by Marc
‘Three days across ork-held land?’
‘Exactly, Kallin. I wouldn’t like to think you were questioning this course of action.’
Kallin muttered something under his breath that Samiel was glad he didn’t quite catch.
‘Now, crew.’ continued Karra-Vrass, ‘since Samiel is back with us I think this is an appropriate time for a reading. Damrid?’
‘Sir.’ Damrid stepped forward, fishing a small prayer book from his ill-fitting fatigues. He began to speak of hope and duty, of how they were all sinners who wanted only to survive that they might redeem themselves in the Emperor’s service. The words were familiar to Samiel, who had heard such things so often before in the chapels of the administrative colony where he had once lived. But he knew they were not meaningless, even if he had trouble believing them – devotion was the only thing keeping many Guardsmen sane. And even he, sometimes, found himself calling to the Emperor for help – especially when he fought his way out of a flaming wreck and felt the flames on his back as he leapt from the white-hot explosion behind him…
He was a sole survivor. Perhaps the Emperor had already heard him once, and wasn’t ready to grant a miracle a second time. Maybe that was why he was supposed to be so unlucky.
Samiel and Damrid buried Graek’s body quickly – orks were little more than animals, and they could home in on a spoiled corpse like any other beast. Samiel didn’t object when Damrid rifled through his dead comrade’s fatigues and pocketed the few trinkets and ammo rounds he found – he’d done the same himself, to friend and foe.
‘Is it wrong…?’ asked Damrid falteringly. ‘Is it wrong to lose a fellow man and think we’re better off without him?’
‘I don’t know.’ replied Samiel. ‘I didn’t know him long.’
The last handful of damp earth was thrown over the dead man’s face. ‘You didn’t want to. He was bad. The worst.’
“What did he do?’ It wasn’t a question that was generally asked of a Chem-Dog, for a man’s crime was his own damn business. But Graek was dead, and he wasn’t about to complain.
‘A slaver. He ran with the… the uncleans. Some Arbites tracked him down, but he found them first, and when he finished with them they say you couldn’t tell they had ever been human.
‘And he never changed, that was the worst. He never saw the light. He never stopped hurting people. When we evacuated the civilians out of the south, he went missing for days, and after he came back we’d hear stories about families burned in bunkers and children hunted down for sport. They blamed it on the orks, but Graek had some… some things he kept. I think he was the worst sort of person.’
Samiel was grateful for an unhealthy shudder from the Defixio’s engines as they kicked protesting into life. ‘Dunno if they’ll hold together,’ Dniep was saying. ‘Fuel’s not a problem, you can run a Leman Russ on boot leather and bad language. But she took a big hit back there and the track drives are looking shaky.’
‘Will it last?’ Karra-Vrass’s voice was dispassionate – he must have known that his life depended on the Defixio not breaking down, but he didn’t sound like it.
Dniep stood up, wiping the oil off his hands onto his stained fatigues. ‘Three days? Be surprised, sir. But then again, sometimes even I get surprised by how much punishment these things can take.’
‘Good.’ The officer raised his voice. ‘Burial detail, are you finished?’
Damrid raised a hand. He had rolled up the sleeves of his fatigues and for the first time Samiel noticed something – a tattoo, a skull surrounded by barbed wire, with a barcode underneath, at the top of the boy’s arm. It was one of the many symbols branded on the fresh convicts brought in to keep up the population of the Dead Moons, which meant that Damrid wasn’t second generation like Samiel had assumed. He was a con. What had he done, this boy? You heard tales of kids slung into the chem-mines for stealing loaves of bread or failing to cheer when the planetary governor waved to the crowds. Poor lad. Life could be bad enough without being sentenced to a slow death when you were hardly old enough to know what right and wrong really were.
‘And weaponry?’
‘Loaded and ready,’ came Kallin’s voice from within the hull.
‘Very well. The orks will have patrols out looking for survivors and we must not give them the chance to find us. We roll immediately’
They clambered into the Defixio, Damrid into the turret to take the first lookout, with Karra-Vrass alongside Dniep at the front. Kallin and Samiel, meanwhile, slumped against the sponson mounts to catch some of the noisy, cramped downtime that passed for sleep on the move.
