The Last Ditch

by Sandy Mitchell

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next few days fell into a predictable pattern of tyranid assaults above and below, which we repeatedly repulsed, although not without grave losses among the defenders. The Nusquans bore the brunt of it, retreating cavern by cavern from the lower levels, and sealing the tunnels behind them wherever they could; but the tyranids were relentless, boring new passageways as soon as the old ones were closed, and altering their tactics with every fresh assault.

  We hardly had it easy on the surface, either; although for the most part, at least, the encircling swarm only came at us over the ice, the hive mind evidently having decided to reserve the majority of its burrowers for the assault on the caverns below. The few exceptions it threw at our fortifications in an attempt to outflank them were easy meat for the overlapping fire lanes of our heavy weapon emplacements: mindful of the lessons they’d learned so painfully on Corania, the 597th were well prepared for this particular tactic, and the ’nids soon went back to attempting to swamp us by sheer weight of numbers. We also had air support from the Valkyries of the PDF, which did sterling work in breaking up the main formations before they could throw themselves against our trench line, and for which we were truly thankful; but a continuous tide of malevolent chitin continued to batter against the breakwater of our defences with little respite.

  ‘I’m surprised they’re not using gargoyles against us,’ I said, having seen for myself how effective the airborne horrors could be at circumventing fixed defences more often than I would have liked, but to my vague surprise this particular swarm seemed to be eschewing the use of winged bioforms.

  ‘That would be because the crosswinds are too strong and unpredictable,’ Magos Izembard remarked tonelessly, sweeping into our command centre without warning, and making his way over to the hololith through the horde of bustling troopers necessary to coordinate such a huge operation. He seemed unusually agitated, although his familiar monotone did nothing to betray it; his body language was another matter entirely, however, and I must confess I was a little surprised. It’s an article of faith among the Mechanicus that strong emotions are a human weakness, and an unwelcome distraction on the path to understanding the Omnissiah, so whatever had the magos so worked up had to be grave indeed.

  ‘A pleasant surprise,’ I greeted him, although my suddenly itching palms were strongly intimating that his sudden advent was liable to be anything but good news. ‘What can we do for you?’

  ‘You can vox the commanders of the Nusquan 1st and the PDF,’ Izembard said, ‘and the governor, if you see much point in that. I have attempted to do so repeatedly, along with yourselves, but been unable to get a message through.’

  ‘All the vox-channels are pretty clogged,’ I said, reflecting that he’d probably taken their overloading as a sign of the Machine-God’s displeasure. ‘And operational messages get the highest priority.’

  ‘As they should,’ Izembard droned. ‘But I have news of the utmost importance.’

  ‘The last civilian shuttle’s just cleared the pad,’ Sulla voxed at that moment, from her command Chimera on the fringes of the starport125, and a ragged cheer broke out across the operations room. I didn’t suppose for one moment that we’d managed to clear every single civilian from the city; there were bound to be a few who’d stayed hidden with the idea of looting the deserted metropolis, or because they were just too stubborn or eccentric to leave, but, quite frankly, I felt that they deserved all they were going to get.

  ‘Pass the word to the Nusquans,’ Kasteen ordered, with some relief. ‘Abandon the lower levels and pull back.’ She glanced at the hovering tech-priest. ‘And you’d better get your cogboys out of the power plant too. When the troops leave, their lifeline’s going to be severed.’

  ‘Begin withdrawal,’ Broklaw transmitted to our people, almost simultaneously. ‘Fall back to the pads, and keep them clear.’

  ‘Commissar,’ Izembard said, ignoring the frantic activity around us. ‘You have to listen. We have a definite time at which the bioforms you found were frozen.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I said, adopting an expression of polite interest, and waiting for him to come to the point, which even a tech-priest was bound to do eventually. ‘You must be delighted to have finally worked it out.’

  ‘It’s not just a question of intellectual curiosity,’ Izembard grated, ‘it’s a matter of life and death. For this entire world.’

  To say I was surprised would be understating the matter considerably. In my experience, tech-priests were hardly given to exaggeration, and I looked at him again, more seriously, noting once more the signs of agitation he was obviously taking considerable pains to suppress. I furrowed my brow. ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow,’ I said. ‘Why should it matter so much when the ’nids arrived?’

