Then the first of those necron tanks entered the fray, the lightning from its turret lashing out in focused beams that blew great, gaping holes in the Imperial defences. The Medusas rounded on it, and a fortuitous series of direct hits blasted the floating dreadnought apart. It dropped to the ground, smoke curling from beneath its dark green plating, but more vehicles like it were already edging forwards.
Gunthar kept firing, targeting the foot soldiers because he knew his lasgun could be effective against them, counting his shots until he reached twenty-five then replacing his power pack and firing again. He scored several glancing hits, but only one target fell, and this rose again within seconds. Suddenly, the cluster of necrons into which he had been shooting was wiped out by a Medusa shell, and he wondered what the use of his being here was, what difference he was making. He knew how the Death Korps soldiers, any of them, would have answered that question.
They were like a force of nature, wave after wave of them surging towards their enemies, to be dashed against them like the tide against a cliff face. Each of their lives bought no more than a few seconds for the Medusas to reload, and yet still the skull-masked soldiers kept on coming, eroding away at that cliff.
The necrons were not without tactics of their own. Gunthar realised that they had focused their efforts upon one point in the Krieg line, and now, suddenly, they broke through there. A score of gauss guns flared in unison, and green energy coruscated around a Medusa and, incredibly, stripped the armour from its frame as if it had been mere flesh on bone. In the meantime, a pair of necron tanks nudged into the Death Korps ranks, and their manifold guns discharged great lightning arcs that could fell five men at once. While the Imperial forces were in disarray, looking to regroup before this latest threat, a flank of skimmer-mounted necrons dived over their heads to make short work of a second Medusa.
Then Gunthar heard a new sound behind him, a thundering of hoof beats, and in an instant the tide was turned once more.
Krieg death riders came sweeping in from two directions and set about the outflanked necrons, surprising them with the speed of their arrival. Their hunting lances were tipped with explosives, powerful enough to blow a necron foot soldier apart. The necrons responded by targeting the riders’ mounts, unaware that these were no commonplace horses. They were bred, like the Death Korps themselves, in the underground hives of Krieg, bio-sculpted to cope with its surface conditions. They had been gifted with sub-dermal armour and a drug injection system that kept them stimulated, aggressive and immune to all but the most crippling pain.
Of course, they were still no match for the green lightning, but they attacked with such violence, such frenzy, that few necrons had the chance to bring their guns to bear before they were knocked off their feet and trampled by uncaring hooves. In contrast, the skilled riders aimed their lances, and fired laspistols, with uncanny precision despite their mounts’ bucking and rearing. Their gas-masked faces, peering out from beneath their helmets, gave the impression that this horsemanship came effortlessly to them, and they flew their skull-emblazoned pendants proudly.
Given some respite, the Medusas barked again and two more necron tanks went up in flames. The melta gun snipers had picked off most of the remaining ghosts and some skimmers, and even Gunthar despatched another foot soldier as it brought its gun to bear upon a mounted ridemaster. The quartermasters moved in to patch up the fallen and even some Guardsmen with the most horrific injuries were rising, necron-like, to fight again.
A Krieg platoon had pinned down a smaller group of foot soldiers but, as Gunthar looked for a shot, the beleaguered necrons vanished en masse. Was that it, he wondered? Was it over at last? His other senses told him that it wasn’t. Seeking a new target, his eyes alighted upon a hovering tank even as it began to belch out a stream of gleaming reinforcements. New necrons, he wondered, or the old ones restored? Either way, this battle was far from done yet.
Gunthar’s third power pack had dried. His orders, in this situation, were to find a quartermaster and request more ammunition, but the corpse of a PDF comrade—his former sergeant, he realised—lay closer, lying where the quartermasters couldn’t get to it. It was scarred by claw marks but intact and still gripping its lasgun. He would have to break cover to reach it, but what choice did he have?
He was expected to die today, anyway.
