Death or Glory, page 6
That ought to have been enough to subdue any opponent, but once again I underestimated the ork capacity for beserker rage and lack of instinct for self-preservation. Instead of collapsing, it surged to its feet, roaring just as loudly as before, staggering slightly as it favoured its wounded leg. That was enough: I sidestepped, striking at its back, and severed the thing’s spinal column. It fell at last, rolling down to join its comrades, and twitched for a moment before finally becoming still.
‘Nice work, sir,’ Jurgen said, lowering his weapon.
I looked around us, breathing hard, not quite daring to believe it was all over at last. ‘Is that the last of them?’ I asked.
My aide nodded. ‘Must be,’ he said, with an assurance I quite envied; but then his people had generations of experience fighting these creatures, so I suppose he had good reason for his confidence. ‘If there were any more around they’d be all over us by now.’
‘Well that’s a comfort,’ I said, with less sarcasm than I’d intended, then the obvious question struck me. ‘But what I want to know is how they found us so fast.’
As it turned out, the answer to that question lay close at hand, and we were able to find it after a relatively brief search. The task was pretty onerous, however, as both of us were still suffering the effects of our precipitous descent, and the heat of the desert would have been debilitating enough even if we’d both been in the peak of condition to begin with. Not for the first time, I cursed whoever it was who had originally decided that black would be the ideal colour for a commissarial uniform, and discarded the greatcoat (which, in the normal course of events I found extremely welcome, surrounded as I usually was by iceworlders who tended to adjust the temperature in their quarters to levels more usually reserved for the preservation of food). Jurgen, no doubt, found the high temperatures even more onerous than I did, but accepted them as he did everything else with his habitual stoicism.
I’d insisted on resting for a while before commencing our scouting expedition, grabbing some food and water, and was heartily glad I had done so, despite the presence of our uninvited guest inside the pod. The temperature within had risen considerably[33], and as you can well imagine the scent of baking ork wasn’t exactly a spur to the appetite. After a while, and with considerable effort, we were able to lug the cadaver outside, where it joined its comrades on a makeshift charnel heap.
‘We ought to burn them,’ Jurgen said, which I gathered was some sort of superstition among the Valhallans, although since the greenskins were all indisputably dead I couldn’t really see the point[34]. It was moot anyway, the arms locker aboard our little craft not having any flamers among its inventory, so we deferred the matter in favour of exploration and set out in the direction from which our attackers had come.
Fortunately, the tracks they’d left were easy to follow, and after some moments of floundering up and down the shifting sands of the endless dune fields, we reached one of the narrow, rocky defiles the Tallarns call wadis. There, the furrows they’d left in their wake died away, although the occasional boot print was still visible in the thin scattering of dust, which coated the ground, and we were able to make reasonable progress. In fact, now we were free of the encumbering sand, in which we had sunk to our ankles with every step, I felt almost invigorated, despite the all-pervasive heat.
By this time, we were both perspiring freely, and I paused for a moment to take a mouthful of water from the canteen I’d slung over one shoulder before we set off. As I did so, I caught sight of a bright flash of reflected sunlight from around the next turn of the defile, and motioned Jurgen to silence. Something metallic was up ahead, that much was certain, although what it was I still had no idea.
Readying our weapons, we moved on cautiously, my mouth drier now than it had been before I’d stopped to drink, and the palms of my hands tingling again, although this time it was simply from nerves rather than a warning from my subconscious. Several times during that painstaking advance my eyes registered that telltale flickering again, although what it presaged I still had no idea.
At length we reached the bend in the defile, and, flattening ourselves against the rock walls, peered cautiously around it. My breath hissed involuntarily through my teeth.
‘Vehicles,’ I said, although in truth that was paying them something of an unwarranted compliment. Had we a tech-priest with us, I’m not sure whether he would have burst out laughing on the spot, or tried to exorcise them as an abomination against the machine spirit. Both, probably; useful as they are on occasion, I have to say most of the cogboys[35] I’ve come across in my long and discreditable career have been the proverbial Emperor short of a tarot deck.
Jurgen nodded. ‘Orkish,’ he pronounced, with all the assurance of his heritage, although even I had been able to tell that. There were three of the things parked in a wider canyon, into which the wadi we followed opened out like a tributary joining a river[36], and I had never seen a more ramshackle collection of vehicles in my life. Two were a curious hybrid of tractor and motorcycle, with wide tracks where the rear wheels should have been; one clearly intended for a single rider, while the other had two of the elongated treads side by side, separated by a flatbed on which was mounted a large and intimidating heavy weapon, clearly intended to be fired by a passenger. It was this which had been responsible for the flashing I’d seen. The crude sighting device attached to it had come loose, shifting slightly in the wind, intermittently reflecting the blazing sun up the narrow side canyon we’d been following.
The third member of the convoy looked a little more conventional, being mounted on four sturdy wheels. Like its curious companion, it had a pintle-mounted weapon, which I recognised as an Imperial pattern heavy bolter, no doubt looted and installed by whatever debased equivalent of our own tech-priests these grotesque creatures possessed. Scanning the whole area with an amplivisor from the well-stocked lockers of our lifepod, and detecting no signs of life, I gave the signal to descend.
