13th Legion

by Gav Thorpe

  'Well/ explains the Myrmidian, settling down among the bags of grain, 'they fund the Schola Progenium abbeys. That's where we get the Sisterhood, the Commissars, the Storm Troopers, the scribes and so on. That's got to be worth some­thing/

  There are bounties and treasures aplenty for those of the true faith/ Kronin points out, the first thing I've heard him say today. He says less and less these days, I think he's getting more and more isolated, unable to talk properly with the rest of us. This vast, bleak world probably isn't helping him, it's easy to feel unimportant and lonely when faced with such harsh and eternal elements as the ones that rage outside. I can feel a melancholy mood coming on, fuelled by frustration and exhaustion.

  'And of all those bounties/ Gappo says, 'we end up with bloody Poal!'

  'So there is a sense of humour in there!' exclaims Poliwicz with a laugh as the rest of us chuckle stupidly.

  'Shut the frag up, and turn those steaks over, I don't like mine burnt!' Poal snaps, causing another fit of giggles to erupt.

  'I wonder if Franx has killed Linskrug yet?' I speculate idly, as Gappo busies himself with handing out mess tins.

  "Why did you put them together then?' asks Kyle, sitting up from where he was lying in a bedsack at the far end of the tent.

  'Don't you know?' I say, suddenly feeling bitter about being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, an ugly and painful death lurking not far away. 'It's the same reason we're all here - torment is good for the soul/

  Two days we've waited for the orks on this Emperor-forsaken mountainside. Two days sitting on our hands, so to speak, in the freezing snow and bone-chilling wind. We're set up just beneath the cloud line, sometimes it drifts down on us and you can't see your hand in front of your face. The air is so thin up here too, causing sickness and dizziness, the lower pressure making your body expel its gases pretty continuously. That caused some laughs the first few times until it became plain uncomfortable. Some of the men have already died from expo­sure to the elements, killed by sheer altitude.

  The only way to cross onto the plains is over a ridge at the top end of the valley, or that's what the guides reckon. A few

  brave souls have tried to navigate the routes to the north and west, but none ever returned. We've got some explosives rigged up to bring down a good sized chunk of snow and rock on the greenskins, but I expect that'll just get their attention more than anything. I hope these Kragmeer guys know what they're doing because I don't want to get caught up in that mess when it comes tumbling down.

  Now that we're here you might be fooled into thinking that the hard slog was over, but you'd be wrong. We've been kept really busy digging trenches in the ice. If you ever thought snow was soft, you're sorely mistaken. The stuff round here has been packed solid for centuries and I swear is harder than the rock. We've only been able to get the trenches maybe a metre and a half deep. Also, the bulky mitts you have to wear make it hard to grip the haft of a pickaxe or a shovel handle, and Poliwicz almost took his foot off earlier this morning. The watery light of the sun is just about above the clouds now, and for once the snow seems to have slackened off. Well, relatively speaking -it's just coming down continuously in big chunks now, instead of almost horizontally in a blizzard.

  The wind's shifted to the south/ one of the guides, Ekul, explains when I ask him about the calming weather. 'But that's actually bad news/

  'Why so?' I ask, wanting to know the worst before I get caught out by it. He looks to the south for a moment, showing the pointed, sharp profile of his nose and chin from out of the grey and white furs he's wearing. Like the rest of the Kragmeerites, his face is battered and weathered, and his dark eyes seem to gaze into the distance as if remembering something. He looks back at me, those eyes regarding me slowly, set above high cheekbones that seem to have been chiselled rather than grown.

  There's a kind of funnel effect in the valleys and that stirs up the storm a lot/ he replies eventually, bending down to draw a spiral with his finger in the snow. 'It builds up and builds up and then whoosh, it breaks up and over the mountaintops and comes rushing up here. We call it the Emperor's Wrath. A bit poetic, but you understand the idea/

  'Bad news to be caught out in it/ I finish for him.

  'Seen men blown easily thirty metres clear off the ground, and that's no lying,' he tells me with a sorry shake of his head.

  We stand there looking down the pass at the zigzag of trenches being built. We've taken up position on the western side of the valley, the shallower face. The other penal regiment has been split into two contingents, forming a first line and a second line. The plan is for the orks to crash against the first line and when they're thrown back the surviving defenders will pull back and reinforce the second line. I thought it would have been better on the eastern slopes, where the going is steeper and would slow down die ork assault. But of course the Colonel has looked at everything and pointed out a good kilo­metre of defilade further along the valley, where units on the eastern slope wouldn't be able to target the valley floor. All the orks would have to do would be rush the gauntlet of fire for the first kilometre and then they'd be in the defilade and in cover. Once they were clear of that they'd be out of range. That said, I've fought orks before, and I can't see them refusing the chal­lenge of six thousand guardsmen shooting at them without trying an assault. It's the way their minds work - they're brutal beasts, without much thought, just an unquenchable hunger for war and bloodshed. Emperor knows, nature has certainly built them for battle. As I said before, you can shoot them, stab them, chop them, and they don't go down.

