergeant major,’ she said. ‘You’ve readied them well. This will work.’

Van Veenan nodded. She was right. He’d readied them as best as he could. They knew what to do. Once the tunnel breached the ground, the opening would be reinforced and two ladders sent down the tunnel. A sentry would use one ladder to watch for any ork guards and signal when it was clear for Guardsmen to escape up the other.

Commissar Hardnuss would lead the first group of twenty-five troopers down the tunnel. Then fifteen minutes later the next group would go. Throughout the night, at fifteen-minute intervals, groups of twenty to twenty-five Guardsmen would make their escape. Naturally, van Veenan would lead the last group.

It took a little less than two hours to bring the tunnel to the surface, reinforce the opening and put the ladders in place. In that time, van Veenan made only one alteration to his plan. He would act as watch sentry for the first group. He needed to see them safely away.

The first group of escapees was already in Barracks Five fidgeting with nerves as Corporal Tua came crawling out of the tunnel. He looked up at van Veenan and nodded. ‘We’re through, sarge,’ he said. ‘Twenty yards short of the woods, just like we thought. It’s a good night for it though, it’s dark out there.’

‘Thanks, corporal,’ van Veenan said. He turned to look at the gathered Guardsmen. ‘You all know the plan. When you reach the end of the tunnel, wait for my signal to go. When you go up and over, keep low and make for the trees.’ He paused a moment and added, ‘The Emperor protects.’

Van Veenan climbed down and began the long crawl through the dimly lit passage. At the end of the tunnel he climbed the ladder and peered out through the hole in the ground, keeping only the top of his head exposed. Tua was right, neither of Rotauri’s small moons hung in the sky and darkness lay heavy. The prison camp was bathed in a sickly yellow glow from high lumen towers, but luckily the diffuse light didn’t reach the tunnel exit. Van Veenan turned to examine the treeline. It seemed so close and yet dangerously far away. Darkness had wound itself around the trunks of trees to provide the perfect cover – provided they made it there. He turned his attention back to the prison camp, watching for ork patrols. A group of greenskins passed, arguing loudly about whose fist was the biggest, but they never once looked in the direction of the tunnel.

He looked down at Hardnuss and gestured for her to go. She climbed the ladder, looked over to him and, in a moment of human connection he’d never had with a member of the Commissariat, reached out a hand. Van Veenan took hold of it. She locked eyes with him, squeezed his hands with a vice-like shake and nodded. Then she climbed out and, crouching low, dashed away into the thick shadow of the trees.

Van Veenan watched her go, alert for any signal that the orks had spotted her fleeing across the dark ground, and only when she vanished into the thick gloom of the trees did he allow himself to breathe again. He exhaled slowly, calming his nerves. The first of them had made it. They could all make it.

He looked down and nodded for the next Guardsmen to go. They climbed the ladder, up and out, and stalked low across the grass and into the trees where Hardnuss would be waiting. Each time a new Guardsman came out of the tunnel, van Veenan checked the surrounds for any guards, watched the fence-line and listened intently until he was sure they were clear. Then he would signal for them to exit the tunnel.

After the eleventh had made their way across to the trees, he was about to signal the next when he heard the crack of a footfall breaking a twig and the gruff voices of two approaching orks.

‘I’ll be warboss of me own lot of boyz one day. Won’t be doin’ any zoggin’ patrols then.’

‘Yeah, you be warboss of cleanin’ the squig pen.’

‘Shut ya face. I is gonna work me way up.’

‘Go on then, ya git. Challenge ’Eadbasha in da pit. Show everyone you is toughest.’

‘I will. Next time there’s a pit fight I’ll challenge the boss in front of everyone, show ’em dat I should be the boss.’

‘Zog off ya will. Pass me dat fungus beer. You ’ad too much.’

Keeping the barest amount of his head visible, van Veenan watched the pair of orks trudge past. They were outside the camp but were keeping close to the light as they patrolled the perimeter. As they moved closer, van Veenan lowered himself down the ladder and with a sudden crack the rung bearing his weight snapped. His feet dropped out from under him but he held tight to keep from falling.

‘Oi,’ he heard one of the ork guards say. ‘You ’ear that?’

‘’Ear what?’

‘A snappin’ noise.’

‘I ain’t ’ear nothin’ but you gobbin’ off. Now pass me dat beer back.’

Van Veenan exhaled. He pulled himself back up the ladder and watched the bulky shapes of the ork guards disappearing into the dark. He waited at least a minute and then motioned for the Guardsman to go.

The rest of the twenty-five Guardsmen made it out of the tunnel and into the relative safety of the dark woods without incident. Van Veenan watched the trees for a good five minutes after the last of them had gone. There was nothing he could do now. Hardnuss would take command of that group, moving them off on the long march through the forest to Flaxton, where the Rotauri First had been headquartered, and hopefully contact Imperial forces, inform them of the rapidly growing ork threat and request reinforcements. Van Veenan descended the ladder and began crawling back through the tunnel towards Barracks Five, where he would oversee the rest of the escape.

By the time Corporal Tua led the third group of Guardsmen down the tunnel he allowed himself a sliver of belief that they might pull this off. They had been right to put their faith in Sergeant Major van Veenan, and perhaps what some of the troopers said about him being blessed by the Emperor was true after all. Van Veenan’s escape plan certainly seemed to have His blessing.

Tua climbed the ladder, keeping watch, and was ready to clear the first of his Guardsmen to make for the trees when he heard the loud approach of two orks. The same two greenskins that had passed just over an hour before were making their way back around the outskirts of the camp. Tua stayed low, remaining patient as the orks approached, waiting for them to pass before sending his troops up and out of the tunnel exit. Unfortunately, the inebriated orks, who must have been consuming fungus beer at an alarming rate, were wandering directly towards the tunnel.

‘I is gonna drive the big Gargant.’

‘You is not. Only the mekboyz are gonna drive it.’

‘I could if I wanted to.’

‘You don’t know anything about it, you zoggin’ git.’

‘I is not a git. You is a git.’

‘Git.’

‘Call me a git again and I’ll bloody well krump ya.’

‘Zoggin’ git.’

The first ork roared and swung a wild, beer-fuelled punch at its patrol partner. The haymaker strike landed awkwardly but was still hard enough to send the second ork staggering directly towards the tunnel exit. It stumbled, tripped over its feet and fell directly into the tunnel opening.

Tua cursed as the ork fell past him and slammed into the dirt at the bottom of the hole. Shocked, the greenskin stood, shook its head and found itself looking directly into the face of Corporal Tua. It took the ork a moment before its red eyes grew wide.

‘Humies! Da humies ’ave a tunnel!’

‘Shit,’ Corporal Tua said. ‘Shit! Fall back! Fall back now!’

Even as Tua was screaming at the Guardsmen to retreat, the second ork jumped down into the hole. Both orks grabbed their shootas and began firing indiscriminately at the Guardsmen around them and those still in the tunnel. In that moment, Corporal Tua’s thoughts turned to the God-Emperor. He had time to wonder why the Emperor had chosen that moment to lift van Veenan’s blessing and forsake them all to their enemy before several explosive shells entered his back and erupted out his chest, opening his torso in a splatter across the freshly dug dirt.

Inside Barracks Five, van Veenan heard the kinetic booms of ork shootas firing from beyond the prison camp. Though the deafening cracks of the ork weapons echoed and bounced off the buildings outside, the sound was unmistakably coming from the direction of the escape tunnel.

These booming blasts alerted not only van Veenan to the discovery of the tunnel but also drew the attention of every greenskin within earshot, including those newly arrived orks in their rickety shanty town – and, of course, not wanting to miss out on some fighting, they came streaming towards the noise.

The troopers who’d been in the tunnel when orks began swarming back the other way came flooding out in a mass of chaotic confusion. They poured like rats fleeing water up and out of the tunnel entrance. Van Veenan grabbed the next trooper that clambered out of the tunnel, a young off-world girl, and spun her to look at him. ‘Give me the situation, trooper.’

‘Orks found the tunnel, sergeant.’ She spoke quickly, her pupils dilated from both the darkness and the adrenaline flooding her body. ‘They’re coming!’

Van Veenan suddenly found himself pumped full of adrenaline too.

‘How many soldiers were behind you?’ he said to the red-haired trooper, but her eyes had returned to the tunnel. ‘Hey!’ He shook her by the shoulders. ‘How many were behind you?’

‘I was tenth in the line so there’s fifteen others behind me.’

Van Veenan turned to the troopers who had escaped the tunnel, huddled together like frightened civilians. ‘Stand to!’ he roared at them. ‘Pull yourselves together, damn it! You are warriors of the Imperium!’

He counted the troopers coming out of the tunnel. There were still ten down there. The howling, roaring war cries of the orks were growing louder. Human screaming soon followed. The orks were on them, tearing them apart in the claustrophobic darkness below ground and any moment the xenos would burst into the barracks. Van Veenan decided quickly.

‘You, you, you, you and you,’ he said, picking out five of the troopers, ‘slide the bunks over the tunnel entrance, put everything heavy you can find on top of them.’

‘Sergeant major, there are still–’

‘Now, troopers!’

‘Yes, sergeant.’

They slid the bunks along the now worn track in the rockcrete and over the hole in the floor.

‘Hey!’ a voice screamed as the troopers moved the bunks across. ‘We’re still down here!’

Screams of pain. Squelching of soft tissue. Breaking of bones. The roar of orks reverberated from under the beds, joined by the dying screams of those Guardsmen who’d been trapped with them. Van Veenan saw the faces of those troopers who’d closed the tunnel. He kept his face passive as he returned their gaze. He knew how they felt. He felt the crushing guilt too, probably more so, but unlike them, he couldn’t show it.

‘You acted under my orders,’ van Veenan said. ‘I condemned those troopers, not you. The sacrifice of the few for the lives of the many. Now, weigh the bunks down. Quickly now.’

The troopers moved off and began tossing whatever loose objects they could find onto the bottom bunk. It was best to put them to work. He could not afford for them to dwell on what had happened. He needed to keep the Guardsmen in this barracks, and the hundreds of others still in the camp, safe. The orks began smashing against the bottom bunk; he could see their strong green fists pounding upwards, the whole unit lifting with each strike.

‘We need more weight,’ van Veenan said. ‘Get on the bunk.’

The nearby troopers glanced at each other, the sounds of the dying still echoing from below.

The bunk bounced again with the strikes of green fists.

‘Now!’

The troopers didn’t hesitate again, clambering onto the bottom bunk to add weight. Van Veenan had bought some time, but it would not be much.

‘You there,’ van Veenan said, gesturing to another group of four Guardsmen, ‘we need weapons, whatever you can find that we can swing, stab or poke at an ork. The rest of you, there are loose bricks in the rear wall. Find the removable section and pull them out. Get ready to go but not until I give the word.’

The troopers set about their orders. He could see them trying to ignore the thumps of the orks hitting the bunks, but many of them flinched with each pounding crack.

A pile of what would have to pass for weapons collected on the floor: half a dozen handmade picks and shovels, hammers, an assortment of planks of wood, twisted scraps of metal, and there, on top, the circular saw they’d used to cut through the rockcrete.

Van Veenan walked forward and picked up the heavy saw. He hefted it up, judging its weight and balance. Then he realised the banging had stopped and instead he heard the scraping of the bunks on the floor. Eventually, even orks would realise they weren’t getting anywhere by punching whatever was in front of them. Now they were working together to tip the bunks over.

‘Are you ready?’ van Veenan said to the troops at the back wall. Several of them nodded. He could see they’d removed the bricks, opening their way for an escape into the camp.

‘We’re going to make a break out into the yard. Once outside you need to scatter. The greenskins are obviously going to be displeased with us so spread out and fight as best you can. We’re going to have to hope the orks coming through the tunnel provide some amount of distraction.’

Van Veenan stepped up to the hole in the wall. Behind him, the bunks – the troopers who were weighing it down now off to gather weapons and ready themselves – had started rocking on the spot, closer and closer to toppling over. ‘I’ll take point.’ Van Veenan flicked the safety switch on the saw and squeezed the trigger on the handle. The saw roared to life, shaking and wanting to pull down with the gyroscopic force of the spinning blade.

