The Last Ditch

by Sandy Mitchell

  ‘We’d be in orbit,’ I said.

  Mires nodded. ‘A long, elliptical one. Take us months to get back. Supplies would be low, and the air pretty thick. But we should have got control again by then.’

  ‘And if we haven’t, we’ll have slowed enough for the shuttles to take us off,’ I finished.

  ‘Exactly,’ Mires said, looking cheerful for the first time since our initial meeting in the docking bay. He glanced at me, anxiously seeking approval, clearly not wanting to sign off on such an insanely risky course of action alone. ‘You want to run this by your people before we get started?’

  I shook my head. I already knew what Kasteen and Broklaw would say; a slender chance of survival would be better than none as I’d proven for myself on far too many occasions. I sighed, trying not to wonder if this time would turn out to be the exception. ‘Just do it,’ I said, hoping I hadn’t killed us all a day early.

  FIVE

  The bridge was still looking more like a collection of scrap than a functioning command centre, but a few more of the lecterns had been patched together and hastily manned by the time I took my seat as close to Mires’s control throne as I could. My chair seemed solid enough, welded to the deck behind one of the shattered crew stations which hadn’t been brought back into operation yet, and which would give me something to cling on to if the worst happened, which I was morbidly convinced it would. From where I sat I had a clear view of the pict screen, which at the moment was showing rather too much of the rapidly-approaching planet for my peace of mind, and, more importantly, a clear view of Mires: though it would be scant consolation, I’d privately determined that if things did go terminally ploin-shaped, he’d get to the Golden Throne a few minutes ahead of the rest of us.

  ‘How are we doing?’ I asked him, gripping the arms of my seat as I spoke, sure my augmetic fingers were leaving dents in the metalwork34. I kept my voice light, though, and I was careful to slump a little against the worn and lumpy padding, so I’d look more at ease than I actually was.

  ‘Ready as we’ll ever be,’ he responded, sounding a lot more like how I really felt than I did.

  ‘Best get to it, then,’ I said, reflecting that as last words went, they sounded remarkably prosaic. Perhaps I should have made a run for the saviour pods, now the guards had been withdrawn in anticipation of the outer decks becoming hotter than a baker’s oven, while I’d had the chance; but if this ridiculous stratagem succeeded despite the odds, the Commissariat would have me packed off to a penal legion for desertion almost as soon as I hit the ground. At least if I died today my reputation would remain intact, much good it would do me.

  By this time, the mottled white mass of the planet had grown to fill almost the entire screen: a second later the horizon line disappeared altogether, leaving nothing but the face of the planet towards which we were plummeting. Even in my most pessimistic imaginings, I’d had no idea we were as close to annihilation as that.

  ‘Give it everything you’ve got!’ Mires barked down the speaking tube to the enginarium, and, in spite of the on-board gravity field fluctuating to compensate, I could swear I’d felt a sudden surge of extra acceleration. Highly unlikely, of course, as the engines had been flat out ever since he’d suggested this insane manoeuvre, but perhaps his sweating subordinates had managed to wring a little more out of them by sheer willpower.

  ‘Ciaphas,’ Kasteen voxed, an undercurrent of tension in her voice which, under the circumstances, I could hardly blame her for. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘We’re about to hit the atmosphere,’ I said. ‘Is everyone secure?’ Even in extremis, I remembered to sound as though I cared about the welfare of the troopers; in the unlikely event of us getting out of this mess, we’d be going into action against the orks before too long, and I wanted to be sure they’d watch my back for me when we did.

  ‘As secure as we can manage,’ Kasteen said. ‘We’ve welded the Chimeras to the deck, and padded them inside with as much bedding and other stuff as we can find. We’re packed in like preserved rations, but we should survive the worst of the buffeting.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ I replied, hoping that an outward show of confidence would keep morale as high as possible under the circumstances. Gradually, to my inexpressible relief, the curve of the horizon reappeared in the pict screen, a faint sliver of black drifting up from the bottom left hand corner.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ Mires urged, as if the Fires of Faith were a recalcitrant pack mule needing to be cajoled.

  ‘It seems to be working,’ I told Kasteen after a few more minutes of tense anticipation, the huge sense of relief I felt no doubt evident in my tone.

