All the same, when the order to withdraw came, he railed inwardly against it. He had been so close. He even wondered, where had the Emperor been when He was needed, though he was immediately ashamed of that thought, and he asked himself: What if I just did it, blew the charges now? I might still damage the tomb, and more importantly I could kill the necron lord, and if I took the rest of my comrades with me, well, wouldn’t they understand? Wouldn’t they consider that a worthwhile sacrifice?
He almost did it. His hand was on the detonator. Then, he thought maybe he should vox the colonel first, request sanction for his plan, and then he knew what the colonel would say. He would point out that half the necrons, their leader most likely included, would take the atomic blast and stand up again, while the soldiers of the Death Korps would die and remain dead. It wasn’t worth the price.
There was nothing Gunthar could do.
The process of disengagement was as difficult and costly as might have been expected. The grenadiers exhausted their melta guns laying down covering fire for retreating Guardsmen. The necrons still pressed them hard, although Gunthar noticed that their parting shots were mostly aimed at ordnance and vehicles, reducing their enemies’ capacity to mount another attack like this one.
He slipped away when he judged it safest to do so, his remaining bodyguards falling into step behind him. Their mission might have been aborted, but the charges at Gunthar’s chest still had to be protected. Both troopers died providing that protection, shot in their backs, and it was a weary, desolate and solitary Gunthar who stumbled out of the range of the necron guns at last to join the departing column of soldiers.
In defeat, the Death Korps of Krieg were as disciplined, as regimented as ever, in contrast to the shuffling, dejected survivors of the PDF. They still numbered in their thousands, but those few thousand, Gunthar realised, were all that remained of three regiments now. A couple of Guardsmen in the 103rd confirmed that they had been ordered west to the space port rather than south back to their dugouts. The same was true of the 42nd regiment, and the 81st, who had also disengaged from their battle to the east, were planning to make a wide half-circuit of the city and follow them.
‘Then who’s left guarding the city walls?’ asked Gunthar, but he feared he already knew the answer to that question.
He found Colonel 186 marching with the lower ranks. He must have lost his transport – or, to judge by his drawn bolt pistol and the limp he sported, left it to take a more active role in the fighting. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Gunthar. ‘I tried. I just couldn’t see an opening, but next time… Give me another chance, and I’m sure I can…’
The colonel stared at him as if he didn’t have a clue who he was.
‘Sergeant 1419, sir. I was – I am – carrying the mining charges.’
The colonel shifted his gaze to Gunthar’s chest, and immediately summoned a quartermaster to his side. ‘Remove the explosive devices,’ he instructed, ‘and make sure they are stored safely.’ The quartermaster produced a knife and began to slice through thick straps and layers of tape. The colonel, in the meantime, strode on without another glance at Gunthar, leaving him feeling wretched and worthless.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he confessed as the quartermaster extricated the first of the batons from its wrappings and lowered it gingerly into a reinforced box.
‘Our orders were to withdraw,’ said the quartermaster.
‘I know. I know they were, but…’ Gunthar was tongue-tied again. He hadn’t been tongue-tied in so long. He didn’t feel like a soldier any more. ‘I just never imagined… I thought it would be over by now. I thought the Death Korps of Krieg always fought to the end. What do we do now? How do we fight the necrons now?’
‘We don’t.’ The quartermaster had detached the last of the atomic mining charges, and he knelt by the box now, secured its lid with a series of latches and handed it to a servitor to carry. ‘This war is over,’ he told Gunthar bluntly. ‘The necrons have won.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
The day had begun like any other day. Arex had been woken by a touch of sunlight through ill-fitting shutters. She had sat bolt upright, searching for the intruders she had sensed in her dreams. Skeletal hands, reaching for her as she slept… The hab, the latest in a long line of identikit rooms, had been empty, the rest of the nightmare all too real. Arex had almost been disappointed.
She knew the dream would come true one day, and this waiting was a form of slow torture for her. In the dream, she had welcomed the skeletal hands’ touch.
