Death or Glory, page 7
‘One more thing,’ I said as he jerked us into motion again, and swung the heavy bolter, which I’d been clinging to for support. For a moment, I found myself wondering if it would still function for me, its spirit having been corrupted by its enforced servitude in the hands of our enemies, but it had apparently remained loyal to the Emperor and opened up as readily as if it had still been mounted on the Chimera from which it had evidently been ripped. The hail of shells tore the ork bike things to shreds, which was hardly surprising at this range, cooking off the ammunition in their own weapons and igniting the fuel still in their tanks with a most satisfying roar. ‘We don’t want the greenies getting these back, do we?’ (In case you were wondering, it would have been pointless attempting to salvage either one of them for our own use: having been designed for ork physiology, attempting to ride one would have been somewhere between uncomfortable and impossible.)
‘No sir, we don’t,’ my aide agreed, and opened the throttle fully. Our trip back to the pod was mercifully short, but unpleasant nevertheless. The greenskin who’d built the ramshackle vehicle we rode in had either never heard of the concept of suspension, or considered it something for sissies.
By the time we reached our destination, I was beginning to have severe doubts about the wisdom of this course of action, but we didn’t really have much of a choice. Attempting to walk out of the desert would take us far longer, if we even made it out at all, and however uncomfortable the buggy might have been, it was at least well adapted to the terrain. I’d expected us to bog down in the dunes surrounding the crash site, but Jurgen ran us up the treacherous slope as easily as a sump rat up an outfall, and brought us to a halt outside the pod with an air of triumph I had to admit was well merited.
Our next job was to load up as much of the supplies aboard as we reasonably could. Food and water were our first priority, of course, and after that bedding and ancillary equipment. Most of this I left to Jurgen, his expertise in this area being considerably greater than mine, and went to check on the contents of the arms locker. Apart from the lasgun he’d already used on the orks, and which had remained slung across his shoulders ever since, there were eleven other standard issue assault weapons, along with five boxes of powercells for them[41]. Reluctant to leave anything behind which an enemy might find useful, I added them to the stack of equipment to take with us, a fortuitous decision which, although it seemed like a waste of our limited space at the time, was to turn out to be more than vindicated. I had hoped to supplement them with something heavier, but the pod’s designers had obviously decided that if you needed support weapons you’d either be able to find them for yourself or you were done for anyway, and devoted the limited storage space aboard to survival gear and comestibles.
The last thing I found was a drawer full of commbeads, no doubt intended to let the survivors of a crash landing explore their surroundings without losing touch with one another. I seized them gratefully, slipping one into my ear and running rapidly through the frequencies. My commissarial codes were enough to give me full access to any Imperial transmissions in the vicinity, but to my complete lack of surprise all I could find anywhere was static[42]. Nevertheless, the familiar feel of the thing in my ear was obscurely comforting, and I picked one up for Jurgen too, along with a number of spares. We weren’t all that likely to run into a tech-priest out here, and the last thing I wanted was to lose touch with my aide at a critical moment.
By the time we’d finished loading the buggy, leaving barely enough room for the pair of us to squeeze aboard, the morning was well advanced, and I decided to have one more meal before we set off. Despite our best efforts, there was still a considerable quantity of food left aboard the pod, or a fair amount of the basic ration bars at least, and it seemed a shame to waste any more of them than was strictly necessary. (Although for all I know they’re still sitting there under a sand dune, as close to edible as they ever were. As the old Guardsman’s joke has it, the main reason they last so long is that no one with any possible alternative would actually eat one.)
Despite their usual, and probably fortunate, lack of any clearly identifiable flavour, we ate a couple apiece, and tucked a few more away in our pockets just to be on the safe side. (My greatcoat had been stowed on the buggy, of course, the searing desert temperatures making any other course of action patently ridiculous, but I had a bit of room left in my trousers, and Jurgen, as always, had a motley collection of pouches and webbing pieces hanging off his torso armour like undergrowth clinging to a tomb.)
