Caves of Ice, page 17
‘The gargant’s veered off,’ he said. Well, thank the Emperor for that, I thought, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about the booby trap they’d laid for it bringing the whole mine in on top of me while I was down there in the dark facing the necrons again... My hands began to tremble slightly as I thought about that, so I stuffed them into the pockets of my greatcoat and studied the hololith grimly. Something about the redistribution of the ork forces was nagging at my subconscious, and I felt my scalp prickling as I finally realised what it was.
‘The tunnel entrance we found was about here,’ I said, indicating a point on the opposite flank of the mountain from the valley we were so successfully defending. The bulk of the greenskin forces were moving in that direction, the gargant’s unexpected diversion merely a part of the general drift. And there was only one obvious reason why the orks’ attention would have been distracted from the ongoing battle with us.
‘Frakking warp!’ Kasteen breathed, coming to the same conclusion. ‘The tinheads are attacking the greenies!’
‘In some force, too, judging by the number of reinforcements moving up,’ Broklaw said, studying the display in more detail. That wasn’t necessarily the case, of course, orks will gravitate naturally to wherever they expect the fighting to be fiercest, but it was certainly suggestive.
‘Perfect!’ Kasteen said, to my absolute astonishment. ‘You know what this means?’
‘Nope.’ Mazarin shrugged in the corner of the hololith, her image shrunk to the size of my hand. ‘Not my department.’ But of course Kasteen hadn’t been talking to her in any case.
‘It means the bloody necrons are awake!’ I said, a strange mixture of terror and relief dancing down my spine. ‘We haven’t a hope in hell of getting to the portal now.’ I tried to feign disappointment, while wondering how best to ensure I was on the first shuttle up to the freighter.
‘Not necessarily,’ Mazarin chipped in, and the flare of hope in my chest withered and died. Luckily it was only her image in the room with us, or I’d probably have throttled her with my bare hands. (Not that it would have done me much good, I suppose, given the amount of metal she seemed to have in what was left of her body.) ‘If I’m reading these energy spikes right the portal’s being activated roughly every seventeen minutes.’
‘Which means what, exactly?’ Kasteen asked, taking far too much interest in what the bisected woman had to say for my liking. Mazarin shrugged, unless it was the air conditioning behind her kicking up another notch and bouncing her around.
‘The necrons here are probably still in stasis. The ones fighting the orks are being shipped in from somewhere else.’
‘Securing the tomb before they wake the others,’ Broklaw said. Kasteen nodded.
‘Sounds plausible.’ She looked across at me. ‘And they still have no idea we’re behind them. You can be in and out before they even know you’re there.’
‘Lucky me,’ I said, clenching my fists in my pockets until the nails drew blood.
‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ I said. I felt a vague sense of disconnectedness after that, the reason for which continued to elude me for a while, until I realised that contrary to the habit of a lifetime the subsequent statement was actually true. The harsh arc luminators of the main staging area just inside the mouth of the mine flattened the colours of the scattered equipment around us, including the power lifter against which I leaned in what I hoped was a casual manner rather than revealing the weakness of my knees. ‘Our chances of coming back from this assignment are practically non-existent. But it’s also no exaggeration to say that the lives of everyone else on the planet, not to mention uncountable others, hang on whether we succeed or not.’ I flicked my eyes along the impassive faces in front of me. Not one of them blinked. I ploughed on, feeling vaguely wrong-footed. ‘I think you’re the best team for the job, which is why I asked for you. But I’ll only take willing volunteers. If anyone wants to pull out you have my word there won’t be any disciplinary action taken or a word about it on any of your records.’ Because I’d be too busy being dead to worry about it… I forced the thought away.
‘We’re up to it,’ the storm trooper sergeant said, the unlit cheroot in the corner of his mouth waggling disconcertingly as he spoke. I gathered that it was some kind of tradition in his squad that he wouldn’t light it until the mission was completed. The little knot of men behind him nodded in silent agreement. Not one of them broke ranks, which I would have found astonishing had I not spent a couple of hours combing the records for the most aggressive and disciplined squad in the entire regiment.
And Sergeant Welard and his squad were it: old school storm troopers (quite literally, they’d been together since the schola progenium assessors back on Valhalla had decided they were natural born cannon fodder). They were, accordingly, one of the few teams to have remained single-sex following the amalgamation of the two former regiments which now made up the 597th, since there was no point rotating in replacements for the casualties they’d taken on Corania[67] and wherever else they’d fought before. Schola-raised storm trooper squads generally fight better than most because they’ve been together so long and know each other so well that they share an instinctive rapport no outsider can ever fully share, but the downside of that is that once their numbers drop below a handful they become pretty much useless, and I’ve never understood why the Guard persists with the tradition[68]. Right now though, men who’d follow orders without thinking were precisely what I needed, and Welard and his team fit the bill nicely.
