Caves of Ice, page 5
It still didn’t feel right to me. For the debris to have fallen in that pattern, the wall itself must have been undermined. A faint, but ominous cracking sound echoed through the chamber.
‘Penlan!’ I shouted. ‘Get back!’ But I was too late. She was half-turning towards me, an expression of puzzlement on her face, when the floor gave way beneath her and she vanished from sight with a single startled shriek.
‘Penlan!’ Lustig started forward, until I restrained him with an arm across the chest; there was no knowing how far the treacherous deadfall extended. ‘Penlan, report!’ Static hissed in our comm-beads.
‘Watch that first step, sarge.’ Her voice sounded winded, but if she could crack jokes she couldn’t be that badly hurt. ‘It’s steeper than it looks.’
‘Better move carefully,’ I counselled the sergeant. ‘No telling how unstable the rest of the floor is.’ I inched forward cautiously, Jurgen at my side, just enough to shine the beam from our luminators down into the hole. It seemed sufficiently solid. From here I could see that a thin crust of ice had formed across the gap where the roof fall had breached the ceiling of a chamber below us. A chamber, I suddenly realised, which didn’t appear anywhere on the map.
‘That froze over recently,’ Jurgen said, with the certainty of an iceworlder. I edged a little closer to the hole, from where I could see Penlan. She’d fallen about five or six metres, but most of that, thank the Emperor, had been down a steep slope rather than a sheer drop. A friction-gouged channel in the ice showed where she’d slid most of the way. Seeing my face appear in the gap, she waved.
‘Sorry about that, sir,’ she said. ‘My foot slipped.’
‘So I see.’ I got Jurgen to direct his luminator around the chamber she was in. It was roughly circular, no more than a few metres wide, and I began to suspect that it might have been a natural ice pocket. It was easy to imagine a solitary miner falling the way Penlan had, and being less lucky about landing. The gap they’d left behind them could have frozen over before the search party arrived. Perhaps Morel’s mysterious disappearances had been accidents after all. ‘Does that hollow look natural to you?’
‘Maybe.’ Penlan shone her own beam around, then stiffened, aiming the lasgun. ‘There’s another tunnel here. I can’t tell how far it goes.’
‘Sit tight.’ Lustig appeared at my elbow, a coil of climbing rope in his hands. He began looping it round himself, and threw the end down to Penlan. She grabbed it, slung her lasgun, and began to swarm up the rope. After a second she hesitated.
‘Sarge. There’s something down here. I can hear movement.’ After a second or so I heard it too. The scrape of claw against ice, moving fast, and the loud panting of a predator which has caught a fresh scent. I joined Lustig, grabbing the rope, and hauled until the muscles in my back cracked.
‘Get her up!’ I shouted. Jurgen ran to help too, and between us we dragged Penlan a good three metres up the ice face. From there her boot soles caught some purchase, and she was able to scramble her way up the wall. I dropped to my knees, feeling the cold bite through the fabric of my trousers, and extended a hand down into the darkness. ‘Grab it!’
Penlan did so, a firm grip clamping round my wrist, and I tightened my grip on hers. We’d nearly made it, when something seized the dangling rope below her and jerked it hard.
‘Frak!’ Lustig and Jurgen dropped suddenly, pulled off balance, and Penlan’s weight dragged me down. For a moment I thought we’d make it, but the ice beneath me had too little traction, and for a long, agonised moment I felt myself slipping. My hand tightened reflexively around her wrist, instead of letting go which would have been far more sensible, and before I knew it I was plunging forwards into the shadowy pit.
I landed hard, the breath driven from my lungs, a dozen small pains flaring across my body where I’d bounced on the way down. Penlan groaned beside me, face down and winded. Just as well, a small analytical part of my mind told me, or the slung lasgun might have broken her back.
