Death or Glory, page 10
‘This way,’ I said, leading my aide along beside the pipe, which continued to ring and reverberate with the slugs and bolts knocking holes in the other side. By my reckoning, we only had seconds to move before the horde was upon us.
‘Right behind you sir,’ Jurgen assured me, although my nose had already done the job for him, and we sprinted for a small rockcrete blockhouse into which the pipes we were following disappeared. If we could get behind that…
‘Oh frak,’ I said, as another greenskin appeared round the corner of the structure. I dropped it with a single las bolt, realising in that instant of incredulous relief that it was only a gretchin, but that meant that there was bound to be a whole swarm of them right behind their fellow. I was soon proved to be correct in that assumption, as what seemed at the time to be a positive tide of the little vermin, but in all probability was no more than a dozen or so, boiled around the corner of the blockhouse, squealing and waving firearms which seemed even more primitive than those wielded by their masters. Indeed, at least one exploded in its owner’s hands as he attempted to use it. Nevertheless, Jurgen and I swung aside at once, seeking refuge deeper within the tangle of pipe work, which continued to surround us, and just in time too; another ill-aimed volley rattled off the metalwork as we did so.
‘I think this is a dead end, sir,’ Jurgen said, and with a thrill of bowel clenching horror I realised he was right. On either side of us, the sheltering pipes disappeared into the side of a large storage tank, easily five or six metres high. Climbing to safety wouldn’t be an option in the time we had left either. By the time our pursuers reached the end of the narrow gap we’d so incautiously trapped ourselves in, we’d simply be making ourselves a better target.
‘Go back,’ I said decisively. At least if we tried to engage them just inside the mouth of the metal defile they could only come at us a few at a time, and we might be able to pick them off one by one. It was a slim enough chance, Emperor alone knew, but that was infinitely better than no chance at all. As I turned back, my mouth dry, a sick knot of terror wound itself tighter inside my gut. The deeper, guttural tones drowning out the squeals of the lesser greenskins told me that my earlier fears had been well founded, and that the mob of orks we’d seen before had crossed the drainage channel without any difficulty whatsoever.
Nevertheless, we had no other choice, and turned to face our destiny as best we could. For some reason, the last transmission I’d heard from Sergeant Tayber came back to me at that point: ‘Take as many of the grox-reamers with us as we can.’ Well it still didn’t sound like much of a plan to me, but it would have to do to be going on with. My survival instinct hadn’t let me down yet, and I just had to hope that it wouldn’t do so today.
I raised my laspistol, taking aim as steadily as I could at the rectangle of sunlight ahead of us. Shadows moved beyond it, and we were abruptly plunged into eclipse as an ork filled the space. I just had time to register the ridiculously large gun in its hand and the inevitable meat cleaver whirling above its head as my finger tightened on the trigger…
Abruptly, the ground shook, and my ears rang to a series of overlapping explosions. The ork disappeared, to be replaced by a cloud of eye-watering dust, which billowed around us for a moment. I shook my head, dazed, and my survival instinct kicked in even more strongly than before. I grabbed Jurgen by the arm.
‘Come on,’ I shouted, coughing as the dust irritated the back of my throat. ‘Move!’ The sound of sporadic gunfire forced itself past the ringing in my ears, the harsh bark of ork firearms, and the distinctive crack of ionising air, which could only be produced by Imperial lasguns. To his credit, my aide recovered what wits he had, almost at once, and needed no further urging.
We emerged from our refuge into a scene of carnage. Most of the greenskins were down, and in no state to continue the fight; in fact most of them were in no state to continue to live, being scattered around the landscape in a gratifying number of pieces. The few surviving gretchin had clearly had enough, heading for the horizon with as much speed as their stunted little legs could muster, which in all fairness was pretty fast. Only a handful of orks continued to hold their ground, too stupid or belligerent to flee themselves, pouring a hail of slugs and bolts into the surrounding metalwork, from which well-aimed las bolts continued to erupt in reply.