‘Well then,’ I said at last, tearing myself away from our refuge with a surprising amount of reluctance, ‘I suppose we ought to be going.’ I scrambled aboard the buggy, wedging myself as comfortably as I could between the heavy bolter and some crates of survival equipment, and waited while Jurgen fired up the engine, which belched a plume of foul smelling exhaust into the clear desert air. ‘Time we saw what’s out there.’
Had I known, of course, I’d probably have dug the deepest hole I could in the sand and pulled it in on top of me, but I still thought we were close enough to our own lines to find refuge with little difficulty. So I braced myself as Jurgen kicked our ramshackle vehicle into gear, and with a roar and a bounce, which seemed to loosen the fillings in my teeth, we rattled off to meet our destiny.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The rest of the day passed without incident, despite my natural apprehension at the prospect of attracting attention from any enemies in the immediate vicinity. (Not to mention our own forces. If a Guard or PDF unit noticed us before we noticed them, given our mode of transport, they could hardly be blamed for opening fire before we got close enough to identify ourselves as friends.) My fears in this regard were far from unfounded, as any unseen lurkers would have had more than adequate warning of our approach: the roar of our engine echoed from the dunes surrounding us loudly enough to blot out almost any other sound from my ringing ears, and I blessed the foresight which had impelled me to pass one of the commbeads to Jurgen before we set off. Without them, conversation between us would have been impossible.
Not that it was exactly easy even then. We progressed in a series of spine jarring jolts, each one of which drove the breath from my lungs, so that whatever remarks we did manage to exchange were generally interrupted by staccato hesitations every other word. After a while, I discovered that the discomfort was marginally less if I stood at the bolter, or to be more accurate clung on to the thing for dear life, letting my knees flex with the bouncing of our sturdy little vehicle, and that this allowed me a better view of our surroundings. Using an amplivisor would have been impossible under the circumstances, so I had to make do with what I could see with my own unaided eyes, and I have to admit that this wasn’t a lot.
This wasn’t to say that the landscape was unvaryingly monotonous, however Occasional outcrops of reddish brown rocks broke through the sand, like reefs in an ocean of dust, and thin patches of desiccated scrub clung grimly to whatever crevices they could find. Lichens, too, speckled their surfaces, in an astonishing profusion of colours, although perhaps the eye simply picked them out more easily because of the contrast they made with their surroundings. Of animal life I saw no obvious sign, although I have no doubt that it was there. If there’s one thing I’ve learned on my travels around the galaxy it’s that life is incredibly tenacious, and will manage to find a way of getting by even in the most inimical of environments.
At length, with the shadows beginning to stretch and the sky becoming tinged with purple, I decided to call a halt. Jurgen complied with alacrity, which was hardly surprising given that he’d been wrestling those cumbersome controls for most of the afternoon, and coasted us to a halt in the lee of one of the outcrops of rock. I jumped down gratefully, almost stumbling as the sand gave way beneath my boots, and tried to stretch some feeling back into my cramped and knotted limbs.
‘How far do you think we’ve come?’ I asked, reaching for the nearest bundle of survival rations and heaving it onto the ground beside me.
Jurgen shrugged. ‘About eighty klom,’[43] he said, beginning to set up the stove.
I raised an eyebrow, surprised. ‘That far?’ I asked, trying not to sound sceptical. Jurgen nodded, taking the rhetorical question as literally as he tended to take everything else.
‘That’s pretty fast given the conditions, and the way the buggy’s loaded down,’ he said. I couldn’t argue with that, so I left him to set up camp and wandered up the side of the outcrop, searching for some firmer footing where I could try and work some flexibility back into my limbs with a little chainsword practice now that the air was cool enough to make physical exercise feasible again. Fortunately, I found it, and by the time I’d finished running through the familiar routines of attack and defence, I was beginning to feel a great deal calmer and more comfortable.
