by Sam Bradbury
On the other hand, no. I wasn’t about to get that close. Not even I was dumb enough to take on a mounted LMG.
Okay, plan B. I opened a comlink to Rico. ‘Cover me. I’m going to get myself a VC32.’ And he gave me the nod as I very stealthily moved out of cover, praying not to be seen by the snipers.
Because here’s the thing about snipers: they’re patient, cool-headed, accurate and, man, they’re dogged. They take up position, squint down their sights and wait for their prey to appear. And they’ll wait and wait and wait. It’s not a job for the attention deficient.
But what they don’t have is good peripheral awareness, which is why a lot of snipers work in teams: one guy for the waiting and squinting, the other to watch his back. But these guys were just scrap-yard guards, they were not expecting sophisticated warfare, so they were working in teams of one – which made them vulnerable.
It meant I could outflank one. Not easily – let’s not get cocky, kid – but it was possible to sneak up on one. This guy, for example; the guy I saw in front of me now, using a pair of barrels for cover, still as the night, a phantom waiting for me to appear so he could pop a cap in my ass. But – crucially – with a blind side.
Too bad for him. He and his buddies were still taking pot shots at Rico’s position as I worked my way to the side of him, crouching there as he loosed off a couple of shots at Rico’s cabin and taking my combat knife from its sheath. Now I was just an arm’s length away from him, so close I could almost hear his breathing. I moved forward and reached with my knife hand, ready to bring it across the front of his respirator. He wouldn’t see it coming. He wouldn’t feel a thing. It would be instant.
He fired a couple more shots and I told myself he was trying to kill my buddy. Trying to make it easy on myself, hesitating as I did so.
Which was a rookie’s error. Secure that shit. Make the kill. Worry about it later. That was how it went.
Sure enough. He went to reload and as he did so inclined his head a little so that he was looking behind himself – and saw me. With a shout he jerked as though electrocuted, swinging his rifle behind himself, the barrel connecting with my wrist, knocking my arm off even as I lurched forward to finish the job.
Messy. Christ, this was messy. Already he was casting aside the VC32 and reaching for his sidearm, an StA-18.
I recovered and came forward with the knife again, praying that I wasn’t offering myself as a target for other snipers. He was quick. He’d pulled out the pistol and loosed off a shot, but he was shooting wild and shooting wide, the bullet getting nowhere near me. Then he was holding up a hand to ward me off as I struck, snarling, the gun no use to him now – not at such close quarters – and the blade of the knife slid into his neck at the jawbone so that he was writhing and gurgling, impaled by the blade, arms thrashing as he died on a piece of cold corrugated metal in the middle of a filthy scrap yard. As he did, he knocked off his own respirator mask and I caught my breath. He was young, just a kid. Hardly the first Helghast youth I’d killed and probably not the last, but even so. You don’t get used to it; you never want to get used to it – not if you plan on staying human.
Now the other snipers had seen that something was wrong and turned their fire on my position, but I’d got what I wanted – a VC32 sniper rifle and I picked as much ammunition as I could from the kid’s body before taking off with it to find cover of my own.
I’m good with a sniper rifle, comfortable with it. Perhaps it says something about me, but I don’t want to see the whites of the enemy’s eyes when they die. Not because I’m a coward, just because it’s easier that way. War’s easier that way. You can’t let it get personal. So one by one I took them out, methodically working from one to the other, Rico providing cover fire. And that, gentlemen, I thought, as the final sniper folded to the deck, is how you work as a team.
The LMG gunner was the last to die. He saw me coming and panicked, stepping away from his mounted gun and yanking his assault rifle up to open fire on me. I was out of ammo but clubbed him with the stock until he went down, finished him off with a combat knife, made sure his respirator stayed on and tried not to think about it.
Now I was through to the crane, Rico at my heels, and we climbed a ladder to a high platform and a control deck, frantically trying to figure out how to work the arm of the crane. And failing. We ran from console to console, jabbing at buttons, but nothing we pressed or pulled had an effect and the arm remained immovable, console lights winking implacably at us.
