Hero of the Imperium, page 43
‘Well if that was the way the ambulls got an ork down here it’s pretty well sealed,’ Grifen said. I nodded. It seemed likely, but I supposed we had to be sure. With an effort I dragged my mind back to the mission at hand.
‘We’ll make a final sweep and head back,’ I decided, to everyone’s relief. ‘We have to report this. It takes priority over everything.’
‘Commissar!’ Simla called, from the other side of the spoil heap. ‘Take a look at this!’
Cursing, I rounded the pile of rubble, homing in on the light from his luminator to find the sharp-featured trooper crouching over something metallic which had evidently been frozen into the floor of the tunnel and dislodged by the explosion. A crudely made bolter of some kind, the barrel sheared off by what looked like claw marks.
‘An ork shoota,’ I said unnecessarily. ‘It must have been dropped by the one the ambulls killed while they were dragging it back to the den.’ Simla nodded.
‘So it must have come from further up the tunnel.’
Great. The hole in our defenses was still wide open. I dithered for a moment, but in the end there was really no other choice. The necron threat, though terrible, was only a potential one, and had been contained for the time being. But the orks remained a clear and present danger, and would do so until we’d completed our mission. Slowly and reluctantly I stood.
‘Sergeant!’ I called. ‘Move them out. We’re going on.’
Editorial Note:
Again I must apologise for inflicting another example of Sulla’s overly purple prose on my patient readers (except for those of you who, quite understandably, may choose to skip it.) I do so because events were still moving along on the surface of the planet even as Cain made his disturbing discovery in the depths of the mine. And, as before I feel it important to present a little more background detail than Cain’s typically self-centred narrative provides.
We pick up her account of events at a point where her platoon had been rotated back from the front lines for rest and recuperation, after taking a number of casualties while repelling a series of increasingly determined ork assaults.
Extracted from Like a Phoenix From the Flames: The Founding of the 597th, by General Jenit Sulla (retired), 097.M42.
I’m proud to say that despite the loss of so many gallant comrades in arms, whose sacrifice will ever be remembered,36 our morale remained high and our determination resolute. Though the greenskins were undeniably a nuisance, we had sent them packing on every occasion they troubled us, and it was almost with a sense of reluctance that we pulled back from our beleaguered redoubt and gave it into the care of Lieutenant Faril and the eager warriors under his command.
Wiser heads than ours had made the decision to relieve us, however, so there was no point in appealing it, and so we picked up our wounded and joined the trickle of tired but still resolute soldiery and headed back to the main refinery complex for a hot meal and a few hours of sleep. We were secure in the knowledge that the fray was far from over and that we would shortly once again have our chance to wreak the Emperor’s vengeance on the greenskin barbarians who had had the effrontery to encroach on His sacred dominions.
As we trudged through the snow the sky above us was bright with the trails of the shuttles from our sturdy transport ship, and I reflected how beneficent fate, or the guidance of His Glorious Majesty, had so arranged matters that even now, as we faced and bested His bestial foes, His loyal subjects were being taken to the safety which our doughty vessel afforded. Indeed, the truth of the soldier’s maxim, ‘The Emperor Protects,’ had seldom been made manifest to me with such crystal clarity.
It was while I was reflecting thus, and enjoying an unexpectedly lavish meal of the soylens viridians which the tech-priests who ran this palace of wonders had so generously provided from their own resources, that Colonel Kasteen summoned me to the command centre.
Upon my arrival my attention was immediately seized by the hololithic display, which the colonel was consulting along with Major Broklaw, Captain Federer of the engineering contingent, and a civilian I was given to understand had something to do with the mining operation here.37
As I listened to the plan which the colonel began to unfold, I was stunned by its boldness and elegance. For it was nothing less than to lure the loathsome greenskins into a trap which would surely annihilate both them and their awesome engine of war which, even as we spoke, was edging ever nearer. How fitting it seemed to use the creatures’ impetuosity and overconfidence to lure them to their own destruction!
