by Dan Abnett
He turned his head slowly and dared to take a look. Circumspect, sidelong, as one might do into a mirror whilst shaving.
The ork was nearly three metres tall and almost as wide. Impossibly large muscles corded its shoulders and arms and stinking furs swaddled its bulk. Its head was huge, twice the size of a human’s, thrust forward and seated on the vast lower jaw. Blackened teeth stuck like chisel blades out of the rotten gums. He couldn’t see the eyes. He could smell the reeking breath, the corrosive saliva that spattered and dripped from the half-open mouth.
Playing dead, he watched as it toyed with his medi-pouch, rooting through the contents with hands big enough to break a human throat like a twig. It took out a roll of gauze and bit it munching and then spitting out.
It’s hungry, thought Rawne, and his guts iced and tightened at the idea.
Suddenly, it moved to him, pulling him up by the hair and jerking him back like a puppet, rummaging in his clothing with the other hand for food pouches, rations, munitions.
Blood spilled out of Rawne’s jerked-open mouth, spattering down his chest. He tried to remain limp, but his left hand crept down towards the knife sheathed at his waist. The huge ork jerked and twisted him like a sack of bones, sniffing and gurgling behind his ear, hot breath on Rawne’s neck, rancid smell in his nose.
Rawne found his knife and slid it out. He must have tensed doing so because the ork froze and then muttered something in its arcane tongue. Rawne moved to swing his knife, but the ork’s huge paw was suddenly around his blade-hand, crushing it and slamming it into the icy wall beside them. Two slams and Rawne’s hand gave up. The Tanith dagger whipped away.
The ork roared, a guttural bellow that deafened Rawne and shook his diaphragm. Holding him from behind, it bear-hugged, pulling its arms apart, determined to rip his torso in two. Rawne screamed, fighting futilely at the greater strength, tearing his arms free. He was dead, he knew that. Death was a moment away.
Pain made him reach into his mouth, to pull at whatever throbbed in his tongue. He found the end of the surgical needle, protruding from the flesh of his tongue. He yanked it out. A shockingly long spurt of blood followed it. Then he stabbed back behind his head with the little sliver of metal.
The ork screamed and dropped him. Rawne landed, spitting and coughing blood from his pulsing tongue. The ork was flailing around the cave wildly, holding one eye that dribbled with clear fluid and stained ichor. The noise of its rage was deafening in the ice-hole.
Rawne scrambled for a weapon, but the ork turned and sent him flying across the cave with a flat backhand. Rawne hit the ice wall hard with his shoulders, upside down and horizontal. His shoulder blade cracked and he dropped to the floor.
The ork charged him, one eye half-closed and oozing around the stub-eye of the surgical needle impaling it. Rawne rolled.
His lasgun was on the far side of the cave, but his knife was in reach.
His knife. How many fights had he won with that? How many throats had he cut, how many hearts had he burst, how many stomachs had he opened?
He reached it, grasped it, turned in a low crouch to meet the attacker, a gleeful look on his face.
The ork faced him, its back to the cave mouth, a huge, crude bolt-pistol in its ichor-spattered fist.
The ork spoke, slow, rumbling, alien. Rawne didn’t know what it said, but he knew what it meant.
There was a blinding flash and the roar of a weapon loosed in the confines of the cave.
Rawne had always wondered what it would feel like to take the killing hit. To be shot mortally. To die. But there was no feeling. No sense.
In the blink of an eye, he saw the ork explode, its mid-section disintegrating in a burst of light.
It fell, almost in two parts. Its body fluids froze as it flopped to the ground.
There was a tall figure in the care entrance, blocking the light. “Major Rawne?”
Ibram Gaunt entered the cave and holstered his bolt-pistol.
It seemed that the commissar had fared no better than him. The ork warband had decided to take advantage of the chaos of the crusade’s push to seize Typhon as part of its attempt to build a raiding foothold into the Sabbat Worlds. Charged with destroying the menace, the Ghosts had deployed into the long gorges and ice-floes of the moon and come undone. As Rawne’s platoon had been cut down along the eastern edge of the screaming valley, so Gaunt’s had to the west. In retreat, the greenskins had proved the more determined adversaries.
The commissar and the major crouched down in the ice cave together. Rawne had made no sign of gratitude. In many ways he knew he would rather be dead than remain beholden to the off-worlder.
