The first direction I looked in was the crash site, of course, but if there were any ’nid survivors there, they were remaining under the cover of the debris cloud raised by the impact of their arrival. After a few minutes of intense scrutiny, I’d still seen nothing moving but dust eddies. I was almost beginning to breathe easier, despite the bitter experience of decades, and the almost literal unbreathability of the air, when I decided to sweep the horizon just to make sure.
‘Frak,’ I said, feelingly. Something was definitely moving, between us and the looming ramparts of the hive – not close enough to make out yet, but definitely in large enough numbers to raise a visible plume of dust in their wake, whatever they were. Heading in our direction, too. I swept the lenses to left and right, and this time, far closer, was able to make out the unmistakable six-armed silhouettes of a small brood of genestealers, then, about a kilometre beyond them, the larger profile of a lictor, flickering like a badly-tuned pict-caster as its chameleonic skin attempted to mimic the constantly-changing clouds of dust blowing about it. ‘We need to move.’
‘Right you are, sir,’ Jurgen acknowledged, as matter-of-fact as if I’d just asked for a fresh bowl of tanna. Slinging the bulky melta behind him, and holding his lasgun ready for use, he slithered down the tilting hull of the crippled Aquila, taking the bulk of our supplies with him. A moment later I followed, after a last, apprehensive look at the moving dots in the distance.
SEVENTEEN
My boots landed in deep sand, which almost immediately began to work its way inside my socks, the sharp-edged granules making my feet itch abominably. Within a few hours they’d be rubbed raw, and I’d be slogging through the dunes on a mass of blisters. No point worrying about that now though, and the way things were going, sore feet would probably turn out to be the least of my worries. So I put the matter out of my mind as best I could, and slithered through the drift towards the downward-tilted nose of the battered utility craft, following the furrow left by Jurgen.
Emperor knows I’m no enginseer, but even I could see it wouldn’t be flying again without some serious benediction from the tech-priests. The wings were flexed in a fashion the designers would never have envisioned, its landing gear was badly buckled, and several inspection panels had been jarred loose by the impact, revealing partial glimpses of the mechanica inside. The nose was deeply buried in the sand, which reached halfway up the armourglass surrounding the pilot’s seat. Though the panes had been cracked and crazed with the force of our landing, none had shattered completely, effectively hiding the cockpit from view. My pessimistic assessment of our pilot’s chances of survival dropped even further, if that were possible.
Then the distinctive crack of a lasgun echoed flatly around the dunes, and I broke into a floundering run, drawing my weapons and barking my shin painfully on the sheared-off stub of the chin-mounted autocannon. As I caught my first glimpse of Jurgen’s target, a reflex of revulsion stilled the breath in my chest which, given the quality of the air, was probably no bad thing.
A trio of scavenging hormagaunts had ripped the cockpit asunder, and begun feeding on the body of the pilot. There was no telling by this point precisely how or when he had died, but I found myself hoping it had been during the crash. One of the gaunts lay twitching on the sand, part of its head ripped away by Jurgen’s las-bolt, but the other two were already moving, bounding towards my aide with murderous intent.
‘Take the left!’ I called, cracking off a shot with my laspistol at the one on the right as I spoke. Jurgen complied, chewing up its thorax with a quick burst of automatic fire, and the hideous thing stumbled and fell, leaving him well beyond the reach of its scything claws. I wasn’t so lucky, the hasty pistol shot at the target I’d selected missing its head entirely. Before I could adjust my aim it was on me, with a vicious swipe calculated to rip me in two.
I’d anticipated the move, though, knowing such creatures only had a limited repertoire of responses, and swung up my chainsword to block it. The whirling teeth bit deep, severing the tip of a razor-sharp talon as long as my arm, and I pivoted, bringing the screaming blade round to deflect the follow-up strike from the other claw I knew had to be coming. Gaunts always struck in the same scissoring pattern, hoping to catch their prey between the two keen edges of their primary weapons. Unfortunately for this one, it was now off-balance, and I was able to evade it neatly, slicing off the secondary arm which was reaching out towards me with its smaller, hook-like talon in the process. Undaunted, it came on, mouth agape, and stuffed with far too many fangs for my peace of mind, but I’d anticipated this too, and squeezed the trigger again, putting a las-bolt through the back of its throat and into what passed for its brain.
