“Come… you don’t have much further to go,” Ballasra said, offering a helping hand to Nisri. Nisri accepted and grunted heavily as he pulled himself up. He glanced at Ballasra and nodded to Turk.
“You too, sir,” Ballasra said, offering Turk a hand up.
“Thank you,” Turk replied. “We need to move quickly, there’s no telling when this explosive will blow up.”
Ballasra’s eyes widened as he looked at the satchel being presented to him. “Then we’d best move, sir.” He motioned for the others to follow him through a tight corridor in the bramble of jungle trees and the thick web of hanging vines. The corridor had been hacked and burnt through, its edges jagged and scarred, but by this point, Nisri no longer seemed to care.
Kamala paused and raised her head to the air, her hair hanging freely. She sighed, the weight of the world evaporating from her expression. Turk moved to her and whispered, “What’s wrong?”
“The ghosts,” Kamala said. “They’ve gone quiet. We’re almost at the truth of it, my love.” She sounded relieved, and truth be told, so was Turk.
He took her by the arm and guided her to the path, earning stares from the others in the process. He no longer cared; being charged for fraternising with an NCO seemed horribly trivial. Almost in response to his thoughts, Kamala smiled.
4
The howling seemed to be carried on many voices, all of which appeared to be approaching quickly. The jungle rustled and buzzed, as though someone were taking a chainsaw to the trees. The tyranids were drawing closer by the moment, and Rezail found his fingers nervously caressing the vox detonator.
Rezail watched as Sabaak scaled the giant stalagmite-toothed walls, some twenty metres off the ground, and shoved the explosive into a crevice shared by the wall of Devotion and Emperor. If anything, Rezail hoped, they could seal themselves off in Emperor and still escape. It was a thin expectation, admittedly, but it was always human nature to pray against all odds for the favourable outcome.
Rezail activated his micro-bead. “We’ve planted the explosive. The tyranids are coming.” A wash of static greeted him in return. “I suggest you get rid of your satchel.”
There was no response. Rezail sighed. The buzzing from the jungle was growing louder, and Rezail could see the trees quaking under some mysterious force. He held the vox-caster and revved his chainsword, spinning the teeth counter-clockwise for more cutting power. The other men pulled their weapons, and silently mouthed whatever prayers brought them the greatest solace. Each of them prepared in their own way, and then watched the wide tunnel leading to Devotion. The grinding, buzzing noise increased in pitch.
Sabaak clambered down and pulled out his bolt pistol and scimitar, while Sarish idly spun the two laspistols in his hands. The other Guardsmen pulled their lasguns and waited nervously.
“Well, commissar,” Tyrell whispered, “any regrets?”
Rezail smiled, his attention focused on the tunnel and the jungle beyond. He revved his chainblade again. “You’re joking,” he said.
“Not at all. A burdened mind weighs us all down.”
“My burdens are inconsequential,” Rezail said with a smile, “and nothing I can’t shear away with my chainblade and my faith combined. Prepare yourself… here they come.”
“Hell!” Tyrell whispered, watching the tunnel suddenly fill with the enemy.
The others were moving quickly along the cavern wall when Turk heard his micro-bead hiss.
“Hello?” he asked, but there was no response. There wasn’t the need for one. “We’d better hurry!” he shouted to the group ahead, pushing against their backs to move them more quickly.
Ballasra nodded and pointed to the end of their journey: a small fissure angled up into the wall. They hurried into the high, narrow passage, racing against time that they knew was long past spent. Turk dropped the satchel at the mouth of the corridor, and hurried after the others as they scaled the steep and rock strewn slope. He recited a prayer over and over again, in the back of his mind, hoping he wouldn’t have his spine snapped in the inevitable explosion.
The tyranids screeched and chattered in the jungles behind them, and gave chase. The jungles were filled with them, probably thanks to the snake breeds that were digging tunnels through every metre of wall, trying to reach the biomass.