Close to, the collection of ambulatory scrap we’d chanced across was even less prepossessing. The four-wheeled specimen, which Jurgen kept referring to as a buggy, was well armoured it was true, thick slabs of metal crudely riveted to the chassis, but it had clearly been poorly maintained, if it ever had been at all. Patches of rust and bright silver scoring were scattered equally randomly across its surface, the latter no doubt having been inflicted in combat recently enough not to have oxidised yet, and for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom a thick line of red paint had been crudely daubed along both flanks[37].
‘This must have been the boss’s,’ my aide opined, clambering up on the thing, and poking around cautiously. After a moment, I joined him, keeping a wary eye out for any betraying flash of movement among the scattering of rocks, which surrounded us, and inspected the bolter from force of habit. It seemed fully functional, loaded, and several boxes of ammunition were stacked haphazardly around it.
‘How can you tell?’ I asked, deferring to his greater knowledge of the creatures we faced without a trace of embarrassment. We’d served together long enough for me to have more confidence in him than anyone else in the regiment, and he knew me well enough not to take a willingness to listen to advice as a sign of weak leadership. (In fact one of the things I go out of my way to try and instil in the young whelps in my charge is to do precisely that; better a moment of embarrassment than a lifetime of ignorance, if you ask me, and on the battlefield, where what you don’t know is most definitely going to hurt you, that’s liable to be a pretty short span. Besides, there’s nothing better calculated to get the Guard officers you’ll be serving with to loosen up a bit and establish a tolerable working relationship than showing that you respect their opinions; or at least giving them the impression that you do.)
Jurgen shrugged. ‘It’s got the biggest guns,’ he pointed out reasonably. Well that made sense to me, so I prised myself away from the precious bolter and started rummaging through the storage lockers in earnest. Apart from a few crude tools, evidently used to repair whatever damage couldn’t be ignored altogether, there didn’t seem to be much, although one proved to contain a human arm, dessicated by the desert heat, thoroughly chewed, and smelling to the Golden Throne.
‘Somebody’s lunch?’ I suggested, pitching the foul thing over the side, and trying to quell the incipient rebellion in my stomach.
Jurgen nodded grimly. ‘They’ll eat anything, even each other.’
‘How nice,’ I said, with a shudder of revulsion. After that, I opened things a little more circumspectly, as you might expect, but there were no more unpleasant surprises. ‘I take it one of the others was carrying the rest of the rations?’ Perhaps fortunately, there was no sign of anything an ork might consider food on either of the other vehicles.
‘Must have been a foraging party,’ Jurgen concluded, and I nodded my agreement.
‘The question is,’ I said, ‘where they were going to forage, and where they’d come from in the first place.’ I shivered in a sudden gust of chill wind. We’d taken longer than I’d expected to inspect our find, and the sun was beginning to get close to the horizon. Our short sojourn on Desolatia had familiarised me with desert conditions well enough, so I knew that the temperature was about to drop to levels, which Jurgen would find positively welcome, and I most certainly wouldn’t. ‘We’d better get back to the pod.’ We could shelter there for the night at least, and try to work out what to do next. We could hardly stay there indefinitely, but on the other hand I had no desire to strike out at random across this wilderness of sand, trusting to blind luck and the Emperor that we’d find our own lines before another ork patrol stumbled across us. Of course, I hadn’t the faintest idea at the time how far we actually were from the bulk of the Imperial forces on Perlia, or I would probably have been gibbering in panic by now.
My aide nodded. ‘Would this help?’ he asked, proffering a tattered scrap of parchment he’d found in one of the lockers on the buggy. I took it, finding it unpleasantly greasy to the touch, and examined the spiderwork of crude lines and strange ork sigils spattered across it, apparently at random. ‘It looks like a map.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
We returned to our crippled refuge in higher spirits than I’d anticipated, Jurgen lugging a canister of fuel from the smallest of the vehicles we’d found along with us. It still seemed like a waste of effort to me, but if incinerating the corpses of our erstwhile assailants made him happy then good luck to him. For my part, I tucked the scrap of parchment inside my shirt for safekeeping, trying to ignore the way close contact with it made my skin crawl, and watched him ignite his bonfire with a relatively light heart. It certainly looked cheerful enough as the flames took hold, flickering gently against the deep purple of the star flecked sky, and I amused myself for a while, trying to pick out which of the pinpoints of light above us were orbiting starships, until the wind shifted abruptly and the stench of burning meat combined with the deepening chill to drive me back inside the pod.
There, of course, it was almost impossible to see, since the lighting system was as dead as everything else requiring power to function, but once again the well-stocked survival kit came to our aid, and I puzzled at the crude map we’d recovered by the light of a hand luminator balanced on one of the bunks.
It was too canted to sleep on, of course, but I was exhausted enough to feel perfectly comfortable on a nest of rolled-up sleeping bags stuffed into the angle of the bulkhead and floor, and drifted off to sleep as soon as I killed the light. Jurgen, to my unspoken relief, had elected to take a bedroll outside, where he could make the most of the freezing temperature, and his ever-present odour, intensified as always by the daytime heat, had mercifully followed.