Next thing we knew we were under attack from Hig shock troopers, and it got nasty. These were the guys who liked to bring the fight to you; who like to do it up close and personal, the elite of the Helghast forces. They came up to the control deck faster than we could pick them off, and came at us employing the usual shock-trooper tactics, rushing in armed with knives and small arms. I replied in kind, Rico too, bodies piling up around us. Now came another dropship, and as the doors in the hold slid open we let them have it, slaughtering enemy infantry before they could use the lines to deploy. Still they came, though, and for a moment it seemed like we would be overrun. I grabbed VC32 ammo off a Hig corpse and started picking off infantry as they took cover among the junk of the scrap yard below us. It was getting hot now. Christ, this was one well-protected scrap yard. I prayed that our guys in the desert were being left alone.
As I continued the battle, Rico worked on getting the crane arm working and at last, just as it seemed I had fought off the last of their guards, he cracked it, and in the next moment was controlling the crane. The APC swung overhead, hitting the barricade dead on and within seconds we’d shimmied down the ladder to ground level and were hurrying through the hole before more Hig reinforcements arrived.
Rico opened a comlink. ‘Jammer, we’re almost at the factory. What’s your ETA?’
I could hear the engine of the buggy roaring in the background as she replied, ‘Couple more minutes.’
Next we were climbing a fence and finding on the other side that we no longer had a visual on the mobile factory. I stood for a moment looking one way then the next. I could still hear the rumble of it.
‘Where the fuck has it gone?’ exclaimed Rico by my side, aiming a frustrated kick at a metal panel.
Which, as it turned out, was a dumb thing to do because the panel may have looked innocent enough, but it turned out to be performing the essential function of holding the whole shitpile together. The moment Rico kicked it away we suddenly found ourselves on our butts as what turned out to be a very precarious pile of metal gave way beneath our feet and before we knew it we were both sliding down a hillside of trash, landing on the ground at the bottom of a deep canyon of garbage, the steep sides of it rising on either side of us.
And still no sign of the mobile factory.
‘Jesus,’ exclaimed Rico, ‘how the hell can something that big just disappear?’
We could still hear it, though, the sound of distant thunder. A rumbling that we couldn’t quite place, and for a moment the two of us stood with our assault rifles raised, heads jerking this way and that like a couple of prairie dogs, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from.
The noise that was getting closer and closer. Until I realized that the mountain of scrap metal towering above us on all sides was deflecting and rebounding the noise, fooling our ears, and that the factory could be anywhere. Bearing down on us right now, even.
‘Jammer, we’ve lost visual on the factory,’ barked Rico into his pick-up.
‘You what?’
‘You heard right. Fuckin’ thing’s disappeared.’
‘Where are you?’
‘We’re at the bottom of the Grand Canyon of garbage here and we can hear it. Oh, we can hear it. Sure as shit can’t see it, though.’
‘Hang fire, I’ll be with you any second.’
He closed the link and for a second or so we stood there like a couple of leftover turkeys, looking around ourselves, the ground vibrating beneath our feet.
/> Okay, this had stopped being funny now. Where in the name of Sam Hill was the mobile factory?
Suddenly a mound of trash to our rear began to shake as though caught in the first tremors of an earthquake. We wheeled to look at it, eyes travelling up and up as bits of scrap metal began crumbling from the huge pile and thunking to the ground around us. Just a few bits at first, nothing to worry about. Then large chunks of metal, most of an engine block, and next what looked like the partitions from the armoury of a cruiser came slicing down to the ground, a sudden avalanche of parts, so that Rico and I were backing away with our hands over our heads to protect ourselves – and you can bet we were wishing that we were wearing regulation military headgear at that moment.
Then the mountain burst apart and all hell was let loose.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Hooper took another step forward and the petrusite hissed around him like snakes woken from sleep. He felt his fingers loosen with the fear and made a conscious effort to tighten his grip on the touchscreen. Not much further now. Five or six steps. He dared not look behind him to see how far he had come. All he knew was that the encouraging shouts of the men had become more distant. The circuit board was close now. Real close.