The Guardsmen fired their boltguns as they backed away, trying to stem the wave of the dog-like beasts, small tyranids that attacked their targets in numbers. With enlarged heads and overly developed fangs, six spiked legs a piece, and elongated tails, they swarmed over two Guardsmen, biting and spitting out chunks of flesh and muscle. The sight sickened Rezail, but he’d heard of this in other furiously carnivorous species; it took longer to chew and swallow than to chew and spit, so the creatures had grown adept at stripping their targets first and eating later. Both soldiers succumbed in seconds, screaming and falling to the ground, where more dogs tore into their messy carcasses.
Sarish was firing both laspistols at the larger runners and centipedes that were heading for him and the others. With expert shots, Sarish felled them two at a time, while Sabaak finished off the injured. Tyrell tried intercepting those that slipped through by standing between the commissar and the tyranids, but the fight was already so wild and chaotic that it seemed as if they were under attack from all sides. The commissar was already brandishing his chainsword like a true battle-trained alumnus of the Schola Progenium, his blade revving and whining as it cut through the carapace of a simian-like creature with barbed arms.
A human cry pierced through the chainsaw’s scream, and Rezail turned to see Sabaak drop his bolt pistol and stare down at his chest. A fist-sized alien seed had lodged inside his torso. It opened like a flower in bloom, further cracking the sternum apart, but instead of blossoming with petals, tiny black beetles poured forth. Sabaak couldn’t scream, the agony so intense that he contorted into seizures. The bugs ran riot over his flesh, burrowing holes into his skin.
Sarish drew his aim and levelled four shots into the tyranid gunner that had fired the round. By the time he turned his guns on Sabaak, the young soldier was already falling face first into the jungle soil. Without a word, the Duf adar continued firing at the advancing tyranids.
Rezail, meanwhile, swung the chainsword into a runner, severing half its limbs. It convulsed on the ground, spraying yellow ichor on the commissar’s boots. He grunted in disgust.
“Adjutant, shoot that thing, please!” he said.
Tyrell snap-fired a shot into the tyranid before firing on an advancing biped.
“Thank you!” Rezail said, deflecting the biped’s scythe as it swung at Tyrell’s neck, and opening its torso to Tyrell’s laspistol.
The chameleon appeared out of nowhere, literally. Its two pereopods arched down and impaled Sarish through the chest, out through his back and into the soil. Sarish never said a word. He grunted in pain, and fired his two pistols into the chameleon’s face before it could withdraw. Both he and the creature fell to the side, their mutual deaths equally silent.
“It’s just you and me, commissar,” Tyrell yelled, firing at the incoming flood of dog-like biters. There must have been a hundred of them swarming towards the two men. “Oh Holy Emperor!” he cried.
Rezail paused for long enough to cry over his micro-bead. “Get out, get out!”
Then the tyranids swept over both men, sharp teeth biting through the muscles in Tyrell’s and Rezail’s legs. Both men toppled immediately, their voices shrieking in agony. The creatures tore into their faces, necks, arms and chests, never noticing Rezail’s single arm held high above them; the one holding the vox detonator.
The micro-bead clicked and hissed again, and Turk screamed for them to move. This was it, he knew it was. The tyranids behind him were closing fast, but the blinding sunlight above beckoned and promised safety. He couldn’t see where they were going, but he pushed hard and dragged the stumbling Guardsman to his feet before he could fall. And then… cataclysm.
The vo
x-signal reached all the receivers almost simultaneously. The receivers primed the detonators and the detonators triggered the explosives. The three small explosions did little, other than to collapse some rock formations. The explosions from the seven Sentinels, however, combined with the fuel drums, turned the birds into massive frag bombs, incinerating nearby tyranids that were focused on their diet of the planet.
The pressure wave spread burning wreckage across the caverns, and hammered a mortal blow against the network. Giant slabs of rock tore away, shifting the weight above it. Limestone shattered and cracked for dozens of metres inside the rock strata. The tyranids heard the thunder rumble through the walls and tried to run… but there was nowhere left to go.