‘Commissar!’ Bright light shone down on us, the luminator taped to Jurgen’s lasgun, and I heard the distant echo of running feet as the rest of the squad responded to our plight. They wouldn’t be quick enough, I thought, as the creature – whatever it was – rushed out of the darkness. I had a brief, panic-stricken image of claws and jaws too large and terrifying to be real, and as I scrabbled frantically backwards. My hand fell against the lasgun on Penlan’s back. Without thinking I twisted it round, finding just enough play in the sling, and fired without even aiming properly.
Either luck or the Emperor was with me, because she’d left it on full auto. As my panic-spasmed hand locked on the trigger a hail of las bolts sprayed the chamber, blowing chunks of ice from the walls and deafening us with the roar of ionising air and ice flashing into steam. The creature screamed and fled, even more terrified than I was, and as the power cell died and relative silence descended on our ringing ears, Penlan stirred.
‘I’ve got to stop doing that...’
‘I’d appreciate it,’ I agreed. A degree of understanding returned to her eyes.
‘What happened?’
‘The commissar saved your hide,’ Lustig said. I was suddenly aware of the ring of faces around the hole over our heads. No point mentioning that it was purely by accident, of course, so I made a show of mild embarrassment, and patted the frost from my greatcoat.
‘Better get the medic to check you over,’ I said, just to reinforce my caring image.
I took a glance around the chamber. It looked bigger from down here, and the hail of las bolts had melted a number of small pits into the walls. Something seemed to be embedded in one, and I tried to focus on it, to stop my head spinning. Then my brain finally interpreted what I was seeing, and I regretted my curiosity at once.
‘Looks like we found our missing miner,’ Penlan said, with what I felt was rather unseemly relish.
‘Almost,’ I agreed. It was a human hand, severed at the wrist, the stump scored with vicious bite marks.
‘What was that thing?’ Jurgen asked, his habitual phlegmatic tone a welcome calming influence.
‘I haven’t a clue,’ I admitted, scooping my laspistol up from the floor where it had fallen. As I did so I noticed a thick smear of ichor on the ice. The sight cheered me remarkably, not least because if I’d managed to wound the creature it was unlikely to come back for a while. ‘But it bleeds.’ I thrust the sidearm back into the holster on my belt with a sense of grim satisfaction. ‘And if it bleeds, we can kill it.’
FOUR
‘And you don’t have a clue what it was?’ Broklaw asked. I shook my head. In the three or four hours since we’d returned from the depths of the mine I’d been asked that question often.
‘None. But you wouldn’t want one as a house pet, believe me.’ A few of those present in the command centre chuckled dutifully. Besides myself and the major, Kasteen was the only other person seated on what I couldn’t help thinking of as the military side of the conference table. Facing us was Morel, whose interest in the situation was undeniable and whose reaction had fallen somewhere between shock at the news that his worst fears were founded and grim satisfaction that his forebodings had been vindicated. Alongside him sat representatives from the Administratum and the Adeptus Mechanicus. Around us the rest of our senior officers continued to monitor troop positions and intelligence reports, ignoring the little knot of civilians in our midst as best they could as they bustled in and out with data-slates and mugs of tanna.
Remembering Quintus’s advice I’d requested that he and Logash be our liaisons with their respective orders, and was pleased that this decision had proven to be wise. The young scrivener was as affable as I remembered, and Logash had turned out to have a quick wit and a courteous manner at marked odds with the defensiveness of his superior. To Kasteen’s evident relief he had few visible marks of augmentation as well, beyond a pair of faceted metal eyes, which caught the light as his head moved, and although the Emperor alone knew what his robes concealed, she was able to keep her revulsion in check. (When I asked her why she found the tech-priests so disturbing she just shrugged, and said, ‘They’re weird, that’s all.’ She never reacted that way towards me, or anyone else in the regiment with augmetic replacements, so I guess it was just the sense she got from them of having voluntarily, if not eagerly, surrended part of their humanity.)[16]
‘I’ve taken a look through the Codex Ferae,’ Logash volunteered, ‘based on the commissar’s description of the beast. I’m pretty sure whatever it is, it isn’t native to Simia Orichalcae.’