As I considered the plan in detail the keen intelligence behind the order to pull my platoon back became instantly apparent to me. By replacing the weary units at the front with fewer numbers of fresh soldiers our forces could maintain the illusion of remaining at full strength, at least for the few hours necessary to prepare our trap, while we could continue to gradually reduce the number of defenders. When the time came we could easily pull the remainder back to lure our enemies in, covering our own forces’ retreat from our positions on either side, and catching the orks in a withering crossfire which ought to distract them for long enough to detonate the mine.
From the sombreness of Colonel Kasteen’s demeanour I had expected to be given the honour of acting as the lure in this most cunning of stratagems, but it seemed even greater glory was to be ours. The colonel explained that within the hour she had received a message from the gallant Commissar Cain, who even as she spoke was continuing his heroic reconnaissance of the lowest levels of the mine, to the disturbing effect that it was possible the greenskins had found a way into the tunnels. Though all were confident that a hero of his stature would easily repel any of the bestial foe incautious enough to venture there, it was felt necessary to provide an armed escort for the sappers and miners who were to prepare our trap; and since Second Squad of my own platoon had ventured into those very tunnels no more than a day before, with the commissar himself, we were the obvious choice for this vital assignment.
I must own up to it, my breast swelled with pride as I contemplated the honour of the task with which we had been entrusted, and assured the colonel that we would indeed prove worthy of her confidence.
EIGHT
Needless to say the decision to continue our assignment was far from universally popular, although no one apart from Logash voiced any dissent. Grifen and her team were professional enough to understand the necessity of ensuring the safety of our comrades, not to mention ourselves, and so we pushed on in uneasy silence. The only sounds were the crunching of our boot soles in the thick frost that still coated the tunnel floor and the tech-priest’s sotto voce imprecations. Besides which, no one in our party could have been more reluctant to proceed than me, you can depend on it. Every instinct of self-preservation I possessed urged me to flee the caverns at once, and find some excuse to board the first shuttle back to the relative safety of the Pure of Heart.
‘Commissar?’ Jurgen asked, and I suddenly became aware that I was murmuring one of the Catechisms of Command under my breath, something I swear I’d never done consciously since leaving the schola. Just goes to show how spooked I was.
‘Nothing,’ I said hastily, hawking a gob of rapidly cooling phlegm into the encircling darkness. ‘Just clearing my throat.’
‘Oh. Right.’ He nodded, in his usual imperturbable fashion, and walked on, melta held ready across his body. Logash gave me a nasty look.
‘”Fear is the mind killer,” eh?’ he asked, which at least told me his hearing was preternaturally augmented. ‘I think you’ve already proved that today.’ I could hardly believe it: here we were, caught between two of the nastiest foes you could ever hope not to meet, and he was still sulking about not being allowed to loot the bloody tomb.
‘At least I’ve still got enough of a mind to know I ought to be scared,’ I snapped back. We glared at each other like pre-schola juves whose vocabulary is too limited to prolong an exchange of verbal abuse, and for all I knew we’d have descended to shoving and finger-poking if Hail hadn’t cut in on my comm-bead.
‘I can see light up ahead.’
A shiver of apprehension shot through me. We were still deeply underground, and although the tunnel floor had been rising gently for the last couple of kilometres my natural affinity for these conditions told me we should be nowhere near the surface.
‘Hold position,’ I ordered, my irritation with the truculent tech-priest already forgotten, and hurried forward to join her. Jurgen’s familiar odour followed, and we overtook Lunt and Simla. The big heavy weapons specialist watched as we passed, and began to ready his flamer, which now we were in front it was rather less comforting than his show of initiative might otherwise have been.
As we approached Hail’s position I clicked off my luminator, and a moment later Jurgen did the same. As was my habit I closed my eyes as we did so, knowing my dark vision would adjust a little faster, for such things can mean life or death in these situations and all too often do. To my relief Hail had doused her own light, either from training or common sense, so there was nothing to impede my perceptions as I moved up to join her.