‘I’m pleased to see my confidence wasn’t misplaced,’ I said. Apart from Welard there were five regular troopers left out of the original ten, so they were on the verge of falling below the critical threshold at which they would cease to be an effective fighting unit. Nevertheless, they would do. Numbers wouldn’t help us on this mission, our only hope was to move fast and stealthily, and that, I knew, was something they were bound to be good at. (In the constant round of rivalries and practical joke playing between the different factions in my days at the schola the storm trooper cadets were by far the most adept at sneaking into the other dorms and common rooms to make mischief, and always set the most inventive booby traps, although I still maintain we had the edge over them on the scrumball pitch. In fact the only team that ever regularly beat the commissar cadets were the novitiates of the Adepta Sororitas, who seemed to think the point of the game was sending the greatest number of opponents they could to the sanitorium rather than scoring goals.)
‘We’ll get the job done,’ Welard said, moving the cheroot to the opposite corner of his mouth, and the quintet behind him nodded in unison. Their silence was unnerving, but I suppose it was a natural consequence of the rapport they shared. Not a word or a gesture was wasted, to the point where, swathed in their greatcoats and hats, their faces partly obscured, they seemed almost as emotionless as servitors. Or the necrons themselves. An aura of almost palpable lethality played about them, which I began to feel almost comforted by, until I remembered the odds stacked against us.
‘Any questions?’ I asked. Answer came there none, so I drew myself up, straightened my cap, and tried to sound confident. ‘Good. Then let’s go.’
The evacuation was well under way as we set out for the lower levels, a steady flow of miners, Administratum drones and tech-priests walking towards the landing pads with the tense not-quite trot of barely-contained panic, lasgun-wielding troopers guarding the tunnels they thronged through. We strode against the tide, which parted almost miraculously in front of us, each step further from safety seeming like walking on knives to me. A babble of voices surrounded us like syrup, battering the eardrums but overlapping so much that individual words and phrases were indistinguishable.
‘Comms check,’ I said, more to distract myself than anything, and Welard and the other storm troopers sounded off one by one, although truth to tell, and I ought to be ashamed of it, I was so busy battling my own apprehension that none of their names registered with me. Everyone’s comm-bead seemed to be working, though, so I nodded briskly. ‘Very good.’
‘General order.’ Kasteen’s voice cut in. ‘Anyone in sight of Magos Ernulph report now.’ There was an irritable pause, broken only by a faint hiss of static. ‘Anyone with an idea of his whereabouts?’ Another pause. ‘Anyone seeing him, report at once.’
Great. It seemed the tech-priests weren’t about to leave their prize behind after all, and were going into hiding until we’d left. Just so long as they stayed out of our way, though, it wasn’t my problem.
The passageways we strode through were getting narrower now, the air cooler as we entered the mine workings themselves, and I told myself the shivering which seemed to be gripping my body was simply a result of the falling temperatures. Before long the walls around us were filmed with ice, and shortly after that there was nothing for the ice to coat; we were in the mine itself again.
Ahead of us a cavern opened out, harsh with the glare of luminators mounted on poles around its perimeter, the dark mouths of the main tunnels puncturing the walls at intervals. Equipment and storage crates littered the floor, and I recognised it as one of the main utility areas we’d passed through on our ambull hunt, little guessing the horrors we’d find in the depths below. Beyond this point our journey would truly begin.
‘Movement.’ One of the troopers raised his hellgun, and the others melted into the industrial detritus around us with breathtaking speed, leaving me feeling uncomfortably exposed. A lone figure was lurking at the mouth of the tunnel ahead of us, half hidden in the gloom beyond. After a moment to recover my composure, as the rational part of my mind kicked in to remind me that orks or necrons wouldn’t be bothering with concealment, I strode forward unconcerned expecting to find some stray miner or tech-priest finishing off a last-minute job prior to joining the evacuation. As I got closer to the solitary figure I felt my spirits inexplicably lifting as I caught the faint whiff of a familiar odour.
‘Jurgen,’ I called out. ‘What the frak are you doing here?’ My aide stepped fully into view, and the storm troopers emerged from the cover they’d taken, looking mildly sheepish. ‘I thought you were stowing our kit on the shuttle.’
‘All taken care of, sir.’ He produced a thermal flask. ‘I thought you might like a bit of tea for later. And a sandwich.’ He burrowed in one of his pockets for a moment. ‘It’s in here somewhere...’
‘I see,’ I said, silencing the barely audible snickering from a couple of the storm troopers behind me with a quick glance before turning back to Jurgen again. ‘And the melta?’ He shrugged, the heavy weapon slung across his back shifting as his shoulders moved.
‘I couldn’t let you carry your own provisions, sir. Wouldn’t be fitting.’
‘Quite,’ I said, astonished yet again at the depth of his loyalty. For the first time I began to feel that I might actually get out of this ludicrous expedition in one piece after all. ‘I suppose you’d better come with us, then.’
‘Very good, sir.’ He saluted as smartly as he ever did, which wasn’t very to be honest, but more than made up for that in enthusiasm, and fell into step beside me. I motioned Welard and his men to the front and we set off into the darkness, towards the terrors which lay in wait for us in the frozen depths below.
EDITORIAL NOTE:
As the attentive reader will readily appreciate, the overall tactical situation was now becoming increasingly complex. The unexpected necron attack on the orkish flank had thrown the greenskins into disarray, but, typically, they responded with the single-minded aggression of their kind, flinging themselves against this new and deadly foe with what can only be described as enthusiasm. The resulting carnage can barely be imagined.