Suddenly the air was full of flying scrap metal as the mountain of junk appeared to explode from the inside, and we were hurled back, knocked off our feet. I found myself scrabbling in the dirt, my hands protecting my head as lethal lumps of trash stabbed into the ground around me. Then we heard an almighty grinding sound, and I had no time for a WTF moment because the next second I could see it for myself: the mobile factory.
It burst from the hillside and came with its huge grinders rolling, a nest of teeth at its bow. Scrap metal was being captured by the teeth, mauled by the grinders then drawn back into the body of the factory for processing, and what didn’t get sucked inside was simply ploughed out of the way or catapulted forward. I had a second of thinking that at least we’d picked the right puppy for the job of knocking out the petrusite defences, because it destroyed everything in its path, before it struck me that we were in its path. It towered over us, casting our world in darkness and engulfing us with nightmarish sound of clanking metal. Behind the whirling wheels of the grinder – each tooth as big as a car – were its tracks, the height of two men, and on top of that the huge main section of the factory, made up of a kaleidoscopic patchwork of different metals, some sections new and shining, others rusting. Through windows I could see the crew and I knew that like everything else around here the factory was well guarded and getting up there was going to be a tough job, never mind controlling it. It was a monster machine, a behemoth, and I could only hope that it was easier to pilot than it looked from ground level.
But, hell, let’s get our priorities straight, shall we? Right now piloting it was the least of our worries. Right now we needed to concentrate on not being eaten by it.
It hardly seemed possible, so slow and lugubrious was the factory, but with the bombardment of metal around us and the sudden surprise of its entry we were almost immediately pulled into it. We scrambled to our feet and ran, the knives and grinders at our heels. I stumbled. Rico caught me, yanking me to my feet, yelling into his pick-up at the same time, ‘Jammer.’
The two of us were running now, the earth quaking beneath our feet and mountains of garbage on either side of us avalanching trash into our path. Fall now and we were dead. If anything got in our way, we were dead. It felt like we were two specks of dirt around a plughole, gradually – slowly – being sucked in, that it was only a matter of time.
It struck me that I never expected to die this way. Always thought it would be a bullet or an explosion, or if I was really unlucky a knife. In the jungle there was the constant threat of fever, I guess. But one thing I never expected was that I was going to get crushed by a garbage factory.
Then – Jammer was there. An angel in the driving seat of a buggy with an ISA guy in the passenger seat, cresting a pile of trash ahead of us and skidding to a stop right in our path.
‘Get in,’ she screeched. No invite needed. Without breaking stride we both leapt straight into the rear seats of the buggy and she floored it, throwing us back. I twisted round to look behind us, taking in the factory again, my eyes going from the teeth and the revolving grinders right up to the main bridge where I saw two pilots at a windshield. All I caught was their red eyes and respirators, but I could have sworn that they were grinning at us. Laugh it up Higgleberry, I thought. We were in a buggy now and not stopping. And I turned to face the front just in time to realize that yet again I’d spoken too soon. Because in front of us the route came to an end – and we were speeding straight towards a mountainside of garbage rising up ahead of us.
‘Shit,’ said somebody, and it might have been me, or it might have been Rico, or it might have been the terrified ISA guy in the passenger seat.
Wasn’t Jammer, though. Jammer was wearing an almost serene expression and despite the fact that we were all about to die I found myself simultaneously awestruck by her calm and stunned by her beauty. Maybe it wasn’t so bad that hers would be the last face I ever saw, I thought, because we were definitely going to die, right? We were going to smash and explode onto the garbage or be chewed up by the mobile factory’s grinders. They were the only two options, surely?
No.
Jammer stopped. Then reversed, the buggy’s engine screeching a complaint. Building up speed now, she crunched the gears, danced on the foot pedals and spun the wheel, throwing her human cargo to one side as the buggy performed a 180-degree turn.