He had been told this more times than he could count these past weeks. He thought he had accepted it, but he realised now, assailed by the clamour and the stink of the battlefield, a pawn at the mercy of the destructive forces about him, that he hadn’t accepted it at all. A part of him had clung to the image of war presented by the newsreels, had expected to buck the odds against him and return to the space port steeped in glory. He had been one of the more promising trainees, after all.
He saw now that, on the front lines of a war such as this one, no amount of training could guarantee survival, nor hardly improve those odds. Survival wasn’t a matter of seeing the gauss beams coming, or of dodging the explosions, because neither of these things were humanly possible. Survival was a matter of standing in the right place, not a fraction forwards or to the left, of not being the person beside you. It was a matter of chance, blind chance, and of the Emperor’s whim, and by coming to understand this Gunthar felt he had finally rid himself of his last vestiges of fear, of dread.
He was going to die, if not today then tomorrow, or the week after. It would happen, most likely, in the blink of an eye without his knowing his killer. So, all that could possibly matter to him now was how much he could accomplish in the meantime.
He couldn’t picture Arex’s face anymore. He had been doing this for her, only for her, but at some point, without any awareness of it on his part, he had given up the hope of their ever being together again. It was better that way, Gunthar thought. The man she had known—the man she had loved and who had loved her in return—that man was gone. Perhaps, one day, she would hear his name again, even visit his grave if he had one, and remember the short time they had had together with fondness.
Perhaps she would be told how Gunthar had fought for her, died for her.
If so, then he intended to make her proud of him. Judging, as best he could, that all eyes were elsewhere, he ran for the sergeant’s body, dropped beside it, swapped its lasgun for his own. Then, in emulation of the Death Korps Guardsmen, with whom he now felt a greater kinship than he had ever dreamed possible, he ran at the enemy.
Yes, Gunthar Soreson was expected to die today.
But he wasn’t dead yet.
Chapter Nineteen
By the time Hanrik found Colonel 186, he had worked himself into a sweat. He had taken the stairs three at a time, fast-walked through the space port terminal until his chest ached. He pushed his way through the refugees on the hillside. They stood in the freezing rain, facing eastward, and Hanrik followed their silent stares.
He hadn’t been out here, hadn’t looked, in over a week. In that time, his city had shrunk further than he could have imagined, become a skeleton of its former self. Its depleted skyline was alternately lit by flashes of fire and obscured by plumes of smoke, and Hanrik knew he was already too late.
The colonel stood in the back of a half-track, surveying the scene through a pair of magnoculars. He failed to react to the Governor-General’s insistence that they needed to talk, so Hanrik talked anyway. Flustered as he was, he didn’t make a great deal of sense, but he did get the colonel’s attention.
“You agreed,” said the colonel without lowering the magnoculars, “insisted, in fact, that the Planetary Defence Force play a full part in this conflict.”
“A part, yes,” said Hanrik, “but not like this. Not—”
“You left the details of their deployment to my company commanders.”
“Cannon fodder!” Hanrik burst out. “You used my men as cannon fodder, put them on the front lines to be slaughtered. I’ve been listening to the reports, and they… It’s a massacre out there!”
�
�They are soldiers, General Hanrik. They knew what to expect.”
“But they’re… So many of them, the majority of them, they only just… They only had three weeks to train. Even the experienced ones among them, they haven’t faced anything like this before, and they’re under-equipped…”
The colonel turned then, to regard Hanrik blankly through the eyepieces of his gasmask. “That,” he said, “is precisely why their value is limited.”
“They’re expendable, you mean,” said Hanrik bitterly.
“If you prefer. You should be proud of your men, General Hanrik. My officers on the ground report that they did their duty. They impeded the necron advance for almost a minute longer than we expected. A credit to your training.”
“You talk about them as if they were just… They were people, damn it, with lives and jobs and families. Look around you, colonel. Look at the faces around you, every one of them praying for someone they know, someone they love. Just one of your… your numbers means everything to them, and I… How do I explain to them that most of their brothers, their sons aren’t coming back?”
