Death or Glory, page 11
The further we got from the south sector, the more relaxed I became, and I was able to devote more of my attention to what Tayber was telling me. He and his men had been using these tunnels for some weeks, striking at isolated greenskin patrols and raiding for supplies, and that all in all they’d been making quite a nuisance of themselves. Well, bully for them, it was what they were supposed to be doing, and the more greenskins they took out the happier I was, but it became increasingly obvious to me the more detail he went into, that they were only staving off the inevitable.
‘What else do you suggest we do?’ Tayber asked once we’d got back to the ruined factory where we’d parked the buggy. He was looking around the place, clearly wondering if it would do as another makeshift base from which to harass the greenskins. ‘Just give up?’
‘Of course not,’ I said. He seemed convinced, now, that we weren’t ork collaborators, which was something of an improvement, and was at least inclined to hear me out. How much of that was due to my commissarial authority, how much to my personal charm, which I was exerting as subtly as I could to reinforce the good impression hacking a couple of orks to bits in front of him had evidently made, and how much to the plateful of soylens viridiens he was scarfing down as we spoke, I couldn’t be sure. If anything had convinced the PDF troopers of our good intentions it was the pile of survival rations we’d scavenged from the lifepod; it seemed they hadn’t had a hot meal in days. ‘They know you’re out there now. Maybe it’s time to move on.’
‘Move on where?’ Tayber asked, flinching a little as Jurgen leaned across to refill his mug of recaff, which hardly seemed fair to me; after a month or more of living rough he wasn’t exactly fragrant either. I shrugged, forking another mouthful of reconstituted glop into my mouth.
‘We’re hoping to link up with the bulk of our forces,’ I said. ‘We know our regiment made it down in one piece, and it’s our duty to rejoin it as quickly as possible.’ So I could get back to sitting quietly, well behind the front line as usual, with nothing more dangerous to look out for than Colonel Mostrue’s occasional attempts to see if I was quite as heroic as I was supposed to be, although I didn’t think it was advisable to be quite that candid with Tayber. To my surprise he laughed out loud.
‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘You’re going to need it.’ Something about the way he spoke started my palms tingling again, but I smiled as though we were just exchanging pleasantries.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. By way of a reply he drew a map slate out of his pack and showed it to me.
‘We’re here,’ he said, pointing, and to my well-concealed satisfaction I noticed that we were more or less in the position I’d estimated from the crudely scrawled ork map. I nodded, to show I understood. ‘And the closest defending forces are here.’ He scrolled the image across to the western continent, and tapped the narrow peninsular connecting the two landmasses. ‘More or less,’ he shrugged, ‘apart from the odd group of stragglers like us, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I said, masking the way my stomach had suddenly seemed to drop clear of my body with the practiced ease of the born dissembler. I shrugged too. ‘It seems our tactical information was a little outdated.’
‘You might say that,’ Tayber agreed. I took another gulp of the recaff, wishing it was tanna.
My head reeled with the implications of this new information. Anyway I looked at it, my original plan looked like the only one with even the slightest chance of ensuring my survival. Remaining hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines indefinitely was a slow way of committing suicide, nothing more. Sooner or later my luck was bound to run out.
‘Nevertheless,’ I said slowly, ‘I’m going to try it. I have to. My duty to the regiment demands it, my duty to the Commissariat demands it, and besides,’ I shrugged, with a faint grin at Jurgen, knowing only he would get the joke, and that I was further from joking about the matter than anyone else would think, ‘the nearest mug of tanna is on the next continent somewhere. And I’m just about in the mood to go and get it.’
In the end, I persuaded Tayber to come with me far more easily than I’d expected. I’d been worried that I’d have to exert my commissarial authority, but he was bright enough to realise that the fracas in the south sector would have stirred up the greenskins to the point where sneaking around unnoticed would be far less easy than before. As for the troopers with him, I neither knew nor cared what they thought; once I got Tayber on side they’d follow orders like good little grunts and that was that. If I noticed any signs of reluctance to pull out on his part I simply put it down to the practical difficulties of our intended journey.