I returned to the campsite in a mood I can only describe as mellow, to find that Jurgen had been busy in my absence. Darkness was falling in earnest, bringing with it the night time chill, and I retrieved my greatcoat from the buggy. After a hot meal and a mug of recaff, I retreated to the survival bubble he’d erected, rolled myself up in the sleeping bag I found there, and drifted off into the last night of untroubled slumber I was to enjoy for some weeks to come.
Not that the following morning gave us any presentiment of what was in store. I woke to find Jurgen already abroad, stirring something grey and lumpy in a pan on the portable stove, which, despite its appearance, smelled surprisingly appetising. He glanced up as I stepped carefully over his bedroll, which he’d laid down just outside the bubble, and handed me a mug of recaff.
‘Almost ready, sir,’ he assured me, and went back to tending his porridge. Emperor alone knows what was in it, but it was packed with enough nutrients to leave me feeling ready for anything (which I suppose is ironic, considering how the day was to turn out). I began whistling cheerfully as I started the job of breaking camp. After I’d stowed some of the equipment and carried a couple of bundles back to the buggy, my aide’s silently reproachful look finally succeeded in reminding me that this was supposed to be his department, and I decided I’d better let him get on with it without any further interference. Jurgen was, if nothing else, a stickler for protocol, which normally made my life considerably easier than it otherwise might have been. In the years to come even generals were to find themselves politely but firmly fobbed off when I couldn’t be bothered to deal with them.
Knowing that to persist in what he undoubtedly regarded as a menial task far beneath my dignity as a commissar would leave him disgruntled for the rest of the day, I returned to the outcrop I’d climbed the evening before with an amplivisor, and scanned the horizon, hoping to gather some clue as to our whereabouts. From my elevated position, I found I could see a great deal further than I’d expected in the clear desert air, and my attention was drawn to a faint smudge on the horizon, roughly in our direction of travel, (which, naturally enough, had been the first way I’d looked). My curiosity piqued, I magnified the image as much as I could and tried to make out a few more details.
‘I think we’re approaching a town,’ I told Jurgen, the faint rattles and bangs being picked up by his commbead telling me he was stowing our equipment in the buggy with his usual efficiency. I tried to bring the image into clearer focus, but the heat haze was already beginning to shimmer over the sands, and it was hard to make anything out other than the vague outline of walls and buildings. Try as I might, I was unable to resolve any details of the inhabitants, if indeed there were any. ‘It could be the splodge on the map we’ve been heading for.’
‘That sounds likely,’ my aide agreed. ‘Orks would mark one of our towns down as lots of enemies all right.’ He hesitated, and then went on, a note of caution in his voice. ‘Mind you, sir, they’d think that even if it was only civilians there.’
‘I see.’ I lowered the vision enhancers thoughtfully. That hadn’t occurred to me before, and the idea of trotting blithely into an ork infested killing ground (which is what any urban area is to an infantry soldier, and don’t let anyone ever try to tell you otherwise), was far from appealing. Nevertheless, I couldn’t see any other alternative. We certainly couldn’t continue to drive aimlessly around the desert until our supplies ran out. ‘We’d best proceed with caution then.’
‘Very good, sir,’ my aide agreed, barely able to keep a note of relief from his voice. A moment later the roar of our badly tuned engine shattered the stillness of the desert. ‘Don’t want to attract too much attention, do we?’