“How’s your tongue?” Gaunt asked, getting a fire lit with chemical blocks. “Why?”
“You’re not saying much.”
Rawne spat. “It’s fine. A clean wound with a sharp instrument.” Truth was, his swollen tongue felt like a bedroll in his mouth, but he would not let the commissar have the satisfaction of knowing his discomfort. But he could not disguise the pain his leg gave him.
“Let me see to that,” Gaunt said.
Rawne shook his head.
“That was an order,” Gaunt sighed.
He moved over, pulling his own medi-pouch open. His clips were frozen too, but he warmed them over the chemical flame and then pinched the lips of Rawne’s thigh wound shut. He sprayed the area with antiseptic from the one-use flask. Rawne felt his limb go dead.
Then Gaunt warmed his numb fingers and threaded surgical cord into a fresh needle. He handed Rawne his dagger. “Bite the hilt.”
Rawne did so and stayed silent as Gaunt sewed the torn flesh together.
Gaunt bit off the cord and tied it, wrapping a dressing over the wound. Rawne spat the dagger out.
Gaunt packed the kit away and then settled a kettle pan over the flames, dropping a scoop of ice into it.
“Seems to me Typhon has levelled us, major,” he said after a while.
“How so?”
“The high-born commissar, with all his airs and graces and rank, his schola training and his expertise; the low-life Tanith gangster with his wiles and tricks and diversions — it’s put us on a level. Equals. Both fighting the same hostility with the same chances.”
Rawne didn’t manage his retort. His tongue was too swollen and sore. He managed to spit again.
Gaunt smiled and watched the ice-water boil in the pan.
“Good. Maybe not. If you can still spit at me and hold me in contempt, we’re not equal. I can lower myself down towards your level to help you… Feth, save you. But the day we’re both on a level, your level, I’ll kill myself.”
“Is that a promise?” Rawne asked.
Gaunt laughed. He dropped some dehydrated food cubes into the bubbling pan and stirred them. Dry-powdered bean soup puffed and formed. He was still laughing as he poured the soup into two tin cups.
The wind rose as night fell. It howled outside the mouth of the cave, raising the volume and intensity of the screaming They sat together in the dark, watching the fire. There were only four fuel-blocks left to feed the blaze and Gaunt was being careful.
“You want to know some other differences between us, Rawne?”
Rawne wanted to say “No”, but his tongue was now too swollen and useless. He spat at Gaunt again instead.
Gaunt smiled and nodded down at the spittle freezing on the ice.
“There’s one: this place might be a ball of frozen moisture, but you won’t see me going around losing body moisture like that. The wind will freeze you dry in a few hours. Conserve your body water. Stop spitting at me and you might live.”
He held out a bowl of tepid water to Rawne and after a moment, the major took it and drank.
“Here’s another. It’s warm in here. Warmer than outside. But it’s still close to zero. You’re half-stripped and you’re shivering.”
Gaunt was still dressed in his full uniform and his cloak was pulled around him. Rawne realised how numb he had becom
e and began to pull his vest and cloak around him again.
“Why?” the major asked thickly.
“Why? Because I know… I’ve fought through cold zones before.”
“Not that… why? Why would you want to keep me alive?” Gaunt was silent for a while.
“Good question…” he said at last. “Given that you’d like nothing better than to see me dead. But I’m a commissar of the Imperial Guard, charged by the Emperor to keep his fighting legions able and intact in the face of battle. I won’t let you die. That’s my job. That’s why I saved you here, that’s why I saved the Tanith from the destruction of their world.”
There was a long silence, broken only by the crackling chemical bricks of the fire.
“You know I’ll never see it that way,” Rawne said, his voice cold and small. “You left Tanith to die. You didn’t let us stand and fight. I will never forgive you that.”
Gaunt nodded. “I know.” Then, after a moment, “I wish it wasn’t so.”
Rawne rolled himself up into a cleft of the ice cave and pulled the cloak around him. He felt only one thing. Hate.
Somehow, somewhen, dawn had come up. Thin, frail light poked into the cave.
Gaunt was asleep, huddled down under his cloak, covered in frost. Rawne slowly got to his feet, fighting the ache in his bones and the almighty cold. The fire had long since gone out.