‘We’ll never make it all that way on foot,’ Tayber said, shrinking the image to emphasise the point, until where we were and where we needed to get to could just fit onto the pictscreen together. Dusk was falling, which suited me fine; if we were going to sneak out of this firewasp’s nest without the orks noticing, it would be far better to do it in the dark. I nodded, conceding the point, and Tayber shrugged, his face wanly illuminated by the tenuous glow of the mapslate.
‘Then we’ll have to get you some transport,’ I said. There was no point even suggesting that they hitch a ride with us. The buggy was so stuffed with supplies from the lifepod, there was barely room for me to cling on to the thing, and even if we ditched them (which wasn’t an option given how much ground we had to cover, especially with eight more mouths to feed[53]), there still wouldn’t have been enough room for the whole squad to climb aboard it.
Tayber raised an eyebrow. ‘And where do you suggest we get it?’ he asked.
I indicated the scavenged vehicle with a tilt of the head.
‘I’m sure the greenskins wouldn’t miss another one of those,’ I said. Once again I expected Tayber to argue, but to my surprise he simply nodded, with the first sign of enthusiasm I’d seen since we started this conversation.
‘I know where we can get some,’ he said.
In later years, I suppose, my innate paranoia would have kicked in at that point, but in those days I was far more naive, and so relieved at his ready acquiescence, it never occurred to me that he might have an ulterior motive.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In the end, the plan we agreed on was simple enough, if more than a little desperate. Tayber and his men knew the town well, which was hardly surprising as most of them had grown up there, and had been keeping a commendably close eye on the greenskins’ activities. Tayber called up a street plan on the mapslate, pointing out the local landmarks to Jurgen and me as we leaned over the tiny image. As ever, my innate sense of direction took over as soon as I looked at it, and I was pleased to be able to follow the route we’d taken that morning with little difficulty.
‘They keep most of the vehicles here while they’re not being used,’ Tayber said. Recognising the common map symbol for an Adeptus Mechanicus shrine, I nodded. That made sense, although given the state of repair of our purloined buggy I found it hard to believe that regular maintenance was high on the owners’ list of priorities. I said as much, and one of the other troopers, Hascom by name, chipped in diffidently.
‘They go there for fuel, mostly,’ he said. ‘And it’s where they build new ones.’
‘New ones?’ I echoed, and Hascom nodded.
‘The greenies have some sort of tech-priests. They build things. Sort of…’
I nodded too, to show I was listening. I’d gathered from Jurgen that a few of the orks had a rudimentary knowledge of technical matters, but the news that the greenskins here were capable of producing new toys to replace the ones that got broken put another face on things entirely. I glanced at Tayber. ‘I’d have thought you’d want to take this place out as quickly as possible,’ I said. The sergeant looked uneasy.
‘It’s not quite as simple as that,’ he said. I adopted an expression of polite enquiry, and once he realised I wasn’t going to push him for details he ended up telling me far more than he’d intended to of his own volition. (Which is a good example of why I try to instil a bit of patience into my cadets, although the little whippersnappers are generally too young and eager to see the point.) ‘It’s heavily guarded. We’d never have been able to get inside, and even if we did…’ He hesitated, and I became aware of a subtle tensing among the troopers, like the first faint presentiment of a distant thunderstorm. ‘We couldn’t blow it up.’
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘If it’s a refuelling station there must be promethium tanks.’ I glanced at Trooper Luskins, the tunnel rat, who carried a missile launcher over his shoulder, and his teammate Jodril, whose pouch of spare rockets was almost but not quite exhausted. ‘In fact if you pick your spot, a krak round from outside the compound should do the job nicely.’
‘It would,’ Luskins agreed quickly, with the air of a man who had argued precisely this point himself on more than one occasion.