  Confident that our headlong plunge to oblivion had been arrested, I began studying the face of the world we were approaching, hoping to pick out some landmark I recognised, but by now our ventral hull plating was beginning to glow a dull ackenberry red, the haze of ionising air rising all round the external imagifers, and all I could discern on the planet below us were a few patches of grey murk, which were probably just clouds dropping a fresh load of snow onto the already frigid landscape beneath them.

  ‘Hang on,’ Mires cautioned, ‘it’s going to get rough.’ Something I’d already deduced for myself; despite the best efforts of whoever was trying to keep the internal gravity stable, the ship was beginning to judder around us as the tenuous upper atmosphere clawed at her keel.

  My grip tightened on the armrests again. ‘How much longer?’ I asked, trying not sound as worried as I felt.

  ‘Just a few minutes,’ Mires said, his voice betraying the euphoria of a gambler who has just bet the pot on a low scoring hand, and is beginning to realise everyone else’s is even worse. ‘We’re about to bounce back into space.’

  At that moment, a darker speck appeared against the face of the iceball. I leaned forward in my borrowed seat, trying to get a clearer view of it. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  Mires began to look as though one of the other players had just drawn a pair of inquisitors. His face, or at least the portion of it I could see beneath his beard, paled. ‘The orbital docks,’ he said.

  ‘They’re not that big, are they?’ I asked, as the horizon line continued to crawl across the pict screen. The dot moved with it, passing into the blackness of space, where it immediately began to shine like a bright star, smack in the middle of the screen.

  ‘Big enough,’ Mires said grimly.

  I stared at the swelling image of the docks in the pict screen as we approached. The vast structure seemed to be growing with every passing heartbeat, and a quick glance at the auspex on the lectern next to mine was enough to confirm that we were hurtling towards it at a speed which would reduce both it and us to a cloud of scrap if we collided. The blip marking the void station was dead ahead of us, a couple of smaller, moving echoes nearby probably vessels casting off hastily in an attempt to scurry out of our way while they still could. They were even visible on the pict, or so I managed to convince myself, the faint glow of their engines moving slowly against the starfield.

  ‘Are we going to hit it or not?’ I demanded, my horrified gaze fixed on the orbital station, which now all but filled the screen. I was able to make out individual spires and docking arms by now, and a handful of ships like our own, which for whatever reason had apparently elected to remain despite the danger35.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Mires said, chewing his lip nervously. I felt my fingers closing around the arms of my chair again, as though I had hold of his neck. ‘It’s going to be close.’

  Fat lot of help that was. ‘Can we use the utility boats’ engines to nudge us off course?’ I asked.

  ‘If we could we’d already have done it,’ Mires said dismissively, but right then I was too terrified to take offence. ‘It’d do about as much good as climbing out an airlock and farting.’

  ‘If the hatches haven’t been welded shut by our skip through the atmosphere,’ Kolyn added, glaring at his captain from behind the auspex station.

&n
bsp; ‘Academic anyway,’ Mires said, his gaze fixed on the station ahead of us. As the image grew, I began to appreciate just how vast and complex the city-sized structure we were hurtling towards was. The larger features I’d noticed before, the great central mass and the docking arms protruding from it, making the whole thing resemble nothing so much as a huge metallic starfish, took on texture, each blemish the size of a hab block. Auspex and vox arrays depended from them, like vines on a ruined citadel, and I began to discern innumerable smaller craft scurrying between them, like insects round a nest. If our own vox antennae hadn’t been sheared off by our recent dive through the atmosphere, I’d no doubt a barrage of panic-stricken messages would be echoing through the bridge by now.

  ‘Cut power to three, five and seven,’ Mires barked, and I felt a sudden vertiginous lurch, as the unseen toilers in the enginarium complied with with his order. ‘And sort that damned gravity out!’

  The huge bulk of the void station began to drift away from the centre of the screen now, and I felt a sudden flare of renewed hope. ‘Whatever you’ve just done, it seems to be working36,’ I said, although he seemed to have cut it a bit fine for my liking37.