Too stupid to realise it was dead, the foul thing rallied, then leapt into the attack again, only to fall heavily to the sand as it finally got the message and expired.
‘Sorry, sir,’ Jurgen said, with an apologetic shrug, ‘they took me by surprise.’ He poked the one he’d downed cautiously with the barrel of his lasgun, and it twitched feebly for a second before vomiting up a rancid mess of bile and masticated pilot. Ignoring the mess on his boots, my aide put another round through its skull to make sure it wouldn’t be getting up again, although, if I was any judge, it only sped things up by a second or two.
‘Me too,’ I said, conscious of the irony. All the time I’d been scanning the horizon, the vile creatures had been right under our noses. ‘What worries me is how many more of them there are.’ There must have been dozens of spore pods ejected by the drone we’d followed down, and the others left in orbit, and they’d all have been directed towards the same area[119]. That meant there were hundreds of the ghastly things roaming the desert, if not thousands[120], which was hardly going to make it any easier tramping across a lethal wilderness in an attempt to find help.
I glanced round apprehensively, conscious of how badly hemmed in we were by the whispering sands. The faint hissing of the grains as they were blown over one another by the wind would mask the sounds of any more approaching, and we couldn’t see beyond the next dune. All we could do was keep a sharp lookout every time we crested one, hope the conditions here made us equally hard to detect, and pray to the Emperor that none of the swarm were burrowers.
‘Better get moving,’ I said at last, conscious that if we delayed much more I’d lose my nerve entirely. Staying where we were wasn’t an option, as the hive mind would be aware of the loss of its meat puppets, and would surely send more to investigate[121]. Picking up the survival gear we’d dropped in the melee meant putting my weapons away, which gave me a moment’s disquiet, but there was no help for it. Our chances were slender enough as they were, without leaving our food, water and shelter behind. Reluctantly I scabbarded my chainsword, holstered the laspistol, and shouldered the habitent. It was just as unwieldy as I’d expected, but, with the melta slung across his back, Jurgen would have found it even more awkward.
Slogging through the dune field was every bit as gruelling as I’d anticipated. We soon discovered that scrambling up them was more effort than it was worth, every step sliding back almost to its starting point in the loose grains and raising clouds of the stuff which made breathing even more difficult. So, despite my apprehension about being ambushed, we remained at the bottom of the gullies between the sand drifts, trying as best we could to keep moving in the direction of the hive, although the haphazard arrangements of the dunes meant that we seemed to spend as much time moving parallel to it as towards our destination. My initial estimate of how long it would take us to get there revised itself depressingly upwards with practically every step, until it was so far in excess of the maximum time we could possibly survive out here that I gave up thinking about it in sheer self-defence.
We’d entirely lost sight of the downed Aquila within moments of leaving it, which I couldn’t help thinking was something of a mixed blessing; although we were now hidden from any further tyranid organisms drawn to feed on the carrion we’d left scattered about it,
it would have been a useful marker point in this wilderness of sand. My sense of direction, so reliable in enclosed spaces, was far less helpful in this accursed wilderness, and I was soon completely disorientated. Even the sun was no help, obscured as it was by the huge pall of debris flung up by the crash of the bioship. All about us was the same dust-hazed twilight, casting no shadows, merely deepening inexorably as the day wore on.
After what my chronograph assured me had been no more than a couple of hours of fruitless plodding, but which felt like a day and a night, I called a rest stop, and luxuriated in a mouthful of water. The parched tissue of my mouth seemed to absorb it directly, like a sponge, but enough of it trickled down my throat to clear the worst of the dust still settled there, and I followed it with a second swallow before passing the bottle to Jurgen. He drank as abstemiously as I, and resealed it, the lessons learned in our arduous journey across the desert region of Perlia needing no reminder or reinforcement.