‘Go!’ van Veenan called, and he ducked through the hole in the wall. He began moving even before his eyes adjusted to the dark. From inside the barracks he heard the rocking bunks finally tip over and fall with a crash to the floor.

It didn’t take long for the greenskins of the camp, already alerted by the sounds beyond the fence, to notice van Veenan and the troopers pouring out of the barracks. When the first snarling ork appeared in front of him, van Veenan wasted no time. He rushed at the greenskin, right into the spittle spray of its war cry, and swung the saw. The blade, its serrated teeth spinning at three thousand revolutions per minute, met the side of the ork’s neck and threw chunks of green flesh in a wide arc. Eventually the ork’s severed head dropped to the ground. The body fell back, a great crimson flood gushing from the headless neck.

Around him the troopers ran in multiple directions, ork guards thundering after them. Shoota shots reverberated through the night.

The orks coming from the tunnel soon surged out of the hole in the barracks wall. It took a moment for the prison guards to realise what was happening, but when they did the chaos of the night intensified. Warboss ’Eadbasha, who himself strode out amongst the camp, roared orders that the humies be rounded up and any orks from outside the camp trying to kill them be krumped instead.

A group of orks rushed into Barracks Five and tossed several grenades into the tunnel. This killed a number of greenskins still coming into the camp from outside and collapsed the tunnel entrance in a blast of soot and dirt.

The orks eventually corralled the Guardsmen, van Veenan included, into one corner of the camp. Most of them were obeying ’Eadbasha’s shouts to not kill the humies, but van Veenan watched as some troopers refused to be recaptured and the orks, perhaps from some vicious greenskin instinct, forgot they were supposed to keep them alive. Most were rapidly caught, tackled to the ground and torn apart amid screams of pain and terror, or were blasted into fragments by the impact of a shoota round, but some of them kept the guards going on comical chases.

One Guardsman, being chased by none other than Big Nob ’Ardskull himself, sprinted towards the edge of the transport yard, where six ork warbikes had been parked. He threw his leg over to mount the black, skull-fronted bike. Two exhaust pipes as thick as a human torso stuck diagonally up behind him. The Guardsman hastily looked down at the handlebars as if searching for how to start the thing. He flicked a switch, gunned the throttle and slammed his foot down on the kick-starter. The bike turned over, puffing smoke and firing briefly before dying again. The Guardsman pressed another button, flicked a different switch and tried to kick-start the bike again but all to no avail. It wouldn’t start.

’Ardskull slowed as he approached, the Guardsman now desperately hunting for how to start the bike.

‘You ain’t orky enough,’ the massive nob said before grabbing the trooper by the shirt and lifting him off the saddle. ’Ardskull looked around as if checking the warboss wasn’t watching and then smashed his steel-topped head into the trooper’s face, caving his skull in. He tossed the body to the dirt and then walked off.

When what passed for order in the camp had been restored, van Veenan stood with the group of Guardsmen rounded up by the ork guards. Warboss ’Eadbasha thumped over in his hydraulically actuated suit, his red eyes glaring at the group of Guardsmen.

‘Which of you humies did this? Which is da boss of you?’

Van Veenan stepped forward.

’Eadbasha grunted. ‘You is boss?’

Van Veenan nodded. ‘I organised the escape if that’s what you mean. I’m responsible.’

The warboss grunted and opened his massive klaw to reveal the sharpened edges of the two hooked fingers. Van Veenan’s heart began slamming in his chest and adrenaline flooded his system as ’Eadbasha’s klaw arm pulled back ready to strike. But, despite every instinct telling him to flee, he stood his ground. He set his jaw and stared at the creature.

The klaw flashed and ’Eadbasha’s hydraulics hissed as he swung. As the killing blow began to fall, van Veenan screamed with furious rage at the greenskin. The klaw stopped, just before impacting the side of van Veenan’s skull.

‘You got gutz,’ ’Eadbasha said. ‘But you ain’t even da biggest.’ The warboss grumbled as if that fact was immensely disappointing to him. He turned to two nearby guards. ‘Bring ’im.’

Chapter Eight

The two orks carried van Veenan across the camp, his feet barely scraping the ground as they hustled after the looming, hydraulically powered shape of their warboss. He led them to the bunker where the weirdboy now powering the Gargant had been imprisoned. ’Eadbasha opened the heavy door, the hinges groaning their complaints.

Inside the bunker was a row of steel cages. The orks tossed van Veenan into the first cage, slamming the door closed and securing it with an old-fashioned padlock. ’Eadbasha stepped forward, grabbing the cage door and rattling it to check it was secure. Then he lowered his immense form – already hunched over to fit inside the small domed bunker – and stared at van Veenan through the thick bars. His green lips peeled back over both rows of pointed yellow teeth, each one rotten and twisted like gnarled stalactites and stalagmites in the dark of a cave. Van Veenan could see the defined scratches of file marks where ’Eadbasha had worked to sharpen his fangs even more than was natural.

‘’Ow many?’

Van Veenan knew what he meant but wouldn’t give him the satisfaction that easily. ‘How many what?’

A rumbling snarl built in ’Eadbasha’s throat. ‘’Ow many humies sneaked away?’

Van Veenan stared back into the red eyes buried inside ’Eadbasha’s bulbous, misshapen head. ‘None,’ he said. ‘That was the first group that tried to escape. I don’t know how many your new friends out there killed though.’

That same growl emanated from ’Eadbasha’s throat. Van Veenan wasn’t sure if it was annoyance, disappointment or disbelief. ‘Don’t matter. I got a buncha humies left. I got more grots comin’ with the boyz joinin’ my Waaagh! I ain’t gonna krump ya and I ain’t gonna krump ya friends neither. You humies is gonna finish my effigee and then you is gonna watch as Waaagh! ’Eadbasha goes off and smashes humies all across the galaxy. All ya humies sneakin’ about for nothin’. We smart enough to find ya little tunnel. We gonna make sure your friends can’t do nothin’ like that again, and you is gonna sleep in ’ere.’

‘You didn’t find the tunnel. One of your idiot guards fell into it.’

’Eadbasha slammed his huge fist up against the cage with a crash. Van Veenan, despite himself, flinched.

’Eadbasha smiled with vicious glee. ‘See?’ he said to the guards. ‘Even da ’ard humies are scared. It’s like they don’t even like fightin’.’ Then he turned, and with the hiss of released hydraulic pressure, stomped out of the bunker, the two orks following like canids trailing after their massive green master. The heavy rust-orange door swung closed and locked.

They left van Veenan alone, bathed in the withered amber glow of the bunker’s emergency lighting. The light was enough to see by but little more than that. Van Veenan propped himself up against the bars of the cage and leaned his head back, closing his eyes and feeling the cool of the metal against the back of his skull.

‘Humie nob van Veenanz.’

Van Veenan opened his eyes – apparently he was not alone. Through the cage bars he saw the shape of Mekboy Rukaz move out of a dark corner. It took van Veenan a moment to realise that Rukaz was also locked inside a cage, at the other end of the bunker.

‘I thought I told you not to go sneakin’ about yet,’ the ork said. He still had his green goggles propped up on top of his head and wore his strange coiled contraption on his back. It flashed with a pulse of green energy that momentarily lit up the bunker.

‘I’m touched,’ van Veenan said. ‘I didn’t know you cared.’

‘I don’t,’ Rukaz said. ‘I care whether you finish buildin’ my Gargant.’

‘Sure,’ van Veenan said. ‘So, why are you locked in here?’

‘I is always locked in ’ere.’

‘You’re a prisoner too?’

Rukaz didn’t answer but in that moment, van Veenan knew he’d been right about the tension between the mekboy and the warboss. Maybe he could leverage that.

‘Why does ’Eadbasha keep you locked up?’

‘Da warboss is a warboss,’ Rukaz said as if that explained it; perhaps in the mind of a greenskin it did.

‘Did you get on his bad side? Not that I suppose he has any other side.’

‘I is a smartboy,’ Rukaz said. ‘I do too much thinkin’ for ’Eadbasha. They won’t never admit it but all them big nobz and warbosses are scared of us that do the thinkin’ because they ain’t never done any themselves. They don’t know how to think. Unorky they call me. I’ll show ’em. If I can think up ways of killin’ while not gettin’ killed that seems like the way to win fights. That seems orky to me. Zoggin’ git locks me in ’ere and tells me to stop doin’ so much thinkin’ when he knows wot’s wot about krumpin’.’

‘Sounds like you should be in charge,’ van Veenan said.

‘Yeah, I probably should.’

‘And that Gargant, the one you built, it should be yours.’

‘Should be, yeah.’

‘So, why don’t you take it?’ van Veenan asked.

‘He’s big, ain’t he?’

So, even for what might well be the smartest ork in the galaxy, things still came down to who was biggest. Van Veenan knew he was about to take a step over the line into heresy, and that if he ever got out of this the Inquisition would likely want a word, but, given the situation, he took it.

‘What about you help us escape?’

Rukaz chuckled. ‘You want me to help you escape? I is already locked up. ’Eadbasha will krump me for that even if I haven’t finished his Gargant. You is proper stupid, humie nob van Veenanz.’

‘You should be warboss. You should have that Gargant. If you help us escape, we can help you get it.’

‘You already been caught sneakin’ about. ’Eadbasha is stupid as a brainless grot but he ain’t gonna let you do any more sneakin’ about buildin’ tunnels.’

‘We won’t be trying that again. We’ll fight our way out.’

Rukaz chuckled again. ‘Did you get krumped in the head, humie nob van Veenanz? You think you can fight all ’Eadbasha’s boyz?’

‘No, but if we can get weapons, we can make a surprise attack, blow up the fence and make a break for it.’

‘Now you the one not doin’ any thinkin’,’ Rukaz said. ‘None of you humies would make it past ’Eadbasha’s Waaagh!’

‘If we finish your Gargant first, why do you care?’

‘I don’t.’

‘So, will you help us?’

Rukaz scratched the side of his neck. A spark of green between the coils on his back momentarily lit up the space again. ‘I is still not sure what’s in it for me.’

‘You get my soldiers some weapons and we’ll kill ’Eadbasha on our way out.’

Rukaz was silent for what stretched into an awkwardly long time, but van Veenan didn’t push him. He waited for the green cogs to turn inside the ork’s mind. ‘All right then, humie nob van Veenanz. I get you some dakka and help you escape, and you kill me da warboss and I get to keep the Gargant.’

‘You’ve got a deal.’

Van Veenan had no intention of letting any orks off Rotauri with that massive war machine. If the opportunity arose, he’d more than happily help kill Warboss ’Eadbasha. He didn’t care about what passed for ork politics and who would fill the void left at the top, whether it was Rukaz or ’Ardskull or some other ork, but right now he’d say whatever he needed to get his troopers free.

Van Veenan had been confined to the bunker for a week. It had reached the point where, if they hadn’t been bringing him food and water at semi-regular intervals, he might have thought the orks had forgotten about him.

Each morning the door would open and a pair of ’Eadbasha’s most trusted ork guards would enter. They’d walk past van Veenan’s cell and drop a dish of cold, unidentifiable goop and a small cup of water outside his cage, just within reach, and would continue on to let Rukaz out of his cage. The entire time they were inside the bunker the orks never engaged van Veenan, no matter what he said to them. The guards must have been under the strictest orders from Warboss ’Eadbasha to simply pretend he wasn’t there. Then when Rukaz was returned to his cage at the end of the day, they repeated the whole routine with the food and the ignoring.

Strangely, van Veenan had begun to look forward to the return of his bizarre greenskin cellmate. They may have been enemies but at least it was someone to talk to. Each evening Rukaz would give van Veenan a brief update on what was happening in the camp.

Day one: ‘All your humie friends look… wotsat thing you humies get… sad, ain’t it?’

Day two: ‘Some of da humies were puttin’ in the nuclear plasma reactor and stupid Groblok told ’em to plug it in the wrong way. They is dead now but it was only a little boom so the Gargant is still okay.’

Day three: ‘Another kroozer of ork boyz showed up today. All of them those flashy Bad Moon gitz. Got more teef than brains those Bad Moons.’

Day four: ‘Today I stashed away a bunch of shootas, stikk bombs and rokkits in the yard for you, humie nob van Veenanz – enough for about thirty of you. A leg servo fell off the Gargant and crushed loads of your humies though.’

