Hero of the Imperium, page 35
‘How far have they got?’ I asked. Durant swept the hololith display round to the west, skimming us across the surface of the barren world with breathtaking speed. The broken landscape of the mountain range swept past, the higher peaks dotted with scrub, lichen, and a few insanely tenacious trees – apparently the only vegetation which could survive here. Just as well too, or there wouldn’t be an atmosphere you could breathe. Beyond the foothills was a broad plain, crisp with snow, and for a moment I could understand the affection my colleagues had for this desolate but majestic landscape.
Abruptly the purity of the scene changed, revealing a wide swathe of churned-up, blackened snow, befouled with the detritus and leavings of the savage horde which had surged across it. A couple of kloms5 wide at least, it resembled a filthy dagger-thrust into the heart of this strangely peaceful world. The resolution of the hololith wasn’t good enough to make out the individual members of this barbaric warband, but we could see clumps of movement within the main mass, like bacteria under a microscope. The analogy was an apt one, I thought. Simia Orichalcae was infected by a disease, and we were the cure.
‘Seems like we got here just in time,’ Kasteen said, putting all our thoughts into words. I extrapolated the speed of the ork advance, and nodded thoughtfully; we should have the regiment down and deployed roughly a day before they reached the valley where the precious promethium plant lay open and defenceless. It was cutting it fine, but I was just thankful we’d get there ahead of them at all. Fortunately they’d crashed in the opposite hemisphere, and that had given us just enough time to make the journey through the warp to oppose them.
‘I’ll get everyone moving,’ Broklaw offered. ‘If we get the first wave embarked now we can launch the shuttles as soon as we make orbit.’
‘Please yourselves.’ Durant somehow managed to make his immobile shoulders convey the impression of a shrug. ‘We’ll be at station-keeping in about an hour.’
‘Are the datafeeds set up?’ I asked, while I still had some measure of his attention. He repeated the gesture.
‘Not my department.’ He inflated his lungs, or whatever he used instead of them. ‘Mazarin! Get up here!’
The top half of a woman almost as encrusted with augmetics as the captain rose on a humming suspensor field to join us on the command dias. The cogwheel icon of a tech-priest hung from a chain around her neck. As we spoke she hovering roughly at my head height, the tunic she wore stirring unnervingly in the faint current from the air recirculators at what would have been level with her knees if she’d had any. ‘The one in the fancy hat wants to know if you’ve wired up his gadgets.’
‘The Omnissiah has blessed their activation,’ she confirmed, in a mellifluous voice. Her hard stare at the captain told me his irreverence was an old and minor annoyance. ‘They are all functioning within acceptable parameters.’
‘Good.’ Kasteen, to my mild surprise, was looking distinctly uneasy, her eyes flickering away from the tech-priest whenever she thought she could politely do so. ‘We’ll have full sensor coverage of the planet’s surface then.’
‘As long as this old blasphemer remembers how to keep his collection of scrap in orbit,’ she agreed. Once again the two of them exchanged a look that confirmed my initial suspicion that their bickering was a sign of an easy familiarity rather than any genuine friction. A waving mechadendrite reached forward across Mazarin’s shoulder, clutching a data-slate, which she thrust towards the colonel. Kasteen took it with every sign of reluctance, all but shying away from the mechanical limb. ‘The appropriate rituals of data retrieval are on this.’
‘Thank you.’ She handed the slate to Broklaw as though it were contaminated. The major took it without comment, and began scanning the files.
‘Waste of a perfectly good starship if you ask me,’ Durant grumbled. ‘But the money’s good.’
‘We’re most grateful for your co-operation,’ I assured him. A troopship would have been equipped to deploy a proper orbital sensor net, which would have been infinitely preferable, but the battered old freighter’s navigational array would just have to do. Our deployment was a hurried one, made in response to a frantic astropathic message from the staff of the installation below us, so we had to make do with what we could grab instead of waiting around for the right equipment.