‘We need to know where we are,’ I said, eyeing the side of the nearest dune with scant enthusiasm. But we couldn’t keep plodding on blindly forever, and the short break and some fresh water had perked me up as much as possible under the circumstances. Taking the amplivisor again, I began to make my way up the sand pile. I’m not embarrassed to admit I used my hands as much as my feet, another lesson learned the hard way on Perlia, and probably a wise precaution anyway, since I had no wish to announce my presence by skylining myself.
From the top, the landscape looked just as bleak as ever, and I swept the amplivisor across it, finding little to raise the spirits. The far distant line of the hive, like a thundercloud on the horizon, seemed no nearer than before; hardly a surprise given the tiny fraction of the intervening distance we would have walked, but it lay more on my right hand than I’d expected, and I resolved to adjust our course accordingly. The dust plume I’d spotted before was far closer now, enough for the amplivisor to pick out individual dots among it, but the intervening haze prevented me from discerning any further detail. Another good reason to go wide, though; the organisms looked unusually large, and there were at least a dozen that I could see.
I continued scanning the panorama before me, picking out several groups of gaunts wandering in the middle distance, and, far away, what looked like the leprous bulk of the pod which had brought them, but there was no sign of the genestealer brood or the lictor I’d spotted before, which suited me fine. Then, much closer at hand, I saw a gleam of reflected light, so bright it could only have come from a metal surface.
My spirits soared. Out here, amid so much desolation, the only possible explanation for that would be a human presence. Probably a vehicle of some kind, or, at the very least, an Adeptus Mechanicus altar, set there to monitor something, and through which we could attract attention and rescue.
‘Jurgen!’ I slithered down the dune in a flurry of sliding grains, which all but buried me as I came to a precipitous halt at the bottom. ‘There’s something metallic out there!’ I floundered to my feet, creating a miniature sandstorm as I did so. ‘I can’t tell what it is from here, but it means humans. We can get a ride back, or call for help.’
‘If the ’nids haven’t eaten ’em already,’ my aide added, and, recalled to the grim realities of our predicament, I nodded.
‘We’ll move in cautiously.’ I’d taken careful note of the position of the object, whatever it was, and was sure I could find it without too much difficulty, in spite of the open nature of our surroundings. From here we’d just have to skirt two further dunes, and our objective ought to be in sight.
Before moving off, I drew my laspistol. Jurgen’s point had been a good one, and any humans out here would surely become bait for the tyranids before long, including ourselves.
My aide readied his lasgun too, and we began to advance cautiously along the gully between the dunes, watching for any sign of movement. Despite an almost overwhelming impulse to break into a run, I kept my eagerness in check, all too aware of the consequences of letting our guard down, even for a moment. Tyranids excelled at attacking from ambush, and this environment seemed purpose-made to conceal a lethal surprise.
Sure enough, a surprise was waiting for us round the final corner, although under the circumstances I would almost have preferred more ’nids. ‘Frak,’ I said feelingly, followed by a few more choice expletives.
‘That’s the shuttle,’ Jugen said, in his customary matter of fact tone. ‘How did it get here?’
‘It never moved,’ I said, kicking the half-buried cadaver of the hormagaunt he’d first shot. Like the others, and the rather more widely-distributed remains of our luckless pilot, it had already acquired a tenuous shroud of wind-driven sand; another few hours and it would have been completely buried. Come to that, the entire Aquila would probably disappear in another day or two. ‘We got turned around in the dune field somewhere.’
I might have said a great deal more, but before I got the chance something inhumanly fast and at least twice my height burst from the sand no more than a handful of metres away, and charged at me, its talons and reverse-jointed forelimbs straining in my direction, the feeding tendrils around its jaw writhing like a nest of snakes. The lictor had found us.