Day five: ‘Good news. Only one humie dead today.’

It was the sixth night when Rukaz said: ‘Da Gargant is done.’

‘What?’ Van Veenan said. ‘It’s finished? But I asked you to warn me when it was almost finished.’

‘Yeah. I told you they was puttin’ in the plasma reactor days ago. That’s the last bit wot goes in. It’s been all hooked up now and ready to be powered up.’

‘How was I supposed to know the plasma reactor is last?’

‘Stupid humie. The plasma reactor is always last.’

Van Veenan breathed out heavily.

‘So what happens now then?’ he asked.

‘We starts up the Gargant tomorrow for a systems check, then ’Eadbasha’ll probably start gettin’ ready to get off this planet and on with his Waaagh!’

‘We can’t let that happen,’ van Veenan said.

‘You is right, humie nob van Veenanz. I is gonna have that Gargant. It should be mine.’

‘That’s right – it’s only fair that after all your work creating such a masterpiece it should be yours.’ He wasn’t sure whether it was working, but he’d tried to maintain the ork’s trust, tried to flatter him and inflate his ego, all the while knowing the first thing he would do, aside from trying to get the remaining soldiers of the Rotauri First out of this prison camp, was his Emperor-damned best to blow that enormous ork monstrosity into more pieces than a gretchin force-fed a krak grenade.

‘You is lucky. I heard Warboss ’Eadbasha sayin’ he wants you to see it. He wants all you humies to see the Gargant ready to go. Da humies is done after that, he said.’

‘We’re going to have to attack before that happens. How do I get the weapons you’ve left for us?’

‘You leave that to me. I is gonna get you the dakka. You wait for my sneaky signal and you is gonna know what to do. You just take care of killin’ ’Eadbasha.’

Van Veenan thought about Lieutenant Pokato and the deal he’d tried to forge with the orks. He had to believe they’d made deals for very different reasons. Pokato might have wanted the Guardsmen to believe he was trying to protect them, but he was a craven fool just out to save himself. Van Veenan had no doubt he was a fool too, but he would die for these Guardsmen if that’s what it took. Still, he hoped his deal wouldn’t end with being beaten to death with his own limbs.

There had been no sign of Imperial forces over the last week. He hadn’t wanted to enact his ridiculous escape plan – well, his second ridiculous escape plan – without external support, but as usual it seemed like his hand was being forced. He’d hoped Commissar Hardnuss or one of the other escapees had made contact with Imperial forces and they would come roaring in to rain the Emperor’s fire of liberation down on the greenskins. That hope had faded more with each passing day and he couldn’t wait any longer.

As was proving far too common over his life, Sergeant Major Marcus van Veenan was on an unfamiliar battlefield with no one to rely on but himself and an improvised plan to try to keep those around him alive – and now he could add a shaky and possibly heretical alliance with an ork mekboy into the mix. In all the accounts of famous Imperial Guard soldiers he’d read over the years, none of them seemed to get into situations like this. Or at least none lived to tell the tale.

Chapter Nine

As van Veenan was led out of the gloomy confines of the bunker for the first time in a week, it took time for his eyes to adjust to the orange light of Rotauri’s high sun. When he reached the yard he saw the ork Gargant looming over the gathered Guardsmen, big-bellied and brutish against the backdrop of the sky.

Even as the giant ork machine stood motionless and silent but for the occasional crackle of green lightning down its mismatched torso, van Veenan could imagine what it would be capable of. He could see it stomping with ground-shaking power over a battlefield, unleashing a torrent of mighty rounds that would tear through every armoured vehicle the Imperial Guard could throw at it. More than ever, with its power to draw untold number of orks to ’Eadbasha’s side, the Gargant seemed a threat that could bring the entire sector to its knees.

When van Veenan was led towards the Guardsmen by the two ork guards, he was greeted by the sight of the soldiers of the Rotauri First even more ragged than he remembered. They were thin, their faces gaunt, their uniforms mismatched and dirty. Still, when they saw him most of their faces showed relief. Corporal Trotter clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Good to have you back, sarge,’ she said. ‘Sorry to say you’ve made it just in time for the end.’

‘Don’t count us out quite yet,’ van Veenan said, keeping his voice low. ‘I want you to find thirty troopers who can still fight and quietly gather them here.’

Trotter nodded and nonchalantly moved off into the Guardsmen.

Van Veenan resisted the almost overwhelming urge to pace. He wrung his hands together, desperate to be doing something other than passively waiting. The mekboyz and gretchin moved over the massive Gargant, dismantling the last of the scaffolding, and then began entering the machine to undertake the final stages of preparation. It seemed obvious from the way the orks ignored them that there would be no more work for the humans. They had done the heavy construction. The slave work was finished. The only reason they were still here was likely because ’Eadbasha needed something to test the Gargant on.

Slowly, van Veenan watched troopers moving towards him, giving small nods as they approached. Eventually Corporal Trotter and thirty Guardsmen she considered capable had joined him at the back of the group. They stood around in anticipation, though not entirely sure of what. In truth, not even van Veenan knew precisely what the plan was. He was waiting, probably ill-advisedly, on an unknown signal from a crazed ork mekboy.

Just as van Veenan was thinking Rukaz had either forgotten about him or had deliberately abandoned him, the short mekboy came waddling towards him.

‘You,’ he said, pointing at van Veenan, ‘you is in charge, right?’

‘That’s right,’ van Veenan said, playing along for the benefit of the nearby orks who watched with passing interest.

‘I need you to take some of your humies into that bunker and collect the plasma generator power inverter coupling. It’s ’eavy, probably you’ll need lots of humies.’ Rukaz paused, lifted his goggles and performed the most exaggerated wink van Veenan had ever seen. It was so painfully obvious that he was sure they would all be killed on the spot, but oddly none of the orks recognised the gesture for what it was. Apparently stealth and deception, or the detection of it, were not within the ork skill set.

‘Right,’ van Veenan said, ‘got it.’ He looked around at the thirty Guardsmen who had already been selected. They knew this was somehow related to their instructions but were understandably confused about what Mekboy Rukaz had to do with all this. ‘You at the back here, with me.’

The ork guards, whose eyes had begun to glaze over with the words ‘plasma generator power inverter coupling’, watched van Veenan and his thirty troops walk towards the bunker. They shrugged and turned back to the Gargant.

Inside the bunker was a large pile of equipment that had been covered with a green canvas tarpaulin. It was irregularly shaped and seemingly out of place amidst the rest of the neatly stacked supply crates. Van Veenan approached the pile, waiting for the Guardsmen to enter the bunker after him.

‘Is that what we’re in here to get?’ one of the troopers asked.

‘I’m hoping so, trooper,’ van Veenan said. He reached down and flicked the canvas cover off the pile. He heard sharp intakes of breath from many of the troopers; some of them let out low whistles.

‘Yep,’ van Veenan said, ‘this is what we’re here for.’

Piled against the wall of the bunker were at least some of the weapons the greenskins had confiscated after Rotauri had fallen. Ninety per cent of the collection were lasguns but there were several boxes of grenades and a crate of Mars-pattern man-portable missile launchers too. There were far more weapons here than van Veenan had expected. Not that he was complaining.

‘Time to gear up, Guardsmen,’ van Veenan said and he began with his orders, pointing at troopers as he went, organising them to suit the plan rapidly forming in his head. ‘We’ll split into three ten-man fire-teams. You eight there run light, one lasgun each plus another to drop with others on the way – you’re with me and Trotter in squad one. Make sure you’re able to shoot as soon as we leave this building. You ten are squad two, grab as many weapons and grenades as you can carry. The rest of you grab those missile launchers, you’ll run as heavy weapons in squad three.’

The men and women behind him did not hesitate; though they must have known van Veenan had somehow made a deal with a xenos, a crime punishable by death, none of them mentioned it. They grabbed weapons, the familiar sound of lasguns priming like a sweet music to them all. They carried the Emperor’s fury in their hands once again.

‘All right,’ van Veenan said, looking at those gathered before him. ‘Our objective is simple – we’re getting out of this camp and we’re taking that Emperor-forsaken Gargant down on the way. You all know the odds aren’t good so I won’t blow smoke up your arse. Many of us will die. Maybe all of us. Guardsmen die, that’s what we do. But when we die, we take xenos with us. We’ll show them why Imperial Guardsmen are not to be kept as slaves.’ The men and women nodded, steeling themselves, grasping their lasguns and launchers with white knuckles. ‘Our attack will be three-pronged.

‘Squad one, we’ll come out in arrowhead formation. I’ll take point. We exit this building in a firing advance towards the yard. We move fast and hit as hard as we can. If it’s got green skin, you kill it.

‘Squad two, move inside the arrowhead. Your primary goal is to get weapons to as many other Guardsmen as you can. Once you’ve delivered your weapons, break formation and start a fighting swarm.

‘Squad three, you move at the rear. Once the havoc starts, your aim is to breach the fence. The missiles and grenades should be enough to do it. Bust us a hole. Squad one, through all this you stay on me. We’re going for the Gargant. All clear?’

There were nods and responses of ‘Yes, sergeant.’

‘Good.’ Van Veenan moved to the door, the troopers behind him readying themselves. He turned back to look at them. ‘We’ve forgotten who we are,’ he said. ‘We are the Astra Militarum. We are the hammer that crushes the foes of mankind. We’ve spent all this time fearing the fact that we are locked in this prison with the greenskins, but we’ve forgotten what else that means. They are locked in here with us. The Emperor protects.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ they responded in unison.

‘Good speech, sarge,’ Trotter said. ‘Like I said, good to have you back.’

And van Veenan opened the door.

No doubt the orks expected to see van Veenan and the group of Guardsmen exit the bunker carrying a large piece of equipment they didn’t understand. What they saw instead were Guardsmen emerging with guns, something they absolutely did understand. Their eyes grew wide with surprise. A nearby ork reached for its slugga, but van Veenan already had his lasgun shouldered. He pulled the trigger and, with the familiar crack of las-fire, an instantaneous beam lit up with a blaze of blue directly through one of the ork’s wide red eyes; the eyeball shrivelled away into black goo and the back of the ork’s skull blew out with the pressure of superheated fungal brain matter.

A dozen greenskins standing nearby stared as the dead ork landed with a heavy thud in the dirt. After a moment they opened fire with booming shots towards van Veenan’s small force. Those orks armed only with choppas began charging, bellowing out guttural roars. The troopers in van Veenan’s first squad fanned out in a broad arrow, targeting lasgun fire at the approaching xenos. The second and third squads, as per van Veenan’s orders, remained tucked inside the formation, firing out if they could but remaining focused on making it to the yard. Like blood in the water, the sound of shootas and lasguns attracted the attention of the predators all around them. Orks throughout the camp turned en masse at their favourite sound in all the galaxy, the sound of fighting, and none wasted any time in rushing towards it.

The hundred or so Guardsmen left in the yard reacted to the sudden eruption of fighting in various ways. Some scattered, either from fear or from a realisation that they could aid van Veenan by spreading out as a distraction. Others remained where they were. The bravest, or perhaps most reckless, among them attacked the orks. They tackled them in groups of three or four, jumped on their backs, scratching and gouging at their faces and eyes. Most of these desperate assaults ended with the Guardsmen being tossed to the ground and orks battering their heads into pink paste, but several groups of troopers overpowered their much larger foes.

Warboss ’Eadbasha, who with the swelling of his Waaagh! had grown to almost ten feet tall, turned from where he was waiting near the feet of the Gargant and looked in the direction of the rapidly spreading conflict. His red eyes flashed with anger. This may have been fighting, but it was fighting that was interrupting his big moment. He stomped towards the fray, swinging his enormous power klaw. With each powerful arc, the klaw sent a spray of Guardsmen into the air, arms, legs and backs fractured by the impact. Van Veenan saw the warboss coming through the yard. He wasn’t interested in the unarmed Guardsmen around him; he was coming for those that had started this – he was coming straight for van Veenan. Van Veenan looked around but could not see Rukaz anywhere. The mekboy had no doubt run away to hide as soon as he’d let van Veenan into the bunker.