He remembered being told that his own sons weren’t coming back. Three separate messages, eighteen months apart, but Hanrik hadn’t forgotten a single word of them.
The colonel said dismissively, “The citizens of your world have grown soft. They have forgotten their debt to the Emperor.”
That was like a blow to Hanrik’s face, and he lashed out verbally, “I should have known you wouldn’t understand. You’re incapable of human feeling, afraid to even show your face. Who do you care about, colonel? Who is there to miss you?”
The Krieg man turned his back and raised his magnoculars, further incensing Hanrik. “I’m talking to you, colonel,” he snapped, “and for once you are going to listen to me. We may serve in different forces, but technically I still outrank you. I’ve asked around, I know you’ve only commanded your regiment for five minutes, whereas I—”
“Would you rather it had been my Guardsmen who had died?”
The sudden question took Hanrik aback.
“Would you rather we had sacrificed them, left the defence of this world to your under-equipped trainees? Because that, General Hanrik, is bordering on treason.”
“Of course I don’t… Of course I wouldn’t… I value their lives as much as I do any life. I just think your men were perhaps better able than mine to—”
“If you have a wish to see Krieg blood, Hanrik, you only have to wait a few more hours. We are dying as you speak.”
“I know that, colonel, and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply…”
Hanrik was still stumbling through an apology when the colonel wrenched his magnoculars around to overlook the north end of the city. He wasn’t listening anymore. He had a comm-bead in his ear, and evidently it had just relayed bad news. “What’s happening?” asked Hanrik. “What’s wrong?”
“Spiders,” said the colonel grimly. “Mechanical spiders, flying out of the necron tanks. They’re tearing our Guardsmen apart.”
“Then that confirms what we feared,” said Hanrik. “The necron army is still growing. It seems that, every time we face them, they are sending new, more powerful creatures onto the battlefield. Colonel, we thought we outnumbered them, but what if…?”
“We’re fighting back,” said the colonel. He paused and listened to his comm-bead again. “The Medusas are targeting the spiders, trying to find their weak spots. One of them just… I’m hearing that it crawled away from a mortar strike. They’re tough! But… but, wait, it is wounded. I’m hearing that the spider is wounded.”
The colonel hopped abruptly out of the half-track and marched towards the space port, two aides trailing along behind him. Hanrik hastened to keep step with them. “I’m returning to my office,” said the colonel, when pressed, “to vox requests to the 42nd and the 103rd regiments for further reinforcements.”
“You think we need them? Are… are we losing?”
“The necrons’ resources must be finite. I think the spiders are their last line of defence, else why were they not employed in earlier battles? We are close to winning the war, Hanrik, but first we have to win this battle, and right now it’s poised on a knife edge. I suggest you think about that instead of indulging your hurt feelings.”
Hanrik opened his mouth to protest, but didn’t know what to say so he let the colonel outpace him. He looked back at the city, thought of all the people who had died there, were dying there still, and he wondered if he could have saved them.
The truth was that, after he had lost Arex, he had given up trying. He ought to have done what he had intended from the start: contact the Departmento Munitorum and complain in the strongest possible terms about the Death Korps’ conduct on his world.
To have taken such an extreme step, however, he would have had to have been very certain of his ground—and the colonel had a way of shaking his certainties.
He returned to his office, deflated, and reached for the vox-caster to hear the latest reports but hesitated, decided to sit in silence for a while and think.
Inevitably, he found his hand straying to his tunic pocket, his fingers closing around the cold, hard shape of the data-slate he had been keeping in there, the one on which he had transcribed the message.
It had come in this morning on the PDF command channel, encrypted with a key that had been cycled out of use eight years ago. Only a handful of officers knew about the message at all, and only Hanrik knew what it said. It had taken him two hours, searching his memory, scratching away with his stencil, before he had been able to decode the sequence of electrical pulses. Just thirteen words, but he had read them a hundred times: Hanrik. We have your family. Call off your attack. You have one day.