  ‘Because of the impact which formed the geology of this region,’ Izembard said, striding to the hololith, and erasing the current tactical display with a flick of his mechadendrites. Broklaw took a step forward, a trenchant protest about this cavalier behaviour forming on his lips, which I forestalled with a gesture. Whatever this was about, I wanted to see it.

  A stylised cometary fragment appeared in the display, on an intersecting orbit with the looming bulk of Nusquam Fundumentibus, and duly collided with it. A few mountain ranges fell over, an impact crater appeared, and gigatonnes of vaporised slush rose up to enshroud the whole globe. When it cleared, the geography was more or less as I remembered it from the picts in the briefing slate.

  ‘The asteroid,’ I said. ‘You were trying to work out whether the ’nids got here before or after it hit.’

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ Izembard said. ‘So far as we can tell, they arrived at exactly the same time as the impact event.’

  ‘They hitched a lift on a comet?’ Broklaw asked, not bothering to hide his incredulity.

  ‘There was no comet,’ I said, the whole thing suddenly making sense to me. ‘It was a bioship, which crashed here, just like we did. Only at a much steeper angle.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Izembard said, and a cold chill rippled down my spine.

  ‘Which means we’re sitting right on top of it,’ I said.

  ‘A fragment, at least,’ Izembard said. ‘And from the increasing cohesion of the swarm we’ve observed recently, it’s safe to assume that it’s regenerating.’

  ‘The missing orks,’ I said, with horrified understanding. ‘The swarm’s been feeding it all this time.’ Which must mean that the whole of the Leeward Barrens was riddled with burrower tunnels, all the way out to the Spinal Range, and that for every ’nid we’d observed on the surface, untold numbers had been scuttling around undetected beneath our feet.

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ Izembard said. ‘Fortunately the city was too well defended for it to risk a direct assault before now, or it would have been fully reactivated by this point.’

  ‘When it does, it’ll re-establish a connection with the hive fleet that sent it,’ Kasteen said, her expression of stark realisation no doubt mirroring my own. ‘And there are over a dozen worlds in this sector which have been settled in the last few thousand years.’

  ‘It’ll be banging the dinner gong,’ I said, ‘with the entire sector on the menu.’

  ‘Then we need to destroy it,’ Kasteen said. ‘I’ll pass the word to the Nusquans to counter-attack, and we’ll reinforce with as many units as we can.’

  ‘That would be extremely inadvisable,’ Izembard said, to my immense and well-concealed relief. ‘The bioship fragment must be at least a kilometre beneath the lowest level of the city, and the only access to it would be along the tunnels bored by the tyranids themselves. We can infer that the system is extensive, but beyond that we have no way of telling which connect to the hive node, which to other destinations, and which have simply been left by a burrower moving from one place to another.’

  ‘And the tunnels aren’t going to be all that wide,’ I added. We’d all seen termagants swarming out of them, in the wake of the huge serpentine b
urrowers, so we could picture the number of troopers they’d hold easily enough. ‘We’d have to go in on foot.’ Which would make any large body of troops terrifyingly vulnerable, clustered together in the dark, the majority unable to turn around or use their weapons; and there was no doubt about it, we’d need huge numbers on our side to have any chance at all of getting through to our objective, even if we had a clue where it was.

  ‘Suicide to try,’ Broklaw agreed, which at least saved me the bother of trying to weasel my way out of leading this ridiculous expedition, as everyone would undoubtedly expect a Hero of the Imperium to do.

  I nodded, as though I’d been considering the matter carefully. ‘Not much chance of a kill team getting through either,’ I added, contriving to give the impression that I was reluctantly ruling that out as well; if the thought occurred to anyone else, it was carrots to credits who’d get stuck with the job of leading them in, so I’d better shoot it down now before someone started getting ideas. ‘There must be thousands of ’nids down there.’

  ‘Clearing the tunnels is a job for the Space Marines,’ Kasteen agreed. ‘We’ll brief them as soon as they arrive.’

  ‘Regrettably,’ Izembard said, ‘unless they do so within the next six to eight hours, it will be too late.’