Van Veenan shot as he moved, picking targets and firing on them with as much priority as he could in the growing mayhem. In his peripheral vision he caught sight of a Guardsman taking a shoota round in the leg. He fell, his leg torn apart from the knee down. ‘Pick up the pace!’ Van Veenan yelled as he fired a las-beam into the chest of an ork who ran at them with choppa raised and spittle flying from its wide, roaring mouth. A shoota shell from somewhere hit the ground in front of van Veenan and exploded, bursting upwards, spraying a shower of dirt into his face and momentarily dazing him.

‘Sarge!’

He heard the shout from behind him. He thought it was Trotter, but with the noise and confusion he couldn’t be sure. ‘I’m fine,’ he called. ‘Triple time, let’s go!’

They were almost to the main group of Guardsmen but needed to hurry. They wouldn’t stand a chance if they couldn’t arm as many troopers as possible. They were already dying faster than van Veenan had expected. Inaccurate they may be, but with massed fire now turning towards the advancing Guardsmen, the orks’ shootas were levelling troopers all around van Veenan, blowing limbs off or opening bowels in sprays of viscera.

Van Veenan saw ’Eadbasha sweeping his way through the yard like a tornado. Despite what he’d told Rukaz, he had no intention of trying to take down the rampaging warboss. Van Veenan was not a power-armoured Adeptus Astartes who could go toe to toe with a ten-foot-tall howling green killing machine. No, the heavy weapons team would breach the fence and hopefully some Guardsmen would escape, but more than anything he hoped they would create as much confusion as possible so he could bring down the Gargant before Warboss ’Eadbasha crushed them all between the long digits of his power klaw.

‘Squads two and three, execute now,’ van Veenan called as their arrowhead formation reached the main group of Guardsmen.

Squad two began running in all directions, handing out or just throwing weapons to every unarmed Guardsman they passed. None of them needed any encouragement to turn their newly acquired firearms on the orks all around them.

‘Scatter and fight,’ van Veenan roared.

Newly armed Guardsmen shouldered weapons and began firing as they moved. This sudden injection of new opponents drew the orks’ attention into a thinly spread attack.

A shoota round struck the ground to van Veenan’s left, bursting on impact and covering him with more mud. He dived to the right as another round whistled past, rolled and came up kneeling. He raised his lasgun with practised ease and fired in the direction of the shot. His las-beam struck an ork in the chest, opening a smoking hole.

Around him the mass of Guardsmen in the yard were breaking apart, troopers scattering in all directions to find what cover they could behind the depot buildings or piles of unused scrap. Las-beams streaked outward with flashes of blue in an anarchic display as the fighting rapidly spread across the camp, in all directions, with seemingly no fixed battle lines.

Van Veenan’s plan was progressing though. He watched squad three as they ran to take cover behind what had been Barracks Seven, not letting the surrounding mayhem distract them from their goal. Moments after they slammed their backs up against the wall, and with half the squad dropping to their knees to provide covering fire, van Veenan saw first one, then two, then several more missiles fire towards the camp’s fence. The first missile fell short, detonating in the middle of a group of gretchin trying to run away from all the fighting. With a burst and a spray of small, squealing green bodies the last of ’Eadbasha’s original grot slaves met their undignified end. The second and third missiles found their target and directly impacted the fence, blowing the wooden and steel construction outward. When the next missile struck the ground just inside the fence-line it triggered several landmines just below the surface. Mushrooms of dirt erupted upwards in a tower, and even before the soil and fragments of rock had settled to the ground Guardsmen were already making a break for the exit. Van Veenan silently congratulated squad three before he yelled his order to his own squad.

‘Squad one, tighten up on me.’ He looked at the squad’s six remaining members. He saw a few longing glances towards the now smoking hole in the fence. ‘I know the way out is open but that’s not our job. Our job is to put an end to the threat here. We’re going to get inside the Gargant. We built it, we can tear it down.’

Squad one nodded in unison. ‘Yes, sergeant.’

They followed after him as van Veenan ran for the towering ork machine. All around them the camp had devolved into carnage. If there was any focal point of the fighting though, it was the mammoth hole that squad three had blasted through the fence. This was where most Guardsmen were headed and it drew most of the greenskin attention.

Van Veenan and his squad took advantage of the confusion and moved swiftly towards the massive ork war machine. As they were crossing the yard, stray shoota rounds and tumbling ork rokkits cut squad one’s numbers from six to four. Just van Veenan, Corporal Trotter and two troopers, Natana and Tereti, remained. Van Veenan hastily corrected that number to three when Natana’s head exploded.

As he was urging the last remnants of his squad to hurry, van Veenan heard a rumbling, screaming roar overhead followed by the unmistakable boom of aircraft rupturing the sound barrier. He looked up in time to see six aircraft passing above them. Not just six aircraft but six Imperial Thunderbolt fighters on a low-pass reconnaissance flight. The type of flight van Veenan had seen many times before, the type of flight that meant there was a force advancing somewhere behind them.

Van Veenan felt a sliver of relief at the possible arrival of reinforcements, but they would need to join the fight soon. The men and women of the Rotauri First had deliberately swarmed throughout the camp, causing it to descend into mayhem – and there was only so long they could hold out in the anarchic fighting so suited to the orks.

As he turned to make for one of the Gargant’s feet, where he knew there was a doorway, he saw the massive, hydraulically driven shape of Warboss ’Eadbasha stampeding through the fighting, his eyes fixed squarely on van Veenan.

Chapter Ten

Commissar Hardnuss rattled around inside the commander’s seat of the Leman Russ tank, peering out through the thin reflector sight. She was glad she hadn’t refused the helmet handed to her as every time the immense sixty-ton vehicle accelerated, decelerated or abruptly turned, her head hit the turret ring above her in the tight space. Not to mention that without the helmet’s noise-cancelling headset, the furious roar of the tank’s V12 engine would have deafened her.

Following their escape from the prison camp, Hardnuss and her small retinue of troops had trudged the ten miles to Flaxton. The civilian population, mostly workers at the promethium refinery or families of Guardsmen, had fled at the first signs of the ork invasion and the town was completely empty, the flora and fauna of Rotauri already reclaiming the streets.

From inside the First Infantry’s headquarters, Hardnuss had managed to contact the Navy transport Wings of Endeavour carrying the Larlo VI Seventh Armoured Rangers. They were one week out but already en route to investigate the loss of communication with Rotauri. Hardnuss had filled them in and provided coordinates for Flaxton to act as a staging ground.

After a week of impatient waiting, the sight of the mammoth Devourer drop-ship descending in a field outside the town was like a vision straight from the Emperor. A yawning beast, the Devourer opened its immense forward bay door, and with a rumbling growl from its throat came the glorious sound of a mechanised regiment firing their vehicles to life.

Colonel Dresner, a tall, wide-shouldered man in command of the Seventh, had rolled forward in his command Chimera to meet Hardnuss.

‘Commissar Hardnuss, I presume,’ the colonel had said.

‘Yes, colonel,’ Hardnuss replied. ‘I’m very glad to see you.’

The colonel nodded. ‘You seem to be missing one of these.’

He tossed an object to Hardnuss. She caught it and looked down at the familiar sight, a gunmetal-grey barrel, a black body emblazoned with a golden aquila – a bolt pistol.

Later, as the tank regiment thundered away from Flaxton, Hardnuss squeezed the grip of the bolt pistol, feeling the familiar weight in her hand. It felt good to wield a weapon of the Emperor again, to have the power to deal out punishment to those who deserved it. As a commissar that was her purpose; she hadn’t realised quite how much she missed it when it had been taken away. It was an extra thrill to be in the commander’s seat of a Leman Russ, to have the might of the machine to add to her pent-up need to deliver vengeance. Command of this tank had been given up to her by one of the Seventh Armoured Rangers’ sergeants so that she could ride into battle with the regiment and use her knowledge of the ork camp to assist their attack.

Her tank was near the front-centre of the forty-strong advance of lumbering, unstoppable armoured vehicles as they drove in an extended line towards the now wildly overpopulated ork shanty town and the prison camp beyond it. The tanks powered through the forest, turning sharply on their rumbling tracks to negotiate their way between the trees, splintering and knocking them down with their thick armour plating when there was no other way around.

As the Seventh emerged from the treeline, forty promethium-guzzling V12 engines growled in unison. And the orks were already waiting. There could be no hiding the advance of an armoured regiment. The greenskins did not need complicated auspex stations or a planetwide vox-network, it was enough for them to hear the ferocious engines ploughing through the forest. When the line of Leman Russ war machines hit the open ground before them, a sight that should have stuck fear and awe into the hearts of mankind’s enemies, the orks whooped in joyous rapture. It was not only Hardnuss who felt elated at finally engaging in battle; the greenskins too were at last able to release the frustration that had built up within them.

The orks poured from the shanty town in a green wave, some clambering up onto the roofs of precariously constructed buildings and others hanging out the windows to take aim at the approaching Imperial forces. Seemingly all at once, with no leadership or tactical consideration, the greenskins opened fire. Bullets from sluggas and shootas merely pinged off the thick Leman Russ armour and even large-calibre explosive shells that detonated on impact did little more than leave black scorches over the surface of the tanks.

Despite being sealed within the steel beast with her noise-cancelling headset firmly over her ears, when the Leman Russ fired Hardnuss felt as though she were inside a crack of thunder. The world shuddered but the commissar kept her gaze fixed on the reflector sight and watched the barrage of battle cannon shells from the Seventh Armoured Rangers slam into the ork town. The hastily erected buildings stood no chance under the onslaught and they burst apart in flying debris of wood, rockcrete and sprays of ork flesh. Beyond the exploding town, Hardnuss could see the camp and the shape of the immense ork Gargant standing above it all.

‘Colonel Dresner,’ Hardnuss said over the vox, patching into the colonel’s tank beside her in the line, ‘I’d advise watching our fire. We’ve got friendlies in the camp.’

The colonel didn’t reply and for a moment Hardnuss wondered whether he’d received other orders – it wouldn’t surprise her to learn that those in the camp were considered acceptable losses. But then the colonel spoke over the regiment-wide vox-channel.

‘All units, close fire only. We hit the orks with smash and crash.’

The line of tanks accelerated towards the ork shanty town ready to plough in, their advance all but unstoppable, at least until the first ork tankbustaz emerged onto the field. Several mobs of these large boyz pushed their way through to the front.

Dozens of rokkits were loosed towards the advancing tanks, spinning, tumbling and looping through the air and leaving tumultuous lines of smoke trailing behind them. Most flew in harmlessly haywire trajectories, spearing into the ground or buzzing away into the forest, but a number found targets. These tankbusta rokkits struck the immensely thick Leman Russ armour but their shaped charges punched hard. With explosions that rocked the mammoth vehicles on their tracks, they tore craterous gouges into hulls and several managed to bring tanks to a halt as engines took damage or the crews inside were punctured by spall rupturing off the internal walls.

Commissar Hardnuss watched as the tankbusta boyz brought out bright red squigs, snarling, snapping and yanking at the chains that held them. Each of the wild creatures had bombs and rokkits strapped to their sides and their ork masters released them, letting them bound straight at the vehicles.

Tanks across the line opened fire at the charging squigs with their hull-mounted heavy bolters. The red orkoid creatures began hopping and dashing in serpentine paths to avoid the fire, but those that were hit splattered in sprays of red or exploded as the armament they carried discharged. Any that reached the tanks struck with suicidal detonations, blasting damage in the front and sides of tanks and in some cases disabling the vehicles as they blew their tracks off.

Hardnuss saw tanks, half a dozen or more, drop back from the line as the orks managed to disable them. That still left more than enough of the Emperor’s hammers to smash into the ork town and lay waste to everything around them. Hardnuss felt the fully unleashed raw power of the Leman Russ’ engine as they crashed through a rockcrete barrier and into the tight, twisting streets.

Tanks rammed their way through ork buildings, killing just as many of the greenskins under their rolling tracks as they did with their heavy bolters. Close confines were not ideal for tank warfare and the need to smash their way through buildings and negotiate the shattered debris slowed down their advance.

Orks swarmed around the slowed tanks, shooting at them from close range, climbing onto them to try to lever open the hatches. Some even resorted to hitting them with choppas. Those vehicles armed with sponson-mounted flamers sprayed the greenskins with superheated promethium when they drew too close.