EIGHTEEN
I reacted instinctively, cracking off a couple of shots from the laspistol in my hand which struck the ghastly thing squarely in the middle of its armoured chest, leaving cauterised craters of vaporised chitin as visible evidence of my marksmanship, but either the thick plates protecting its thorax were holding, or I’d failed to hit anything vital behind them. Jurgen began shooting too, with scarcely any greater success, but at least the burst of automatic fire managed to check its rush sufficiently for me to reach for my chainsword. Not that I expected to hold my own against something so monstrously fast and agile, and with so great an advantage in reach, for long, but it was clear I wasn’t going to bring it down with the laspistol.
At which point I found the habitent, which I’d slung from my shoulder on that side, was impeding my ability to draw the close combat weapon. Without even thinking about it, I grabbed the bundle and threw it at the lictor, an impulse which undoubtedly saved my life. At that instant, a volley of viciously-edged barbs erupted from somewhere in the centre of its las-bolt-pocked thorax, hissing through the air towards me. By great good fortune my fumbling throw had caused the packed survival shelter to erect itself, the thin dome of weatherproofed fabric popping out of its cover in mid-air, and the flesh hooks snared it, ripping it to shreds as the thin ropes of sinew they were attached to attempted to drag it into the reach of the lictor’s writhing feeding tendrils.
‘The melta!’ I shouted, knowing that was the only weapon we possessed capable of bringing the hideous creature down reliably.
‘Right you are, sir,’ Jurgen responded, leaving off trying to find a weak spot with his lasgun in favour of unslinging the heavy weapon from its awkward position across his back. Even for a marksman of his exceptional skill, the chances of felling a lictor with the small-arm alone were miniscule; we’d have needed a whole squad concentrating their fire to be certain of bringing something that size down with las-weapons. All I had to do was buy him the few seconds he needed to ready a shot, and try not to get ripped to shreds in the meantime.
Which was a lot easier said than done. I took advantage of the lictor’s confusion to get in closer, behind the tattered remains of the habitent, which it seemed to be having some difficulty disentangling from its flesh hooks: a fortuitous development for me, because until it managed to do so it wouldn’t be capable of winding them in again for another go, and while the fabric and memory polymer frame were still flapping about in front of its face its vision was partially obscured. Something else I could make good use of.
I leaped aside, just in time to evade a strike from the inner edge of one of its wickedly serrated scything claws, which, had it succeeded, would have snapped closed along the surface of its upper arm, cutting me in half. As it was, the deadly limb passed harmless
ly over my back, close enough for the breeze of its passing to stir my greatcoat, raising a cloud of dust as it did so. I lunged with the whirling blade of my chainsword, driving in for a thrust to the pit of its middle arm, only to realise that the hand at the end of it was lashing out to grab me. Changing direction at the last moment, I narrowly evaded a grip tipped with talons capable of puncturing ceramite, and although it cost me the chance to plunge my blade deep into one of the towering creature’s few vulnerable spots, my hasty deflection robbed it of three of its fingers, leaving only a solitary thumb behind.
Surprised and hurt, the lictor roared, giving me the benefit of a blast of halitosis compared to which Jurgen’s exhalations carried the sweetness of a spring breeze, and charged in again, but this time I got the distinct impression that its attack was more cautious. The tyranids breed their scout organisms to remain hidden, attacking from ambush only when they’re certain of success, and when they don’t manage to make a quick kill it disconcerts them. This one seemed to be thinking[122] that it might have made a mistake in picking on me, and I was keen to reinforce that impression. If I could throw enough of a scare into it, its instinct to run and hide might cut in, preferably before it dealt me a mortal wound.
So, in spite of all my own instincts urging me to turn and flee, I did the one thing it would never expect prey to do, and charged in, bellowing like a berserk ork, swinging the chainsword in the loose horizontal figure of eight old Myamoto de Bergerac[123] used to refer to as the floating leaf (although in my case, he used to say, it was more like a plummeting brick[124].) At worst, the flickering blade would create a barrier between me and the lictor, across which it would be unable to strike without the risk of further pruning, and at best it would allow me another chance to do some serious damage. I didn’t expect to be able to kill it, of course, but I could certainly make it decide that this particular meal wasn’t worth the effort of trying to eat.
Greater Good Page 19