Even as we watched, another couple of orks went down, comprehensively shredded by a neatly executed crossfire, and that seemed to be enough. The remaining trio, all leaking copious amounts of their rancid blood, stared at one another in mutual shock as it finally penetrated their skulls that they were undoubtedly about to go the same way, unless they followed the gretchin. As one they turned, began to flee and then became aware that Jurgen and I were cutting them off from safety. With the inevitable yell of ‘Waaaaargh!’ they reacted like all their kind tend to do in extremis, lower their heads, and charge.
Needless to say, my immediate reaction was simply to get out of the way, let them go, and good riddance, but, unfortunately, that didn’t seem like a viable option. For one thing, Jurgen and I were hemmed in by the blasted pipes, with nowhere to go, and would probably have been trampled in the rush if we’d tried it. For another, there was no guarantee that the orks would simply keep going even if we were able to make room for them. From what I’d seen of the creatures already, it seemed all too likely that now they’d been presented with another target their innate bloodlust would override the impulse to flee again, and they’d simply cut us down on the way past. There were our rescuers to consider too. The initial impression I made on them would have to consolidate the authority of my office.
As I try to impress on the young whelps in my charge these days, it isn’t the scarlet sash and the fancy hat that makes you a commissar, it’s the way you wear them. The troops you serve with are never going to like you, but if you can get them to respect you that can be almost as good. Remember, you’re going to spend most of your career on a battlefield with them, and they’ve all got guns, so making them think you’re a liability is never going to be a very good idea.
Almost without thinking, I stepped to the side, where I’d only have to take on one of the greenies, and lashed out with the chainsword.
‘Oh no you don’t!’ I snarled, with the best impression of martial zeal I could summon up under the circumstances, and ducked under the arm carrying a grotesquely oversized stubber of some kind. Like its fellows, the ork I’d picked on carried a large, heavy axe in the other hand, and I had more sense than to engage it from the side it could swing the thing unhindered. Why none of them shot at us as they charged I had no idea at the time, but I’ve observed the same thing on innumerable occasions since. Once they get close enough to an enemy they show all the tactical sense of a Khornate cult, so carried away with the prospect of getting into close combat that they seem to forget all about the ranged weapons they’re carrying. Anyhow, the only thing this greenie tried to do with his gun was stave my skull in, which I dodged easily, finding as I did so that he’d kindly left himself wide open for a strike to the torso. By luck rather than judgement, my chainblade bit deep, slicing clean through him, and he ran on a few paces before pitching to the ground, coming apart in the middle like a gently sautéed ambull steak.
Jurgen engaged the one on the other flank doggedly, hosing it down with las bolts, his gun on full auto. I only caught a glimpse of the result, but it wasn’t pretty, the luckless greenskin coming apart under the relentless hail of point-blank fire, almost as thoroughly as if it had been hit by a necron flayer. That left the one in the middle, which had barrelled on past me while I still had the other one standing between me and it. It lifted the cleaver in its hand, bellowing with rage, and bore down on Jurgen. My aide switched his aim smoothly, hitting it in the chest with a couple of bolts, and then the lasgun went silent. We’d expended a lot of shots between us since leaving the buggy parked in the derelict factory that morning, and full auto will drain a powerpack faster than an ogryn with a beer glass.
Fortunately, I was still turning from the blow, which had bisected the first ork I’d encountered, and even more luckily the enraged greenskin slipped in the mess we’d made of its fellows. As it lost its footing, Jurgen moved with surprising speed, ramming the butt of his lasgun into its nose, with an audible snap! It staggered backwards, still trying desperately to regain its balance, and I continued the sweeping motion of my gently humming chainblade, taking it behind the knee. It fell to the ground as its right leg came off, tried to rise with an air of stupefied astonishment, and I swiped its head clear off its shoulders with the backswing. The decapitated corpse swayed slightly, and tumbled to the blood soaked ground.
‘Nice move,’ I said to Jurgen, glancing around to see if there were any more greenskins in the vicinity. He shrugged, snapping a fresh powercell into his lasgun.