With that in mind, we approached the town at little more than walking pace, having discovered that the engine was marginally quieter at lower speeds, keeping the ever-present dune fields between us and it for as long as possible to muffle the sound even further. Eventually, we crossed the line of a road, the smooth rockcrete arrowing away from the town towards Emperor knew where, and turned along it. From this point on stealth would be out of the question in any case, and our best bet was simply to make the best time we could into the relative shelter of the outskirts. Assuming no one was waiting in ambush for anyone foolish enough to use the highway, of course…
A quick glance was enough to reassure me that the possibility was remote. Judging by the thin film of wind drifted sand covering the smooth, grey surface nothing had moved along it in a long time, certainly not for several days, and that meant that any defenders would be unlikely to be directing their attention towards it. That didn’t mean the carriageway hadn’t been mined, of course, but I was pretty sure Jurgen would notice any telltale irregularities in the road surface and react accordingly, so I tried not to think about that.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ I told him, sweeping the amplivisor across the line of walls, which made up the boundary of the town. On the smooth surface of the highway the ride was much steadier, and I was able keep them trained on the vista ahead with no more effort than if we’d been scooting along in our faithful old Salamander. Signs of fighting were everywhere, none of the structures I could see having been left undamaged, and several had collapsed entirely. The streets ahead were choked with fallen debris, although to my relief none of it seemed to have been rearranged to form barricades or weapon emplacements.
‘Looks bad,’ Jurgen agreed, slowing to skirt a couple of burnt-out groundcars, which had evidently been hit by heavy weapons of some kind. They looked like civilian models, the thin sheet metal of their bodywork ripped open like ration packs, and I tried not to look too closely at their contents. Whoever the occupants had been they’d piled in regardless of the cars’ nominal carrying capacities, their charred bones tumbled together in death, so thoroughly entangled, it would take a genetor magos to tell which bodies they’d originally come from. And the chances of that were negligible; whoever these people were, only the Emperor knew, and probably only He cared. ‘Refugees, if you ask me.’
‘Seems likely,’ I agreed, dismissing the matter from my mind. Whether any of their fellows had made it to safety, shared their fate, or simply fled to perish in the desert, there was no way of telling. All I could infer with any certainty was that the orks had indeed been here, although whether they were still around or had moved on in search of more to defile and destroy I couldn’t be certain. The only prudent course of action was to assume that they were still infesting the area, and I instructed Jurgen to proceed with caution. ‘Find somewhere we can park this thing out of sight, and let’s move in on foot. I want to know what we’re getting into.’ The palms of my hands were tingling again, and I trusted my subconscious enough to take notice of the presentiment of danger.
‘Very good, commissar.’ My aide complied with his usual speed and efficiency, coasting us to a halt in the remains of a nearby fabricator unit. What had once been produced here I couldn’t tell, the crushed and mangled machinery all around us being half-buried by what remained of the roof, but I nodded approval of his choice. The thick slabs of metal surrounding us would provide excellent cover if we had to conduct a fighting retreat. It would disrupt the outline of our vehicle on any auspex screen (assuming the greenskins had the brains to use such a thing of course[44]), and provide enough concealment for us to make our way deeper into the derelict settlement without attracting any attention… I hoped. I strained my ringing ears as Jurgen killed the engine, but heard nothing beyond the thudding of my heart and the faint ticks of the cooling mechanism.
‘Better let me go first, sir.’ Jurgen unslung his lasgun and scurried to the nearest patch of daylight, squinting slightly as he crouched low and took aim at the street outside. After a moment, he raised a hand to indicate that the coast was clear. ‘No sign of life.’
‘Good,’ I said, with rather more emphasis than I’d intended, and scrambled down from my position at the heavy bolter. I felt a little unsteady on my feet for a moment or two, no doubt as a result of the sudden cessation of the lurching motion I’d grown used to, but by the time I’d crossed the floor to join him the momentary flash of vertigo had faded away as swiftly as it had come. I drew my laspistol and chainsword as I trotted forwards, feeling instantly calmer for having weapons in my hands again, and crouched down next to Jurgen, trying not to breathe too deeply through my nose.