  ‘Too late why?’ I asked, already dreading the answer.

  ‘Because our analysis of the response time of the outlying elements of the swarm to changes in circumstance elsewhere is tending towards zero,’ Izembard proclaimed dramatically. He glanced from one of us to another, seeing nothing but blank incomprehension on every face. ‘It’s woken up,’ he explained, in plainer Gothic, ‘and it’s coordinating the swarm with almost complete efficiency. We calculate that it will be strong enough to begin reaching out to the fleet which spawned it before the end of the day.’

  Kasteen, Broklaw and I looked at one another, shocked speechless. After a moment, I found my voice.

  ‘That doesn’t mean there are other bioships close enough to respond straight away,’ I said, aware even as I spoke that I was clutching at straws. Even if that were true, it would just be a matter of time before an armada of the hideous creatures descended on the sector, dooming not just Nusquam Fundumentibus, but untold numbers of other worlds; which would leave me uncomfortably short of boltholes to run for.

  ‘It doesn’t mean there aren’t, either,’ Broklaw said.

  ‘If we can’t get to it, there’s no point debating the matter,’ Kasteen said decisively. ‘We’ll just have to pray that the task force or the Space Marines arrive before it can call in any reinforcements, and bombard the site from orbit.’

  ‘That may not be enough,’ Izembard said. ‘Even a concentrated lance barrage would be unlikely to damage a target buried so deeply.’

  ‘Then we’re frakked,’ I said, reflecting that at least we’d be spared having to break it to Clothilde that the Navy were about to start using her precious capital for a spot of target practice; news I felt sure she was unlikely to take well. ‘All we can do now is pull out, before the ’nids overrun the place, or the power plant blows up.’ My voice trailed away, as my brain finally caught up with my mouth. I turned to Izembard. ‘How long is it likely to be before the power station goes critical once your people abandon it?’

  ‘It shouldn’t go critical at all,’ Izembard said, looking as affronted as it was possible to with a face composed mainly of metal. ‘We have protocols in place for an ordered shutdown before those ministering to the system pull out. The plant in the Leeward Barrens had been left unstaffed by the actions of the tyranids, preventing the safety precautions from taking effect.’

  ‘How long would it take to go bang if they just ran for it, then?’ I persisted. ‘Without hanging around to shut things down properly and light the incense?’

  Kasteen and Broklaw were nodding thoughtfully, seeing where I was going with this, but Izembard still seemed to be struggling with the idea. ‘Pressure levels would begin to rise towards critical in about twelve hours,’ he said. ‘But an actual detonation would take considerably longer, depending on the strength of the welds, and how recently the prayer slips had been renewed.’

  ‘We don’t have twelve hours,’ Broklaw said. ‘Can your cogboys do anything to speed it up a bit?’

  The few remaining areas of flesh on Izembard’s face paled, then went a strange mottled purple, and when he spoke again his vox-coder seemed to buzz a little more than usual. ‘That would be complete anathema to a faithful servant of the Omnissiah,’ he said flatly.

  ‘So would leaving an entire planet to be eaten by ’nids, I would imagine,’ I replied.

  Izembard’s shoulders slumped, as much as was possible given their inhuman rigidity, and the heightened colour slowly drained from his face, returning the skin to the unwholesome pallor it normally displayed. He nodded slowly. ‘Certain safety protocols could be circumvented,’ he conceded. ‘But that wouldn’t accelerate the process enough to culminate before the hive node recovers fully.’

  ‘Then we’re still frakked,’ Broklaw said.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ the magos said, startling us all; not least himself, I suspected. ‘I strongly disapprove of the wanton destruction of any mechanism, but the Omnissiah teaches us that dispassionate analysis is the surest way to the correct solution, and in this instance the dictates of pure reason would seem to admit of no other choice. A sufficient quantity of explosives, placed near the inlet filters, would release the pressure from the magma pocket beneath the power plant.’

  ‘Causing a volcanic eruption,’ I said, to show I’d caught on, although the object lesson I’d received in the Leeward Barrens was hard to forget.

  ‘Precisely,’ Izembard said. ‘Although may the Omnissiah forgive me for suggesting it.’