YOU CAN’T DREAM when you’re not asleep, but it still felt like a nightmare. It wasn’t that long ago it had happened, but he knew it would be burned across his mind’s eye until he breathed his last. It was the reason he was on the Defixio at all, and the reason they all thought what only Kallin spoke – that Samiel was a jinx who had used up too much of his luck. His previous tank, an Executioner, had found itself surrounded and outnumbered by the light vehicles and bikes the greenskins rode like madmen.
He saw the billowing black-red of the fire and felt the heat across his face. He felt the cold earth against his back heating up as fuel spilled over the ground and rippled towards him, on fire.
He could see, as if they were in front of him right then, the silhouettes of his old crewmates, fire at their backs and orks at their front, blasting away with sidearms at their assailants. When the magazines had gone up from a lucky warbike shot the rear of the tank’s hull had been torn off and Samiel had tumbled out while the burning wreck slid to a halt, and there his crewmates had made their stand.
Living on a planet like Savlar meant you valued every scrap of pride you scrounged, and the men who crewed the shattered tank weren’t going to let themselves be taken prisoner by anyone or anything. Samiel watched as one was cut down by explosive shellfire, another ground beneath the wheels of a warbike that slewed insanely close.
And then the plasma coils went critical. An expanding globe of white-hot energised plasma, like a new star, incinerated the crewmen and burned a hole in the ork attack.
When the smoke cleared and the bodies were recovered, Samiel was the only one alive. His injuries were minor, and the orks hadn’t even noticed him in the confusion. He heard them all say he was the luckiest Guardsman on the planet.
But they weren’t smiling when they said it.
‘NO USE, SIR. Goes as far as I can see.’ Samiel snapped out of his half-sleep, and once more he was back inside the stale hull of the Defixio. He knew something was wrong because the tank was only moving slowly now, and Karra-Vrass was replacing Damrid at the turret hatch.
Damrid dropped down onto the floor.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Kallin, also jolted out of his own half-dreams.
‘Minefield,’ came the reply, and Samiel realised it was probably the worst possible answer. Orks made no attempt to conceal their minefields, but they laid a hell of a lot and didn’t care if they lost a couple of their own to them, meaning the fields were always big with no way through. They also had a habit of packing them with so much explosive they left craters the size of command bunkers – current Guard wisdom was that the orks laid mines more because they liked the noise than for any strategic advantage.
Karra-Vrass came back down and pulled a folded-up map from inside his greatcoat. He laid it out on the floor – it showed the northern part of the continent across which the Defixio was trying to travel. Samiel saw just how far they had to go, and how much of the ground they had to cover was covered in the green markers of known ork camps and outposts.
Karra-Vrass stabbed at the map with the end of his swagger stick. ‘Dniep, is this our position?’
‘Near enough.’
Between the Defixio and the Cadian HQ lay a plain bounded by contours – in the world outside, those contours were ragged, torn ranges of loose earth and landslides. No kind of country for a tank.
‘The minefie
ld will have no safe channels, and the high ground is not an option. However, the field is not particularly deep. Defusing is possible.’
Everyone looked at Dniep. He had a knack with anything technical – Samiel had heard tell of the miracles he had worked with the stubborn Leman Russ engines, and no doubt he could have taught the Tech-Guard Engineers a thing or two about clearing mines. ‘I could do it.’ he said, with an uncharacteristic bravery that made Samiel realise just how desperate a situation they were in.
‘What about patrols?’ asked Kallin. ‘We’d be waiting here for hours, the bloody greenskins could pick us off for fun.’
‘Dniep could stay.’ It was Damrid who spoke – by now all the crew were crowded around the map. ‘If someone marked the mines first, he’d defuse them in half the time. We’d have a driver in case we got jumped. He’d have to go out and clear a path afterwards, but not for as long. We’d still be targets, but we’d have a better chance.’
‘And we’d leave a man behind if we had to run for it,’ added Kallin grimly.
