"There are few worse things in the Galaxy than war, and one of them is peace."

- Inquisitor Jaq Draco

PROLOGUE: EXPOSITION AND PREMONITION

The dark briefing room flickered with green light.

"How do they do it?" Losson said, his tone somewhere between awe and incredulity. "It's just not possible!"

"There's a lot about Ork biology we don't understand," Skate pointed out, leaning back against the wall in his rickety wooden chair. "We know how they reproduce, yes, and something of the Waaagh!, but past that we're working on battlefield observational data alone."

"You're saying there could be some... mutation allowing this?" Losson said, tracing one finger over the pulsating blue strand that wormed its way across the thinner end of the vast green continent on the holographic map that hung in front of him. It represented the front line, although in reality the fighting was much more ragged. The blue line was at best an educated guess, with positions wavering constantly as Ork assaults and Imperial counterattacks tore up the ground between the sides. Losson was painfully aware that the position of the line was going in entirely the wrong direction and a lot faster than he'd like.

"All I'm saying is that it's a possibility," Skate said guardedly. "It's all we have. You have any better ideas than that? It explains why there are so damn many of them, at least."

"Then how in the Warp are they making all these vehicles fast enough?" Losson snapped. "This makes no sense! No sense!"

"All right, all right. Cool it, Rex," Skate said, and removed his Commissarial cap to reveal the thinning yellow-grey strands of his hair, placing it carefully on the table beside him. "It's not my fault."

"I know, I know," Losson said. "I'm sorry, Lucius. It's just this whole thing is... it's just wrong."

"I know what you mean," Skate said sympathetically, and got up to join Losson at the map. "It shouldn't be happening like this. This was supposed to be over by Emperor's Day two years ago."

"One world, giving us this much trouble... this had better not become the new Armageddon," Losson said dispiritedly.

"It won't be that bad," Skate assured him. "We've always got Exterminatus."

"Except we don't have bloody Extermi-frakking-natus, because we've got more men down there on that Emperor-forsaken rock than we can pick up in a damn year!"

"True," Skate murmured. "And if we start to pull out, the front line will collapse and the rest of the army will be pulverised."

"And if we stay there," Losson continued, "we'll keep retreating until we don't actually have any more land to stand on and we get to see how well a Leman Russ can float. What a clusterfrak."

"A conundrum indeed," Skate said heavily, staring disconsolately at the mass of ominous green that swarmed over most of the continent. The gold patch representing the Guard's territories had shrunk another couple of kilometres in the last day alone, and Skate could swear the colour had actually faded as well. Probably just a trick of the unreliable holoprojectors, but still definitely not a good sign.

"We need more tanks," Losson said. "And artillery. And aircraft. And infantry. And, I don't know, some sort of Ork-killing virus."

"I could use some more amasec," Skate said with a wan half-smile. "I'm running low again. It's been two months since the last shipment came in, back with the Farradins."

"I'm surprised there was still any left," Losson said. "You know what a bunch of drinkers that lot are."

"Word from Commissar Lestrade is that they're running out of rotgut much faster in Zeta sector since they got the Farradin reinforcements."

"Hah. Sounds like his job isn't much fun at the moment," Losson said, with that special malice reserved for those who are having a hell of a time of it themselves and would like the opportunity to take pleasure in the same thing happening to other people. As Lord-Generals go, he was decidedly less insane and more practical than most of them (which was probably why he was stuck on this damn planet rather than actually having an easy posting, he reflected grimly), but he was definitely not above enjoying other people's pain. There was precious little else to enjoy, after all, but he counted it as a point in his favour that he'd so far refrained from resorting to, as it were, making his own entertainment.

"Emperor knows what he's up to," Skate said, with a chuckle that soon turned into a hacking cough. "Him and Tump... what I wouldn't give to be down there with them, eh?" A faraway look entered into his eyes, one Losson recognised as the sort of blood-drenched nostalgia most Commissar-Generals had after so many years of service. "I remember once, back on Charybdis, we fought off a Tau invasion from three different directions at once with a tenth of their men and a twentieth of their armaments."

"What, you won?"

"Nah, the bastards came back two days later with a few thousand more troops and kicked our arses," Skate said, smiling wistfully. "Oh, but it was a good fight. I must have killed at least a hundred of them with old Betsy here-" he patted the gleaming chainsword hanging from his belt "-and they just wouldn't stop coming. It was beautiful. The bloodstains are still in me old coat"

He sniffed, and wiped a tear away.

"Oh, good times," he said, refocusing on the map.

"Speak for yourself," Losson said. "It's a bloody miracle I survived to be here after all those years on the front line, and I'm damn well not going back."