Something was different today: distant sounds from the outside, below. Arex strained to make out the tramping of boots, the roaring of engines. Too noisy for the invaders. She had slipped out of bed, crept up to the window, put her eye to the crack between shutters and frame, and she had seen the most wonderful sight of her life:
An army, unmistakably marching to war. The Imperial Guard, behind a banner depicting a white, eagle-winged skull against black. A convoy of siege engines crawling in its wake. She had shaken the sleeping Tylar, excitedly, told him the good news. The Emperor hadn’t abandoned them, after all.
Her Uncle Hanrik hadn’t failed her.
She was all for running right out there, but Tylar had counselled caution. The soldiers would be long gone before they could reach them. They took their time, got dressed, Arex’s hands shaking so much that Tylar had to fasten her scavenged top for her. They ate the last of the food paste. They had been trying to make it last, to delay the day when they would have to venture into the outside again. They hugged each other for courage, then they opened the door.
It had taken them days to climb as far as they had, minutes to descend to the ground level again. They had found the streets empty, as Tylar had predicted they would. From the east, however, they heard sounds of a pitched battle, which Arex had found reassuring. ‘What do we do?’ she asked. ‘Wait for them to come back?’
‘Maybe,’ said Tylar, ‘we don’t have to. If the soldiers came into the city this way…’
‘We can retrace their steps,’ Arex realised. ‘We can leave!’
Even as she had spoken the words, she had doubted them. It had seemed impossible, after all this time, everything she had been through, the hopes she had seen dashed, that it could be so easy. She kept waiting for something to go wrong, for the invaders to spring an ambush, or perhaps to wake and find herself back in that squalid little room on a day like all the other days.
What she had not expected was that, as she and Tylar neared the outermost surviving tower, as they climbed a heap of rubble in their path, just as she had begun to entertain the faintest hope again, to taste freedom, they would come under lasgun fire.
They ducked into a doorway. Arex could smell burnt hair, and was afraid it was probably hers. ‘Lasguns,’ she whispered to Tylar. ‘The invaders don’t use lasguns.’
‘Probably cultists,’ he growled. ‘A few of Amareth’s bunch survived the purges, or they might belong to one of the other churches.’
‘I think,’ said Arex, ‘I think I glimpsed a red and purple tunic. I think they’re PDF, Tylar. They must think… They must think we are the cultists.’
Tylar craned forward, tried to see, and another las-beam nearly sliced off his nose. ‘Don’t shoot,’ he yelled, ‘don’t shoot! We aren’t who you think we are. We’re on your side. Praise be to the Emperor!’
‘I can’t let you through,’ came a nervous voice in response. ‘Go back!’
‘You can’t!’ cried Arex. ‘You can’t make us… We’ve been kidnapped, shot at, almost sacrificed, and we just want to… Please, let us out of here!’
‘I have the governor’s niece with me,’ called Tylar.
There was silence for a moment, then the voice returned, uncertainly: ‘Lady Hanrik? Is that really you?’
Negotiations had proceeded swiftly after that. The owner of the voice, a Lieute
nant Smitt, claimed to have met Arex at several functions, so she had pretended to remember him and, fortunately, had recalled one of those functions in enough detail to convince him of her identity. She and Tylar had emerged cautiously from hiding, to find a single PDF squad waiting for them, the majority of them unarmed and teenaged. Smitt, in contrast, was grey-haired and wizened, and walked with the aid of a cane. He had been retired, he explained, but had returned to duty to help out as best he could in the current crisis.
He had directed them to the space port, apologetic that he had no vehicles to take them there. Tylar had said it was okay, they had become well used to walking. Smitt had kept looking at Arex with tears shining in his eyes, and repeating that this was a miracle, they had never expected to find her alive. It wasn’t until later that she had learned what those tears were for.
