The Last Ditch

by Sandy Mitchell

  Magot grimaced. ‘Who let that one rip?’ she asked, with a pointed glance in Jurgen’s direction.

  ‘The inner sanctum connects directly with the volcanic vents,’ I told her.

  Jurgen sniffed the sulphur-reeking air. ‘Smells like Hell’s Edge,’ he said, and I nodded, reminded all too strongly of the settlement beside the magma lake on Periremunda, and the unpleasant surprise which had awaited us there.

  ‘Secure the section,’ Grifen ordered, and the troopers fanned out, one team to each of the tunnel mouths leading off from opposite sides of the chamber.

  ‘Good idea,’ I agreed, shoving the door closed behind us. There was a lot of the complex we hadn’t covered on our way in, and the last thing we needed was to be taken by surprise by an ork or two sneaking up on us while we were engrossed in carrying out Izembard’s instructions. The thin slab of metal wouldn’t delay them for more than a couple of seconds, but the noise they made forcing it open would be all the warning we needed. ‘Jurgen, keep the exit covered.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ he replied, dragging a chair from behind the nearest of the lecterns. He subsided onto it, his melta aimed squarely at the door, resting comfortably on top of the abandoned control station.

  I handed him the data-slate, after paging down to the directions the tech-priest had given me. ‘I’ll need both hands for this,’ I told him, looking around at the instrumentation surrounding us. There were a lot of flashing lights and flickering dials, rather too many of them red or with the needles bouncing back and forth against their stops for my liking. ‘Where do I start?’

  ‘Three lecterns on a dais, it says here,’ Jurgen told me, his forehead furrowing. ‘What’s a dais?’

  ‘This is.’ I mounted the circular platform, around the circumference of which three lecterns were equidistantly spaced, so that their operators would be facing outwards across the room. They’d all remained at their posts with single-minded dedication or been taken by surprise at exactly the same time, judging by the amount of blood which had been spilled here, and I moved gingerly, the soles of my boots adhering unpleasantly to the still tacky floor.

  ‘The one facing the door should have a dial on it,’ my aide continued, ‘saying “Flow Chamber Pressure”. Is the needle anywhere near the red bit?’

  I looked down at the dial in question. ‘If it was any deeper into it,’ I said, ‘it would be about to go round again.’ The indicator was hard against the stop at the limit of its display, and I didn’t need a tech-priest to tell me that things were looking grim. ‘Which buttons do I press?’

  ‘None of ’em,’ Jurgen said. ‘It says here you need the emergency pressure vent, on the pumps themselves. Down the left-hand corridor.’

  ‘Left as I’m facing, or as we came in?’ I asked, already on the move.

  ‘As you’re facing,’ Jurgen said, and I abruptly reversed direction, heading for the opposite tunnel mouth. He rose to his feet as I sprinted past. ‘Should I come too?’ he asked, and I shook my head.

  ‘Keep covering our backs,’ I told him, glancing back as I did so. ‘If this doesn’t work we’ll have to get out of here fast, and we won’t want any greenskins getting in the way.’ He was already out of sight by the time I finished, but our comm-beads relayed the rest of my words comfortably enough.

  Despite the urgency of my errand, I found my pace slowing as I entered the chamber, unable to prevent myself from glancing around in awestruck astonishment. I was in a huge natural cavern, the walls fissured and cracked, many of them leaking foul-smelling vapours; no doubt the removal of a sense of smell was high on the list of augmetic enhancements for the tech-priests who worked here. In the centre of it the pumps rose, three or four times the height of a man, pipes a metre or more in diameter driven deep into the rock beneath my feet, or cutting horizontally across the cavern to disappear into the wall. Several of them pointed in the direction of the turbine hall we’d seen on our way in, while others presumably carried the water from wherever it was collected, ready to be forced down into the bowels of the planet.

  ‘Commissar!’ Sergeant Grifen waved to me from beneath the shadow of the nearest of the pumps. ‘I think you should see this.’

  ‘So long as it’s quick,’ I said, acutely aware of every tick of the clock. But Grifen was a veteran, and as cognisant of the danger as I was; she wouldn’t divert my attention at so critical a juncture without excellent reason.