However, the lessening of the pressure on the beleaguered Valhallans was undoubtedly of great benefit, enabling the evacuation of the Imperial forces to take place relatively unhindered, especially as most of the front-line units had already been given their orders to disengage in preparation for luring the gargant into the now abandoned booby trap.
As to the fate of this formidable war machine, the following extract from Sulla’s memoirs may prove illuminating despite her best efforts to render it unreadable.
Extracted from Like a Phoenix From the Flames: The Founding of the 597th, by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 097.M42.
Notwithstanding the flood of rumours which had swept the regiment, most of them contradictory, but which all agreed in the main particular that Commissar Cain had discovered some new and potent threat in the bowels of the mine, I held fast to my duty and resumed my post at the front line. Whatever the truth of the matter I had my orders, and as a loyal officer that was enough for me. No doubt those better placed to evaluate the intelligence the commissar had so heroically gathered would inform us of whatever we needed to know to meet and overcome this latest vile stain on His Glorious Majesty’s blessed dominions in the fullness of time, or so I told my subordinates, and until such information was furnished wild speculation about daemons, tyranids, or walking metal statues was merely a waste of time. This last flight of fantasy would, of course, turn out to have more than a grain of truth in it, but in the closing years of the forty-first millennium, with the true horror of the necron menace still unknown to all but a few, such talk seemed naught but the most febrile of fantasies.
My platoon had resumed its position in the forward line, with strict instructions to fall back at the specified time to draw the gargant into our carefully laid trap, and we had been engaging the main bulk of the greenskin army with a gratifying amount of success. So much so, in fact, that I began to fear that we were thinning them out too quickly, and that we would be forced to engage the towering war machine ourselves before the time came to disengage. The shadow of that grim colossus was falling across us as we gazed in awe at it, the shrieks of thousands of tonnes of unlubricated metal sliding across one another as it tottered forward on unfeasibly stubby-looking legs setting the teeth of every woman and man among us on edge, and I found myself comparing it most unfavourably to the swift darting elegance of the eldar walkers and the majestic nobility of our own blessed titans[69].
I was on the verge of ordering those fortunate enough to be manning the forward trenches to engage those members of its crew who could quite clearly be discerned scurrying about on the main hull when the vast cannon nestled in the construct’s belly spoke, the concussion sufficient to drive the breath from our lungs and cause cracks to appear in our stout fortifications even at this distance. I turned my head, expecting to see the most grievous havoc wreaked among the precious buildings of the refinery, only to see instead the distant gout of a vast explosion somewhere among the slopes of the mountains surrounding this vital outpost of the Imperium.
‘It’s veering off!’ my communications specialist yelled, angling his head so I could read his lips, for the awesome sound of that titanic explosion had left my ears still ringing, and to my astonishment I beheld the truth of his words. It had clearly faltered, almost on the point of engaging our forward line, and was now turning ponderously towards the looming peaks it had so inexplicably attacked.
At that moment we received our orders to withdraw, so I cannot be sure of what I witnessed next, seeing it as I did at an ever-increasing distance in short, snatched glances over my shoulder as we ran, and through a curtain of falling snow. However, it seemed to me that the terrifying construct was surrounded by small structures, no higher than its knee, which had appeared by sorceries so arcane I was at a loss to explain them. Blank metal pyramids they were, dully reflective, and surrounded by a crackle of lightning which blurred their outline still further; sorcerous lightning without a doubt, for it lashed forth to scourge the hull of that mountain of metal, striking sparks so bright they hurt to look upon. Chunks of metal larger than Chimeras fell lazily to the snow, and the burning bodies of its luckless crew pattered down around them, so that I cannot for the life of me conceive how it could ever have prevailed. But whether it did or not I cannot truly answer, for the snow whirled in around that epic confrontation, and I saw no more.
FOURTEEN
One thing I have to say for Welard and his storm troopers, they were as fast and stealthy as I could have wished for. Jurgen and I had to work hard at keeping up with them even though they advanced as cautiously as though the enemy were already in plain sight. Two or three of them covered the tunnel ahead while the others darted forward to conceal themselves in crevices or patches of shadow before taking up the duties of guardians themselves to allow their comrades to move forward in their turn. They did all of this with an eerie precision apparently unhindered by the bulk of the melta bombs they carried, communicating only by hand signals and eschewing the use of the comm-beads, for which I was grateful, starting in dread at every superfluous sound which might call attention to us. But as we hurried on, following the route which had etched itself indelibly on the synapses responsible for my ability to navigate underground, we saw none of the signs I so dreaded. No gleam of metal in the darkness ahead, no green charnel glow forewarning us of the presence of death incarnate.
We advanced in semi-darkness, our luminators shrouded, so that the dazzling highlights which had been struck from the ice surrounding us on my previous trip into the depths were almost entirely absent. Now, instead of the refulgent background glow I’d grown used to, the walls threw back no more than a slick, almost organic-looking sheen, as though we were passing down the gullet of some warp-spawned leviathan. The thought was hardly a comforting one, and I shuddered from more than the cold.