He sat back in his seat and rubbed his weary eyes. He wished Costellin were here, but there had still been no word from him. He had come to trust the commissar’s wise advice, and his discretion. The last thing he wanted to do was take the message to the colonel, because he knew what the colonel would say.
The colonel was here. He was standing in the doorway, and Hanrik started and bundled the slate away guiltily. How long had he been there, watching?
“How… how did you get on?” he stammered. “With the reinforcements, I mean.”
“We have ten more platoons—fewer than I had hoped, but it may suffice. The 103rd is also sending six Medusas. If you have any more men to spare, however—”
“I don’t,” said Hanrik, a little more forcefully than he had intended. “That is to say, if I had them, you could… The only recruits still here in port, the only males of fighting age at all, are the sick and those who were injured during training.”
“There are other cities on this world.”
“They have sent the best they have. Even if it weren’t for the unrest… Even if we could raise a new force in time, we have nothing to arm them with. We had to beg, borrow and steal the lasguns we have. I couldn’t swear we didn’t send a handful of troopers out there with nothing but knives.”
The colonel nodded and seemed to accept this. He tapped the butt of his bolt pistol in its holster. “There is nothing more I can do here,” he said, “so I am going to the front. You will join me?”
“No,” said Hanrik hastily. “I… You’re right, maybe there is more I could do. I thought I might vox around the city administrators again, put some pressure on them. There might be old storehouses they have forgotten about, or—”
“The equipment,” said the colonel, “is less important than the men to carry it. Once this battle is over, we will have equipment to spare.”
“I will do what I can,” said Hanrik. After the colonel had left, however, he buried his face in his hands, thought about the whole new mass of as yet faceless citizens he had just agreed to condemn to death, and he asked himself how it was that yet again he had been manoeuvred into doing exactly what the Krieg man had wanted.
It was dark in Hanrik’s office, but he didn’t have the energy to
stir himself, to switch on the light. The space port was eerily quiet but for the buzz of voices from his vox-caster unit. Hanrik was alone, and lonely. His officers were meant to be keeping him updated but, although they were stationed well back from the action, they were still too close for their own comfort. Hanrik was lucky if, between the curses and the screamed orders, they found a moment to feed him any information at all.
The news, however, what news there was, was promising. A concerted push by the death riders had forced the necrons back a good fifty metres. The majority of their foot soldiers were down, their corpses—those that had not been melted dissipated to the winds. The new Medusas arriving from the south had made a difference, bombarding the pyramid-shaped tanks and the mechanical spiders for long, precious minutes before the skimmer-mounted necrons had reached them.
“They can’t take the meltas out of play,” Colonel Braun reported, sounding almost optimistic for the first time. “Even when the necrons can target a grenadier, he is usually able to throw his weapon to a comrade before he is obliterated.”
Hanrik read the transcript on his slate again. One day… It was almost dawn.
He didn’t think the message had come from the necrons, although he had flirted with that dreadful thought at first. From someone in the city, then, although that was almost worse. To think that his own people could have betrayed the Emperor, collaborated…
A return call came in from a grouchy city administrator, woken from his bed and nursing a grudge that a seat on a rescue ship hadn’t yet been found for him. Hanrik conveyed the colonel’s request for more resources and, for the fifth time that night, was subjected to a tirade of protestations including a list of incidents with which the overstretched authorities were already dealing. He waited for this to subside before adding that medical supplies were also urgently required.
Finally, it was all over. The confirmation came from a breathless PDF major, astonished that the remaining necrons had vanished before his eyes. Switching to the open channel, Hanrik heard the colonel ordering a grenadier squad forward to the generatorum with demolition charges. There were many requests for medical assistance, but he switched off the vox-caster before the bodies could be counted. He would have to face that final tally soon enough, he reasoned.
09 - Dead Men Walking Page 21