‘Over here, sir.’ The whisper came from one of the deeper shadows, into which the woman had blended almost invisibly. Her skin was very dark, almost the colour of recaf, and she used this natural advantage to the fullest.38 As she moved her silhouette came into focus, backlit by a soft, greyish radiance from somewhere further down the tunnel. I sighed with relief. I’d been dreading the sight of the sick, greenish glow which had permeated the necron tomb I’d penetrated before, and the realisation that whatever we were coming to had nothing to do with them hit me with an intensity akin to euphoria.
‘Any sign of movement?’ I asked, and Hail shook her head, a barely-visible motion in the darkness which I sensed as much as saw.
‘Nothing yet,’ she said.
‘Good.’ I stood still for a moment, letting my tunnel rat’s senses attune to this change in our environment. As my eyes adjusted fully the pale glow seemed to strengthen, a faint, irregular disc about the size of my thumbnail throwing the darker stone around it into stark relief. And there was a faint current of air on my face too, sharp with the smell of cold and heavy with damp. Impossible as it seemed, it looked very much like a fissure to the surface. ‘I think this is it,’ I concluded.
‘Surely we’re far too far underground?’ Logash queried at my elbow. Lost in my reverie I hadn’t noticed him tagging along, and I started momentarily, to his unconcealed amusement.
‘Could be the bottom of a crevasse,’ Jurgen volunteered. It sounded plausible to me, and he had grown up on a world like this, so I nodded.
‘That would explain our dead ork,’ I said. ‘It just fell down into the tunnels here.’ Maybe the fall had killed it and the ambull who brought it home just got lucky, although in my experience it would take more than dropping a few hundred metres down a hole to finish off a greenskin for sure, especially if it landed on its head.
‘So this whole expedition has been a colossal waste of time,’ Logash concluded. I shook my head.
‘Far from it. If one ork found the hole, others could, and they can climb down a rope just as easily as any other species.’ That’s not entirely true, of course, they’re clumsy brutes at the best of times, but they’re determined and resilient, and sometimes that’s enough.
‘Best go on and check it out then,’ Hail said, more for the pleasure of contradicting the tech-priest than supporting me I suspected, but the display of solidarity was welcome nevertheless.
‘I think so,’ I said, and moved on, the others taking up their positions around me as we continued on towards the gradually intensifying glow. As we got closer the faint current of air grew stronger, and the almost tolerable low temperatures of the tunnels began to drop rapidly, so that I found myself shivering again even through the thick weave of my greatcoat.
‘Smells like snow,’ Grifen said cautiously. ‘We must be getting close.’ I was prepared to take her word for it, after all she knew snow and ice the way I did tunnels. I was mildly surprised to see even the stoic Valhallan pulling her greatcoat just a little tighter. If I could trust her instincts as strongly as I believed, that didn’t augar well.
In the event we were even closer than we realised. We turned a corner, skirting an outcrop of some deeply-veined rock I didn’t bother listening to Logash identify, and the full force of the blood-chilling cold I’d experienced after the shuttle crash hit me in the face along with a weak shaft of sunlight which seemed almost dazzling after the gloom of the tunnels.
‘Emperor’s bowels!’ I said, pulling my scarf up over my mouth and nose, feeling sharp shards of pain skitter through my abused lungs. Somehow, incredibly, the ambull tunnel had broken the surface, hundreds of metres deeper than should have been possible. But we were undeniably outside again.
‘Interesting,’ Logash said, not even shivering, Emperor rot his augmented hide. Snow whirled in around us, stinging our eyes, and obscuring everything in front of us from sight. He pondered for a moment. ‘Perhaps a small valley, cutting into the mountains...’
I considered it, overlaying a rough estimate of our position on the orbital images I’d seen in the Pure of Heart’s hololithic bridge display. It was perfectly possible that we’d come right through the heart of the ridge forming one of the sides of the valley protecting the refinery complex, and found ourselves at the bottom of a defile of some kind that cut into it from the other side.