"Ah, you old coward," Skate said, punching him playfully on the arm. Losson winced. Even at a good deal over a hundred years of age and with that persistent respiratory disease of his, Skate packed one hell of a punch under that bulky blue coat. "I could have you executed for that, you know."

"Who're you calling old, gramps?" Losson retorted.

"It's great-great-grandfather at the moment, in fact," Skate said proudly.

"Is that right? You never told me about that."

"Really? News came with the Farradins. Our Jessie gave birth to one Antimony Skate Junior about four months ago."

"Well done," Losson said absently, before his brain processed what he'd heard. "Wait, what? Jessie? Isn't she only fifteen?"

"Well-remembered," Skate said happily. "Girl after me own heart. Get going young and never stop."

"Is that not a little too young?"

"If she can make 'em, she can damn well take 'em," Skate said, leering horribly.

"You're disgusting," Losson said, and zoomed in on the map to a close-up of Zeta Sector. The green light of the hologram reflected eerily off his beard and highlighted his face, making him look rather like a half-hearted monster in some C-rate horror holo.

"I'm pragmatic," Skate corrected, the smile fading from his face as the torn landscape of Zeta Sector came into view, blurry edges finding sharpness as Losson discreetly kicked the projector underneath the table.

"If you're so pragmatic," Losson said, jabbing a finger at the map, "tell me what to do here."

"Bit of a thorny issue, isn't it?" Skate mused. "Even if we somehow engineered a breakthrough, there's no way we could get enough troops there in time to back it up without letting the rest of the line collapse."

"Making a breakthrough with Orks is always like that. Even if you get through the crust, there's still one hell of a lot of placenta to get through underneath."

"Placenta?" Skate said suspiciously.

"It's a kind of food."

"And you call me disgusting."

"Not like that, you dolt. It's just baked bread with tomato and cheese on it."

"And it has a crust, does it?"

"Notorious for it," Losson said. "And these Orks are the mysterious green things that you hope are herbs but are probably something much worse."

"Good analogy."

"Thank you."

They stared at the map in silence for a while.

"You know, General Padley says the Sun Crushers lost another Thunderhawk today," Skate said at last, deciding to break the awkward pause with awkward news.

"Ah, frak. We really can't afford that," Losson said gloomily. "Well, they can't, at least. That's two they've lost now, isn't it?"

"Yeah. I tell you, Commander Tseng is bleedin' furious."

"More so than normal? How can you tell?" Losson said, grinning despite himself. Tseng was one of the old school, a school whose teachings seemed to largely consist of how to be extremely angry all the time.

"It's in the eyebrows," Skate said, totally deadpan. "They lost another ten-odd marines to go with it, as well."

"What got it? Some kind of lucky artillery shot?"

"Word is they shot it down from the air."

"What, the Orks?"

"Fighta-Bommerz," Skate confirmed. "Hundreds of 'em. Pretty much pecked the ship to death from what I hear."

"Emperor's heart," Losson muttered. "This war just keeps getting better and better."

"And that takes us right back to: how in the Warp are they building vehicles so fast?" Skate said thoughtfully.

"And where the hell all these new Orks are coming from," Losson added.

"Mystery to me," Skate said, picking idly at a scab on his weathered hand. "Maybe there's some kind of underground level in their territory?"

"Subterranean factories and breeding grounds," Losson said. "It's a possibility, though not one I'd particularly like to entertain."

"And even that wouldn't explain how fast their central base is expanding. It's more than five kilometres wide now, and that doesn't even take into account all the subcaverns they're bound to have."

"We could do that easily," Losson said.

"But Orks couldn't. That's the thing. The sheer scale of the whole mess is what bothers me," Skate said, having the decency to look worried. "There's no way this could be done with Ork tech, no matter how many they had working on it. They're all about size, but it's just not possible to do what they're doing this fast. Even for them."

"I'm starting to think we're going to need a lot more reinforcement than what we've got on the way," Losson said grimly.

"Starting?" Skate said. "I've been saying that for months. With the troops we have now there is just no way we can win this, not even when you take away whatever the Orks are doing to keep their numbers so damn high."

"Emperor preserve us. This isn't what I wanted to be doing at age ninety," Losson sighed, wiping a hand across his face.

"Well, it's better than dead," Skate reasoned. "Most humans in this galaxy don't reach fifty."

"True."

Losson reached forward and flicked a switch on the dull metal console. The map burst apart in a shower of green sparks and vanished.

"Frak this," he said wearily. "I'm going to bed. Maybe it'll all look better in the morning."

"I doubt it," Skate said, and picked up his cap. "Here's hoping, though."

Losson opened the door, blinking into the harsh light of the corridor's fluorescent ceiling tubes.

"Here's hoping," he muttered, and walked through it, leaving Skate staring thoughtfully at the blank wall.