‘Then how the hell did it get here?’ Morel asked. Logash shrugged.
‘Maybe the orks brought it with them.’
‘That’s highly unlikely,’ Kasteen said, taking a little too much satisfaction in contradicting the tech-priest. But he took it in his stride and gave way to her greater expertise.
‘You’d be a better judge of that than me.’ He shrugged again. ‘Maybe it stowed away on one of the tanker shuttles then.’ Quintus nodded in agreement.
‘They’re certainly big enough for something to hide in undetected. I remember a couple of years back a few of the miners thought it would be funny to smuggle in some...’
‘Who cares how it got here?’ Morel broke in. ‘The question is, what are we going to do about it?’
‘Go back down there and kill it,’ I said. Morel nodded with grim satisfaction, but Quintus’s eyes narrowed a little.
‘I don’t want to sound as though I’m doubting your sense of priorities, but surely the orks are the real threat. Can’t this thing wait until you’ve seen them off?’
‘It’s not the creature we’re worried about,’ Kasteen said. ‘It’s the unmarked tunnels the commissar found down there.’
‘Probably burrowed by the beast,’ Logash said. He pulled a data-slate from the recesses of his robes, and started scribbling notes with a luxpen embedded in the tip of a finger. ‘That might account for the size of the claws the commissar saw...’
‘It doesn’t matter who dug them,’ I pointed out. ‘What matters is that they’re a potential hole in our defences.’ As if to underline my words a bright flash cut through the flurrying snow outside the window, followed almost at once by the concussive thud of explosive detonation. The orks had obligingly arrived on schedule and were busily throwing themselves (or more probably their gretchin cannon fodder) against our outer defensive line with a gratifying lack of success so far. Luckily, Mazarin and her acolytes had managed to get the damaged shuttle flying again in a matter of hours, and the rest of our deployment had gone without a hitch, so we’d been more than ready to meet them despite my fears.
‘I take your point,’ Quintus said. ‘What do you suggest?’
‘I’m going back down there,’ I said. ‘With a squad of troopers. We’ll map the tunnels as we go, and kill the creature when we find it.’
‘You’re leading the group personally?’ Logash asked. I nodded.
‘Commissar Cain is by far the best man for the job,’ Kasteen explained. ‘He has more experience of tunnel fighting than anyone else in the regiment.’ Not from choice, I might add, but if it kept me out of the cold and away from the orks, I wasn’t about to object.
‘I’d like to come too, if I may,’ Logash said. I think I’m hardly exaggerating when I say the rest of us simply stared at him in blank astonishment. ‘Xenology’s a bit of a hobby of mine. I might be able to identify what we’re looking for.’
‘This is a search and destroy mission, not a stroll around the zoo,’ Kasteen said irritably. Logash looked a little crestfallen, I thought she was being unnecessarily hard on the boy. At least he was trying to help, which was more than his superiors were willing to do, and it didn’t seem too good an idea to squash that enthusiasm. Besides, I had no objection to presenting the beast with another potential meal,to stand between me and it. (Of course if I’d known just how much trouble he was going to turn out to be I’d have left him behind, or even shot him on the spot, but regrets are a waste of good drinking time, as my old friend Divas used to say.)
‘It would be at your own risk,’ I told him. ‘And you’d be under military authority. That means you do what you’re told at all times. All right?’
‘Fine.’ He nodded eagerly. ‘Do I get a gun?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Kasteen and I said simultaneously.
After seeing the civilians out, Kasteen, Broklaw and I returned to the business of fighting the war. Our strategy seemed to be working, at least for now, keeping the main line of the ork advance bottled up in the neck of the valley quite nicely. The peculiar nature of an iceworld, and the Valhallans’ understanding of how to exploit it, were paying handsome dividends, as the latest sensor downloads from the Pure of Heart were making abundantly clear. I gazed at the blurry image in the tactical hololith. It looked like someone had dropped it on the journey up here from the landing pad, as the three-dimensional representation of the battlefield would occasionally jump a few centimetres to the left, blank out, and reset itself. I reflected ruefully that perhaps we shouldn’t have been quite so eager to get rid of Logash. (Who had practically skipped out of there, eager to be off, and prattling about various unpleasant life forms our intruder probably wasn’t.)