Outside, the midmorning sun struck hard from the face of the building opposite, another industrial structure, which had once housed a power plant of some kind judging by the tendrils of piping emanating from it in all directions. Now, it was a roofless ruin, evidently the result of a massive explosion within; a contingency the architect had obviously allowed for if the metre-thick walls were anything to go by. Even so, the facade had cracked, slumping wearily in several places, and the doors and windows were shattered, lying in pieces across the boulevard, which separated the two structures. I assumed that the power plant itself had gone up, probably as a result of the attendant tech-priests being killed or forced to abandon their posts, as there was relatively little sign of combat damage to be seen.
‘No sir, we don’t,’ my aide agreed, and opened the throttle fully. Our trip back to the pod was mercifully short, but unpleasant nevertheless. The greenskin who’d built the ramshackle vehicle we rode in had either never heard of the concept of suspension, or considered it something for sissies.
By the time we reached our destination, I was beginning to have severe doubts about the wisdom of this course of action, but we didn’t really have much of a choice. Attempting to walk out of the desert would take us far longer, if we even made it out at all, and however uncomfortable the buggy might have been, it was at least well adapted to the terrain. I’d expected us to bog down in the dunes surrounding the crash site, but Jurgen ran us up the treacherous slope as easily as a sump rat up an outfall, and brought us to a halt outside the pod with an air of triumph I had to admit was well merited.
Our next job was to load up as much of the supplies aboard as we reasonably could. Food and water were our first priority, of course, and after that bedding and ancillary equipment. Most of this I left to Jurgen, his expertise in this area being considerably greater than mine, and went to check on the contents of the arms locker. Apart from the lasgun he’d already used on the orks, and which had remained slung across his shoulders ever since, there were eleven other standard issue assault weapons, along with five boxes of powercells for them[41]. Reluctant to leave anything behind which an enemy might find useful, I added them to the stack of equipment to take with us, a fortuitous decision which, although it seemed like a waste of our limited space at the time, was to turn out to be more than vindicated. I had hoped to supplement them with something heavier, but the pod’s designers had obviously decided that if you needed support weapons you’d either be able to find them for yourself or you were done for anyway, and devoted the limited storage space aboard to survival gear and comestibles.
The last thing I found was a drawer full of commbeads, no doubt intended to let the survivors of a crash landing explore their surroundings without losing touch with one another. I seized them gratefully, slipping one into my ear and running rapidly through the frequencies. My commissarial codes were enough to give me full access to any Imperial transmissions in the vicinity, but to my complete lack of surprise all I could find anywhere was static[42]. Nevertheless, the familiar feel of the thing in my ear was obscurely comforting, and I picked one up for Jurgen too, along with a number of spares. We weren’t all that likely to run into a tech-priest out here, and the last thing I wanted was to lose touch with my aide at a critical moment.
By the time we’d finished loading the buggy, leaving barely enough room for the pair of us to squeeze aboard, the morning was well advanced, and I decided to have one more meal before we set off. Despite our best efforts, there was still a considerable quantity of food left aboard the pod, or a fair amount of the basic ration bars at least, and it seemed a shame to waste any more of them than was strictly necessary. (Although for all I know they’re still sitting there under a sand dune, as close to edible as they ever were. As the old Guardsman’s joke has it, the main reason they last so long is that no one with any possible alternative would actually eat one.)
Despite their usual, and probably fortunate, lack of any clearly identifiable flavour, we ate a couple apiece, and tucked a few more away in our pockets just to be on the safe side. (My greatcoat had been stowed on the buggy, of course, the searing desert temperatures making any other course of action patently ridiculous, but I had a bit of room left in my trousers, and Jurgen, as always, had a motley collection of pouches and webbing pieces hanging off his torso armour like undergrowth clinging to a tomb.)
‘Well then,’ I said at last, tearing myself away from our refuge with a surprising amount of reluctance, ‘I suppose we ought to be going.’ I scrambled aboard the buggy, wedging myself as comfortably as I could between the heavy bolter and some crates of survival equipment, and waited while Jurgen fired up the engine, which belched a plume of foul smelling exhaust into the clear desert air. ‘Time we saw what’s out there.’
