[Imperial Guard 01] - Fifteen Hours

by Mitchel Scanlon - (ebook by Undead)

  Hearing the chilling sound of an alien battlecry, Larn looked up from the dead body beneath him to see a group of a dozen orks charging towards him. For a moment he almost turned, whether to run away or scramble after the gretchin’s fallen gun to defend himself he did not know. Only to realise that no matter what he did now it would make no difference. The orks were too close. He was as good as dead already.

  This is it, he thought, his panic abruptly displaced by an unnerving sense of calm. I am going to die here. I am a dead man and there is nothing anyone can do to save me.

  “Forward!” he heard a voice yell as a shotgun boomed behind him and the face of the foremost ork disappeared in an explosion of gore. “Vardans, by my mark! Advance and rapid fire!”

  Amazed, Larn saw a battle-scarred sergeant in a grey-black greatcoat stride past him leading a ragtag band of Vardans in a counter-charge against the orks. Moving at a slow walk, firing from the hip with shotguns, lasguns and flamers blazing, they advanced towards the oncoming orks, taking a gruesome toll of the enemy with every step towards them. While before them orks screamed and died, the sergeant led his men forward with bullets and lasbeams flying all around him, his pace never faltering, his voice a clear beacon of authority among the confusion of battle. Watching the sergeant lead his men from the front, his every gesture calm and unafraid, Larn found himself wondering if one of the long-dead saints of the Imperium had somehow regained human form and now walked among them. The sergeant seemed immortal. Unkillable. Like a hero from the tales they told in the scholarium.

  A legend, leading his men to victory.

  “Forward!” the sergeant yelled, the counterattack gaining momentum as every man still alive in the trenches gathered to advance beside him. “Keep on firing. Forward and advance!”

  Following the sergeant’s lead the advance continued, the constant fire of the Vardan guns and the slow measured pace of their progress seemed every bit as relentless and unstoppable as had the orks’ charge earlier. Until, wilting before the remorseless ferocity of the Vardans’ attack, the orks did something which Larn had never thought he would live to see.

  They turned and ran.

  Watching the surviving orks run back towards their lines, Larn slowly became aware of a brief hush falling across the battlefield as the Vardans’ advance halted and they stopped firing. Soon, as it became plain the orks’ attack was ended, new sounds broke the silence: the cries of wounded men, the shouts of their comrades calling for a medic, the noise of nervous laughter and disbelieving oaths as other men found they were still very much alive. Hearing those sounds, Larn felt the tension abruptly leave him as the realisation hit him that he had survived. Still kneeling over the body of the dead gretchin, he looked down at the thing’s rained face in with sudden queasiness, afraid he was going to vomit. Then, he saw a shadow fall across him as a nearby Guardsman came to stand beside him.

  “You must be a new fish?” a cynical voice asked him. “One of the new groxlings to the slaughter they sent us in the lander? I think this belongs to you.”

  Looking up, Larn found himself staring at an ugly dwarfish Vardan with a shaven head and a mouthful of stained and crooked teeth. The Vardan was holding a lasgun in each hand, one of which Larn recognised sheepishly as his own gun — the same weapon he had lost earlier.

  “Here, new fish,” the rant said, giving him a sardonic broken-toothed smile as he tossed the lasgun towards him. “Next time you need to kill a gretch, you might try using this.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  13:39 hours Central Broucheroc Time

  The Field Station — Lessons in Futility, Parts One & Two — Friends & Heroes Awaiting Disposal — Welcome to the 902ND Vardan — Corporal Vladek and the Distribution of Resources — Meeting Sergeant Chelkar and an Addition to Davir’s Woes

  Pausing for a moment to catch his breath while he waited for the stretcher bearers to bring another patient, Surgeon-Major Martus Volpenz was surprised to realise how inured he had become to the sound of men screaming. Around him, the walls of the apothecarium field station reverberated with it constantly. He could hear men shouting, begging, moaning, shrieking, muttering profane oaths and whispering half-remembered prayers. Not for the first time, ever mindful that it was his calling to alleviate the pain of others, the surgeon-major looked about him at the place where he practised his craft and felt despair.