‘They have a few vulnerable points,’ he said. I nodded. Given the historic antipathy his people had for the greenskins, I supposed he would have been likely to know them. (In fact if I’d bothered to ask before, instead of dismissing the stories I’d heard aboard the Hand of Vengeance as pure exaggeration, I’d have found out that pretty much every Valhallan did.)
‘You’ll have to run me through them some time,’ I said. (Which, of course, being Jurgen he took as an order rather than a pleasantry, presenting me the following day with a datafile detailing a number of ways to take out a greenskin in hand-to-hand combat; something I’ve had occasion to be grateful for on innumerable occasions in the years since.)
‘Very good, sir.’ He glanced around, levelling his recharged weapon. ‘Was that the last of them?’
‘I hope so,’ I said. There didn’t seem to be any more greenskins in the immediate vicinity, so after a moment I holstered the laspistol and switched off the chainsword, returning it to the scabbard. ‘I suppose we ought to find out who to thank for this.’ I indicated the chunks of scattered ork littering the rockcrete around us.
‘That would be us.’ A man emerged from the tangle of piping, his eyes concealed behind a pair of solarspecs which reflected Jurgen and me as large headed mannequins. He wore a vest of flak armour over dusty fatigues, although unlike my aide’s khaki ones both were printed in an urban camo pattern. Sergeant’s stripes were visible on his sleeves, although the floppy sun hat he wore in place of a helmet, printed like the rest of his uniform in mottled grey, was devoid of insignia. He carried a standard issue lasgun, which he kept casually at rest, not quite pointing at us.
‘Neat trick,’ I said. The man nodded at the trio of dead orks at our feet.
‘I could say the same.’ He looked me up and down. ‘I’m guessing you’re Cain.’
‘Unless you know of any other commissars running around the place,’ I agreed. ‘And you must be Tayber.’
‘Guess I must.’ He gestured, and a handful of other men began to emerge from the tangle of pipework. ‘I see you found us after all.’
Of course. The ruin in front of us must be the hydro station. That would explain all the pipework I supposed. I shrugged, plastering my most insouciant grin on my face.
‘It sounded as though you were busy,’ I said. ‘Under the circumstances it would have been rude to insist on an escort.’ Tayber continued to stare at me, and I decided to seize the initiative. ‘How’s Grenbow? You were cut off pretty abruptly.’
‘I’m fine, sir.’ A young fellow, scarcely out of his teens if I was any judge, spoke up, a bulky vox set still strapped to his back. It looked as though my guess had been right; it had stopped a round of some kind, but had undoubtedly saved the young trooper’s life in the process.
‘Pleased to hear it,’ I said, and returned my attention to the sergeant. ‘We should get moving. There were still some greenskins left back there.’ I gestured in the direction of the column of smoke, billowing gently skyward from the point where we’d blown up the truck. Tayber nodded.
‘We should. They know where we were hiding out now. Get the rest of your people together, and let’s go.’
‘We’re it,’ I said. I gestured towards my companion. ‘This is my aide, Gunner Jurgen. Our troopship was hit when we entered the system, and our escape pod crashed in the desert a couple of days ago.’
‘Sounds like a fascinating story.’ Tayber turned and gestured to his men. ‘Come on. We’re moving out, although Emperor alone knows where to.’
EDITORIAL NOTE:
Since, typically, Cain concentrates on his own experiences to the exclusion of anything else, the following extract may shed a little light on some of the preceding section. Alas, like so many other retired military men (and one woman in particular who springs to mind in this context), Sergeant Tayber’s memoirs leave something to be desired in matters of style. Nevertheless, they remain perennially popular on his homeworld, as does Cain’s own published autobiography To Serve the Emperor: A Commissar’s Life. (Which, incidentally, is far less readable than the more candid private account of his activities; perhaps it’s something about the idea of setting their experiences down for posterity, which induces a kind of mental constipation in warriors used to solving problems in a rather more straightforward fashion.)
From The March of the Liberator: the Cain I Knew by Alaric Tayber, 337 M41
It may be some small claim to fame, and certainly pales into insignificance compared to the uncounted thousands who owe their preservation to his inspirational leadership, but mine was the first life to be saved by Cain the Liberator, or, to be a little more accurate, the lives of myself and the remains of my squad.