  ‘Under the circumstances, I’m sure He’ll be prepared to stretch a point,’ I said. ‘Better to lose one power plant than have every machine on the planet shut down, surely?’

  Izembard nodded slowly, looking somewhat reassured, and I turned to Kasteen again. ‘We need Federer,’ I said. ‘The Nusquans don’t have any sappers of their own.’

  ‘He’s too busy shoring up our defences on the surface,’ Broklaw said, ‘and he’ll be busier than ever now we’re pulling back. Slapping a couple of demo charges on a pipe and setting a timer isn’t exactly advanced theology.’

  I couldn’t be entirely sure, but I thought I saw Izembard wince as he spoke.

  ‘I’ll vox the Nusquans and advise,’ I said. ‘They should still be holding the plant if the tech-priests haven’t pulled out yet.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Kasteen was already turning away, to where a small group of aides were hovering anxiously, all carrying data-slates. ‘That would help.’

  My comm-bead was tuned to the 597th’s operational frequencies, of course, but it wouldn’t take much to find out which ones the Nusquans were using; but all our vox ops were busy, and, knowing that lives probably depended on leaving them to get on with their jobs, I was understandably reluctant to interrupt them. Then an alternative occurred to me, and I switched to the band reserved for the Commissariat.

  ‘Forres, this is Cain,’ I began, launching into the most condensed version of the crisis facing us that I could manage, without bothering to waste any time on the preliminary pleasantries. She listened carefully, asking a few questions when my desire for brevity overwhelmed the need for clarity, and waited for me to finish.

  ‘Sounds like we’re frakked,’ she said. ‘We’re still hanging on at the objective, but we used the last of our demo charges to bring down a trygon tunnel the ’nids were using to try and cut us off from the Spiral126. You’ll have to bring some more with you.’

  ‘We’ll get right on it,’ I said, cursing under my breath. As you’ll appreciate, I had no intention at all of putting myself in the firing line, being rather more concerned with how quickly I could bag a seat on one of the shuttles which were, even now, on their way to pluck us to safety. But Forres clearly expected me to undertak
e this fool’s errand myself.

  I glanced at the hololith, which by now had been restored to the tactical display Izembard had so cavalierly overridden, looking for a unit I could palm the job off on, but, try as I could, none of them seemed able to assist. The tyranids had redoubled their efforts in the face of our withdrawal, and every unit out on the ice was being hard pressed.

  With a faint sigh, I bowed to the inevitable, knowing that if I didn’t, the planet, the sector, and, most importantly, the undeserved reputation I relied on to make my life as trouble-free as possible, given the trouble-magnet nature of my job, would all vanish down the maw of the hive fleets.

  ‘I’ll be there ASAP127, I assured her. After all, the Nusqans still seemed in control of the power station and its immediate surroundings, so I’d have plenty of troopers to hide behind: and with the scout Salamander I generally favoured as a personal conveyance, I should be able to outrun most of the trouble we were liable to encounter, especially with Jurgen in the driving seat. Which ought to leave me arriving back just in time to board a shuttle, with another piece of relatively risk-free conspicuous gallantry to affect modesty about under my belt. Not to mention that, while I was running around the city like a glorified delivery boy, there was no chance of being dragged out onto the surface to freeze my nads off encouraging the troops.

  All in all, I began to convince myself, things could be a good deal worse; little realising just how much so they were about to become.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Jurgen was waiting for me as I left the governor’s palace, by the side door next to the kitchens, the engine of the scout pattern Salamander he’d requisitioned from the vehicle pool growling quietly. Though I generally favoured the rugged little vehicles for personal transport, I’d been understandably reluctant to use one on Nusquam Fundumentibus; the sub-zero temperatures made the open passenger compartment far too uncomfortable to endure for long, so on the occasions when I really couldn’t avoid venturing out onto the surface I’d made do with the relative warmth and comfort of a Chimera. The wide open spaces of the cavern city were all climate controlled, of course, feeling to me no cooler than a brisk spring morning on a temperate world, so I clambered up to my habitual perch next to the pintle mount without so much as a shiver, and a reassuring sense of familiarity. Not even grazing my shin on the crate of explosives I found waiting there was enough to distract me from a growing sense of optimism about the success of our mission.