  To a man less accustomed to it, the dimly lit interior of the field station’s main operating theatre might have been mistaken for a scene from hell. Along one wall of the station, hundreds of severely wounded men lay in litters stacked four men high on a series of metal racks. Against the other wall a dozen exhausted surgeons worked feverishly to clear the most urgent cases from tables that stank with the blood that stained every surface of the floors and walls. For each man they healed, a dozen more men waited amid the suffocating stink of blood and pus and death, desperately wailing and pleading for help in a cacophony of suffering that never reached its end.

  “Stomach wound,” his surgical assistant Jaleal said, breaking into his thoughts. “He’s been given morphia,” he added, checking the treatment notification tag on the patient’s ankle as the stretcher-bearers lifted the unconscious form of a wounded Guardsman onto the operating table before them. “Two doses.”

  Taking a pair of scissors, Jaleal removed the tag, before cutting away the Guardsman’s tunic in blood-encrusted strips to reveal the wound hidden beneath it. Then, taking a wet cloth from a bucket at the foot of the table, he washed the worst of the blood away from the edges of the wound.

  “Looks like a through and through,” he said. “From the size of the wound I’d say an ork gun was the culprit. The blood’s dark. Looks like his liver’s been punctured.”

  “Give him some ether somnolentus.” Volpenz said, taking a scalpel from a tray of instruments nearby as he stepped to the side of table. “Standard dosage.”

  “We have none,” Curlen, his other assistant, said. “We used what was left on the last patient.”

  “What about the other anaesthetics?” Volpenz said. “The nitrous oxide?”

  “Gone as well,” Jaleal said. “If he wakes up we’ll just have to hold him down.”

  “At least tell me we have some blood plasma left?” Volpenz said. “If I have to go digging around this man’s insides in search of a wound in his liver he’s going to bleed like a stuck pig.”

  “Not a drop,” Jaleal said, shrugging in helplessness. “Remember the sucking chest wound twenty minutes ago? He got the last of it.”

  “How much blood is there in the overspill bag, Jaleal?” Volpenz asked.

  Ducking his head under the table, Jaleal checked the contents of the transparent bag underneath it designed to catch the blood bleeding out of the patient as it oozed along the disposal gutters set in the table’s sides.

  “About half a litre,” he said, pulling the bag up from beneath the table. “Maybe three-quarters.”

  “All right,” Volpenz said. “Replace that bag with a new one and use the contents of the one you’ve got to autosanginuate him.”

  “You want to transfuse him with his own blood?” Jaleal said. “There’s barely enough in here to keep a dog alive, never mind a man.”

  “There’s no other choice,” Volpenz said, leaning forward with a practiced hand to make the first incision. “He’ll die anyway if this wound isn’t seen to. Now, look sharp, gentlemen. We’re going to have to do this fast, before he bleeds to death.”

  Cutting an incision to open the wound, Volpenz quickly peeled back the skin around it and fixed a clamp in place to keep it open. Then, while beside him Jaleal used his cloth to mop at the blood welling in the wound cavity, Volpenz searched desperately for the source of the bleeding. It was hopeless. There was so much blood in the wound he could hardly see a thing.

  “Vital signs are weak,” Curlen said, his fingers at the man’s neck to feel his pulse. “We’re losing him.”

  “Lift his legs up, Jaleal. It’ll send
more blood to his heart,” Volpenz said. “I only need a few more seconds. There! I think I’ve found it. He’s got a tear in the main artery leading to the liver.”

  Pushing his hands deep into the wound cavity Volpenz clamped the bleeding artery shut. Only to find his hopes frustrated as, abruptly, the cavity began to fill with blood once more.

  “Damnation! There must be another bleeder! Curlen, how’s he doing?”

  “I can’t find a pulse anymore, sir. We could try to manually resuscitate him?”

  “No,” Volpenz said, throwing his bloody scalpel down on the instrument tray in frustration. “It wouldn’t do any good. He’s bled out. The round probably hit a rib and caused bone fragments to perforate his liver in a dozen places. Clear the table. We can’t save this one.”