‘Tankbusta bombs,’ Colonel Dresner roared over the vox. ‘Take down any greenskins with those tankbusta bombs!’

Hardnuss immediately began scanning the area she could see through the reflector sight and saw a lightly armoured greenskin dashing down the street towards them, a round flat-sided bomb in its hands.

‘Two o’clock,’ she called down the vox, ‘we’ve got a tankbusta at two o’clock.’

The gunner on the heavy bolter was firing into a group of greenskins descending a destroyed building beside them and immediately began to swing around to target the tankbusta, but Hardnuss could already see he was going to be too slow. She undid the turret hatch and pushed it open. As she emerged from the top of the tank, she was immediately assaulted by the sounds, sights and smells of battle. She ignored it all to raise her newly acquired bolt pistol. She fired three times in quick succession at the ork tankbusta. The creature fell, dropping the tankbusta bomb harmlessly to the ground.

Below her, the tank jerked and began rumbling forward again. Hardnuss bellowed out a war cry to match that of the greenskins around them, firing randomly with her bolt pistol. After so long kept captive, she couldn’t help but feel a cathartic release in executing those greenskins that had kept her prisoner. She considered, just for a moment before she banished the heretical thought, whether perhaps humans were not so different from greenskins after all.

Chapter Eleven

Outside the camp, the complexion of the battle had changed. Van Veenan had seen the reassuring sight of a battle line of Leman Russ tanks burst forth from the trees and slam into the ork shanty town in a thunderous frontal assault. Those orks from outside who had been running for the hole in the fence had performed a rapid about-turn and headed back to engage the newly arrived armoured vehicles.

But inside the camp, van Veenan had more pressing concerns as, with deceptive speed, Warboss ’Eadbasha had caught up with him. The massive ork lumbered across his path, blocking him from reaching the Gargant.

Hydraulic fluid sprayed in a high arc from a hose connected to his shoulders as the warboss leaned forward and roared, his misshapen and bulbous head close enough that van Veenan felt the heat of his breath.

‘WAAAAAAAAAAAGH!’

’Eadbasha closed his mighty klaw, already dripping with blood, and swung it wildly. Van Veenan lunged forward, right under the arc of the klaw and almost between ’Eadbasha’s legs. Troopers Tereti and Trotter both dived to their left, dodging the powerful weapon. Trotter rolled smoothly and lifted her lasgun as she came up kneeling. She fired at the enormous warboss, the las-beam connecting with ’Eadbasha’s torso, but it struck a part of his chest encased in thick armour. The surface of the metal burned and became a bubbling black liquid in an area not much larger than a one throne coin. She fired again, moving her aim upwards towards ’Eadbasha’s exposed head, but he shifted sideways just enough that the beam caught his iron jaw with a glancing blow, leaving a superheated red line that soon faded into a black gash. Tereti was up and firing too, her las-beam burying itself in ’Eadbasha’s power klaw arm but doing little damage.

‘Emperor damn it,’ Trotter muttered as she prepared to fire again, but by now ’Eadbasha had swung his other arm around. He held a twin-barrelled shoota that looked like little more than a pistol in his enormous fist. Trotter rolled to the side, the concussive blast striking the ground nearby and causing an explosive ringing in her ears. Tereti attempted to scatter too, but was caught as the shot burst at her feet. She was thrown backwards, her standard-issue Astra Militarum boots, and the feet that were in them, nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, van Veenan, lying on his back under the hulking warboss, plucked a krak grenade off his belt, ripped the pin out with his mouth and tossed it straight upwards before scampering through ’Eadbasha’s legs to clear the blast radius. Thankful for all the practise he’d had with his improvised sock-ball, he looked back to see the krak grenade float perfectly upwards and, with a clink, magnetically attach itself to ’Eadbasha’s armoured chest. Van Veenan counted. Three… two… ’Eadbasha clamped his power klaw over the krak grenade, but before he could pull it off, it erupted. Van Veenan rolled onto his stomach and covered his head with his hands to protect himself from the explosive debris and the fragments of shattered armour.

After the momentary deafness had passed, van Veenan looked up. His heart immediately sank. Warboss ’Eadbasha still stood. His power klaw had been blasted open, the weapon twisted and missing one of its long, talon-like fingers, and his chest armour was blackened and cracked, but he was still alive, his face full of fury.

‘Emperor’s teeth!’ Van Veenan cursed as he clambered to his feet. A lasgun beam streaked past. Trotter, in her dazed and confused state, had fired again but missed high over ’Eadbasha’s shoulder.

Van Veenan lifted his lasgun ready to fire but ’Eadbasha swung his power klaw. Van Veenan took a leaping step backwards, dodging the swing, but the end of the warboss’ weapon caught the barrel of his lasgun and sent it spiralling from his grasp. The ork brought his shoota around to aim at van Veenan, who instinctively dived sideways as the barbaric gun boomed, gouging twin craters where he’d been standing. Van Veenan rolled, knowing a follow-up attack would be imminent, but he wasn’t fast enough. ’Eadbasha’s power klaw slammed down from above him, the two remaining digits impaling themselves into the dirt either side of van Veenan’s torso. The klaw sparked, smoked and released a high-pitched grinding as ’Eadbasha closed the damaged appendage. Van Veenan felt the pressure of the klaw squeezing shut, pinning his arms to his sides.

Trotter screamed as she ran at the warboss, firing las-beam after las-beam. Most of them struck the warboss on his thick armour, ablating the surface a small amount but causing no significant damage. Several of the shots struck flesh, though. Van Veenan could smell the burning of ork as las-beams cut into ’Eadbasha’s bare arm just above the power klaw, a smell like setting a match to a mushroom. ’Eadbasha didn’t flinch, not even as Trotter’s final las-beam hit him in the face, burning through one cheek and exploding out the other in a spray of teeth and tongue. As Trotter reached the warboss and desperately swung her lasgun at his legs like a mad lumberjack, ’Eadbasha threw his free fist and backhanded Trotter aside like an annoying fly before turning his attention to van Veenan.

‘Should ’ave krumped ya when I ’ad da chance,’ ’Eadbasha growled as the crushing pressure of the klaw grew, squeezing van Veenan’s arms against his ribs and making it hard to breathe. He was sure his bones were about to snap.

‘Puny humies easy to break.’

Van Veenan saw stars burst across his vision. He felt a pop in his ribs, then another and a sudden sharp pain. He couldn’t breathe at all now. He knew he was about to be crushed and was disappointed he wouldn’t get to go out with a witty one-liner. He seemed to be looking out at the world through a rapidly contracting tunnel. Then, as his vision was fading, the pressure released.

’Eadbasha had let go.

Van Veenan instinctively gasped for air, which magnified the pain in his ribs. He settled for small gulps as he tried to suck in precious oxygen. The power klaw lifted away as ’Eadbasha turned, only to be engulfed by a searing hot torrent of orange flame.

Van Veenan felt the skin of his face tighten; his eyebrows and hair began to curl and burn as the stream of flame roared over the top of him. He rolled to the side several times, ignoring the pain it caused in his ribs, knowing he had to escape the radiant heat. When the flame ceased, van Veenan looked up at what had sprayed the warboss with fire. To his surprise it was not Imperial forces; it was a contraption that looked like an enormous bipedal tin can. The machine, painted black and white and thickly armoured, walked on multijointed mechanical legs. Its four arms had two serrated power klaws, a spinning saw blade and a short-barrelled flamer, smoking from having just fired. Thick exhaust pipes on the back spewed coils of smog into the air. On top of the cylindrical body a hatch was open, out of which was poking the unmistakable green-goggled head of Mekboy Rukaz.

’Eadbasha turned to the mekboy driving the robotic machine. Large sections of the warboss’ armour and much of his exposed flesh were charred and melting away after being hosed down with the flamer. He growled deep in his throat and worked his jaw, attempting to speak, but the dark-green skin was blackened and, in some places, completely gone. He persisted though, ripping burned flesh apart as he opened his mouth to howl at the mekboy.

‘Rukaz!’ ’Eadbasha roared. ‘You traitorous git. I knew you was nothin’ but trouble.’

Van Veenan was utterly astonished that ’Eadbasha was still standing. Being doused with burning promethium would have left little of a human but charred bone. The pain must have been excruciating. Perhaps it was true that greenskins felt no pain at all.

‘Smartest is best, ’Eadbasha,’ Rukaz called back. ‘It’s time da galaxy got to see what us mekboyz can do. I is gonna be mek-boss now. This is gonna be Waaagh! Rukaz!’

‘As if,’ ’Eadbasha said. ‘I is toughest.’

‘My smarts make me toughest,’ Rukaz said. ‘Time for you to see why.’

Rukaz disappeared into his insanely armed Deff Dread, the hatch clanging shut behind him. Moments later the mekboy’s can, saw blade whirring and multiple klaws opening and closing, charged at Warboss ’Eadbasha.

‘WAAAAAAGH!’ ’Eadbasha roared and despite the way his damaged armour still smoked, his power klaw sparked and black hydraulic fluid sprayed from almost every pipe and tube, he charged straight at Rukaz’s machine. The gigantic ork and the monstrous machine, both around ten feet tall, slammed into each other with unbelievable force, momentarily spinning like dance partners before separating.

’Eadbasha swung his enormous power klaw and slammed it into the armoured shell enclosing Rukaz, taking a chunk out of the metal and causing the Deff Dread’s mechanical legs to work furiously to keep itself upright. Rukaz recovered control and ploughed straight back into ’Eadbasha, knocking him backwards.

Rukaz’s smaller power klaws didn’t strike ’Eadbasha. They worked surgically, grabbing at pieces of his shoulder armour and bending and pulling them off. ’Eadbasha retaliated by pushing the machine back and then slamming his power klaw down on top of it. The legs buckled but then powered up again. Rukaz went straight back to working on ’Eadbasha’s armour. Like the mekboy he was, he was dismantling ’Eadbasha piece by piece.

Van Veenan scampered away from the fighting, grabbing Tereti’s fallen lasgun with one hand and Trotter’s arm with the other.

‘Come on,’ he said as he ran for the Gargant. Even as they headed for the massive mechanical ork, smoke began pouring in rising pillars from vents at the back. The eyes still glowed green from the power of the tortured weirdboy but now the head turned, the arms began raising the massive cannons and the whole thing seemed to shift its weight forward, ready to walk. The Gargant was coming to life.

‘Emperor’s teeth and damnation,’ van Veenan cursed, but his words were swallowed by the sounds of rending metal, smashing rockcrete and howling engines. He turned to look behind him and saw the comforting sight of Leman Russ tanks smashing out the back of the ork settlement and towards the camp.

The Gargant groaned and with a discharge of its green energy, the right foot lifted, moved forward and then slammed to the ground in an earthquake step.

The Leman Russ tanks roared as they bulldozed through the fence and into the camp. The cavalry was here to liberate these prisoners of Waaagh! Van Veenan felt immense relief – they wouldn’t need to get inside the Gargant after all. That many Imperial tanks would blow the ork’s mighty war machine back into its component parts.

And sure enough, with resounding booms that seemed to crack the air in half, tank battle cannons opened up with the Emperor’s fury on the Gargant. Van Veenan waited for eruptions of superheated metal to burst from multiple locations all over the Gargant. Instead, what followed was a bright green flash of energy several yards away from the surface of the machine. Wherever a shell struck, a green crackling glow appeared and traced the shape of an energy bubble. Van Veenan’s heart sunk. The Gargant was protected by some form of force field.

Of course it was.

Even as shell after shell hit the Gargant, its force field held strong. It lifted its immense weaponised arms towards the tanks. The multi-barrelled cannons started to rotate, slowly at first but quickly gaining speed until they began to fire. The rapid, concussive booming of the cannons was even louder than the firing of the tanks. It was so loud that it may as well have been the only sound in the world. Van Veenan planted his hands over his ears, his eyes began to water and he was fairly certain he would never hear anything again. The orks throughout the camp cheered but van Veenan only knew this because he could see them raising their arms and weapons in the air.

The shots from the Gargant’s cannons streaked towards its attackers. The shells struck everything: tanks, buildings, the ground, other orks – it didn’t matter, the destruction was indiscriminate. The shells that hit tanks plunged through the armour, bursting them open in explosions of spinning shrapnel.