Had I known, of course, I’d probably have dug the deepest hole I could in the sand and pulled it in on top of me, but I still thought we were close enough to our own lines to find refuge with little difficulty. So I braced myself as Jurgen kicked our ramshackle vehicle into gear, and with a roar and a bounce, which seemed to loosen the fillings in my teeth, we rattled off to meet our destiny.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The rest of the day passed without incident, despite my natural apprehension at the prospect of attracting attention from any enemies in the immediate vicinity. (Not to mention our own forces. If a Guard or PDF unit noticed us before we noticed them, given our mode of transport, they could hardly be blamed for opening fire before we got close enough to identify ourselves as friends.) My fears in this regard were far from unfounded, as any unseen lurkers would have had more than adequate warning of our approach: the roar of our engine echoed from the dunes surrounding us loudly enough to blot out almost any other sound from my ringing ears, and I blessed the foresight which had impelled me to pass one of the commbeads to Jurgen before we set off. Without them, conversation between us would have been impossible.
Not that it was exactly easy even then. We progressed in a series of spine jarring jolts, each one of which drove the breath from my lungs, so that whatever remarks we did manage to exchange were generally interrupted by staccato hesitations every other word. After a while, I discovered that the discomfort was marginally less if I stood at the bolter, or to be more accurate clung on to the thing for dear life, letting my knees flex with the bouncing of our sturdy little vehicle, and that this allowed me a better view of our surroundings. Using an amplivisor would have been impossible under the circumstances, so I had to make do with what I could see with my own unaided eyes, and I have to admit that this wasn’t a lot.
This wasn’t to say that the landscape was unvaryingly monotonous, however Occasional outcrops of reddish brown rocks broke through the sand, like reefs in an ocean of dust, and thin patches of desiccated scrub clung grimly to whatever crevices they could find. Lichens, too, speckled their surfaces, in an astonishing profusion of colours, although perhaps the eye simply picked them out more easily because of the contrast they made with their surroundings. Of animal life I saw no obvious sign, although I have no doubt that it was there. If there’s one thing I’ve learned on my travels around the galaxy it’s that life is incredibly tenacious, and will manage to find a way of getting by even in the most inimical of environments.
At length, with the shadows beginning to stretch and the sky becoming tinged with purple, I decided to call a halt. Jurgen complied with alacrity, which was hardly surprising given that he’d been wrestling those cumbersome controls for most of the afternoon, and coasted us to a halt in the lee of one of the outcrops of rock. I jumped down gratefully, almost stumbling as the sand gave way beneath my boots, and tried to stretch some feeling back into my cramped and knotted limbs.
‘How far do you think we’ve come?’ I asked, reaching for the nearest bundle of survival rations and heaving it onto the ground beside me.
Jurgen shrugged. ‘About eighty klom,’[43] he said, beginning to set up the stove.
I raised an eyebrow, surprised. ‘That far?’ I asked, trying not to sound sceptical. Jurgen nodded, taking the rhetorical question as literally as he tended to take everything else.
‘That’s pretty fast given the conditions, and the way the buggy’s loaded down,’ he said. I couldn’t argue with that, so I left him to set up camp and wandered up the side of the outcrop, searching for some firmer footing where I could try and work some flexibility back into my limbs with a little chainsword practice now that the air was cool enough to make physical exercise feasible again. Fortunately, I found it, and by the time I’d finished running through the familiar routines of attack and defence, I was beginning to feel a great deal calmer and more comfortable.
I returned to the campsite in a mood I can only describe as mellow, to find that Jurgen had been busy in my absence. Darkness was falling in earnest, bringing with it the night time chill, and I retrieved my greatcoat from the buggy. After a hot meal and a mug of recaff, I retreated to the survival bubble he’d erected, rolled myself up in the sleeping bag I found there, and drifted off into the last night of untroubled slumber I was to enjoy for some weeks to come.