And by doing that she’d stopped us exploding on to the garbage. Which was good.
But now we were facing the oncoming mobile factory. Which wasn’t so good.
The ISA guy was still jabbering like he was fit to wet his pants and even Rico was shouting in shock as we sped towards the factory. Just as we passed under sight of the control deck I caught a second glance at the two pilots and once again I could have sworn they were mocking us, but, hell, who could blame them? The buggy and the mobile factory were on a collision course and, in a collision between a mobile factory and a buggy, who was going to come off worst? Even I’d have put my money on the mobile factory, and I had more to lose than most. Then, just as it seemed the front bumper of the buggy was about to make contact with the foremost spikes of the grinder, Jammer was again pulling on the wheel and again she wore a look of complete contentment, as though in the eye of the storm, with her own and three other guys’ lives at stake, she was at her happiest – like there was nowhere else in the universe she would rather be. And the buggy veered sharply to the right, as close to the blades and spinning grinders as it could get without being sucked in, garbage pissing down on us still, and Jammer slaloming through it with the grace of an expert.
Not that her expertise was doing much to comfort her passengers, all of us screaming, terrified we were going to be pulled into the jaws of the factory or crushed by the onslaught of flying waste pinging off it. There was no way we could make it, I thought.
No way.
Sure enough a huge chunk of junk knifed into the ground in front of us, blocking our path and we were certain to hit it. On one side of us an irregular pile of junk, impossible for the buggy to traverse at this speed, on the other side the factory, a cacophonous horror of blades and grinders and crushing tracks. Unless …
Unless Jammer saw a way. Which she did, and as the ISA guy in the front, sure of his own certain death, screamed and raised his arms over his face, Jammer stood on the pedals and wrenched the wheel to take us underneath the factory.
Yeah, that’s right – underneath the factory.
Somehow she’d managed to negotiate a path between the forward grinders and the tracks to take us beneath, where suddenly the ceiling was revolving gears and axle and there was hardly any room for a buggy stuffed full of screaming ISA guys and one beautiful, cool-as-ice ISA girl.
Controlling the rear of the buggy as it threatened t
o slide out, she steered us between the tracks of the factory and to the rear of the vehicle and the only exit. But suddenly there was no clearance and Jammer was screaming at us to get down as we crunched into the rear axle, which stripped off the buggy’s rollbar with a savage screech of agonized metal, but with us intact – beat that – and we emerged at the other end of the factory with one less rollbar, but alive at least.
The buggy skidded to a halt and for a second or so we all looked at each other in complete silence, the enormity of our escape taking a while to sink in, before the ISA guy blurted at Jammer, ‘Are you crazy?’ and she just grinned.
You know what? I hoped so. I hoped she was crazy because I was having an idea. We still needed to be on that mobile factory and now the crew would assume we’d been pulled into it. They were probably giving each other high fives right now, thinking of all the ISA burger they’d just cooked up below. That meant we could take them unawares – if we managed to board the factory that was. And to do that we needed our driver staying crazy because we needed to be up close and personal on that factory.
‘Jammer,’ I said, ‘get behind it.’
She looked at me then looked at the mobile factory and saw what I meant. And with a smile that I packed away to enjoy again at a later date, she hit the gas and we took off in a cloud of dust, free, thankfully, of the flying barrage of trash, steering through the junk left behind by the factory and getting closer to the thundering tracks.
‘Rico, are you with me on this?’ I shouted over the roar of engines.
He gave me a look to say You kidding? and joined me as I climbed from the back seat to the hood of the buggy, Jammer keeping her nice and steady and steering a line towards the rear tracks. I crouched on the hood, holding on to what was left of the windshield with one hand and using the other to balance as Jammer brought us parallel to the factory. Seeing the juddering links of the factory getting closer, I knew that if I got this wrong I’d be hauled into the gears of the factory or pulled beneath the tracks, and either way I’d be decorating the scrap yard with my guts. Plus I had to get a move on or Rico wouldn’t have time to make the jump as well.