‘You’ve got the easy job,’ Broklaw assured him. This much was true: the Pure of Heart only had to stay in orbit over the refinery, feeding her sensor data into our tactical net, so we could keep an eye on our enemies from above. Given the size of the horde we’d seen, that was a comfort. It looked even larger and more formidable than my most pessimistic imaginings, outnumbering us by at least three to one. On the other hand we’d be on the defensive, which would be to our advantage. And they’d want to take the place intact, so we wouldn’t have to worry too much about incoming artillery fire. The extra intelligence our orbital eye would give us would help immeasurably in deploying our defences to frustrate their attacks.
‘You call this easy?’ Durant asked rhetorically. A sweep of his arm took in the humming activity of the bridge. ‘Having half my systems rewired, trying to hold it all together...’ His voice trailed off as Mazarin floated away with a faint tchah! of disapproval, and something a little softer entered his body language.
‘Your tech-priest seems efficient enough,’ I said, trying to sound encouraging. He nodded.
‘Oh, she is. Far too good to waste her time on a tub like this really, but you know. Family ties.’ He sighed, some old regrets surfacing in spite of himself, and shook his head. ‘Would have made a good deck officer if she hadn’t got religion. Too much of her mother in her, I suppose.’ Startled, I tried to make out traces of a family resemblance, but the main feature they had in common seemed to be an abundance of augmetics rather than anything genetic.
I took the first shuttle down, of course, as befitted my entirely unwarranted reputation for preferring to lead from the front. I’d be well under cover before the orks arrived and should have my pick of the quarters planet-side; I wasn’t expecting much in the way of comfort in an industrial facility, but whatever there was I meant to find it. In this I had a valuable ally, my aide Jurgen who had an almost preternatural talent for scrounging, which had made my life (and no doubt his own, although I was careful not to enquire about that) considerably more comfortable than it might otherwise have been in our decade and a half together. He dropped into the seat next to me, preceded as always by his spectacular body odour, and fastened his restraint harness.
‘Everything’s in order, sir,’ he assured me, raising his voice a little so that it carried over the chatter of the troopers surrounding us, meaning that our personal effects had been stowed in the cargo bay to the rear with his usual efficiency. Despite his unprepossessing exterior, and his apparent conviction that personal hygiene was something that only happened to other people, he possessed a number of positive qualities which few people apart from me were ever able to appreciate.
From my point of view, the most important was his complete lack of imagination, which he more than made up for with his dogged deference to authority and an unquestioning acceptance of whatever orders he was given. As you can imagine, having someone like this as a buffer between me and some of the more onerous aspects of my job pretty much amounted to a gift from the Emperor. Add to that the innumerable perils we’d faced and bested together, and I can honestly say that he was the only person I ever fully trusted – apart from myself.
The familiar kick of the shuttle engine igniting cut our conversation short. It went without saying that rather than military dropships, the Pure of Heart was equipped with heavy-duty cargo haulers which had been hurriedly converted to meet our needs as far as possible. The end result was better than I could have reasonably expected, but was far from ideal. The front third of the cargo space had been partitioned off with a hastily welded bulkhead, and then subdivided into half a dozen decks with metal mesh flooring. Somehow Mazarin and her acolytes had managed to cram some five score seats with their associated crash webbing into this space so that we were able to disembark a couple of platoons at a time. The rest of the hold had been left open, to take our Chimeras, Sentinels, and other vehicles, along with a small mountain of ammo packs, rations, medicae supplies, and all the other stuff necessary to keep an Imperial Guard regiment running at peak efficiency.
Looking around I could see men and women hugging their kitbags, holding lasrifles across their knees, their faces half hidden by the thick fur caps worn in anticipation of the bone-biting cold on the planet’s surface. Most had fastened their uniform greatcoats too. These were mottled with the blues and whites of iceworld camouflage, and I was suddenly acutely aware of what an obvious target my dark uniform and scarlet sash would make me out in that icy waste. No point worrying about it now though, so I gritted my teeth and forced a relaxed smile as the first faint tremors of the hull announced that we’d started to enter the upper atmosphere.