Karra-Vrass began folding up the map. ‘We’re not leaving anyone. But we may find ourselves in a firefight a man short. We’re already down a loader.’
‘So, who do we need the least?’ asked Dniep.
And this time, they looked at Samiel.
IT WAS DARK by then. Jaegersweld had two moons, one large and bright, but its light was filtered through many layers of ever-present cloud and a sickly, grey glow fell over the landscape. The minefield was obvious enough – some explosive-packed devices stuck above the ground, more of a challenge than a trap. But while they might have been animals, orks were a very cunning type of beast. They would have some buried so you couldn’t see them, and those were the ones Samiel would have to spend a long time marking so Dniep’s foray would be as short as possible.
Samiel told himself it could be done – it wasn’t far across. And it certainly had to be done, for the loose, muddy hills on either side would be near-impossible for the Defixio to clamber across, even with Dniep at the controls.
Hopping down from the front hatch, Samiel was acutely aware of just how exposed he was. Outside the tank, he felt soft and vulnerable.
Inside the tank he was on home ground, a tiny bubble of the Imperium around him. Now he was behind ork lines, and alone. He checked his gear – flare gun, bayonet (another of Dniep’s ‘finds’), a bag of spent shell casings to mark the mines.
It wasn’t slow work, but there were a lot of mines, densely packed to make the huge chain explosions the orks liked so much. He looked up every now and again to check for glints of approaching machinery against the grey-black horizon, and listened for the juddering drone of an ork engine. Once or twice he heard the chatter of gunfire far off, but that might mean anything in an ork warzone – they could be launching a major assault or just taking pot shots at one another for fun.
That they were so difficult to predict was the worst thing, because you couldn’t just herd them into killing zones or cripple their economic base or any of the other things that worked with good old-fashioned humans. The only thing that worked was hatred. There was no sympathy, no honour. You had to exterminate them, all of them, because they were seemingly designed to spring up again at the slightest chance. Samiel knew that war against the orks would never end – even if they were wiped off the surface of Jaegersweld, the Guard would just be packed off to the next planet that became infested, and it would begin all over again. For Samiel, it had become a case of getting out alive and hoping that some distant commander would grant him a plot on a conquered planet as reward for a lifetime of fighting, so he could let someone else do all the hating. But if he really had used up all his luck already, as the others suspected, then he didn’t fancy his odds.
The sound that alerted him was the squeal of metal on metal as the Defixio’s turret turned to face something he couldn’t see. Samiel looked around him – he was more than halfway across the minefield, a long trail of shell casings marking the hidden mines. The Defixio was too far away – if he ran for it now it would probably move before he got there and he’d be left standing in full view of whatever was attacking. He obeyed the first rule of the Imperial Guard, and kept his damn head down.
The autocannon fired and an explosion bloomed some way off. A group of vehicles was illuminated for the briefest moment – bikes, huge clunking things like battering rams on wheels with speeds limited only by the insanity of their riders.
Orks. They had been found, and now the greenskins were moving in for the kill. They were crazy, these bikers, but they were as dangerous as it got for a tank – they carried the crudest of explosives which could crack open a Leman Russ with ease. Samiel had seen it done. And now it was going to be done to the Defixio.
The red-hot exhausts and muzzle flashes were visible now as the bikers careered down the valley at tremendous speed, and the Defixio was moving.
It was heading the only way it could – towards the nearest ridge of surely impassable ground. Karra-Vrass was gambling on the tiny chance that the Defixio might make it, because the other chances were the minefield and the approaching orks, and those odds were worse still.
It wouldn’t make it. No way. Kallin’s sponson chattered away at long range at the bikes, and after a worryingly long wait (Damrid must be having to load it himself, thought Samiel, remembering Graek’s shattered ribs) the autocannon fired again. Two bikes tumbled flaming to a standstill, but the others sheared through their wreckage and stayed on course.