The walls could no longer support the weight of the desert above them, and the tyranids’ network of tunnels had destabilised the area further. The caverns collapsed, bringing a fall of sand and giant limestone rocks plummeting into the jungle. The tyranids scrambled away from the falling sky and the cascading pillars of sand. The fall turned into an avalanche, and in moments, the ceilings over Apostle, Basilica, Cathedral and Devotion collapsed.
In turn, the weight of the buckling caverns cracked through the roofs of the many unexplored caves below. This precipitated a second cave-in that crushed the unexplored beauty of the lower network. Sand and debris rained into ancient underground seas, past kilometre high waterfalls, and onto fossilised jungles preserved and sparkling with mineral coats. The deep collapse acted like a drain, pulling at all the tunnels and connecting caves, until it tore the entire network down into ruin.
One moment Turk was running, rumbling sand beneath his tired legs and the blue sun above his head, the next, he was falling, the world pulled out from beneath his feet. Turk slammed back into the sand after a terrible moment of freefalling, the drop a stomach-lurching ride, and then tumbled down the longest slope he’d ever experienced.
The ground levelled out, and Turk finally rolled to a stop. He was dizzy and sick, his senses reeling, unanchored. A dust cloud obscured everything around him, while static bursts discharged and dazzled him. Someone’s scream forced him to focus; a Guardsman was being swallowed by a sinkhole in the sand, his hands frantically scrambling to find purchase. He was neck deep; nose deep a second later, his eyes impossibly wide in panic. Turk scrambled to grab him, but it was too late, he simply vanished.
The pull of the sand continued, and Turk felt the desert beneath his own feet drag him slowly to the same hole. The sand felt too liquid, robbed of its cohesion. More static discharged and flared against the choked air. Turk leapt to the side and crawled against the current, losing a metre to every one he gained. Finally, he dragged himself onto a stable patch, and turned to see sand spiralling around sand in a torpid whirlpool. There must have been an air pocket somewhere beneath him. Add the strange properties of the sand, and the drag was enough to pull men down to their doom.
Turk collapsed atop his small island, panting and exhausted. He felt like he’d been running for as long as he could remember being alive. He ached. He was tired in a way that made him dizzy. He wanted to sleep, but there was no promise that his ordeal was over. The tyranids, he realised, and that thought alone was enough to shock him with adrenaline.
He looked around in mad panic, trying to get his bearings, but saw nothing that made sense. A massive dust cloud hung in the air, slowly settling and sparking. The sand sloped upward and away into a massive dune that seemed to stretch to impossible heights. Streams of sand continued pouring down the slope. They were thick, at first, but thinned slowly to a trickle. The more the dust storm settled, and the more Turk could see, the higher the dune soared, until its stature proved too incredible to comprehend.
Turk’s micro-bead crackled to life, the voice strained and broken by bursts of static. Others had survived, Turk realised, gratefully. Slowly, the survivors found one another and gathered together: Nisri, Turk, Ballasra and a handful of others. When Turk found Kamala, they embraced and kissed, ignoring decorum and scandal. They then found two more men, their bodies snapped and twisted by unkind falls, and another two with broken legs and arms. The scout Mousar was among the dead, his mouth and eyes caught in a gasp, his neck turned at an odd angle. Turk quietly covered his scarred face with his kafiya.
“Has anyone seen Chalfous?” Ballasra asked. They all shook their heads in quiet shock, although Turk suspected it was Chalfous he had seen drowning.
Turk claimed the 892nd’s banner from one of the fallen Guardsmen, and then they waited for the dust to settle completely. As it did, what they saw made even less sense. The sand dune that stretched above their heads was at least a kilometre tall. They could finally see far enough to follow the dune’s ridge by sight, before realising that it wasn’t a dune, but the lip of a giant crater. It was dozens of kilometres in diameter, massive whirlpools of sand and giant daggers of upturned rock dotted across its surface. They were at the bottom of the giant bowl that had once been the caverns.
As they explored their surroundings, Ballasra whistled them over. A claw had appeared in the sand, followed by the upper body of a wounded snake. Turk drew his pistol and killed the tyranid before it could crawl free.