‘Pilot’s making the most of it,’ I said, half joking, and raising a few grins from the troopers around me. ‘Must have been watching Attack Run6 in the mess hall.’ Jurgen grunted something. He too was swathed in a greatcoat, but, like everything else he ever wore, it contrived to look as though it were intended for someone of a slightly different shape. He suffered from motion sickness on almost every combat drop, but that never seemed to affect his fighting ability once he was back on terra firma. I suspected he was so relieved to be back on solid ground he’d take on the enemy with a sharpened stick rather than have to face the possibility of retreat and being airborne again.
This time though, he wasn’t the only one. The overloaded shuttle was being buffeted by the thickening atmosphere, bouncing around like a stone on a lake, and pale, sweating faces were everywhere I looked. Even my own stomach revolted on a couple of occasions, threatening to spray the narrow compartment with the remains of my lunch. I swallowed convulsively; I wasn’t going to compromise the dignity of my office, not to mention become a laughing stock among the troopers, by throwing up. Not where anyone could see, at any rate.
‘What the hell does he think he’s playing at?’ Lieutenant Sulla, commander of third platoon, and a sight too over-eager for my liking, scowled, which made her look even more like a petulant pony than usual.7 Nevertheless the distraction from my somersaulting stomach was a welcome one, so I invoked my commissarial privileges and retuned the comm-bead in my ear to the frequency of the cockpit communicator to find out.
‘Say again, shuttle one.’ The voice was calm and methodical, undoubtedly the ground controller at the refinery landing field. The answering voice was anything but: a civilian suddenly in the middle of a war zone without a clue as to how to survive, and clearly not expecting to. Our pilot, without a doubt.
‘We’re taking ground fire!’ The edge of hysteria in his voice was unmistakable. Any moment now he was going to panic, and if he did we were all likely to die. I doubted that our overloaded engines had any tolerance left for evasive manoeuvres, and if he tried, the chances were that he’d lose control completely. As if to emphasise the point we hit another air pocket, and dropped vertiginously for a handful of metres.
There was nothing else for it: I unbuckled my seat restraints and lurched to my feet, conscious of Sulla’s eyes on me. I grabbed the nearest stanchion for support. It was embossed with an Imperial aquila, which I found reassuring, and with its support I was able to take a couple of halting steps towards the cockpit.
‘Is that wise, commissar?’ she asked, a faint puzzled frown appearing on her face.
‘No,’ I snapped, not having time to waste on courtesy. ‘But it’s necessary.’ Before I could say any more another lurch slammed my body weight into the narrow door to the flight deck, propelling it open, and I staggered inside. My overriding impression was one of flashing lights and control lecterns, uncannily like miniature versions of the ones on the starship bridge, and the bleak white snowscape passing below us at an alarming speed. The pilot stared up at me, his knuckles white on the control yoke, while his navigational servitor continued regulating the routine functions of the ship with single-minded fixity of purpose. ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked, trying to project an air of calm.
‘We’re under attack!’ the man shouted, raw panic edging into his voice. ‘We have to pull back to orbit!’
‘That wouldn’t be wise,’ I said, keeping my voice level, and grabbing the servitor’s shoulder to steady myself as the shuttle lurched again. It just kept on adjusting controls with a complete lack of concern. Beyond the thick vision port the bleak and frozen landscape hurtled past as serenely as before. I could see no sign of enemy activity anywhere. ‘We’d take hours to rendezvous with the ship if we abort on this trajectory, and we only have limited life support. You’d probably suffocate along with everyone else.’
‘We have a safety margin,’ the pilot urged. I shook my head.
‘The rest of us do. You don’t.’ I let my right hand brush the butt of my laspistol, and he turned even paler. ‘And I don’t see any immediate danger, do you?’
‘What do you call that?’ He pointed off to starboard, where a single puff of smoke burst briefly. A moment later a small constellation of bright flashes sparkled for an instant some distance below and to the left. Bolter shells detonating against the ground, after some trigger-happy greenskin took a hopeless potshot in our direction.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ I said, almost amused. ‘That’s small arms fire.’ The analytical part of my mind noted that the main bulk of the ork advance was still some distance away, which meant we ought to be on alert for a small scout force attempting to infiltrate the refinery (which was now looming reassuringly in the viewport), or reconnoitre our lines. ‘The chances of anything actually hitting us at this range are astronomical.’
