Caves of Ice, page 21
But my attention remained fixed on the gargant, which loomed over everything like a shadow of doom. Despite the great rents in its metre-thick armour plate and the fused wreckage of its primary armament it still looked unstoppable, lurching forward uncertainly with a shriek of tortured metal, the left leg dragging slightly as though limping from its wounds.
‘Fire at will!’ Kasteen roared, suiting the action to the word, and hundreds of lasguns crackled repeatedly, sending echoes booming like surf from the structures still standing. The orks replied enthusiastically, but, praise the Emperor, no more accurately than usual, so our casualties remained light in comparison to the scores who were falling and being trampled underfoot by their comrades.
‘Target the gargant!’ Broklaw ordered the Chimera crews, and dozens of heavy bolters began to hose down the looming tower of metal which continued to plod towards us, cracking the ice of the landing field under its weight with every tottering step. They didn’t seem to be bothering it much, but at least they were keeping the crew’s heads down, and the open galleries on its shoulders clear of the heavy weapon crews who would otherwise have been adding a hail of supporting fire to its own formidable armament.
‘They’re consistent at least,’ Kasteen muttered at my elbow. True to their nature the orks were attacking us directly across the landing field, sweeping down the length of it parallel to the line of storage tanks, now shimmering behind a haze of promethium vapour from their rapidly-draining contents. At the sight of that wavering shroud my blood ran even colder than it already was. It would only take one stray round landing next to them for the entire complex to be engulfed in an explosion almost impossible to imagine. And us along with it, of course.
‘Keep our fire directed away from the storage tanks,’ I cautioned, and she nodded grimly, perceiving the danger too. Not that it would make a lot of difference in the long run, I thought. The gargant was swinging its remaining gun around to target the centre of our formation, which of course meant me along with the senior officers, and I began to think we only had moments left if that. The ork advance seemed almost unstoppable, for every greenskin that fell another dozen continuing to charge forward slavering with bloodlust.
‘Shuttle three requesting landing co-ordinates.’ A new voice cut into the comm-net, and I became aware of the roar of a powerful engine becoming audible even over the din of the ongoing battle. A flare of hope rose within me...
‘Shuttle three, abort your approach.’ Mazarin’s voice cut in abruptly, shattering it, her tone calm and authoritative. ‘The greenskins are all over the pad.’
‘I can still make it,’ the unseen pilot argued, and the blocky shape of the shuttle suddenly appeared over the refinery, banking sharply round to run in over the main bulk of the ork army. Something about his voice sounded familiar, and I wondered if it was the same one who’d got us down here in the first place. Sporadic small arms fire bounced off his hull, and I stilled my breath remembering our abrupt arrival here, but the orks didn’t get lucky this time and he came in low over our heads, his landing thrusters screaming. A few of the troopers waved and yelled, but most kept firing grimly into the onrushing horde of blade-waving barbarity. Another couple of moments and they’d be on us. I drew my chainsword, preparing for the shock of impact, and continued spitting las-bolts into the wall of screaming ork flesh bearing down on us almost as fast as the tidal wave of promethium still scouring the mine beneath our feet.
The gargant lurched forward again, and impelled by panic or instinct I finally noticed the deep gash in its leg. It was a slim chance, but...
‘Target its left leg!’ I yelled, and the Chimera crews switched their aim, pouring a concentrated barrage of heavy bolter rounds against that single, vulnerable spot. For a moment I thought the desperate gamble would fail, but as the torrent of explosive fire chewed away at the torn and overstressed metal the towering leviathan began to sway alarmingly. The damaged limb seemed to seize up entirely, then failed altogether with a crack of rending metal which echoed like thunder between the encircling hills, audible even over the din of battle surrounding us.
Abruptly it lost its equilibrium entirely, toppling absurdly slowly at first, then faster and faster as more of that titanic bulk neared the ground. The orks around it scattered in panic, like ants beneath a descending boot, and a gratifying number of them failed to make it.