Since the greenskin plague had descended on our homeworld, we had fought them to the best of our abilities, resorting to hit-and-run tactics, as their overwhelming numbers took their inevitable toll on our gallant defenders. In the previous chapter I set out how, separated from our rapidly disintegrating command structure, we had gone to ground in the remains of the hydro station where Luskins had previously worked, using the tunnels connecting it to the rest of the town to launch guerilla raids on whatever targets we found. By some mischance, we must have betrayed the position of our makeshift citadel on one of these excursions, as we were attacked in our own base by a warband of some considerable size. Ironically, this was on the very day Commissar Cain had made contact with us, the first vox signal we’d managed to receive in almost a month.
Had it not been for this fortuitous coincidence, we would undoubtedly have been caught without warning, and butchered in our lair. However, we had just set out to meet the commissar when the unmistakable sound of ork voices alerted us to the fact that our hiding place had been discovered. We engaged them at once, managing to hold them off, but I could tell that our position was hopeless. To make things even worse, or so it seemed at the time, Commissar Cain had also encountered some elements of the warband surrounding us and was trapped himself, massively outnumbered and facing certain death.
Had I known then what matchless depths of courage and resourcefulness the Liberator possessed I would have worried far less. By a brilliant stratagem, he succeeded not only in overcoming the foes surrounding him, but also in drawing off the bulk of the greenskins besieging us. Fearing, no doubt, from the noise of the carnage this peerless tactician had been able to wreak that they were facing a counterattack, the vast majority of them turned to meet this phantom foe, giving us the opportunity we needed to fight free. By great good fortune, the line of retreat chosen by the enemy took them through an area we had mined in anticipation of an attack from that direction, and for reasons we failed to understand at the time, they had halted right in the middle of the killing zone. One simple detonation sequence was all it took to reduce the bulk of the greenskins opposing us to a handful of stunned survivors.
It was then that we caught our first sight of Cain the Liberator, standing firm in the face of an ork charge, which would undoubtedly have given a lesser man pause. Undaunted, he ran forward to meet them, dispatching his assailants in a flurry of deft strikes and parries, his chainsword hewing greenskin bodies as casually as a woodsman’s axe felling trees.
As he sheathed his weapon and strode out to greet us, a self-effacing smile on his face as though embarrassed to have been seen at work, I was struck for the first time how young he was. We had no commissars in the PDF[52], so all I knew about them were the stories everyone knows, but I was soon to discover that in spite of his apparent youth his maturity and judgement were second to none. Indeed, his first question after we’d exchanged greetings was to enquire after the welfare of our vox operator, who had been hit in the middle of our last exchange of messages, an early indication of the concern we were soon to discover that he felt for all those who had so fortuitously fallen under his care.
It was as we left our former refuge, however, that I first realised the truly inspirational nature of his leadership. To all intents and purposes we had been routed, forced on the run again, but to Commissar Cain this apparently crushing setback was nothing of the kind. Indeed, it was to be the beginning of a victory more complete than any of us could possibly have dreamed at the time.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Returning to where Jurgen and I had parked our purloined transport was to prove less of an ordeal than I’d anticipated. One of the PDF troopers turned out to have worked in the hydro plant before being conscripted, and knew the network of tunnels and sewers beneath the city well enough to guide us back without fear of running into any more of the greenskins. I hoped. It was becoming increasingly clear to me that brutal and impulsive as they were, the commonly held belief that they were also as thick as sump dregs wasn’t exactly true. All right, the average greenskin is pretty stupid compared to a human (or even a ratling for that matter), but then abstract reasoning isn’t exactly high on their list of priorities. Something had led them to Tayber’s hiding place in the hydro station, and it wouldn’t take much for them to realise that we’d taken to the tunnels beneath it. So, even though my old hiver’s instincts welcomed the sense of enclosure around us, interpreting it as safe and familiar, my conscious mind was at least partially occupied, the whole time filtering the echoes around us for any sound of pursuit or ambush up ahead.