‘But we’d end up killing our own people,’ Grenbow put in. He was still lugging the useless vox set around, although for the life of me I couldn’t see why. Perhaps he was just so used to it that he simply didn’t notice the weight any more.
Luskins shrugged. ‘They’re dead already. Just haven’t stopped moving around yet.’
Grenbow and a couple of the others flushed angrily, and I stepped in to defuse the situation with the instinctive ease of long practice.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t quite see what you’re getting at.’
Tayber sighed heavily. ‘It’s where they keep the prisoners,’ he said. I thought of the emaciated wretches I’d seen that morning, and privately agreed with Luskins: none of them looked as though they were going to last much longer. Saying so wouldn’t get us anywhere, though, so I nodded judiciously as though he had a point.
‘We should take whatever precautions we can to protect the civilians,’ I said, little dreaming of how that simple platitude was going to come back to haunt me. For the moment, though it had the desired effect, the air of tension around us draining away as swiftly as it had come. ‘That goes without saying.’ I turned back to the sergeant. ‘But the objective has changed from the one you were considering before. We need to get in, obtain some transport, and get out again. How would you do that?’
‘We’ll need a diversion,’ Tayber said. ‘But coordinating it will be a problem. Once we split up we’ll be out of touch.’
‘No we won’t,’ I assured him, tapping the commbead in my ear. ‘We’ve got enough of these to go round.’ The sergeant looked surprised for a moment.
‘Good,’ he said. He glanced at Jodril. ‘Got any frag shells left?’
‘One,’ the loader confirmed, ‘and two krak.’
‘Sounds like a diversion to me,’ I said, turning to the missile team. ‘Can you find a spot overlooking the compound?’
Luskins smiled lazily. ‘Know just the one,’ he said, to my complete lack of surprise.
‘Pleased to hear it,’ I told him. ‘Set up there, wait for our signal, and then drop the fragger on the biggest bunch of greenies you can find.’
‘Then head for the rendezvous,’ Sergeant Tayber said firmly, clearly worried at the prospect of Luskins’s enthusiasm for cooking off the promethium getting the better of him once we were inside. I nodded judiciously, as if I was considering it.
‘That might be best,’ I conceded, and spun the mapslate towards Luskins. ‘Where are you going to be?’
‘Here.’ He pointed, and I nodded again.
‘You can see the main gate from there?’
‘Clear as day,’ the rocketeer assured me, and his loader nodded a vigorous assent.
‘Then I suggest,’ I said to Tayber, in a tone of voice calculated to convey that the suggestion was nothing of the kind, ‘that they remain in place until we’re clear. In case we need covering from pursuit.’
‘That might be prudent,’ the sergeant agreed, with evident reluctance. I turned back to Luskins, masking my own apprehension at the thought I might just be giving a pyromaniac the biggest box of matches on the planet.
‘But don’t fire without a specific order from Sergeant Tayber or myself,’ I added, as if it were an afterthought. ‘Those rockets don’t grow on trees.’
‘No, sir.’ He nodded soberly, and broke into a grin. ‘Be good if they did, though, wouldn’t it?’
Once the troopers had dispersed to their prearranged positions, Jurgen and I had little to do but wait. Night had fallen in earnest, and with it had come the cold, so I fastened my greatcoat with a sense of profound relief. In the darkness, its sombre black was a positive advantage, and one I intended to exploit to the full in the hours to come. As always when waiting for the action to begin, I found myself wondering if I was doing the right thing. Jurgen and I would be running a tremendous risk, and I was by no means sure how much I could rely on my new allies. Perhaps it would be most prudent to simply leave, and head westwards alone, hoping to slip past the orks unobserved.