If so, that was both good and bad news. Bad in that there was indeed a way through the tunnels which breached our defences, but on the plus side we would be a long way from the main body of the besieging orks. The only ones this far down the other side of the ridge would be stragglers or scouting parties like the one we’d encountered before.
Even shivering as I already was, the thought was enough to send an additional chill through me. There was no telling how many such groups had struck out ahead of the main advance,39 and if one had already discovered the tunnel entrance and reported back the entire army could be on its way to take advantage of it. Well, perhaps not that many, but a large enough force to cause us some real problems if they got loose behind our defensive line. (Not that it was going to hold for a second once the gargant arrived, of course, so I was just having to thumb my palm40 that Kasteen had come up with some strategy to deal with it while we were running around in the tunnels.)
‘Tracks.’ Magot was kneeling on the ice a few metres back from the curtain of whirling snow, staring at it intensely. I couldn’t see a thing myself, but once again I found myself putting my full confidence in the Valhallans’ natural affinity for these dreadful conditions. Grifen moved to join her, squatting beside her friend.
‘Looks like,’ she agreed. ‘Ork boots, I’d say.’
‘How many?’ I managed to ask, through the muffling scarf and my rapidly numbing facial muscles. Magot shrugged.
‘One pair?’ She didn’t sound terribly sure. ‘The floor’s chewed up around here something awful.’
‘One ork,’ Logash confirmed, scanning the floor with his metal eyes, a hint of impatience entering his voice. ‘And ambull tracks. The greenskin must have wandered in, disturbed it, and ended up as lunch.’
‘Only one ork?’ I asked. ‘You’re absolutely sure?’
‘Of course,’ Logash said. ‘It’s completely clear to anyone with the right eyes to see these things.’ Normally I’d have found the hint of the typical tech-priest arrogance returning to his voice irritating, I admit, but at the time it almost came as a relief. I assumed it meant he was getting over his sulkiness. But I had more pressing concerns to consider.
‘Then what happened to the others?’ I wondered aloud. Orks were obnoxious and quarrelsome, but they were curiously sociable in their own brutal fashion, and our solitary ambull victim wouldn’t have been out here alone. True, his friends wouldn’t waste all that much time looking for him once they noticed he was missing, but they might still be in the vicinity. And that meant they could stumble in here just as easily as their erstwhile companion.
‘A good question,’ Logash conceded. ‘I suppose you’ll want to scout around and make sure there are no more of them outside?’
Well actually that was the last thing I wanted to do, but it was necessary, and I couldn’t back down in front of the troopers now that someone had verbalised the thought, so I nodded.
‘It’s the only way to be sure,’ I agreed, managing to conceal my reluctance tolerably well I believed. I was not quite sure whether I detected the ghost of a vindictive smile on the tech-priest’s face.
Conditions outside were even worse than I could possibly have imagined. The snow continued to flurry all around us, driven by a wind keener than an eldar wych’s flensing knife, and I found my eyes shutting reflexively before I was a handful of paces from the cave mouth. With a thrill of panic I realised I couldn’t open them again: the wind-driven tears had frozen on my face and sealed them closed. I was just about to give way to the impulse to retrace my steps (a sure way of stumbling to my death down a crevasse or terminal hypothermia away from the vigilance of my companions), when a reassuring arm settled across my shoulders. I inhaled Jurgen’s acrid odour gratefully, as though it were the bouquet of a fine vintage, mildly surprised to find that my nose was still working.
‘Hold on, commissar.’ Something settled across my face, and the stinging in my eyes abated a little. I blinked them clear, forcing them stickily apart, feeling the partially-melted ice crystals slither round the corners of my eye sockets. Jurgen’s face came blearily into focus, the portion of it between his scarf and thick fur hat obscured by a pair of snow goggles identical to the ones I now realised were protecting my own sight. ‘That should do it.’