Van Veenan could do nothing but watch as the Gargant tore through the Emperor’s most faithful vehicles with relative ease. The armoured division returned fire, and the Gargant took a small step backwards under the barrage, but the energy bubble surrounding it never failed. Tanks were sheared in half, disappearing in bursts of fire, leaving the shapes of burning Guardsmen to run from the wreckage with flailing arms.

A dozen, maybe two dozen tanks were destroyed in what seemed like an instant. Eventually the armoured assault force broke through and peeled out in a fan, spreading into the camp to avoid the concentrated fire of the Gargant. Throughout the camp the Guardsmen, who had moments ago been fighting so valiantly, dropped to the ground and scrambled for what cover they could find, men and women now trapped in the middle of a war between gods.

As the tanks spread out they unleashed their heavy bolters and flamers at the orks, who ran around in what seemed delirious joy at the battle unfolding around them. Many had flocked to the Gargant and stood around its massive feet cheering and roaring and firing randomly towards Guardsmen and tanks. As the Gargant stepped backwards to maintain its balance under the barrage of Leman Russ fire, it planted a foot right on top of a large gathering of greenskins. Many of them avoided the foot but several others did not, and van Veenan felt an odd sense of pride that the metal sheets he had spent so much time riveting together had just crushed a bunch of orks.

Eventually the green force field flickered under the onslaught, with shells exploding closer and closer to the ork machine’s armoured surface, but the damage it suffered was minimal compared to the utter annihilation it was causing. Tanks were still being shredded across the camp. The might of Imperial Guard armour had been added to the fray, but they had done little more than scratch the Gargant’s surface.

‘Emperor’s Throne,’ van Veenan exclaimed. He turned back to Corporal Trotter, who like him was doing little more than keeping her head as close to the dirt as possible. ‘Trotter, we need to get inside that thing!’

Trotter crawled up beside van Veenan. ‘But, sarge, what about that force field? If battle cannons don’t get through, what makes you think we can?’

‘Look at those greenskins,’ van Veenan said, ‘moving around near the feet. They’re passing through the field as if it isn’t even there. It only stops weapons. I think we can make it through too.’

‘That’s a gamble, sarge. We could get fried.’

Van Veenan looked at her. ‘Fifty thrones says we make it. You going to trust me this time?’

Trotter cracked a wry smile. ‘Okay, sarge. I’m with you.’ She instinctively dropped as a battle cannon shell flew overhead, low enough to whistle through the air. ‘I’m trusting you’ve got a solid plan of how we actually destroy that thing.’

‘The head,’ van Veenan said. ‘There’s an old military saying, to kill the snake you have to cut off the head. Or, in our case, we need to make the head explode. Come on, on me.’

Van Veenan rose to his feet and began running towards the Gargant, Trotter right beside him. They fired at those orks in their path, cutting them down with accurate lasgun fire while dashing through barely aimed shots from the greenskins. As they approached the bottom of the Gargant they drew the attention of those orks who had gathered around it. The orks brought their shootas to bear and unleashed a staccato rhythm of fire towards van Veenan and Trotter.

Van Veenan tried to continue on towards the Gargant, firing back and veering randomly to avoid presenting an easy target, but as more and more shoota rounds exploded all around him he knew either he or Trotter would soon be blown to pieces. ‘Emperor damn it,’ he said as he rapidly changed direction and headed away from the Gargant, making for the cover of a solid rockcrete storage bunker. He and Trotter pressed themselves against the dome-shaped wall of the bunker. Shoota rounds burst in the dirt nearby and several bounced off the roof and flew over their heads.

Looking back through the chaos, van Veenan saw Warboss ’Eadbasha and Mekboy Rukaz still battling each other amid the mayhem. ’Eadbasha was swinging wildly at Rukaz’s Deff Dread but Rukaz had managed to tear ’Eadbasha’s thick chest armour away, revealing his green flesh.

Growing desperate, ’Eadbasha planted his shoota up against Rukaz’s can and fired multiple times. At such close range the shells burst against Rukaz’s armour and blasted back to rip ’Eadbasha’s flesh too. Rukaz’s can staggered, sparks and smoke and what might have been oil or blood pouring from a hole blasted into it. For a moment van Veenan thought ’Eadbasha had won but then Rukaz’s can leapt towards the warboss, leading with the buzzing saw blade. It buried itself into ’Eadbasha’s now exposed chest, and with a mighty straining of metal and a wailing of pistons and actuators Rukaz pressed forward and lifted the blade. The saw, throwing an arc of blood twenty feet into the air, buried itself deeper into ’Eadbasha’s chest until it was completely inside the warboss and still spinning madly, chewing his flesh and internal organs into mince. ’Eadbasha smashed his power klaw against Rukaz’s can contraption again and again, denting the top in, long after van Veenan thought he should have been dead. Eventually though, with nothing left inside his chest but blended soup, the warboss fell still. Rukaz lowered the saw blade and the body of Warboss Nok ’Eadbasha, self-described prophet of Gork and Mork, dropped to the ground, dead.

As if the orks had somehow sensed the death of their warboss and the sudden shift in the power dynamic, the fighting throughout the camp lulled; the greenskins not directly engaged with Imperial Guardsmen stopped and turned to look at Rukaz standing over the body of ’Eadbasha. Blaring through a vox-amplification unit, Rukaz’s voice suddenly boomed out over the camp.

‘I is no longer Mekboy Rukaz,’ he said. ‘I is now Mek-Boss Rukaz and this,’ he gestured to the Gargant with his bloody saw blade, ‘is all Waaagh! Rukaz now! WAAAAAGH!’

Most of the orks joined the roar, but not all.

‘I is not fightin’ for no oddboy!’ a shout came from nearby. ’Ardskull, a huge choppa in his hand wet with human blood, approached. ‘I should be warboss. I was big nob!’

‘You ain’t killed ’Eadbasha though,’ another ork shouted, ‘Rukaz did. He da boss now.’

‘He only killed ’im because he got that Deff Dread wotsit,’ ’Ardskull replied, but seeing a lot of the orks didn’t seem to agree, he said, ‘We don’t fight for no mekboy. I is the biggest. I kill Rukaz and I be warboss then.’

’Ardskull rushed towards Rukaz with his choppa raised over his head. ‘’Ardskull for boss!’

Rukaz dropped back inside his Deff Dread and stomped towards the charging nob. ’Ardskull swung his choppa but Rukaz parried the blow with one klaw. The other klaw shot forward and grabbed ’Ardskull right around the circumference of the metal dome attached to the top of his head. Rukaz’s klaw squeezed shut. ’Ardskull howled in anger, but Rukaz didn’t relent. The metal dome bent in half, squashing whatever brains ’Ardskull might have had beneath it. Rukaz’s saw moved forward and beheaded the ork nob. He raised it high to display to all those orks that watched.

‘I is mek-boss!’ Rukaz screamed.

‘Well,’ van Veenan said, ‘would you look at that.’

Taking advantage of the momentary confusion, van Veenan hurried to enter through the door at the back of the Gargant’s foot and began climbing a set of winding metallic stairs that spiralled up into the legs. Trotter followed close behind, their heavy boots clanging on the metal with every step.

Somewhere near the knee they ran into a mekboy who was dashing around tightening bolts that seemed to be springing loose whenever the machine moved. The ork looked up, its eyes growing wide with the surprise of seeing humans inside the Gargant. It grabbed for a large spanner that lay on the floor nearby, but van Veenan acted first and killed the greenskin with a lasgun shot through the chest.

They continued up, reaching the propulsion system in the bowels of the mechanical beast. Here a dozen gretchin worked to patch leaks of oil and solder together live, sparking wires under the agitated direction of another animated mekboy. Van Veenan held his fist up and then gestured with his palm down, silently signalling for Trotter to stop and sneak past.

They moved carefully and the greenskins didn’t seem to notice them until a shout from below drew their attention. It was the familiar shriek of Mek-Boss Rukaz.

‘Humie nob van Veenanz!’ The ork’s voice carried up from the levels below. ‘I know you is up there!’

The grots working nearby turned and saw van Veenan and Trotter attempting to sneak up the stairs. Van Veenan shot them a quick teasing smile before he unclipped a frag grenade from his belt, pulled the pin and tossed it towards them.

He didn’t need to tell Trotter to take advantage of the distraction and follow as he dashed up the stairs. She was close on his tail, her lasgun raised in ready position, just as aware as van Veenan that the gift he’d thrown to the greenskins was about to make the entire Gargant aware of their presence.

The boom of the frag grenade was followed by a succession of other noises – rending metal, grinding gears and drive shafts smashing around their casings. Van Veenan continued moving, hoping he’d managed to break something important.

They rounded the spiralling stairs and were met at the next landing by several ork boyz alerted by Rukaz’s shouts and the subsequent grenade explosion. Only one had a pistol-sized slugga; the other two were armed with choppas. The slugga fired with a loud report and a burst of black sooty smoke as van Veenan and Trotter came into view. The bullet pinged off the wall well wide of the two Guardsmen and Trotter shot the ork through the face with a well-aimed lasgun beam. Van Veenan fired as well, cutting down one of the other orks with a burst to the chest.

The third ork ran at van Veenan with a howling cry, its choppa raised overhead. Trotter recovered quickly, aimed and fired. The las-beam hit the ork in the shoulder, opening a cauterised gash. The ork stumbled somewhat but managed to swing its choppa at van Veenan. Van Veenan dodged back and to the side, but in the tight confines of the stairwell he was forced to raise his lasgun and use it to parry the ork’s weapon. He felt the jarring impact as they connected. He managed to deflect the ork’s blow but the overpowering strength of the greenskin sent him slamming into the wall, his broken ribs erupting with pain. Trotter fired again and thankfully this time her shot put the ork down for good.

Van Veenan coughed and was dismayed to see blood spray from his mouth across the wall. He wiped his mouth. ‘Come on,’ he said to Trotter. ‘We need to keep moving, avoid close combat with the greenskins if we can.’

They continued, higher into the torso and the workings of the Gargant. They came out into a space where dozens of orks carried immense shells over their shoulders, shuttling them up to the arms to feed the massive cannons. The orks spun to look at van Veenan and Trotter but van Veenan didn’t stop, knowing they didn’t have time for, and likely wouldn’t survive, an engagement with that many greenskins.

Eventually, after climbing a seemingly endless number of steps, van Veenan and Trotter emerged into the control room, high in the chest of the great Gargant. Orks were manning control panels of rudimentary dials and gauges and yelling instructions into a complicated network of twisting speaking tubes. In front of them a large pict screen that had once been erected to provide messages of Imperial support to the promethium refinery workers showed the scene outside the Gargant.

The large ork who seemed to be in command – not only because he was standing in the centre of the room yelling wildly, but also because he wore an oversized peaked cap like some comical impression of an Imperial Navy officer – turned towards them. His eyes grew wide.

‘Dey is ’ere!’ he called, word of their intrusion having obviously preceded them. Several of the orks rose from their seats but a voice stopped them.

‘You sit down. You need to keep my Gargant runnin’.’

Van Veenan turned to see Mek-Boss Rukaz stepping off the stairs and into the command room. He turned his goggled gaze to van Veenan.

‘Humie nob van Veenanz,’ Rukaz said. ‘I knew you wasn’t going to kill ’Eadbasha and I knew you was going to go for my Gargant. Sneaky humies always bein’ sneaky. Don’t matter though. I just needed you to start some fightin’ for me so I got my chance at taking down ’Eadbasha myself. I showed ’im what a smartboy can do. Now I is boss. I ’ave the Gargant. I is gonna lead the Waaagh!’

‘I didn’t think you liked fighting,’ van Veenan said. ‘I thought you weren’t interested in conquering the galaxy like ’Eadbasha was.’

Rukaz smiled. ‘I ain’t said that. I just said I could do krumpin’ differently. I showed ’im. Unorky ’e called me. Who’s unorky now?’

And Trotter fired. She’d shouldered her lasgun and pulled the trigger before van Veenan even knew she was moving. The las-beam should have struck Rukaz directly in the centre of the chest but instead of burning an immense hole through him, it stopped several inches away, a bubble-shaped energy field momentarily flashing around him; the two coils on his back sparked and zapped in response.