One day I’m going to learn to stop saying things like that. No sooner had the words left my mouth than the shuttle shuddered even more violently than before, and pitched sharply to port. Red icons began to appear on the data-slates, and the servitor began punching controls with greater speed and abhuman dexterity.
‘Pressure loss in number two engine,’ it chanted. ‘Combustion efficiency dropping by sixteen per cent.’
‘Astronomical, eh?’ Strangely the pilot seemed calmer now his fears had been realised. ‘Better strap in, commissar. It’s going to be a rough landing.’
‘Can you make it to the pad?’ I asked. He looked tense, his lips tight.
‘I’m going to try. Now get the hell off my flight deck and let me do my job.’
‘I’ve no doubt you will,’ I said, boosting his confidence as best I could, and staggered back to my seat.
‘What’s going on?’ Sulla asked as I buckled in and tensed for the impact.
‘The greenskins put a dent in us. There’s going to be a bump,’ I said. I felt strangely calm; there was nothing I could do now except trust in the Emperor and hope the pilot was as competent as he sounded. I considered saying something to reassure the troopers, but I’d never be heard over the noise of the crash alarms anyway, so I decided to save my breath.
The waiting seemed to take forever, but could only have lasted a minute or two. I listened to the chatter in my comm-bead while the pilot read off a number of datum points which meant nothing to me but sounded pretty ominous, fighting down the growing conviction that we weren’t going to make it as far as the pad. In fact, the traffic controller seemed pretty insistent that we avoid the installation altogether, which I could well understand, as dropping an unguided shuttle into the middle of the promethium tanks would end our mission pretty effectively before it had even begun. The pilot responded with a couple of terse phrases which managed to impress me even after fifteen years of exposure to the most imaginative profanity of the barrack room, and I began to think we were in safe hands after all, and might just make it.
This impression lasted all of a dozen seconds. Then a violent impact jarred my spine up into the roof of my skull, driving the breath from my lungs. A sound uncannily reminiscent of an ammunition dump exploding echoed through the hull. I gasped some air back into my aching lungs, and tried to clear my blurring vision as the screech of tortured metal set my rattling teeth on edge. I became gradually aware, through the ringing in my ears, that Jurgen was trying to say something.
‘Well, that wasn’t so...’ he began, before the whole ghastly cycle repeated itself another couple of times.
At last the noise and vibration ceased, and I gradually became aware of the fact that we’d stopped moving and I was still alive. I struggled free of the seat restraints, and wobbled to my feet.
‘Everybody out!’ I bawled. ‘By squads. Carry the wounded with you!’ In the back of my mind a lurid picture of overheated engines exploding into flame tried to ignite a little beacon of panic, but I fought it down. I turned to Sulla, who was trying to stem a nosebleed. For that matter I suppose we all looked a bit the worse for wear, except possibly Jurgen, as with him it was hard to tell. ‘I want casualty figures ASAP.’
‘Yes, sir.’ She turned to the nearest NCO, Sergeant Lustig, a solid and competent soldier I had a lot of time for, and started snapping out orders in her usual brisk fashion.
The door to the cockpit burst open, and the pilot staggered out, looking as bad as I felt.
‘Told you we’d make it,’ he said, and threw up on my boots.
TWO
The freezing air outside was worse than even my most pessimistic anticipation, and I’d been on enough iceworlds before to have had a pretty good idea of what to expect. In truth, I suppose, it was no colder than Valhalla or Nusquam Fundumentibus, but it had been some time since I’d trodden the snows of either, and my memory had obviously skipped over the worst of those experiences. The bone-numbing wind seemed to flay me alive the moment I set foot on the ramp, despite the extra layers of insulation I’d put on before leaving my quarters aboard the Pure of Heart.