No. That would be suicidal. My chances of travelling all that distance without backup were virtually nonexistent. If I was going to stand a reasonable chance of making it back to our lines, I’d have to take the troopers with me, which meant getting them some transport. That, in turn, meant I was committed to this ridiculous plan, which now I came to consider it carefully had more holes in it than Jurgen’s socks… It was with some relief that I heard the commbead hiss in my ear, followed by Luskins’s voice, which sounded breathy and excited.
‘Team two. We’re in place.’
‘Good.’ Instinctively, I kept my own voice under control. ‘Await signal. Team one, advise.’
‘Getting close,’ Tayber said, and then went quiet again, maintaining vox discipline like the good NCO he was, at least by PDF standards. I took a deep breath and clambered aboard the buggy, where Jurgen was already waiting, swathed in a blanket.
‘All right,’ I said, as he fired up the engine and we jerked into motion. ‘Let’s see if this actually works.’
At first, everything seemed to be going well, Tayber voxing in shortly after we set off to advise us that he and the five troopers with him were waiting in the culvert that Luskins had pointed out would bring them close to the perimeter without exposing them to enemy fire; or, with any luck, sentries, assuming the greenskins were sufficiently organised to have posted some in the first place. It was a fairly safe assumption that they hadn’t, at least not there, since the outflow from whatever arcane processes the enginseers had overseen in the depths of their sanctum in happier times was blocked off by a metal grille, rendering entry from that direction impossible without the aid of explosives or other equally conspicuous methods. Explosives were in short supply, of course, and I wouldn’t have been too happy in Tayber’s shoes at the prospect of setting them off in a confined space in any case, but as usual my aide had proved equal to the challenge, producing a small cutting torch from among the plethora of miscellaneous items he’d scavenged from the wreck of the lifepod.
That would still make a bit of noise, but if everything went according to plan, the greenskins would have a great deal more to worry about by the time the Perlians began burning their way through the barrier. Just so long as their attention wasn’t focused on us…
The journey to the former shrine of the tech-priests was nerve-wracking. I crouched behind the bundles of booty encrusting our ramshackle vehicle, hoping that would be sufficient to shield me from view. What little I could see of the night time streets was still more than enough, however, the same bustle of frenetic activity I’d noticed during the day continued unabated throughout the hours of darkness. Here and there, bonfires burned, illuminating the ghastly scene in tones of flickering orange, and once I saw a building ablaze, apparently set on fire purely for the light it afforded[54]. There were fewer vehicles around than before, and most of the ones we saw were heading in the same direction we were, so Tayber’s intelligence looked as though it was accurate at least in that respect.
Once, to my horror, a gaggle of gretchin tried to scramble aboard, shrieking and babbling at Jurgen, which at least proved that his makeshift disguise was holding from a distance. Expecting trouble, as I was, my weapons were already drawn, and my thumb hovered over the activator of the chainsword. But before I could reveal my presence by starting it, Jurgen punched the nearest one hard and accurately, pitching it over the side, and laughed loudly. It had the desired effect, the other gretchin followed their fallen comrade, and broke into hysterical giggles themselves.
‘What was that all about?’ I asked quietly.
Jurgen shrugged. ‘They wanted a lift. I said no.’ A tinge of doubt began to creep into his voice. ‘The little ones don’t usually drive things.’
‘Now you tell me,’ I said, a tingle of apprehension beginning to make its way up my spine. If one of the orks noticed something out of the ordinary, we were done for. Too late to back out now, we were committed. I activated the commbead.
‘Team two, stand by,’ I said. ‘On my mark…’
‘Already loaded,’ Luskins assured me. ‘And I’ve a nice juicy target picked out.’
‘I can see you now,’ Jodril cut in. With the weapon already loaded and ready to fire, he was observing the scene through a spare amplivisor. Peering round the weapon mount and past my aide’s shoulders, I could see we were approaching a pair of wrought iron gates, incorporating the cogwheel sigil of the Adeptus Mechanicus. It was standing ajar in a high, stone wall covered in images of the Omnissiah, which in turn had been largely obscured by vile ork daubs.