The impact shook the ground beneath us, cracking the ice for hundreds of metres around the huge wreck, swallowing almost a third of that vast bulk and opening chasms which engulfed the vast majority of the fleeing greenskins. From deep within that mountain of metal the dull thud of secondary explosions going off echoed like bronchitic coughs, and the lurid red glow of spreading flames began to join the smoke I’d seen earlier.
‘Finish them off!’ Kasteen ordered, and the Valhallans responded with a will, surging forward to engage the stunned survivors. After a short exchange of weapons fire it was all over, the few remaining orks fleeing beyond the effective range of our lasguns and Kasteen reining in the more enthusiastic platoon commanders who seemed on the verge of going after them with a display of profanity verging on the pyrotechnic. I’d expected Sulla to be leading the charge, but it turned out her company was the first to have been shuttled back up to the ship, so for once she didn’t have the chance to do something stupid, which made a refreshing change.
‘I think we should board as soon as we can,’ I said, feeling our luck had already been stretched far thinner than we had any right to expect, and Kasteen nodded.
‘I think you’re right,’ she said. ‘Simia Orichalcae’s rather lost its charm for me.’
‘You and me both,’ Broklaw agreed, and hurried off to organise the next stage of the embarkation as the incoming shuttle grounded at last.
I have to admit that the surge of relief I felt as I hurried up the cargo ramp and heard the comforting clang of metal beneath my boot soles once more left me almost giddy. Nevertheless I couldn’t shake a strong sense of foreboding which intensified with every extra minute we remained on the pad, and continued to hover by the open hatch as a steady stream of Guardsmen and women made their way on board. Kasteen joined me there after a while, her face pensive.
‘Looking for something?’ she asked.
‘Hoping I don’t see it,’ I admitted. ‘It’ll take more than a bath to see off the necrons if I’m any judge.’ All the time we spoke I kept an amplivisor trained on the edge of the complex, dreading the sight of a flash of moving metal. Kasteen nodded ruefully.
‘Shame you couldn’t blow up the portal,’ she said. I echoed the gesture.
‘Shame you never got the chance to blow up the gargant,’ I echoed. We looked at one another, the same thought occurring to us both simultaneously, and went to find Captain Federer.
‘We were going to detonate it by vox pulse,’ Federer confirmed. He was a thin-faced, dark-haired man, whose enthusiasm for problem-solving was matched only by his lack of social skills. Rumour among the regiment had it that he’d once aspired to become a tech-priest but been expelled from the seminary for his morbid fascination with pyrotechnics, and he certainly seemed to have an almost instinctive understanding of the arcane technologies of the combat engineer. If the rumours were true, the Adeptus’s loss was very definitely our gain.
We found him in the shuttle’s main cargo bay fussing over the stowage of the small amount of equipment he’d been able to salvage; under the circumstances Kasteen had decided to abandon our vehicles and stores and use the space we saved to bring up another couple of platoons at a time. Riding back here would be hideously uncomfortable, but far better than still being around if the necrons stirred again.
‘So you could still set the charges off from here?’ I asked, raising my voice slightly to carry over the babble of voices from the troopers beginning to file in to the echoing hold. A few of them had evidently been in a similar situation before, unfurling their bedrolls into improvised acceleration couches as they settled. Federer nodded. ‘Oh yes. You’d just need a sufficiently powerful transmitter. You could even do it from orbit if you wished.’
‘That might be safer,’ Kasteen suggested. ‘After all, it’s going to be a pretty big bang.’
‘Oh yes.’ Federer’s face lit up with what I can only describe as unhealthy enthusiasm. ‘Huge. Massive in fact. On the order of gigatonnes.’ His eyes took on something of a dreamy quality.
‘We didn’t place anything remotely that powerful,’ Kasteen said, looking vaguely stunned. ‘We’d have blown ourselves to pieces along with the gargant.’ Federer nodded, his voice taking on something of the quality of Logash discussing ambulls[74].