He edged around the cave, staring down at Gaunt. Pain ebbed through his sewn leg, his shoulders, his mouth. The pain cleared the fuzziness of his head and made him sharp. He picked up his Tanith knife, wiped the frost from it, and knelt to place its blade against Gaunt’s throat.
No one would know. No one would ever find the body. And even if they did…
Gaunt shuddered in his sleep. He spoke the name of Tanith twice as his eyelids rolled and flicked. Then he spoke, curling up on himself: “Won’t let them die! No, not all of them! In the name of the Emperor, Sym!”
Then his voice died away into mumbling. Rawne’s hand tensed on the knife. He hesitated.
Gaunt spoke again, his dreaming voice a low monotone. “No, no, no, no… it’s burning… burning… I would never… I would never….”
“Never what?” Rawne hissed, about to pull the dagger up in a quick killing slice.
“Tanith… In the name of the Emperor…”
Rawne twisted where he crouched. He pulled the dagger up, not in a killing slice but in an arc that threw it across at the mouth of the cave and impaled the throat of the ork creeping inside towards them.
As it fell back, gurgling, Rawne heard raucous baying from outside. He kicked Gaunt in the ribs to rouse him and swung up his lasgun, firing wildly at the cave mouth.
“They’re on us, Gaunt, you bastard!” he screamed. “They’re on us!”
Eight fierce, wordless minutes, weapons spitting and cracking in their hands. Gaunt roused from deep, troubled sleep to combat readiness with the speed of long experience. Six orks had come right up to the mouth of the cave, and without cover could do little but shoot and die. Caught in the mouth of the cave, the two Imperial soldiers had better cover and the advantage of the slope. Huge carcasses fell and slid, smoking down the crimson ice.
Rawne dropped the last of them and turned to find Gaunt scanning the valley floor with his scope.
“We can’t stay here,” the commissar said. That exchange will bring them from all around.
“We have cover here,” Rawne argued.
Gaunt kicked the ice at the cave mouth. “All we have is a tomb. Get enough of them around to pen us in and they’ll bring the ice-cliff down and bury us. We have to move. And fast.”
They ditched bed rolls and anything else it would take too long to repack. Gaunt prioritised ammo, food, Rawne’s small satchel of tube-charges, their cold weather gear. In less than a minute they were fleeing down the slope outside, cloaks flying, into the dawn chill.
Twelve kilometres away, the steep angles of the rising sun lit the far wall of the valley, but they were in twilight here, a frosty darkness in which the scarlet ice around them glowed and shone like marble. Or meat in a butcher’s shop. Distantly, the crump of weapons fire. They hugged the valley wall, using ice rocks as cover as the wind wailed and agonised around them.
A kilometre or so from the cave, they rested, sweating in their insulated fabrics, crouched down in the cover of a block splinter fallen from high above.
Rawne wiped the ork blood off his knife and cut a hank of cloth from the edge of his stealth cape. He’d lost a glove somewhere, and his hand was aching and raw with the cold. He bound the cloth around his hand, tying it tight like a mitten.
Gaunt touched his shoulder and pointed back the way they had come. Lights, big gleaming lamps, bobbed and bounced along the valley floor: vehicles. The wind was too loud to make out engine notes.
“Come on,” said Gaunt.
From shelter, a scoop cut in the ice floor, they watched the vehicles pass five hundred metres away. Lour big ork machines, black and pumping blacker smoke from crude combustion engines. Thick-treaded tyres with chains gave the front end of the machines traction, and the rear sections were carried on sled runners or tracks. Each vehicle carried at least two other warriors beside the driver, and hefty weapons on pintle or turret mounts. They howled past, spraying up sheets of ice particles, close enough for the men to see the tribal markings on the battered flanks of the machines and smell the stink of their burning oil.
Once they had passed, Gaunt made to continue, but Rawne pulled him back.
“They know how fast we can run,” he said. Sure enough, a roar reached them over the howling wind a minute or so later and the vehicles sped back past they way they had come, searching back over the ground to see what they had missed. One pulled away west and two more raced onwards. The fourth curved around in a spray of ice and moved towards them to search along the wall of the valley.
They were trapped. They could not run because there was nowhere to run to without exposing themselves to the orks if they rose from the scoop. Huddled low, they watched.