Rukaz smiled again. ‘Sneaky humies.’ He lifted the shoota-sized weapon he held, aiming it at Corporal Trotter. It was unlike any weapon van Veenan had ever seen, ork-made or otherwise. It was connected to Rukaz’s backpack with a series of colourful cables, the barrel ending in three spheres that began rapidly spinning about its axis. They flashed with electrical energy before suddenly erupting with what could only be described as lightning. The blazing arc struck Trotter in the stomach. Her entire body spasmed, her muscles locked in seizure and she dropped to the ground, her skin smoking. Van Veenan instantly knew she was dead.

With a burst of ferocious energy van Veenan rushed at Rukaz. The mek-boss aimed his lightning gun at van Veenan but the veteran sergeant anticipated the shot. Even with his shattered ribs and punctured lungs the sudden tumult of adrenaline flooding through him was enough for van Veenan to drop into a tumble. The crackling lash of lightning blasted over the top of him. In that moment he felt no pain as he rolled through and jumped up hard, slamming into Rukaz.

Rukaz stumbled back with the impact. He swung his lightning gun up again but van Veenan was quick enough to get back inside his force field and slam the butt of his lasgun into the ork’s face. Rukaz swung at van Veenan with his free hand, the blow catching him on the side of the face. The strike resonated through his skull and sent him lurching to the side, but he managed to keep his feet. Van Veenan had lost count of the number of times he’d been punched in the face – by humans or xenos – and this strike wasn’t even as bad as some of the larger human fists he’d managed to get his face in front of. It was almost always a bad idea to engage in hand-to-hand combat with an ork but Mek-Boss Rukaz was not, it seemed, as much of a threat when you could get through his bizarre inventions.

Van Veenan took heart in this and charged once more. He slammed the end of his lasgun into the ork’s face again and again. He barely registered that he was roaring, howling with all the fury of the past months as he struck Rukaz with vicious and overwhelming speed. The lenses of Rukaz’s goggles shattered under the butt of the lasgun and as the mekboy back-pedalled under the flurry of attacks, van Veenan saw the ork’s eyes staring out at him. His reddish eyeballs were wide and alight, not quite with fear but with something like wonder.

Van Veenan managed to push Rukaz back to the top of the stairs but felt his attacks slowing. He was burning through the adrenal fuel that was keeping him going. His arms were growing heavy. As his attacks slowed he expected Rukaz to take advantage and retaliate, but instead the ork stared at him with a smile on his face.

‘That was good fightin’, humie nob van Veenanz,’ he said. ‘You turnin’ orky now? You want to join–’

Van Veenan lashed out and kicked the mek-boss as hard as he could. Rukaz fell backwards, almost comically windmilling his arms to try to maintain his balance, but he dropped and tumbled down the stairs.

Van Veenan turned and saw the other orks around the control room staring at him. The greenskins seemed perplexed, at least momentarily, about what they were supposed to do now their new mek-boss had been booted down the stairs. Most of them looked more physically imposing than Rukaz, and van Veenan was not going to risk fighting them, which he was sure would be their eventual conclusion. He took the opportunity to sprint for the stairs; he needed to keep going higher.

Up he twisted through the Gargant, following his nose until he emerged into the head. Before him the weirdboy was still strapped to the chair. The sight was shocking and van Veenan felt a pang of sympathy for the ork. It had shrivelled into a wretched creature. It seemed to have lost all muscle mass and its green skin was tight around the shape of its bones but hung in loose folds elsewhere. Its sunken face was little better than a skull. Still, its eyes and body glowed with the same eerie green energy.

Van Veenan, not giving himself time to think, dashed forward. He began unbuckling the straps holding the helmet to the weirdboy’s head. His pursuers sounded close. Once all the straps were loose, he grabbed hold of the helmet and pulled. It came free of the weirdboy’s head with a sucking sound, like water down a plughole. Long, tendril-like wires coated in blood and pus popped out from where they had been inserted into the weirdboy’s brain. The ork, who had been silent until that point, began to groan.

The orks from the control room reached the top of the stairs and van Veenan turned to face them. Mek-Boss Rukaz emerged and saw what van Veenan had done. This time van Veenan was sure there was fear behind those shattered goggles.

‘I guess that means I was right,’ van Veenan said.

The weirdboy’s groan started to increase in volume. Green energy began bursting from its head and striking the walls with electrical sparks. Van Veenan raised his lasgun and fired at the orks, who had begun running towards the ork weirdboy under the frenzied orders of Rukaz. The orks desperately tried to refit the helmet on the weirdboy’s overloading brain. As it became clear they would not be able to contain the eruption, Rukaz growled. His face twisted in anger.

‘Humie nob van Veenanz!’ he shouted. ‘I ain’t forgettin’ this.’ The ork mek-boss turned and scampered down the stairs.

Some of the orks from the control room followed; those that remained turned their attention to van Veenan. He leaned over and lifted the handle he’d seen Rukaz use from the ground. With a hydraulic drone and the whistling of wind, the face of the Gargant began opening. He fired repeatedly with his lasgun to force the orks to keep their distance and then, without thinking – because thinking just led to unhelpful hesitation in these sorts of situations – van Veenan jumped out of the Gargant’s head.

He landed on the machine’s sheet-metal surface and began half falling, half sliding down its torso. Luckily, the Gargant’s portly belly meant that its structure rose to meet him. He hit metal with a jolt, his ribs erupting with pain, blood spraying from his mouth as the air blasted from his lungs. He tumbled over the surface, rolling and falling, and hitting the metal again. Disorientated, unable to determine up from down as he tumbled, van Veenan groped wildly for anything to slow his descent. He managed, perhaps from instinct more than anything, to throw his arms out and plant the soles of his boots on the surface. He slid on his back, his vision wildly twirling and alight with stars. The rubber of his boots slowed him – at least until he reached the groin, where he ran out of metal to cling to and plummeted to the ground.

Landing heavily on his feet van Veenan felt a sudden stab of pain and immediately knew his leg – perhaps both – had broken. His vision swam. He hacked up blood in spurts of spasmic coughing. For a moment, as he lay on the ground looking up at the Gargant, van Veenan was certain his idea had failed or that the orks had managed to secure the helmet back on that unstable weirdboy. Then with an eruption of green energy that spread outwards like a disc, the head of the Gargant exploded. For the briefest of moments the headless Gargant swayed as if that would be the extent of the destruction, but then a series of explosions cascaded down the body of the massive machine and the whole thing began to fall. As it toppled backwards a multi-bladed flying machine emerged from a hatch in the belly, whirring away into the sky as the Gargant collapsed with a world-shaking crash.

It took almost all van Veenan’s energy to lift his head and track the smoke-spewing flying machine across the sky. Even if it hadn’t had an open cockpit under its spinning blades he would have known who was piloting it. Rukaz flew away from the camp out over the trees, a small contingent of orks and mekboys fleeing after him on foot.

With the destruction of the Gargant and the disappearance of any leadership, the orks collapsed under the continued assault of the Rotauri First and the Larlo VI Seventh Armoured. The remaining men and women of the Rotauri First scoured the camp and the shanty town from end to end, making sure there were absolutely no surviving greenskins. After their experience over the last few months they would not be taking any prisoners.

Company Sergeant Major Marcus van Veenan lay back on his stretcher in the infirmary at Flaxton Barracks. With both of his legs encased in stiff splints he could do nothing but stare at the ceiling. He wished he had some socks to throw.

Van Veenan looked up when Commissar Hardnuss approached; Colonel Dresner was beside her.

‘Well, you know they’ll certainly tell stories about you now,’ the commissar said.

‘Emperor save me,’ van Veenan replied. ‘As if anyone is going to believe this.’

‘How are you feeling, sergeant major?’ Colonel Dresner asked.

‘I feel like I was kept prisoner by orks for several months and then fell off a Gargant, sir.’

The colonel seemed unfazed by van Veenan’s response. ‘The commissar has told me you planned the escape and have essentially been in command of the remnants of your regiment.’

‘Yes, sir. The escape was my plan, though I wouldn’t say I was in command of the regiment,’ van Veenan said. ‘I simply led those that were left, sir.’

‘How do you feel about a more permanent command?’ the colonel asked.

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘That ork that escaped, the one Commissar Hardnuss said was called Rukaz, he is the supposed mastermind of all this?’

‘More or less, sir.’

‘Well, we tracked a small ork void ship leaving the planet. Seems he’s escaped off-world. Several other ork ships have entered the system. They seem to be flocking to this so-called mek-boss. He still poses a significant threat to the Imperium.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘The Rotauri First is being disbanded as an infantry regiment, sergeant major – the losses were too heavy. The Rotauri Second will be stood up after a tithe. However, I have been granted authority to give command of the remaining troopers of the Rotauri First to you. Commissar Hardnuss has volunteered to serve as unit commissar. You and your troops are to spearhead the campaign to engage the xenos threat and finish off this Waaagh! before it can get started. Congratulations, Lieutenant van Veenan.’

‘Sir, I’d prefer not to–’

‘I said congratulations, Lieutenant van Veenan,’ Colonel Dresner repeated.

‘Yes, sir,’ Lieutenant van Veenan said, ‘thank you, sir.’

‘The unit will be officially stood up and transport provided once you and your soldiers recover.’

Once the colonel had left, van Veenan looked over at Commissar Hardnuss. ‘See, commissar?’ he said. ‘I told you something like this would happen if we got out of that prison.’

Commissar Hardnuss smiled at van Veenan. ‘Rest up, lieutenant, the Imperium isn’t done with you just yet.’

About the Author

Justin Woolley hails from the bottom of the world in Tasmania, Australia and is an author of science fiction and fantasy. In his other life Justin has been an engineer, a teacher, and at one stage even a magician. A long-time fan of Warhammer 40,000, he has written the novella Prisoners of Waaagh! and the short stories ‘Redemption Through Sacrifice’ and ‘Night Shriekers’ for Black Library.

An extract from Brutal Kunnin.

It had been a weird trip through the warp.

Ufthak Blackhawk knew full well that there wasn’t such a thing as a normal trip through the warp, because Gork and Mork had their own senses of humour and liked to mess with the boyz every now and then. He still remembered that time he’d ended up seeing out of his own kneecaps for a while. Then there were all the interesting things you might encounter on a space hulk, like those bugeye wotsits with different numbers of arms that moved like a cyboar on nitrous. That was the great thing about space hulks – never a dull moment. Even when you thought you’d killed everything on board, you’d probably still missed a bit. And even if you hadn’t, odds were you’d still have some ladz with you to have a punch-up with if everything got too boring.

This journey, though, hadn’t been on a space hulk; it had been on a humie vessel, one that Ufthak and his boyz had boarded and taken, and on which Da Boffin had installed and then activated a device he’d called Da Warp Dekapitator. This had caused a katastroffic warp implosion – which was apparently a good thing, although Ufthak thought that ‘catastrophic’ sounded like something that should be happening to someone else – and it had dragged not only the humie ship but also all the ork ships around it into the warp and along the path of its last jump, to arrive back where it had come from.

(There was also the part where most of the bodies of the dead humie crew had merged together into a reanimated mass of flesh and steel that hungered for ork blood, and also the screaming humie faces that ran around on varying numbers of insectoid legs and spat poison, but the boyz had needed something to keep their spirits up on the way.)

Now they’d reached their destination, and had emerged from the warp again with nothing more than the sudden but quickly fading sensation that Ufthak’s skeleton wasn’t where it was supposed to be. And what a destination it was.

‘Dat planet,’ Mogrot Redtoof said, looking out of a viewport, ‘is made of metal.’

Ufthak nodded sagely. Back before they’d boarded the humie ship, he and Mogrot had been rivals – two warriors jockeying for position under the command of Badgit Snazzhammer. Thanks to a series of events involving a large robot, several fatalities and a head transplant courtesy of Dok Drozfang, Ufthak’s undamaged head had ended up on the decapitated Snazzhammer’s undamaged and significantly larger body. After a brief meeting of the minds via a headbutt, Mogrot had settled back into a role as Ufthak’s right-hand ork. That didn’t mean that Ufthak trusted him, of course, but at least he was fairly certain Mogrot wouldn’t try to shank him unless he was already wounded.