‘That was before the commissar flooded the mine with promethium,’ he explained. ‘The liquid will have settled to the bottom levels by now. That means the upper galleries would be full of vapour. In effect you’ve created an FAE bomb several kilometres wide.’[75]
‘Assuming the explosives you placed weren’t washed away by the flood,’ I said. Federer shook his head.
‘We anchored them pretty firmly. We were expecting a gargant to tread on them, don’t forget. We allowed for stresses in the region of...’
‘Never mind,’ I said, cutting him off before he could get properly started. Once enthused, as I knew from experience, he was hard to bring back to the point. ‘If you say it’ll work I’m sure it will.’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, nodding eagerly.
I must confess that, despite the uneventful journey back to the orbiting starship, I didn’t feel entirely safe until I heard the docking clamps engage at last and felt the reassuring solidity of the Pure of Heart’s deck plating beneath my feet.
‘You’re back, then,’ Durant greeted us as we arrived on the bridge. It was much as I remembered it from our last visit, except that the hololith was now showing a panoramic view of the snowscape outside the refinery. From the height and angle I judged that the pictcaster was mounted somewhere above the main hull of the last shuttle to leave that benighted place, the final few pickets withdrawing to the safety of its cargo hold even as I watched. The refinery complex still seemed as deserted as ever, but I kept an apprehensive eye on the distant line of structures nevertheless.
‘You seem pleasantly surprised,’ I said. Durant made the almost-shrug I’d noticed before.
‘Yes, well. The Munitorium might have argued about our charter fee if we’d left you behind,’ he said, a little too gruffly to have meant it.
‘Shuttle one preparing to lift, captain,’ a junior officer called from a lectern somewhere to our left, and a palpable air of relief swept the whole chamber.
‘Good,’ the captain said. ‘We’ve been sitting next to this damned planet so long I’m beginning to put down roots.’ He gestured to Mazarin, who was huddled over her workstation with Federer, deep in discussion about something. ‘Take us out of orbit as soon as they dock.’
‘Aye aye, captain,’ she responded, and hummed across to another console, where she busied herself with the rituals of engine activation.
‘Better make it fast,’ I said. As I’d feared, a glint of moving metal had appeared among the refinery buildings, moving rapidly towards the pictcaster. As it got closer I was able to discern a squadron of speeders, each one with what looked like the top half of a necron welded to it. All of them had a heavy weapon apparently incorporated into their right arm, and as I watched, dazzling green beams of malevolent energy lanced out to strike the hull of the slowly-rising shuttle.
‘They’re scratching the paintwork!’ Durant roared, outraged. Truth to tell they were doing rather more than that, scoring visible channels in the metal. They were a long way from actually breaching it, shuttle hulls are sturdy to say the least, but the fact that they were able to inflict any damage at all spoke volumes for the power of the weapons they carried.
‘They’re going after the shuttle,’ Kasteen said, her eyes on the skimmers which began to rise after it, wheeling about the slowly-climbing slab of metal like flies round a grox. They were growing in number too, I noticed with a quiver of unease, more and more of them rising to the join the swarm.
‘They’re not going to make it,’ I said, alarmed. The pilot was making what evasive manoeuvres he could, but the craft was built for durability rather than agility, and several more of the deadly beams struck home. It could only be a matter of moments before something vital was hit...
‘Don’t be too sure,’ Durant said. A moment later the main engines flared into life, vaporising any of the skimmers unfortunate enough to be behind the craft in a burst of superheated plasma, and lifting it cleanly away on an escape trajectory.
‘They’re falling behind,’ Mazarin confirmed, and the projection obligingly rotated to show the remaining skimmers tumbling aimlessly in the wake of the shuttle’s passage. A few moments later the image showed the reassuring refuge of our docking bay, and everyone breathed an audible sigh of relief. (Except for Mazarin, possibly, who may have had her lungs augmetically replaced.)
With our shuttle out of danger Durant had retuned the hololith to the aerial view of the refinery complex which he’d treated us to when we first made orbit.