Tylar had taken her hand, then, and they had set off along the road together. They had walked out of the ruined city, at last, into a world they had almost forgotten. On a day that Arex would always remember as being like no other.
They sat in the warm mess hall at the space port, alone but for a wounded trooper slumped at a corner table. They nursed their first hot drinks in two months, but Arex had no appetite for hers.
‘This isn’t…’ she ventured haltingly. ‘I had a picture of this moment. Even when things were at their most hopeless and I thought I would never get here, I always…’
Tylar reached across the table, took her hands in his. ‘I did the same. I imagined that, outside, everything would be… normal, I suppose. As it was before.’
She had been recognised on the hillside. Refugees had flocked to her, wanting to lay their hands upon her. Most of them had probably never heard her name before, but now they were saying her return from certain death was a sign from the Emperor, a good augur for the outcome of the war. She had flinched from their touches. How could she be their saviour when she had come in such dire need of salvation herself?
There had been one name on all their lips, and from them Arex had heard what the aged Smitt had been too cowardly to tell her.
‘He should have left on a rescue ship,’ she said bitterly, ‘when he had the chance. He must have stayed for my sake, and I never even…’
‘You don’t think,’ said Tylar carefully, ‘he could really have done what they say?’
‘Uncle Hanrik was no traitor,’ she said fiercely. ‘He must have had some reason for sending that message, and we have only this Krieg colonel’s word for it anyway.’ Arex groaned, and ran her fingers through her tangled hair. ‘I just expected that, of all people, he would be… I’ve lost everything else, and Emperor knows I never thought I would see him again, but I always supposed… I thought he would be okay.’
‘We could ask around. We could find out about… Gunthar, was it?’
Arex shook her head. ‘If he was here, he’d have found me by now. You saw how word of our arrival spread. He’s gone, Tylar. Gunthar is gone.’
Tylar gave her hands a comforting squeeze. ‘The Iron Gods, the… the necrons, they have destroyed one city out of many, not a world.’
‘It’s only a matter of time,’ said Arex. ‘We thought… When I saw the soldiers this morning, I thought there was still hope. I was forgetting… What you saw, Tylar, inside the pyramid. The green portal. The necrons cannot be defeated.’
They could hear a stirring in the corridors, running footsteps and raised voices. A black-uniformed proctor skidded to a halt in the doorway and announced excitedly, ‘They’re coming back! The soldiers, they’re coming back!’
The wounded trooper leapt to his feet with surprising spryness, to follow the proctor out of there at an eager run. Tylar was standing too, but Arex remained where she was, in no hurry to hear the news. Everyone else was praying for a miracle – their second of the day – but they hadn’t seen what she had seen. Arex couldn’t bring herself to share their optimism, much as she would have liked to. Her stomach felt heavy with dread, and she had given up praying a long time ago.
Colonel 186’s office was a frenzy of activity. Krieg soldiers were disassembling a communications console, packing it away into crates. The colonel himself stood untouched in the eye of the maelstrom. It took Arex three attempts to find a way through to him. He turned to her, and she tried to meet and hold his gaze but found only her own eyes reflected in his facemask’s lenses. The image would have given her pause had she been less determined than she was.
‘My name is Arex Hanrik,’ she said, imitating the imperious tones her uncle had used when dealing with authority. It had worked twice so far, got her to this room. ‘I am the niece – the last surviving relative – of Governor Talmar Hanrik, and I–’
‘I explained to your uncle at the outset,’ said the colonel, turning away from her, moving to his desk, ‘that this world is under martial law. That means–’
‘I’m aware of what it means. I just want to know what’s… The people out there, they want to know what is happening. I think the least you can do, colonel, the very least you owe them, is an explanation.’
‘We are leaving Hieronymous Theta,’ said the colonel.
‘Then it’s true, what they say. You are pulling out. You’re… giving up.’
‘The first of the drop-ships will arrive in thirty minutes.’
‘But the Iron… I mean, the necrons!’