  Grabbing a piece of discarded cloth to clean his hands, Volpenz stepped away from the table, pausing only to glance at the dead Guardsman as Curlen signalled for the stretcher bearers to take him away. How old was he, he thought. He looks to be in his forties, but that means nothing here. Broucheroc has a way of aging a man. He might only be in his early thirties, even late twenties. Then, as they lifted the dead man’s body from the table, Volpenz noticed an old scar in the patient’s side. He’s been wounded before, he thought. And patched up. I wonder, was it my work or someone else. Doesn’t matter now, I suppose. Whoever saved the poor bastard’s life before, there was no saving him this time.

  Sighing, he turned away to gaze once more at the confines of the operating room around him. As he did, he realised how little good could be done there for the dying and suffering men who came to the field station day after day. It’s not the war or even the orks that kills most of them, he thought. It’s the shortages. We’re short of anaesthetics, antibiotics, plasma, even the most basic of medical equipment. Short it seems of everything except pain, death and futility. Here in Broucheroc, these things at least are never in short supply.

  Then, as he made to throw away the cloth he had used to clean his hands, Volpenz noticed something was written on it. Looking at it more closely, he saw there was a name stencilled in the cloth. Repzik. Abruptly, he realised the cloth must have come from the dead Guardsman’s tunic — one of the pieces Jaleal had cut away earlier to reveal the man’s wound. Repzik, Volpenz thought sadly. So that was what his name was. Then, just as abruptly, he realised that it made no difference.

  Whatever name the man had come here with, he did not need it now.

  In the shadow of the dugout emplacements, a little way behind the trenches, the corpses of the men killed in the last hour-and-a-half had been piled in a line three cadavers deep. Their feet bootless, their bodies stripped of their equipment, some with faces wrapped in concealing cloth, others with dead features left naked to the biting cold: all of them laid haphazardly atop each other like so many logs ready for the burning. Like firewood, Larn thought as he stood gazing down on the dead bodies of the men who had made the journey with him from Jumael IV. Men he had known and liked. Men who had crossed the unimaginable distances of the void only to waste their lives on the wrong planet and in the wrong campaign. His comrades, now reduced to nothing more than a temporary landmark in the unforgiving and war-torn landscape he saw all about him. For what? To Larn, it seemed the most pointless of the many horrors he had witnessed already in this desolate place. A lesson in utter futility.

  Hearing the protesting squeal of a rusted axle, Larn turned to see four bent-backed old women bundled in ragged layers of civilian dress pushing an empty handcart across the frozen ground towards him. Noticing the faded insignia of the Departmento Munitorium on the khaki-green armbands they wore on their sleeves, Larn realised they must be militia auxiliaries levied from among the local population. Wheeling the cart past him, they halted beside the line of corpse and wearily began to lift them into the cart. Until at last, as their labours revealed the face of a corpse hidden deeper in the pile, Larn saw something that made him cry out and race towards them.

  “Wait!” he yelled.

  Startled, cringing away as though afraid he might hurt them, the women stopped their work. Then, seeing Larn standing by the pile to peer down at the face of a corpse, one of the women spoke to him in a voice made dull and lifeless with fatigue.

  “You knew him?” she said. “One of the dead men?”

  “Yes,” Larn said. “I knew him. He was a friend. A comrade.”

  It was Leden. His face slack and pale, his body covered in gruesome and horrendous wounds, he lay at the centre of the pile with dead eyes staring up at the foreboding sky overhead. Having not seen Leden die during their mad flight across no-man’s land, Larn had harboured the hope the simple-minded farmboy might have made it to the Vardan lines and survived just as he had. Now that hope was dashed. Looking down at Leden’s face, Larn realised his last living link with his homeworld had been severed. He was truly alone now. More alone than he could have ever thought possible. Alone, on a strange new world that seemed entirely given over to randomness, brutality and madness.

  “He was a hero,” the old woman said.

  “A hero?”

  Unsure of her meaning, Larn looked at her in confusion. For a moment, her eyes dim and uncomprehending with exhaustion, she returned his gaze in silence. Then, barely more animated than the dead bodies before her, she tiredly shrugged and spoke once more.