The ork half-sled slowed and one of the burly warriors jumped down, running alongside the vehicle, firing into caves along the valley wall. The other warrior traversed the heavy weapon of the trundling vehicle from side to side. Closer…
Gaunt turned to Rawne and nodded to his lasgun. “More range, better sight. Take the weapon’s operator.”
“Not the driver?”
“If his gunner’s dead, all he can do is drive. If he dies, the gunner can still fire. Target the gunner… and when you’ve got him, re-aim on the foot soldier.”
Rawne nodded and breathed hard on his sight to warm the lens. He clicked in a fresh energy clip as quietly as he could. Though the wind was screaming, the hard metal clack would carry like a shot.
He saw Gaunt carefully doing the same with the sickle-pattern magazine of his bolt-pistol.
The motor sled turned their way, its harsh lights catching the lip of their ice scoop, making the scarlet ice translucent and all the more like fresh meat. Rawne took his aim. He knew he was no marksman like Larkin or Elgith, but he was passable. Even so, he let the sled slip closer in before he felt confident of a shot. His only target, the silhouette of the vehicle behind the lights. Closer… almost on them. Rawne fired.
His blazing shot hit the black shape behind the lights. There was a double flash and then a series of loud, fierce explosions, like gunshots. The sled veered sideways, bumping to a halt. Rawne realised they had been gun shots. He had hit the gunner squarely, but his shot had passed through the weapon mount on the way, exploding the heavy bolter and igniting the ammo drum. The gunner’s smoking corpse hung from the burning weapon and, even as they watched, stray rounds super-heated and went off like fireworks. The driver was also dead, the back of his skull and neck riddled with shrapnel from the exploding ammo.
Gaunt and Rawne leaped up out of the scoop and ran towards the motorised sled. The ork left on foot was running their way, firing from the hip.
Bolt rounds whizzed and sang around them, fizzling into the ice. Yelling as he charged the advancing ork, Rawne fired on full auto, his lasgun bucking as he carried it low against his side. Two laser shots spun the monstrous ork off his feet and dropped him on the ice, where he lay twitching.
Gaunt reached the sled, screwing up his nose at the smell of burning flesh. The gun and the gunner were still burning, but fire had not spread to the rest of the machine. He stepped forward, but darted back as another round went up. Then it was quiet.
He leaped up onto the tail-boards and put a point-blank round through the gunner’s back, though he was sure the ork was dead. He had heard too many tales of the greenskin resilience to injury. Gaunt pitched the cadaver off the platform onto the ice, then grabbed hold of the smouldering, ruined weapon. There was a handle release to free the gun and its drums from the mount. He heaved on it, his hands slipping in thick grease. No human strength had tightened this latch. He put his weight behind it, cursing and grunting, expecting another round to explode in his face at any moment.
The latch gave. With a gasp, and an effort that tore ligaments in his back and arms, he hefted the entire gun and ammo carriage off the metal bars of the mount frame and tipped it over off the vehicle. As it landed, three more rounds went off, one scudding across the surface of the ice in slithering jags like a phosphorescent sprite.
Gaunt’s gloves had caught fire from the red-hot metal and he jerked them off, throwing them aside. He clambered forward onto the driver’s position and tried to pull the driver’s body out of the cockpit. Nearly four hundred kilos of dead weight refused to budge.
He looked back at Rawne, in time to see him finishing the fallen footsoldier with his blade. Gaunt yelled him over, his voice lost in the keening wind.
Together they pried the driver’s corpse free and flopped it into the ice. It had already begun to freeze and fell like a sack of rocks. Gaunt got into the cockpit, felt the space roomy and too big for a human operator. It stank of sweat and blood in the enclosed cabin. He tested the handlebar grips and found the foot pedals. His first tries at control revved the engine to a scream and then braked the sled in a jolt that threw the cursing Rawne onto his back in the troop bay behind him. Then he had the measure of it. It was a crude version of the landcars he had driven with his father back home, years ago. There was a foot throttle and also a foot brake, though that did little but dig a massive spike down from the underside into the ice to retard motion. The anchor would only work in conjunction with de-throttling. With the engine racing, the spike would shatter and pull the guts out from under the motor sled. The gears, three of them, were set by a twist on the left handlebar grip. There were gauges on the crude dash calibrated in greenskin script which he couldn’t read or understand, but he began to measure the way the juddering needles spiked and dipped.