  ‘We’ve found the bodies,’ she said, sounding oddly uncertain. ‘Bits of them, anyway. I think.’

  As I rounded the huge metal tree trunk, I could see the reason for her reticence. A tangle of blood-slick metal and glass was piled up against the cavern wall, glittering eerily in the light from the overhead luminators.

  ‘Janni recognised them,’ Vorhees said, with a glance at Drere, who nodded.

  ‘Augmetics. Believe me, I’d know.’ Her mechanical lungs punctuated her words with an even hiss! click! ‘Looks like someone ripped them clean out of the cogboys.’

  ‘Or spat them out,’ I said, a peculiar crawling sensation moving up and down my spine as the memories of Hell’s Edge grew more vivid. The very notion was ridiculous, but I’d seen something almost identical then, and once planted the thought refused to go away. ‘Keep away from the fissures!’

  ‘Commissar?’ Grifen looked at me quizzically, no doubt wondering if I’d taken leave of my senses.

  ‘The fissures!’ I gestured to the cracks in the surface of the rock. The mound of grisly trophies was right beneath the largest, which certainly looked big enough to take a human cadaver; especially if it had been filleted of its non-organic components first.

  ‘Have you pulled the lever yet, sir?’ Jurgen voxed.

  ‘Just about to.’ Recalled to the matter of the moment I turned back to the bulkiest of the metal structures. As Izembard had assured me, a large control lectern was set into it, almost completely obscured by the number of prayer slips and wax seals adhering to its surface.

  Before I had taken more than a couple of strides, however, my attention was arrested by a faint echo of movement, almost inaudible over the steady rumbling of the mechanisms around us and the chugging of the pumps. I froze, listening intently, half convinced I’d imagined it.

  Then I heard it again, an unmistakable scuttling. ‘Pull back!’ I called, gesticulating wildly. ‘Get away from the walls!’

  Clearly still puzzled, Grifen and her troopers scurried to comply; she, Vorhees and Drere no doubt remembering our expedition through the ambull tunnels beneath Simia Orichalcae all too vividly. One of the troopers with them, a recent replacement we’d picked up on Coronus, was a little slower, aiming his lasgun down the dark cleft in the rock beside him from what he undoubtedly imagined was a safe distance.

  ‘I can hear some...’ he began, before his voice choked off in a panic-stricken scream, as something dark and fast with too many limbs erupted from the fissure. He managed to get off about three shots before going down, torn to shreds in a flurry of blows from the creature’s razor-edged talons.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Jurgen voxed urgently, alerted by the noise. ‘Are the orks attacking?’

  ‘There never were any orks!’ I shouted, as the four-armed monstrosity rose from the corpse of the eviscerated trooper, absently licking his blood from its face with a tongue that seemed far too long, to stare speculatively in our direction. ‘The place is swarming with tyranids!’

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Tyranids?’ Jurgen echoed, taking the news as phlegmatically as he always did. ‘No one told us about them.’

  The scuttling noise was all around us now, and even as the ’gaunt launched itself at me with its powerful hind legs, more of the creatures began to emerge from the rents in the rocks. ‘Pull back!’ I yelled, clipping it with a round from my laspistol, but the hideous creature barely slowed, its slavering maw gaping as it bounded in my direction with single-minded ferocity.

  The troopers opened up with their lasguns, dropping several of the newco
mers, but the swarm had been well and truly roused by now, and for every one that fell another came skittering out of the shadows with murderous intent, while reinforcements continued to pour through the clefts in the walls as though the rock itself was sweating tyranids. I parried the first slash of the oncoming ’gaunt’s scything claws with my chainsword, biting deep into its chitin-armoured thorax, and shot it through the brain as it opened its mouth to either scream defiance or attempt to bite my face off64.

  ‘Can you still get to the lever?’ Jurgen asked, ever mindful of our mission. I looked again at the largest pump, with its prominent control lectern; a dozen ’gaunts were bounding across the intervening space, and more movement flickered in the shadows at the base of the great metal column, almost as if they were guarding it65.