‘In the judgement of our generals, there is no more we can do here. There has been an ork uprising on a world called…’ The colonel pulled a data-slate across his desk, glanced at it. ‘Djangalla. We are scheduled to arrive there in eight days’ time.’
‘What about us? Aren’t they…? Are they sending someone else?’
‘We did all we could. We almost destroyed the necrons’ tomb, but we expended the majority of our resources in the attempt and we failed.’
‘Then acquire more resources. Get on to the Departmento Munitorum, demand they send more troops. I know how they work, I heard my uncle arguing with them often enough. You have to keep on at them.’
‘It appears,’ said the colonel, ‘that some assumptions we made about our enemies were mistaken. Our only certainty at this point is that further engagement with them would be a long and costly process, with little chance of a positive outcome.’
‘Then you’re just… You’re leaving us to their mercy? Colonel, there are – there were – nine billion people on this world.’
‘Even so, Lady Hanrik, the numbers just don’t add up.’
‘I won’t accept that. I can’t believe you could be so… myopic. What happens when the necrons are finished with us? When they set their sights on the next world, and the one after that? What happens when they spread to your world, colonel? Krieg is only a few systems away from here, as I recall. If these monsters aren’t stopped now…’ Arex’s voice trailed off. The colonel was just sitting, staring blankly at her, but although his mask expressed nothing as always, his silence spoke volumes.
She sank into a seat herself.
‘They won’t let that happen, will they?’ she said. ‘I should have seen it at once.’
‘The Imperial Navy has been contacted,’ said the colonel. ‘The necessary authorities have already been granted. An Exterminatus order is under preparation.’
‘How long…?’
‘These things take time, as I am sure you’re aware. Our commissars have asked for more rescue ships to be sent, and I believe that some of–’
‘I hear the last ship left over a month ago,’ said Arex. ‘Where has Naval Command been since then? No, let me guess. So long as they believed we had a chance, so long as they thought you might actually beat the necrons, we weren’t considered a high enough priority, and now… now, it’s too late.’
‘I believe,’ the colonel repeated, ‘that some of your city administrators have also made strong representations. Six ships have been despatched, with more–�
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‘That isn’t enough,’ protested Arex. ‘Six ships isn’t nearly enough and you know as well as I do, colonel, that some of them won’t even arrive in time to… to help us.’
‘That is not my concern,’ said the colonel. ‘I suggest you contact–’
Arex flared up at him. ‘It might not be your concern, but don’t you even care? Uncle Hanrik was right about you. I’ve been talking to the people, to the refugees, to the few remaining members of the Planetary Defence Force, and do you want to know what they’ve been saying about him? About what you did to him?’
‘Governor-General Hanrik,’ snapped the colonel, ‘made contact with a necron cult. He intimated that he was prepared to negotiate with them.’
‘For my sake!’ cried Arex. ‘He was trying to help me! He wouldn’t really have… and you… you killed him and for what? You said it yourself, colonel. You tried to deal with the necrons your way, and you failed. You lost our world to them anyway.’ She was filling up with tears. She turned away from the colonel, tried to hide it. She had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t cry in front of him.
‘The troop ship Memento Mori,’ he said quietly, ‘has quarters and provisions for some thirty thousand men. Our numbers, those of our four regiments combined, have been reduced to somewhere in the region of five thousand.’
‘You’re saying you might…?’ Arex sniffed.
‘We have been asked,’ said the colonel, ‘to take some refugees. You will have to journey to Djangalla with us. However, once there, you should be able to arrange for shuttles to convey you to the nearest appropriate colonised world.’
‘That… that’s very generous of you. Thank you.’
‘If it were up to me,’ said the colonel, ‘we would fill the space we have with all the vehicles and the useful machinery we can salvage from this world. As I mentioned, however, your city administrators have been making strong representations.’
‘I… see,’ said Arex.
‘The quartermasters will liaise with you, to produce a list of those to be–’
Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 86