Not that the following morning gave us any presentiment of what was in store. I woke to find Jurgen already abroad, stirring something grey and lumpy in a pan on the portable stove, which, despite its appearance, smelled surprisingly appetising. He glanced up as I stepped carefully over his bedroll, which he’d laid down just outside the bubble, and handed me a mug of recaff.
‘Almost ready, sir,’ he assured me, and went back to tending his porridge. Emperor alone knows what was in it, but it was packed with enough nutrients to leave me feeling ready for anything (which I suppose is ironic, considering how the day was to turn out). I began whistling cheerfully as I started the job of breaking camp. After I’d stowed some of the equipment and carried a couple of bundles back to the buggy, my aide’s silently reproachful look finally succeeded in reminding me that this was supposed to be his department, and I decided I’d better let him get on with it without any further interference. Jurgen was, if nothing else, a stickler for protocol, which normally made my life considerably easier than it otherwise might have been. In the years to come even generals were to find themselves politely but firmly fobbed off when I couldn’t be bothered to deal with them.
Knowing that to persist in what he undoubtedly regarded as a menial task far beneath my dignity as a commissar would leave him disgruntled for the rest of the day, I returned to the outcrop I’d climbed the evening before with an amplivisor, and scanned the horizon, hoping to gather some clue as to our whereabouts. From my elevated position, I found I could see a great deal further than I’d expected in the clear desert air, and my attention was drawn to a faint smudge on the horizon, roughly in our direction of travel, (which, naturally enough, had been the first way I’d looked). My curiosity piqued, I magnified the image as much as I could and tried to make out a few more details.
‘I think we’re approaching a town,’ I told Jurgen, the faint rattles and bangs being picked up by his commbead telling me he was stowing our equipment in the buggy with his usual efficiency. I tried to bring the image into clearer focus, but the heat haze was already beginning to shimmer over the sands, and it was hard to make anything out other than the vague outline of walls and buildings. Try as I might, I was unable to resolve any details of the inhabitants, if indeed there were any. ‘It could be the splodge on the map we’ve been heading for.’
‘That sounds likely,’ my aide agreed. ‘Orks would mark one of our towns down as lots of enemies all right.’ He hesitated, and then went on, a note of caution in his voice. ‘Mind you, sir, they’d think that even if it was only civilians there.’
‘I see.’ I lowered the vision enhancers thoughtfully. That hadn’t occurred to me before, and the idea of trotting blithely into an ork infested killing ground (which is what any urban area is to an infantry soldier, and don’t let anyone ever try to tell you otherwise), was far from appealing. Nevertheless, I couldn’t see any other alternative. We certainly couldn’t continue to drive aimlessly around the desert until our supplies ran out. ‘We’d best proceed with caution then.’
‘Very good, sir,’ my aide agreed, barely able to keep a note of relief from his voice. A moment later the roar of our badly tuned engine shattered the stillness of the desert. ‘Don’t want to attract too much attention, do we?’
With that in mind, we approached the town at little more than walking pace, having discovered that the engine was marginally quieter at lower speeds, keeping the ever-present dune fields between us and it for as long as possible to muffle the sound even further. Eventually, we crossed the line of a road, the smooth rockcrete arrowing away from the town towards Emperor knew where, and turned along it. From this point on stealth would be out of the question in any case, and our best bet was simply to make the best time we could into the relative shelter of the outskirts. Assuming no one was waiting in ambush for anyone foolish enough to use the highway, of course…
A quick glance was enough to reassure me that the possibility was remote. Judging by the thin film of wind drifted sand covering the smooth, grey surface nothing had moved along it in a long time, certainly not for several days, and that meant that any defenders would be unlikely to be directing their attention towards it. That didn’t mean the carriageway hadn’t been mined, of course, but I was pretty sure Jurgen would notice any telltale irregularities in the road surface and react accordingly, so I tried not to think about that.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ I told him, sweeping the amplivisor across the line of walls, which made up the boundary of the town. On the smooth surface of the highway the ride was much steadier, and I was able keep them trained on the vista ahead with no more effort than if we’d been scooting along in our faithful old Salamander. Signs of fighting were everywhere, none of the structures I could see having been left undamaged, and several had collapsed entirely. The streets ahead were choked with fallen debris, although to my relief none of it seemed to have been rearranged to form barricades or weapon emplacements.