The Defixio was at the foot of the ridge and began to climb, the loose earth already slipping under its tracks. The tank wouldn’t have outrun the bikes at the best of times and now it was slower still, hauling itself painfully up the crumbling slope as the bikes roared around it, sweeping towards its near side. Samiels’s sponson fired and the closest bike’s front wheel was shredded, flipping the bike over and sending the ork rider somersaulting into the Defixio’s side. Samiel realised that Karra-Vrass himself must be manning the gun.
The officer’s aim was good but there were only so many rounds he could squeeze off, and the lead biker threw a grenade, fuse sparkling, at the tracks as he slewed past. The explosion was loud even from where Samiel was lying and he saw links of track flying. Three more followed as the bikers passed, Karra-Vrass’s gun still firing but blindly through smoke and shrapnel.
Samiel knew they didn’t think much of him – in fact, they would probably have preferred one less gunner than a sole survivor and the misfortune he brought. But they were still his comrades, and they were still soldiers of the Imperium up against aliens. He couldn’t just let them die.
He stood up, pulling one of the flares out of his bag, and lit it. When his eyes adjusted to the sudden glare he saw the lead biker had spotted the flash in the darkness and was wheeling in Samiel’s direction, the others following.
Samiel considered dropping the flare and running – but ork mines were unstable and the weight of a man would set even the tankbusters off. His heart, already racing, quickened further when he realised that the safest thing he could do was stand his ground and face the bikers’ charge.
‘Come on, you green bastards! Come and get some!’ he yelled over the roar of the bikes’ engines.
It was probably the bravest thing he had ever done. Probably the last, too. Would anyone survive to tell the story of how he died? Could the crew in the Defixio even see what was happening? Samiel couldn’t think of an answer because his mind was full of the bikes screaming towards him. He could see the lead bikers’ bared teeth in the light from the flare, see the pinpricks of white in its tiny piggy eyes and the blur of the front wheel…
It was some way into the minefield when it careened straight into an anti-vehicle mine so scrappily made it stuck out of the ground half the height of a man. The noise was so vast Samiel was totally deafened, and a column of earth burst out of the ground. An instant later a huge chain explosion erupted with such force Samiel felt himself picked off his feet as the conc
ussion hammered over him. He slammed onto the ground, breath knocked out of him, mind reeling, the whole world a swirling madness of white noise and explosions.
When the noise subsided and he opened his eyes, he saw the air thick with smoke coiling from a rip in the ground longer than the skid from a dropship crash. The wan moonlight made strange shifting shapes in the smoke, and the smell of burnt fuel was dizzying. A bike wheel, licked with flame, rolled slowly along the ground.
By the Emperor, thought Samiel, I’m alive.
I can’t believe it. I’m alive.
Through his near-deafness he caught the ragged sound of an engine gunning and the smoke parted to reveal the last biker, blackened and battered with blood-flecked teeth bared, clinging to his bike as it tore towards Samiel through the blast zone. Samiel acted on reflex – he lashed out his gun and fired. It was then that he realised he was armed only with the flare gun.
The sparkling white flare spiralled towards the bike and shattered against the handlebars like a firework, leaving an incandescent comet trail as the bike hurtled forward. Samiel could see the ork’s manic grin and the wicked squinting eyes behind its goggles, and knew he was going to die.
There was a massive wash of heat as the bike took off at the last second in a ball of flame, somersaulting over him and cartwheeling across the plain. The rider was thrown off, on fire, further into the minefield – Samiel covered his head just in time to protect himself from the inevitable shower of debris from another detonating mine.
Samiel watched as the flames guttered out. For the second time in half a minute he was quite astonished to be alive. He lay back on the ground, suddenly exhausted, and got his first real sleep for months.
‘YOU ARE ONE lucky bitch, Chem-Dog.’ The voice was Dniep’s. It was morning, and the sun was flooding the dank valleys of Jaegersweld with drab grey light. Samiel felt he was propped up against the slope. He was aching again, but mostly unhurt.
‘Them greenskin bastards cleared us a path.’ continued Dniep. ‘And that last one, you must’ve caught his fuel tank. Went up like a flare shell, saw it from here. Even Kallin was impressed.’