  “They are heroes,” she said in a listless voice, as though reciting a speech she had heard a thousand times herself. “They all are: all the Guardsmen who die here. They are martyrs. By giving their blood to defend this place they have made the soil of this city into sacred ground. Broucheroc is a holy and impregnable fortress. The orks will never take it. We will break their assault here. Then, we will push them back and reclaim this entire planet.”

  “So the commissars tell us,” she added, without conviction.

  Returning to their work the women made to lift Leden from the pile. Finding him held fast and stuck to the other bodies by frozen and congealed blood, one of the women took a pry bar from the side of the cart. Sickened to his stomach, Larn watched her slide the bar under Leden’s body and put her weight on it, the corpse rising with a crack of splintered ice as her sisters pulled it free and tossed it on the cart. Then, two of them pushing down the handles of the cart while the others stood by the side to stop its contents from falling out, the old women began to wheel away the bodies they had collected.

  “What will you do with them?” Larn called out after them, not altogether sure he wanted to know the answer.

  “They will be buried,” the women he had spoken to earlier said. “Like heroes should be. Buried, up on the hill past the old plasteel works on the Grennady Plass. Heroes’ Hill, it is called. Or at least that is what they tell us,” she shrugged again. “We just transport the bodies. Others deal with their disposal.”

  With that she turned back to the burden of the cart, pushing it away with the other women in the direction of the outskirts of the city. As he watched them go, Larn belatedly tried to remember one of the prayers he had been taught as a child. A prayer to ease the passage of the departed souls of his comrades into the afterlife as they went to join their Emperor in paradise. His mind was a blank, his heart so sick with grief it felt dull and empty. All his prayers had left him.

  “Take off your jacket and pull back your tunic,” he heard a voice say behind him.

  Turning, Larn found himself face-to-face with a gaunt Vardan medic wearing a blood-splattered greatcoat and carrying a satchel slung across his shoulder.

  “If you want me to treat that shoulder wound I will have to be able to see it,” the medic said, opening his satchel.

  Looking at his own left shoulder, much to his surprise Larn noticed a small bloodstained hole in the epaulette of his jacket. Dimly remembering the sudden pain he had felt there when the ork bomb had exploded in the trench behind him, he did as the medic had asked, removing his jacket and pulling down his tunic shirt to allow him access to the wound.

  �
��Hmm. The good news is you’ll live,” the medic said, prodding at the wound while Larn shivered in the cold. “Looks like you were winged by a piece of shrapnel. Took a little bit of flesh with it, but it doesn’t look as though the bone is broken.”

  Taking a sachet of white powder from inside his bag the medic poured it liberally on the wound and pressed a gauze pad over the hole, applying half-a-dozen pieces of adhesive tape to hold the dressing in place.

  “You didn’t realise you had a hole in you, I take it?” he said. Then, seeing Larn nod, he continued. “Probably shock. Get yourself some recaf. Food too, if you can find it. It’ll help you get yourself together. Though I warn you, you probably won’t thank me for that advice in an hour’s time. Once you get your feeling back, chances are you’ll find that wound aches like a bitch. You have morphia?”

  “Four phials,” said Larn. “In my med-pack.”

  “Good. Let me see it,” the medic said. Then, when he saw Larn hesitate, he held out his hand in command. “Kit inspection. As company medical officer, it is my job to make sure you are properly equipped.”

  Pulling the slim oblong wooden case of the med-pack he had been issued with on Jumael from his belt, Larn handed it over. Breaking the seals on the box lid the medic slid it open and checked the contents.

  “Morphia. Vein clamps. Sterilising fluid. Synth-skin canister. Wherever you’re from they obviously don’t believe in sending their sons under equipped to war. Still, my need is greater than yours. I’m going to have to requisition some of your supplies.”

  “But you can’t just help yourself to my med-pack,” Larn said in outrage. “The regulations say—”

  “The regulations say a lot of things, new fish,” the medic replied, taking a handful of items from inside the med-pack and dropping them into his satchel. “Though you can be sure whichever genius wrote them never troubled himself actually finding out if they worked in practice. Anyway, I’m leaving you with half of the gauze, morphia, and clamps. Plus, you get to keep the insect repellent. Given the climate, there’s not much call for it hereabouts.”