  I see someone striding up through the snow and it's not dif­ficult to recognise the Colonel. I watch him as he pushes up through the drifts, hauling himself along the rocks towards us at some points where the going is really treacherous. He pulls himself over the lip of the ledge we're standing on and stands there for a moment, catching his breath, glancing back down towards the entrenchments.

  'How much warning can you give me?' he asks Ekul, looking around, towards the guide.

  'Depends on how fast the orks are moving, sir/ he replies with a shrug. 'A ploughfoot can cover the ground from the pickets in a couple of hours, and assuming the cloud stays up, you should be able to spot a force that size a good ten kilome­tres away/

  About five or six hours, then?' the Colonel confirms and the guide nods. 'Why are you here, Kage?' he adds suddenly.

  'I was surveying the layout of the trenches, sir/1 reply quickly. It's the truth. I made the back-breaking climb up here with Ekul to get a feel for the lay of the land.

  You would not try to get away, would you lieutenant?' he says darkly.

  'And go where?' I can't stop myself answering back. 'Go live wim the orks?'

  'And what are your conclusions, lieutenant?' the Colonel asks, mankfully ignoring my insubordination this time.

  *We need to extend the front trenches on the left flank/ I tell him, indicating the area wim a sweep of my arm. They should overlap the secondary position by a few hundred metres/

  'And how did you become such a student of military theory?' he asks quietly, looking straight at me.

  'Because that's what we ran into when you led us on the for­lorn hope assault into Casde Shornigar on Harrifax, sir/ I point out, keeping the bitterness from my voice.

  'I remember/ he says back to me. There was quite a deadly crossfire, if I recall/

  There was, sir/ I concur, keeping my tone level. Three hun­dred and eighteen men and women died in mat crossfire, you murderous bastard, I add mentally.

  'I will talk to Colonel Greaves about extending his works/ he says with a nod. Thank you, lieutenant/

  I think about Greaves, the man in charge of the other penal regiment, as I clamber awkwardly back down the slope. He's a bull of a man, a few centimetres shorter than I am, but with chest and shoulders that would put an ogryn to shame. He con­stantly lambastes his men, shouting and swearing at them, cursing their heathen souls. He even has some wardens with him - Adep
tus Arbites bullies who like to use their shock mauls. Unlike the Last Chancers, the other poor souls on this barren mountain are all civilians, sentenced to serve a term in a penal legion by the judges and magisters.

  Their commander couldn't be any more different from ours either. I've never seen Schaeffer hit anyone who hasn't tried to attack him first. There's been a few over the years, and they ended up spitting teeth, let me assure you. He despises us all as criminals on principle, but doesn't seem to hate us as individuals. Unlike Greaves, who seems to delight in broadcasting his charges' shortcomings and inadequacies to everyone. If I were to sum it up, it's a completely different philosophy. Greaves's poor bastards only have to survive a certain length of time and they're out, so he tries to make their

  lives as miserable as possible while he can. Schaeffer, on the other hand, thinks he has a higher purpose. He does not act as our judge, he leaves that to the Emperor. And mat means getting us killed, of course. It's like comparing False Hope to Kragmeer. One is very obviously a death-trap, full of instant death. The other is subtler, slowly leeching your life from you with a thousand tests of strength and endurance. Both are just as deadly of course.

  'Mother of Dolan/ Poal curses from where he's sitting on the lip of the trench. There's thousands of them/

  I pull myself up the trench wall and stand next to him. The air has cleared a lot, part of the build-up for the Emperor's Wrath storm brewing to the south, and I can see what he means. At the mouth of the valley, about two kilometres to the south, the ork horde is spilling towards us. There seems to be little organisation or formation, just a solid mass of green-skinned devils marching solidly through the snow. Among the horde are a few tanks, battlewagons we call them. It's hard to make out any details at this range; it's just a dark mass against the snow.

  More than a kilometre away, I make out the shapes of Dreadnoughts among the mobs of ork warriors. These giant walking war engines are twice to three times the height of a man, armed with a wild variety of heavy guns and close com­bat blades, saws and fists. The walls of the valley begin to echo with the noise of their approach. It's like a dull rambling of thunder, a bass tone of war cries and bellows all merged into one cacophonous roar. As the horde gets closer, I can see that they're mainly wearing dark furs, with black and white checked banners fluttering in their midst, their vehicles picked out in places with the same patterning, oily smoke gouting from noisy engines that add to the gloom and racket.

  The orks aren't stupid: they see the trenchlines and slowly the army begins to wheel up the slope, advancing along a diagonal towards us, making less of the slope's incline. The detachment in the primary trenches open fire with their heaviest weapons at about eight hundred metres, the crack of autocannons rever­berating off the valley sides. I can see the sporadic flash of fire from the gun pits dug into the trenchlines, about three hun­dred metres further down the slope from where I am. The orks

  respond by starting a low chant, which slowly rises in volume as uiey advance, until it drowns out the fire of heavy bolters and lascannon.