‘Looks like a humie mekboy place,’ Ufthak said. ‘Humie mekboy ship, coming from a humie mekboy planet. Makes sense to me.’

‘Why do dey do dat, anyway?’ Mogrot asked. ‘Make dere planets all shiny so ya know dey’ve got flashy stuff ya might want, and den when ya go to get it, dey get all annoyed an’ try to kill ya?’

‘Dat’s da problem wiv humies,’ Ufthak opined knowingly. ‘Dey ain’t logickal.’

‘Boss!’

The shout came from the other side of the bridge, where Ufthak and his ladz had taken up residence after they’d tossed out the corpses of the crew formerly stationed there. Ufthak clumped across the deck, absent-mindedly twirling the Snazzhammer as he went. It had been Badgit’s weapon, a two-handed affair as tall as a humie with its legs still attached, with an electrified hammer on one side of the head and a choppa blade on the other. He was starting to get used to the feel of it now, and couldn’t wait to krump a few more enemies with it.

‘Wot?’ he demanded, coming up alongside Deffrow. The other ork pointed with the few fingers that remained on his right hand, having blown most of them off by hitting a humie with a stikkbomb.

‘Look at dat, boss! Dat ain’t one of ours!’

Ufthak sucked his breath in through his teef as a jagged piece of darkness eclipsed the stars. The ships that made up the Waaagh! fleet of Da Meklord – Da Biggest Big Mek, and a warboss in his own right – were many and varied, but Ufthak was familiar with them, and Deffrow was correct: that wasn’t one of theirs. Impressive though Da Meklord’s flotilla was, none of them looked quite that… killy.

‘Dat’s Da Blacktoof,’ Ufthak said in something close to wonder, as the shape of it became clear. It was a monstrous kill kroozer, bristling with guns and ordnance. And there, leering down at them from under the prow, was a single, huge glyph: a monstrous, one-eyed ork skull, with crossed bones behind it. ‘Dat’s Kaptin Badrukk’s ship.’

The rest of his mob made suitably impressed noises. Badrukk was a legend across the galaxy, a freebooter of infamy and renown, and his presence here surely meant that Da Meklord’s own star was in the ascendancy.

Assuming, of course, that Badrukk was here because Da Meklord had arranged for him to be. If not…

‘Message from da boss!’ Da Boffin shouted, bursting into the bridge in a gust of fumes. At some point in the past, Da Meklord’s favourite spanner had, either due to injury or simple curiosity, replaced his legs with a gyro-stabilised monowheel, and as a result he was now both much faster than a normal boy, and spectacularly poor at navigating stairs. ‘All nobs are to get over to Mork’s Hammer right now!’

Mork’s Hammer was Da Meklord’s flagship, and Da Meklord only called his nobs and bosses together if he had something very important to say… or, alternatively, if he wanted to yell at them all. As a new nob, Ufthak had never attended one of these Waaagh! meets before. His chest swelled with new-found pride, and he slung the Snazzhammer over his shoulder as he turned on the spot.

‘Right den!’ He frowned, as a thought struck him. ‘Wait a minute. Do da ’Ullbreakers go backwards?’ He and his mob had arrived via boarding pods, which were still locked into the side of the humie ship after they’d broken through its ferrous hide.

Da Boffin shook his head. ‘Nah. Dey got just one gear – go.’

‘So how’re we s’posed to get back over dere, den?’ Ufthak demanded. What was the good in being a nob if you couldn’t go listen to your boss telling you what he wanted you to go and stomp?

Da Boffin shrugged. ‘Da humies have shuttles on dis fing. We’ll nick one.’

Ufthak frowned at him suspiciously. ‘You know how to fly one?’

‘Can’t be hard,’ Da Boffin grinned. ‘After all, humies can do it.’

The Waaagh! room of Mork’s Hammer was crowded with orks mashed in shoulder to shoulder. Ufthak saw many faces he recognised and many more that he didn’t, because every single ork of any authority under Da Meklord’s command was here. Surly, black-clad Goffs glowered at camouflaged Blood Axes and blue-painted Deathskulls, while the stench of fuel from the Evil Sunz was almost overpowered, but instead just sickeningly offset, by the smell of squig dung that accompanied the Snakebites. However, most numerous by far were the yellow and black colours of the Bad Moons, which wasn’t only Ufthak’s clan, but also that of Da Meklord himself. They were smartest, the richest and the flashest clan of all, and the reason why the Tekwaaagh! had risen so quickly and so unstoppably. Sure, the Evil Sunz might drive a bit faster, and the Blood Axes might be a bit sneakier, but if you wanted the ladz with the best guns, you wanted Bad Moons.

This many orks in such close proximity was a pretty good recipe for a massive fight, especially given the egos involved. Ufthak could see the huge, horned helm and multiple back banners of Drak Bigfang, the Goff warboss; the collection of junk and scavenged armour plates under which was Gurnak Six-Gunz, the self-proclaimed SupaLoota of the Deathskulls; and the fur-clad bulk of Da Viper, the Snakebite Overboss, whose gargantuan squiggoth was so large it allegedly had a hold all to itself in his kroozer. Any of these orks were capable of leading a Waaagh! in their own right, but no one was starting any trouble worse than jostling their neighbour a bit. No one wanted to end up like Oldfang Krumpthunda, who’d taken Da Meklord on one on one and had been… Well, no one was quite sure what he had been, other than it involved getting hit with Da Meklord’s shokkhammer and then ending up in lots of very small pieces in very different places. Some of the boyz said they were still finding bits of him in the stew, now and then.

Horns blared, a brassy note of challenge and conquest, and everyone shut their gobs and snapped their heads around to look at the dais built at the far end. Part of the wall behind it had been turned into a massive effigy of the face of Mork – or possibly Gork, but Ufthak reckoned it was Mork – and this was now yawning wider and wider as the mighty lower jaw dropped away. Steam and smoke gushed forth, obscuring the dais but accentuating the piercing red glare of the eyes lurking near the ceiling.

Then, first as a looming shadow in the murk, and then as a mighty figure resplendent in his yellow-and-black mega armour, Da Meklord emerged from the mouth of a god.

He was a titanic figure, and that wasn’t just down to the size of his armour. Ufthak’s new body was large enough that he was a head taller than most of the mob under his command, but Da Meklord would have towered over him had they stood next to each other. He made ordinary orks look like grots. His mega armour made him nearly as wide as he was tall, and the bosspole rising up above his head and carrying his personal glyphs and banners added another dimension of awe to his appearance. Half of the overlarge skull that housed his enormous brain was plated in metal; in his left hand he held the shokkhammer, and his right hand disappeared somewhere into the gigantic mess of barrels, ammo feeds and coolant pipes that formed his kustom supa-shoota.

‘ALRIGHT, LISSEN UP!’

The assembled nobs quietened down a bit more, each one intimidated into silence by his stentorian bellow. Ufthak stood as straight and tall as he could, to try and make sure his face was visible, even though he was standing quite far back and there were other, bigger orks with more impressive weapons and armour between him and his warboss. There was something intangible about Da Meklord that grabbed a lad by the throat, focused his attention and drove it home to him that this ork, this ork, was one who knew where he was going, and on whom glory and renown would be showered.

‘Da humies call dis world “Hephaesto”,’ Da Meklord rumbled. ‘Dere’s a lot of ’em down dere. Da red-robe types, da ones what look like Evil Sunz, but squishier.’

A bubble of laughter ran through the assembled nobs, save for the Evil Sunz present, who were doing their best to look like they weren’t glowering.

‘Dey’ve prob’ly got a lot of interestin’ tek, cos dose humies tend to,’ Da Meklord continued. ‘An’ normally, I’d be sendin’ all you down dere to get it, and kill ’em all. But dere’s a little snag.’

Ufthak glanced sideways, and saw his own confusion mirrored on the other green-skinned faces around him. What could possibly be a snag to a Waaagh! as mighty as this one? Unless…

‘See, some uvver gitz got ’ere first,’ Da Meklord said. ‘An’ we could fight dem too, dat could be a good larf, but while we woz doing dat, da humies might get away, an’ dat would just be a waste.’

Heads nodded. Humies weren’t exactly a scarce resource, but you couldn’t always rely on some being about when you wanted a scrap, so it made sense to use the ones that were here.

‘I talked to–’

The temperature in the Waaagh! room plummeted. Ufthak could see his breath in front of his face, and faint tendrils of frost began to creep along the walls. Orks readied their weapons, unsure what was going on but ready to fight it, or, if no better options presented themselves, each other.

The air pressure increased rapidly, from unnoticeable to the point where Ufthak felt like something was pressing in on his eardrums. He shook his head and growled, trying to clear the sensation, but it persisted until–

Vorp!

A bubble of energy washed out from the other end of the dais to where Da Meklord was standing, sending the smoke of his entrance billowing, and incidentally knocking the fumes aside to give every ork in the room a clear view of…

Kaptin Badrukk.

The mightiest freebooter kaptin who’d ever lived. The hero of the War of Dakka, the Breaker of the Grand Guard, and the Plunderer of Tanhotep. He stood resplendent in his lead-lined greatcoat, his bald head crowned by his mighty bicorn, which was as tall as a well-fed grot and dripping with medals taken from the corpses of humie commanders. He was leaning casually on his longblade choppa, and had Da Rippa, a gun so radioactive its simple presence in a room practically constituted an aggressive act, tucked under his arm. He was flanked by three more Flash Gitz, each one imitating him so far as possible in their mode of dress and armament, but not coming close to rivalling his sheer ostentatiousness and utter gaudy magnificence. Lurking behind them all was an ork that had to be Badmek Mogrok, another Bad Moons big mek, who fought under Badrukk’s banner and was undoubtedly the source of his teknologickal advances.

For the first time in his life, Ufthak Blackhawk laid eyes on an ork who might just be as impressive as Da Meklord.

‘Ta-daaa!’ Badrukk bellowed, as though he hadn’t just tellyported into the middle of his rival’s command structure, on his rival’s warship. The sheer guts of the git was jaw-dropping.

Da Meklord turned towards Badrukk with a clank of metal and a hiss of pistons. He looked thoroughly unimpressed, but he hadn’t powered up his supa-shoota or sent the triple heads of his shokkhammer whirling around each other, so violence wasn’t imminent.

‘Kaptin,’ Da Meklord growled. ‘I woz just telling da ladz about how we woz going to be havin’… a friendly kompetition.’

‘Dat’s right!’ Badrukk beamed, showing more teef than it should have been possible to fit into one gob. ‘Plenty of loot to go round down dere, I reckon. Of course, my ladz’ve had a bit of a head start, but dat should just help ya out! Cleared a few obstacles out da way, dat sort of fing.’

‘So we’re all gonna stomp da humies, an’ take dere tek,’ Da Meklord said. ‘An’ your boyz ain’t gonna be shootin’ mine in da back, right?’

‘So long as yours don’t shoot mine first,’ Badrukk leered back at him. ‘Dat would be a shame, when dere’s so many humies to go round.’

‘My forts exactly,’ Da Meklord agreed. ‘So we got a deal, den?’

‘We got a deal,’ Kaptin Badrukk said, nodding. ‘Last one to da gubbinz mucks out da squiggoffs!’ He clicked his fingers, and Mogrok did something. A moment later the temperature dropped again, crackling energy surrounded the freebooterz for a second, and then they were gone once more, as abruptly as they’d arrived.

Da Meklord turned towards his assembled nobs.

‘Get down dere, and wotever ya do, don’t let dat git’s boyz get to da good stuff before ya!’ His face broke into a grin every bit as toofy and menacing as the one that had graced the freebooter kaptin’s. ‘I fink dere’s gonna be a few “accidents” before we’re done ’ere, so make sure yer aiming at Badrukk’s ladz whenever ya fink yer gun might go off by mistake, like when dey’z between you and da best loot. Got it?’

Ufthak joined his voice to the others in a roar of assent to assure their warboss that they had indeed got it.

‘Good!’ Da Meklord drew himself up to his full, magnificent height, and filled his lungs.

‘Now get down dere, an’ get fightin’!’

Click here to buy Brutal Kunnin.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Evan Shipard.

Prisoners of Waaagh! © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Prisoners of Waaagh!, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-413-7

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For Mick Green, whose donation to the Australian bushfire appeal earned him a place as a mean, green ork.

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