  ‘We’re not clear yet,’ Mires said, gripping his arm rests as tightly as I was clenching mine. I held my breath, as one of the docking arms swept in from the corner of the screen, edge on to our bow. ‘We’re not going to make it!’

  ‘Brace!’ I voxed, an instant before we struck it a glancing blow, which made the old ship clang like a cathedral bell. The deck juddered beneath me, and half the luminators in the ceiling blew, showering us with broken glass; a second later harsh red emergency lighting replaced them, bathing us all in blood.

  A glittering cloud of venting atmosphere burst from the docking arm as we tore a great gash along it, and debris began haemorrhaging into space from the wound we’d inflicted. Chunks of metal, cargo containers, and what looked uncomfortably like bodies, blizzarded past the imagifer, then we were clear.

  ‘What was that?’ Kasteen voxed, too disciplined to add to the babble of profanity echoing round the bridge, although I doubt that I’d have been so restrained myself in her place.

  ‘We hit the orbital,’ I said. ‘But we seem to be in one piece.‘

  Hull breached in sections Gamma two and Beta three,’ Kolyn reported a moment later. ‘Emergency bulkheads holding.’

  ‘We’ve still got air, anyway,’ Mires said, his eyes fixed on the pict screen. The stars had become a whirling kaleidoscope, and the ominous bulk of the planet rolled regularly across the screen. I’d seen the same thing in the saviour pod I’d left the Hand of Vengeance in so precipitately, so I didn’t have to ask what was going on; we were tumbling, unable to correct our course or steady ourselves without the manoeuvring thrusters. ‘Any casualties?’

  ‘Not so far,’ Kolyn said. ‘The outer decks were still too hot for anyone to be there.’ He shrugged, and gestured at the planet looming over us all. The hull was already beginning to glow red again, and the same faint wisps of ionising atmosphere I’d seen before were beginning to curl around it. ‘Not that it matters. We’ll all die together when we hit.’

  SIX

  It wasn’t the first time I’d arrived on a planet the hard way, of course. Our saviour pod had reached Perlia with most of its braking systems inoperative, after an orkish fighter pilot had used it for a spot of target practice as we’d entered the atmosphere, and the last time I’d set foot on an iceworld, the shuttle I’d been on had fallen victim to a lucky bit of speculative anti-aircraft fire on the way down, but I’d never crashed in anything even a tenth as massive as a starship. I’d like to be able to claim that the experience was less traumatic, but in truth it was just as terrifying as the previous occasions on which I’d first greeted a new world by knocking a dent in it.

  Once again, the saviour pod I’d earmarked crossed my mind as a potential alternative to remaining aboard, but by now we were well within the upper levels of the atmosphere, which would render launching it risky at best; not to mention the fact that I’d probably fry before I got close enough to board the thing anyway.

  I rose from my seat for a moment, unbuckled my belt, and refastened it around the back of the chair to fashion a makeshift restraint. No point in falling out if I could help it. No sooner had I finished the operation than I felt a tremor run through the entire hull. ‘What was that?’ I asked, trying to keep a note of alarm from my voice.

  ‘Thermal shock,’ Kolyn said brusquely. ‘The outer hull’s heating up faster than the core, so it’s expanding unevenly. We’ll be getting some stress failures before long.’

  ‘You mean we’re falling apart?’ I asked, feeling a flare of panic. My chest felt constricted, the air harder to breathe, and after a moment I realised with some relief that this was because the temperature on the bridge was beginning to rise, not merely a response to the stress.

  ‘I hope not,’ Mires said grimly. ‘Just minor stuff.’

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ I said sarcastically as the buffeting increased, despite the best efforts of the beleaguered enginseers to keep the gravity constant. If it failed, our tumbling progress through the atmosphere would fling us about like grox steaks in a blender, and with much the same result. No doubt Jurgen’s tender stomach was considerably put out by now; reminded by association of the thousand or so troopers accompanying him, I vox-cast a few appropriate platitudes, along with a suitably redacted report of our current position. ‘We’re still in one piece,’ I told them, ‘and descending slowly. If we all keep our heads we’ll be fine.’ Which was a bit of a stretch, even for me.