‘Looks bad,’ Jurgen agreed, slowing to skirt a couple of burnt-out groundcars, which had evidently been hit by heavy weapons of some kind. They looked like civilian models, the thin sheet metal of their bodywork ripped open like ration packs, and I tried not to look too closely at their contents. Whoever the occupants had been they’d piled in regardless of the cars’ nominal carrying capacities, their charred bones tumbled together in death, so thoroughly entangled, it would take a genetor magos to tell which bodies they’d originally come from. And the chances of that were negligible; whoever these people were, only the Emperor knew, and probably only He cared. ‘Refugees, if you ask me.’
‘Seems likely,’ I agreed, dismissing the matter from my mind. Whether any of their fellows had made it to safety, shared their fate, or simply fled to perish in the desert, there was no way of telling. All I could infer with any certainty was that the orks had indeed been here, although whether they were still around or had moved on in search of more to defile and destroy I couldn’t be certain. The only prudent course of action was to assume that they were still infesting the area, and I instructed Jurgen to proceed with caution. ‘Find somewhere we can park this thing out of sight, and let’s move in on foot. I want to know what we’re getting into.’ The palms of my hands were tingling again, and I trusted my subconscious enough to take notice of the presentiment of danger.
‘Very good, commissar.’ My aide complied with his usual speed and efficiency, coasting us to a halt in the remains of a nearby fabricator unit. What had once been produced here I couldn’t tell, the crushed and mangled machinery all around us being half-buried by what remained of the roof, but I nodded approval of his choice. The thick slabs of metal surrounding us would provide excellent cover if we had to conduct a fighting retreat. It would disrupt the outline of our vehicle on any auspex screen (assuming the greenskins had the brains to use such a thing of course[44]), and provide enough concealment for us to make our way deeper into the derelict settlement without attracting any attention… I hoped. I strained my ringing ears as Jurgen killed the engine, but heard nothing beyond the thudding of my heart and the faint ticks of the cooling mechanism.
‘Better let me go first, sir.’ Jurgen unslung his lasgun and scurried to the nearest patch of daylight, squinting slightly as he crouched low and took aim at the street outside. After a moment, he raised a hand to indicate that the coast was clear. ‘No sign of life.’
‘Good,’ I said, with rather more emphasis than I’d intended, and scrambled down from my position at the heavy bolter. I felt a little unsteady on my feet for a moment or two, no doubt as a result of the sudden cessation of the lurching motion I’d grown used to, but by the time I’d crossed the floor to join him the momentary flash of vertigo had faded away as swiftly as it had come. I drew my laspistol and chainsword as I trotted forwards, feeling instantly calmer for having weapons in my hands again, and crouched down next to Jurgen, trying not to breathe too deeply through my nose.
Outside, the midmorning sun struck hard from the face of the building opposite, another industrial structure, which had once housed a power plant of some kind judging by the tendrils of piping emanating from it in all directions. Now, it was a roofless ruin, evidently the result of a massive explosion within; a contingency the architect had obviously allowed for if the metre-thick walls were anything to go by. Even so, the facade had cracked, slumping wearily in several places, and the doors and windows were shattered, lying in pieces across the boulevard, which separated the two structures. I assumed that the power plant itself had gone up, probably as a result of the attendant tech-priests being killed or forced to abandon their posts, as there was relatively little sign of combat damage to be seen.