As he magnified the tangle of buildings and storage tanks, now reassuringly far below us, my breath caught in my throat. A glittering tide of moving metal was emerging from the mouth of the mine, more warriors than I could count, blurring into a single amorphous entity which flowed between the buildings like flood water.
‘They’ve woken!’ I gasped, a spasm of fear gripping my bowels. They’d prevented the tide of promethium from flooding their temple, Emperor knew how, which meant their portal was probably still active...
‘Broklaw!’ I yelled, blessing the hurry that had left the comm-bead still in my ear. ‘Stand to! Prepare to receive boarders!’ Everyone looked at me as though I’d gone mad. ‘They can teleport, remember?’ I snapped, and Kasteen nodded grimly.
‘They can swim, too, by the look of it.’[76]
‘Federer!’ I called. ‘Now would be a good time!’ The sapper grinned happily, exchanged a few more words with the hovering tech-priest, and prodded a rune with his finger. All eyes remained fixed on the cluster of buildings in the hololith. Nothing seemed to be happening.
‘It didn’t go off...’ I began to say, then a gout of ice erupted from the plain at the mouth of the valley. Mazarin did something to enhance the clarity of the image, and in front of our eyes a vast, growing crater spread to engulf the nearby metal warriors. They tumbled into it like broken toys, more and more of them as the ground crumbled away faster than they could flee, and Federer punched the air as though he’d just scored the winning goal of a scrumball match.
‘That would have seen off the gargant,’ he said cheerfully.
‘That it would,’ I agreed, awestruck at the amount of devastation he’d wrought. But that had only been the prelude. Deep in the bowels of the pit a sudden flare of light erupted as the promethium vapour trapped in the caverns below ignited. A gout of flame fully a kilometre in height burst from the rupturing ground and raced across the snowscape at the speed of thought, melting the fleeing warriors in an instant, throwing blazing fissures ahead of itself as it went.
There were other explosions now too, the entire surface of the valley erupting like pyroclasts, vaporised rock, ice, and necrons forming a low, looming cloud riven with thunderbolts as electrostatic discharges of incredible power jumped between the particles. The refinery disappeared, sliding into the hellish inferno below, and vanishing as though it had never been...
‘Brace for impact!’ Durant called out, as though this were just a minor inconvenience, and the Pure of Heart was suddenly picked up and shaken like a child’s toy by the titanic shockwave as the very atmosphere of the planet bulged under the force of the energies released. Even the crew grabbed for handholds, and I found myself bracing Kasteen, who had fallen back against me (something I had no complaints about at all).
‘Just a minute,’ Mazarin called, playing the controls in front of her like the keyboard of a forte, and the shuddering gradually ceased. She grinned again, and I began to suspect she enjoyed the chance to push the limits of her engines. ‘Lucky we were so high. If we’d been down where the atmosphere’s thicker it would have been a bit trickier.’
‘Is that it, then?’ Kasteen asked, her eyes riveted on the scene of destruction below. Even from orbit the dust cloud could still be seen staining half the planet, and in spite of all the horrors I’d endured down there I couldn’t help feeling a spark of regret at the scar across the face of the pristine world I’d first looked upon from this very spot a few short days before.
‘I hope so,’ I said, although the twist of apprehension in my gut didn’t fade entirely until we’d dropped back into the warp and were well on our way back to the safety of the Imperium.
Although, of course, where the necrons are concerned nowhere is ever remotely safe, as we now know to our cost. At least that particular nest appears to have been dealt with, even if no one can ever go back to check; the first thing Amberley did when my message finally caught up with her was to place the whole system under Inquisitorial quarantine[77].
If there was one bright spot in the whole affair it was that I got to spend a little free time with her, after the interminable debriefing sessions were finally over and she’d finished going round every trooper in the regiment who’d seen or heard anything of what we’d found on that miserable iceball and threatened them with the wrath of the Emperor if they ever breathed a word of it again. Or the wrath of the Inquisition, which, trust me, is even scarier.