Over the next hour, the survivors found refuge in the shade of a giant finger of rock that broke the skin of the desert. It was encrusted with mud, its water long past drunk by the desert. They buried the dead as best they could, tended to the wounded, killed the occasional injured tyranid that had somehow crawled its way out of the ground, and discussed ways of escaping the crater.
5
It was night, and the air in the crater was deathly cold. The survivors huddled together to keep warm, and they covered the two injured men in the Imperial banner.
They’d found one brief hope in a small puddle of water that had trickled to the surface, but by the time dusk had arrived, the greedy desert had drunk the puddle back up. Now they slept the sleep of the dead, waiting for dawn before attempting to crawl up the crater’s dune wall. Not that they believed they would have much success. The slope was too steep.
Turk started awake, Kamala’s hand gently covering his mouth.
“What is it?” he said, instantly awake. The others did not stir, the deep chill of the early morning drawing them deeper into their exhausted lethargy.
Kamala’s eyes were black under the night sky. Turk felt disquieted by the way her gaze seemed to reach and rifle through his very soul. She was searching for something, searching for an anchor. Kamala kneeled down next to him and waited for him to sit up.
“Beloved, what is it?” he asked.
“The stars are silent again,” she said.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” he asked, hoping no more would come of this.
“No,” she said, a sob escaping her lips. “No it isn’t. I always hear the stars… always… I hear them throb and ache. I hear the echoes of the Astronomicon, the whispers of the warp trying to eat its way into my head.” She thumped her temple with her palm. “The Black Ships… the Black Ships find us and teach us how to ignore all but the Emperor’s voice, but the noise is always there. It never leaves us. Never! Except….” Her gaze flitted back up to the stars, her eyes suddenly lost in the silent heavens.
Turk grabbed her shoulders gently, forcing her to focus on him again. “Kamala, why are the stars silent? The tyranids?”
“We killed them,” she said, her voice broken. “We killed one ship. One.”
“One?” Turk said, dread like cold water washing through his limbs and organs. “There was more than one?”
“We killed scouts,” Kamala whispered. “All that terror… all that horror for one scout ship.”
“More are coming?”
“No,” Kamala whispered, “more are here.”
Nisri felt the low tremor move through the ground, building in strength. Streams, and then rivers, of sand bled from the dune wall. Entire sections hissed as they collapsed and slid. Everyone was awake and standing, their fatigue robbing them of the w
ill to run, to cry, or to hide.
It was Ballasra who pointed to the distant wall, where the starry sky framed perfectly the lip of the crater. A dust cloud rose to blanket the crater’s lip, and tyranids began pouring over the side and down the slope like the seething dark mass of a living shadow.
They numbered in the thousands. They numbered in the endless.
“They’re coming from the south,” Ballasra said.
“There was another ship,” Nisri said. “Merciful Emperor, there was another ship.”
“Make ready,” Turk said, simply. “We have more left to kill.”
Slowly, silently, the Guardsmen prepared themselves. The tyranids were several minutes away, but gone was the anticipation of battle or the frayed nerves of eagerness. There was only the quiet determination borne of a bone-aching weariness and a desperate yawning to be done with it. They had fought, better than they had ever expected to fight, and they had won against incredible odds.
Nisri watched them prepare. He was proud of them, despite their differences… even because of them. How different things might have been if he hadn’t been so stubborn, if Turk and he hadn’t fought. This was not the time for regrets.
He knew what he had to do, for himself, the Guard be damned, his tribe be equally cursed. He called Turk over, beckoning him to the other side of the rock to speak.
Both men walked quietly, Turk perhaps sensing what was to come. When, finally, they were out of earshot of the others, Nisri straightened and spoke.
“I just wanted to say… it was an honour, Prince Iban Salid,” Nisri said, quietly, “and I ask you lead them into battle one last time.”
“I shall,” Turk replied, grasping Nisri’s outstretched arm, “and the honour was mine, Prince Dakar. Journey well.”
[Imperial Guard 04] - Desert raiders Page 22