Like most Valhallans, Jurgen had a passing familiarity with orkish script[38], and had been good enough to familiarise me with the basics, or at least their Gothic equivalents, so after a while I was able to work out some of their meaning.
‘If I’m reading this right,’ I said cautiously, while we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast of reconstituted soylens viridiens on the hull the next morning, ‘they were camped at the oasis back there.’ I gestured in the direction of the long scar left by the pod as it bounced and slithered to a halt the previous day. Jurgen nodded, leaning in to look more closely at the map I held, and leaving me in no doubt that the rising sun was doing its usual sterling job of bringing out the best of his distinctive bouquet.
‘That’s the symbol for a camp,’ he agreed, ‘and it looks more or less in the right place.’ The map had nothing so sophisticated as a scale of distances, but the sigil he pointed to was more or less in the centre of it, and after a bit of thought I’d been able to match a peculiar wavy line along one edge to a stretch of coastline on the eastern continent[39]. I shrugged. We’d descended on the site with the impact of a couple of kilotons of fyceline, so there was no point in going to see if any of the greenskins had survived. More to the point, there wouldn’t be much left back there which would help to sustain Jurgen and myself.
‘Well, we know where they’ve come from,’ I said. I pointed to a spot a short distance from the flattened oasis, ‘and we’re about here.’ There was only one brutish rune further along in that direction and I tapped it with my fingertip. ‘So they must have been heading for this place, whatever that splodge means.’
‘Looks like the symbol for fighting,’ Jurgen volunteered, ‘or lots of enemies.’ He shrugged too, and replenished my mug of recaff from the pot, hissing quietly on the portable stove he’d scavenged from the survival kit before I’d woken. I took the drink gratefully. I’d have preferred a pot of tanna[40], to be honest, but the rations aboard the pod had not been packed with Valhallans in mind, and that particular little luxury would have to wait until we’d rejoined our regiment. Assuming they’d managed to survive the attack on our transport ship unscathed, of course.
‘Then that’s where we’ll head for,’ I said decisively. If you’ve read much of these scribblings, my apparent willingness to go charging off in the general direction of what seemed like a battle zone may strike you as uncharacteristic, to say the least, but to my mind anywhere the orks felt was full of enemies sounded like the right place to be. With any, luck we’d be able to make contact with our own forces, and at the very least we ought to find some PDF trolls to hide behind while we made our way back to the regiment. From which musings you might fairly deduce that I was still blissfully ignorant of just how bad a situation we were actually in.
‘That’ll be a fair trek,’ Jurgen pointed out. ‘We’ll need to get as much of this stuff stowed in the backpacks as we can.’
I nodded. ‘Especially the water,’ I said. Under these conditions we’d need as much of it as we could possibly take with us. I hadn’t exactly had time to admire the scenery on our way down, but I’d seen enough to realise that pockets of civilisation had been few and far between. It was likely to be more than a week before we got anywhere, even if we were lucky. The irony was that the survival pod contained enough to sustain the pair of us for months if necessary, but remaining where we were would simply mean we starved to death later rather than sooner. Better to set out while we were still strong enough to make the arduous journey. Besides, the fact that we’d undoubtedly annihilated the ork camp when we crashed on it was no guarantee that we’d be spared any more unwanted visitors. If another patrol had set out ahead of the one that had attacked us, they could easily stumble across the abandoned vehicles of their compatriots on the way back and come to investigate…
‘Jurgen, I’m an idiot,’ I told him. My aide looked at me quizzically, his mouth hanging open just enough to give me rather too good a look at his half-chewed breakfast. ‘We might not have to abandon the supplies after all. Do you think you could drive that buggy thing?’
A little cautious experimentation was enough to prove that he could, with almost as much elan as he handled the Salamander I habitually requisitioned, and which he drove in a fashion most people unfortunate enough to find themselves in the vicinity generally considered to verge on the life threatening. The ork vehicles were undeniably crude, but that meant that their controls were correspondingly simple, and my aide was able to work them out without too much difficulty. In truth, there was little more to them than a throttle, a steering column, and a brake. Shortly after we’d begun our examination, Jurgen had managed to fire up the engine, and having spent a few moments getting the feel of the sturdy little vehicle, he opened the throttle and disappeared over the rim of the nearest dune in a flurry of sand and profanity.
I was able to follow his progress by the sound of the engine, and after a few moments he reappeared, a broad grin across his face, and slewed to a halt next to me, raising a miniature sandstorm.
‘It’ll do,’ he conceded, which was about as close as he was likely to come to expressing enthusiasm for anything orkish, and I nodded. Whatever else we’d have to face, we wouldn’t have to walk to wherever we were going, after all. I gestured to the other two vehicles.
‘We’d better get the fuel cans from those,’ I said, beginning to unstrap the nearest. ‘Emperor alone knows where we might find some more out here.’
Jurgen nodded. ‘Best to be on the safe side,’ he conceded.
There was nothing else worth taking on either of them, so once the canisters were safely stowed, I swung myself aboard and directed Jurgen to take us back to the lifepod.