‘Never a tech-priest around when you need one,’ Broklaw murmured, obviously thinking the same thing. He cast a sidelong glance at the colonel who pretended not to have heard.
Thanks to the frozen landscape we’d been able to fortify in depth with an ease which would have been impossible practically anywhere else. I was looking (when the blasted hololith would let me) at an extensive network of trenches and firing pits which would have taken weeks to dig in more normal terrain, but which had been hollowed out in mere hours by adroit use of our heavy flamers and multilasers. Of course half the troops manning them would have frozen to death by now if they’d been anyone else, but these were Valhallans, and the bone-chilling temperatures outside were just like a holiday resort so far as they were concerned. I’d even had to break up a couple of snowball fights before the orks turned up to spoil the party[17].
‘So far so good,’ I said, quietly satisfied with the conduct of our troopers. The line was holding nicely, and the view from orbit showed that the ork advance had pretty much ground to a halt in the face of this unexpected resistance. So far as I could tell, the topography of the valley was working to our advantage as well as we’d hoped, with the broad front of the ork advance funnelling into the mouth of it and running right into our killing zone. Of course being orks this didn’t diminish their enthusiasm, quite the reverse. Some flashes of gunfire on the outer fringes of the mob indicated that fratricidal firefights had broken out as the groups farthest from the fighting had run out of patience and had started blasting their way through their own comrades to get to us. Well that was fine with me, the more of them who killed each other the better I liked it, but there were still plenty left where they’d come from.
‘What’s that?’ Broklaw asked, pointing at a blip some way behind the bulk of the ork army. Whatever it was it was massive, and moving slowly but inexorably towards us. A heavy sense of foreboding sank into my stomach as I stared at it. I had a horrible suspicion as to what it might be, but prayed fervently to the Emperor that I was wrong. (Not that I thought for a moment that He might actually be listening, but you never know, and it relieved the stress.)
‘According to this, it’s huge,’ Kasteen said, a hint of confusion in her voice. Rather than verbalise my fears, which would somehow make them more concrete, I voxed Mazarin aboard the orbiting starship to request a more detailed analysis. That way I could continue to cling to the hope that I might be wrong for a few more precious minutes.
‘Single contact, about two hundred kloms... kilometres to the west,’ I said. ‘Can you give us a little more detail?’
‘If the Omnissiah wills it,’ the tech-priest said cheerfully, and busied herself for a few moments with the appropriate rituals. After a short pause her voice returned, with a slightly harder edge to it. ‘It’s a single artefact, approximately eighty metres in height. Self-propelled, with a high thermal signature which indicates combustion processes of some kind. Metallic shell, mainly ferric in composition.’ Her voice faltered. ‘I’m sorry, commissar, I don’t have a clue what it is. I can meditate on it, but...’
‘There’s no need, thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve just confirmed what I suspected. It’s a gargant.’ Kasteen and Broklaw stared at one another in horror. The orkish equivalent of a battle titan, the approaching construct might be crude but it would certainly have enough firepower aboard to punch through our defensive lines without even so much as slowing down. ‘Any suggestions you might have about vulnerabilities we can exploit would be gratefully received.’
‘I’ll analyse the data and see what I can find,’ she promised.
‘We can’t ask for more,’ I said, and turned back to the other officers. We studied the hololith together, brows furrowed. ‘I reckon we’ve got less than a day before it gets here...’ I began, then Mazarin’s voice interrupted me again.
‘Sorry to break in, commissar, but the captain would like a word.’
‘This isn’t exactly a good time,’ I said, then changed my mind. If things went horribly wrong, which they looked very like doing at the moment, the Pure of Heart was my best chance of getting out of the system with my hide intact. And annoying Durant would be a seriously bad idea. ‘No, put him on.’