  With the crimson glare of the emergency luminators, and the steadily rising temperature, the bridge was beginning to resemble the inside of a bake oven by now. I blinked a few drops of sweat from my eyes, and tried to focus on the pict screen, although the picture it was relaying from the outside was far from reassuring; the vessel’s superstructure was flowing like candle wax, the spires and turrets protruding from the main hull softening under the incredible heat of atmospheric friction, or simply ablating away to join the comet tail of debris spiralling in our wake. I found myself blessing the foresight of whichever naval architect had seen fit to site the bridge and enginarium so close to the middle of the hull38.

  Our tumbling progress through the atmosphere, and the nimbus of plasma surrounding us, made it hard to distinguish anything much beyond the hull, but it seemed to me that the horizon line on the pict screen was no longer curved. In fact it was looking positively jagged, and my bowels clenched as I divined the reason. ‘Those are mountains!’ I said. ‘Can we get over them?’

  ‘Throne knows,’ Mires replied, gripping an aquila medallion so tightly I could see blood oozing from his fist. The vast bulk of the ship groaned, and we lurched violently, throwing me against my makeshift restraint.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ I asked without thinking, only becoming aware that I’d voiced the thought when Kolyn replied.

  ‘Primary power relays just shorted out,’ he reported. ‘Everything’s being channelled to gravitics.’ Which was the only reason we weren’t all dead already.

  I took another glance at the screen, too terrified to tear my gaze away. We were low enough by now to be whipping up a hypersonic blizzard in our wake, ripping a gash though metres of ice and permafrost, while the atmospheric bow wave ahead of us pulverised the landscape. A few scrawny conifers clinging hopefully to the snow-encrusted slopes were whirled aside in an instant, mashed to kindling, and then, with a thunderclap like the wrath of the Emperor Himself, the hammerblow of air slammed against the wall of rock facing us.

  The whole mountain seemed to stagger from the impact, the slopes in our immediate vicinity scoured of their covering of ice and snow in a heartbeat, boulders smashed to gravel an instant after that. Flung into the air, the largest pieces of debris clanged against our hull in an ominous carillon.

  ‘We’re almost down,’ I voxed to the sweating troopers below decks, all too aware of
how alarming it would sound to them, ‘and running into a few pebbles being thrown up by our slipstream. Hang on, and brace for impact.’

  The looming peaks were towering over us on both sides now, although it was hard to make out any details of the topography we were so comprehensively rearranging. At least we weren’t likely to hit anyone; from what I remembered, most Nusquans remained comfortably tucked up in their cavern cities as much as they could, only venturing onto the surface when they absolutely had to. There might be orks around, of course, if the mountains we were skimming over were the Great Spinal Range, where the majority of the greenskins had gone to ground, but if we were doing them any harm it just served them right for being on somebody else’s planet in the first place so far as I could see.

  We ricocheted off a low-lying ridge, ripping another gash in our battered hull, then mercifully there were no more peaks barring our way. The pict screen was blinded by flying debris and whirling snow, our altitude no more than a few tens of metres, and, praise the Emperor, a huge expanse of clear ice fields suddenly opened out ahead of us through the murk. I just had time to vox a final warning to the troopers, getting as far as ‘Everyone brace! We’re about to–’ when we did, with an impact which jarred up my spine like a kick from a Dreadnought, rattling the fillings in my teeth.

  A second or two later I felt a second impact, then a third and a fourth, each gouging out a canyon a score or more kilometres long in the permafrost; how many times we bounced I couldn’t have said, but each dissipated a little more of our momentum, and after a while the succession of hammerblows to my sacrum was replaced by a continuous juddering, which would undoubtedly have been a great deal more disconcerting had I not become accustomed to riding in a Salamander being driven by Jurgen over the years. It was hard to make out much on the snow-blinded pict screen, but so far as I could tell we were sliding in a cloud of steam, melting a channel in the ice about three quarters the depth of our hull, the temperature of which was visibly falling by the moment, the searing heat of atmospheric entry being leached away by the chill surrounding us. We’d finally reached a stable orientation too, more or less the right way up, for which I was more than grateful when our much abused gravity systems finally failed, hurling those crewmen who hadn’t had the sense to lash themselves down the way I had into the corners of the bridge like so many sacks of meat.