  ‘Not a chance,’ I told him, as a volley of lasgun fire took out the three leading ’nids, just as they began angling to cut us off from the tunnel we’d entered by. I’d be torn to pieces before I even got halfway to the controls, let alone begun the intricate rituals required to override whatever instructions the machine-spirits within them currently had. I put a las-bolt through the thorax of another ’gaunt, which had hurled itself at me in the wake of the first, and turned back to the tunnel.

  ‘Team two coming to assist,’ Magot voxed, to my heartfelt relief.

  ‘Stay in the control chapel and be ready to cover us,’ Grifen responded. ‘We’re coming in with a swarm on our arses.’

  ‘And get that Valkyrie back on the ground,’ I voxed the pilot. If we managed to make it as far as the surface, I didn’t want to go up with the power plant just because our ride was late.

  ‘We’ll be waiting,’ the pilot promised, ‘with the ramp down.’

  Then my attention was completely taken up with the urgent matter of survival. The creatures clustered around the pumps had ranged weapon symbiotes fused to their forelimbs, the sinister hiss of their discharges almost lost in the general cacophony.

  ‘Take out the gunners!’ I bellowed. The close combat bioforms were only a danger if they got within reach of us, but the living ammunition of the fleshborers would devour us alive from the inside out if their bearers managed to get off a lucky shot. Fortunately for us, the superior range of the troopers’ lasguns kept the ’nid gunners too far distant for accurate shooting, the deadly hail of tiny beetles they spat in our direction either falling short or going wide. But still they came, closing the distance every time we were forced to switch our aim to pick off a charging hormagaunt.

  ‘We can’t hold ’em off for long,’ Vorhees commented, firing short bursts in an attempt to conserve ammunition, but which we both knew would drain the powerpack frighteningly fast in any case.

  ‘Then don’t try!’ I urged, already running for the tunnel mouth. ‘We need to stay ahead of them!’ Lacking the powerful hind legs of their compatriots, which were bred by the hive mind to get into close combat as fast as possible, the termagants should be easy enough to outpace; or at least keep from getting into fleshborer range too quickly.

  I squeezed off a couple of shots at an outflanking hormagaunt, which was using its superior speed to try and cut us off from the tunnel we’d entered by, but the las-bolts ricocheted harmlessly from its exoskeleton; already committed to the attack, I ducked under a strike from its scything claws, felt the talon of one of its middle limbs catch for a moment in the fabric of my greatcoat, and rammed the tip of my chainsword up under its chin, tearing through throat and skull alike as I struggled to free the blade. A gout of vile-smelling ichor soaked my sleeve, and then I was clear, hurdling the carcass of another of the vile creatures, which had just been brought down by the lasgun fire of one of my companions.

  ‘Grenades!’ Grifen called, as we broke through the tightening noose to gain the dubious sanctuary of the tunnel.

  ‘Good plan,’ I agreed, turning to loose a couple of pistol shots at whatever was directly behind us, and finding that the entire width of the passageway was choked with bounding predators. I hit one in the leg, purely by luck, and it stumbled, impeding those behind it; which reacted by removing the obstruction in the most straightforward manner possible, slashing it to pieces in an instant. The only positive thing I could see in our situation was that at least the ’gaunts about to tear us apart were blocking the fire of their weaker broodmates with the ranged weapons.

  Grifen yanked a frag grenade out from beneath her coat, and lobbed it over her shoulder without breaking stride66. The troopers did the same, and, although it was probably my imagination, I could swear I heard the clatter of the canisters hitting the rockcrete over the scuttling and hissing of the brood behind us. Then the onrushing tide of chitinous death rolled over them.

  Just as I’d begun to convince myself that the fuses had been too long, and my shoulder-blades tensed in anticipation of a bone-shattering blow from behind, a quartet of overlapping explosions shook the corridor, jarring the floor beneath my feet. Unable to resist glancing back, I saw that the pursuing swarm had all but vanished, the walls and ceiling decorated with shreds of flesh and gouts of ichor; but before I had time to take in any more, the second wave surged into the passageway, flowing towards us with undiminished purpose. Once again the fleshborers hissed, and a clump of the deadly beetles they used as ammunition hit the floor a metre from where I was standing. The tiny creatures scurried around frantically for a second or two, in search of a host to burrow into, then mercifully expired.

  ‘Termagants incoming!’ I voxed, then turned and sprinted for the relative sanctuary of the control chapel.

  ‘We’re ready for ’em,’ Magot assured me, to my inexpressible relief; then we were clear of the tunnel, flinging ourselves aside to allow our companions a clear shot.

  The results were devastating. Magot had flicked her lasgun to full auto, and the troopers under her command had either followed her lead or been instructed to do so: a hail of fire scoured the tunnel, supplemented by a blast or two from Jurgen’s melta for good measure. When the noise ceased, the passageway resembled nothing so much as a butcher’s slab, the deadly organisms which had pursued us so relentlessly ripped apart by the merciless barrage as effectively as they’d threatened to do to us.

  ‘That’s seen ’em off,’ Magot said, with a fair dose of optimism, considering she’d seen for herself just how implacable the tyranids could be during their abortive invasion of Periremunda.

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ I cautioned, and, sure enough, the unmistakable skittering sound of claws on rock were already forcing their way through the dying echoes of Magot’s massacre. ‘They’ll come after us again as soon as they realise we’re not defending the choke point.’

  ‘Then let’s not hang around till they work it out,’ Grifen said, a sentiment I heartily agreed with.

  ‘Why didn’t they attack us as soon as we arrived?’ Jurgen asked, falling into place at my shoulder, his melta reassuringly ready for use. ‘They’d have taken us completely by surprise.’

  ‘I don’t think they realised we were here,’ I said. ‘They’d already killed everyone in the shrine.’ That much was a given; a swarm the size of the one we’d just encountered would have scoured the place before anyone had time to react.

  Jurgen nodded. ‘So they were sleeping it off when we arrived,’ he said, his brow furrowed with the effort of joining the dots.

  ‘Essentially,’ I agreed, although some of the details of what we’d found continued to nag at me. It made sense that the swarm would make for the deepest part of the complex to digest its meal, the instinctive behaviour of its constituent organisms would ensure that, but how had so many of the creatures got inside in the first place? The main entrance had definitely been sealed when we arrived.

  ‘At least we won’t have to worry about tripping any greenskin booby traps on the way out,’ Grifen commented, as we double-timed our way back towards the pad.

  ‘That’s something,’ I agreed, straining my ears for the scrabbling of talons against the rockcrete floor behind
us. I was just beginning to hope, against all reason and experience of the hideous creatures, that we’d succeeded in intimidating them so thoroughly that they’d given up the pursuit, when, faintly at first, almost drowned by the clattering of our bootsoles, I heard it.

  ‘What is it?’ Grifen asked, seeing me tilt my head in an attempt to isolate the elusive echo.

  ‘They’re coming,’ I said. ‘Behind us.’

  No sooner were the words out of my mouth than an agonised scream echoed down the corridor. Our point woman was down, a massive hole chewed through her torso by a fleshborer shot. As she flailed on the grubby rockcrete, innumerable tiny parasites continued to writhe inside the hideous wound, enlarging it, and burrowing ever deeper in an attempt to feed on the luckless squaddie’s vital organs.

  ‘And ahead,’ Magot said, pausing only to grant the Emperor’s peace67 to her unfortunate subordinate, who was clearly beyond all hope of medical aid.

  ‘How did they get ahead of us?’ I asked, opening fire on the small knot of ’gaunts which had appeared round a bend in the corridor. Then my own question was answered by the sight of an air vent further down the corridor, its metal mesh cover ripped and shredded by powerful claws. If they’d got into the utility conduits they could be anywhere.

  A storm of lasgun fire followed my lead, reaping bloody revenge for our loss. The leading tyranid lost its weapon and a large chunk of its carapace to Jurgen’s melta, but the survivors regrouped almost at once, bolstered by another group of new arrivals. I glanced back down the corridor behind us, seeing a flicker of movement in the distance, which could only be the main bulk of the swarm in hot pursuit.

  ‘We’re blocked in,’ I told Grifen, hoping I didn’t sound as panicky as I felt. ‘We need another way out.’

  Spotting a door in the wall a couple of metres away I flung it open, finding a small workshop behind it, which, judging by the scattering of tools, lubricants and lumps of flesh floating in jars of some foul-smelling liquid, had probably been used for the repair and maintenance of servitors.