  'Waa-ork! Waa-ork! Waa-ork! Waa-ork! Waa-ork! Waa-ork!' they bellow at us, the mountainsides echoing with the battle-cry as it gathers in pace and the greenskins work themselves up for the final charge.

  Their shouts are joined by a series of muffled detonations. Huge fountains of snow erupt to our right, just above the ork army. As a single mass, an enormous crescent of snow billows out. The slope begins to slide down towards the aliens, boul­ders rolling along amongst the wave of whiteness, the sparse trees on the mountainside ripped up as the avalanche quick­ens, its momentum accelerating rapidly. The orks' cries of dismay are swallowed up by the roaring of tons of snow and rock bearing down on them, the slope turned into a death-trap by the cascading ice.

  The ork march falters immediately and the army tries to scat­ter as die snowslide bears down on mem. The ground trembles violently, as it does under a bombardment, and I cast a nervous glance up the slope above, to make sure the effect isn't wider than planned. I must admit I breathe a sigh of relief when I see no movement at all, the glistening ice stretches up the moun­tain completely undisturbed. Ekul and his scouts did well. The gunners in the front trenches continue firing into the panicked horde even as the avalanche hits the orks. One moment there's a dispersing ork horde, the next there's just a solid whiteness, flecked with darker patches as orks and vehicles are hurled sky­wards, before being engulfed and disappearing from view.

  Secondary slides pile up on top of the hill of snow now fill­ing the valley floor, layering more deam onto the orks buried under the packed snow. Greaves's men start cheering, their cries of joy replacing the thunder of the avalanche. I notice that none of the Last Chancers join in, they're all watching the val­ley floor with determined expressions. I know what they're thinking. It's not going to be that easy, one quick avalanche and the orks are dead. It's never that easy for a Last Chancer. Sure enough, as the swirl of scattered snow begins to clear in the air, I can see a sizeable proportion of the ork army left. Stunned and dazed for the moment, but still more than enough to over­ran our defences once they gather their wits again. And now

  they'll be even madder for the fight, eager to even the head count.

  In the front trench, Greaves gets his poor charges to continue the fusillade into die orks, giving them no respite. A smart tac­tic, but I can't help but diink mat it's just Greaves wanting to shout at his penal troopers some more. A bright orange explo­sion lights die centre of die ork mob as a Dreadnought's fuel is detonated by a lascannon. A couple of odier Dreadnoughts and a single batdewagon survived die avalanche, but Greaves is directing his men well and the lascannons and autocannons soon reduce them to burning wrecks.

  An odd tiling occurs to me as die orks forge their way back up the slope. Vehicles need fuel, and there's little to be found out in tins icy wilderness. The Kragmeerites have one-in-three of their ski-based Chimeras converted into fuel carriers for long range work, and it stands to reason that orks would need some kind of support vehicles. Not only for fuel, but for transporting ammunition and food. It's hard to see how tins army, small as it is, relatively speaking, could take a single Kragmeer station, never mind die three that have already fallen. And it's eight hundred kilometres across unbroken ice plains from die near­est to these mountains. Even if tiiey looted everything they could from die fallen stations, they'd have to move it around somehow. Orks are good looters, they can scavenge pretty much anything, and I was half expecting them to turn up in captured, specially modified Chimeras. It doesn't make sense that several thousand orks, hardy as tiiey are, could survive this long without that kind of backup. I don't know what the expla­nation is, but I start to feel uneasy about this. I'd speak to the Colonel, but I don't have any answers, and I'm sure he's made the same observations.

  Lasgun salvoes join die heavy weapons fire as the orks dose. The greenskins begin to return fire, flickers of muzzle flare sparkling across die darkness of die horde as it breaks into a charge. Once more, diey break into tiieir war chant, faster and louder titan ever. The las-fire is almost constant now; Greaves has ordered the troop­ers to shoot at will rather titan volley fire. Orks tumble into die snow in droves, but die rest keep coming on, surging up die mountainside in a living tide of bestial ferocity.

  They won't hold/ Poal says from beside me, his lasgun whin­ing as he powers up its energy cell.

  They might/ I reply, keeping my gaze firmly fixed on the front trench. The orks burst onto Greaves's soldiers like a storm, the poorly trained penal guardsmen no match for the orks' innate lust for close quarters combat.

  'Pull diem back now/ I hear Poal whispering insistently. 'Pull them back before it's too bloody late!'

  I see what Poal means as more and more orks pour into the trenchline. If Greaves makes a break for it now, we can give enough covering fire to keep die orks off his back. If he goes too late, tiiey'll be all mingled up and we won't be able to pick out friend from foe.

  'Now, y
ou fragging idiot!' Poal bellows, clambering to his feet.

  For a moment I think that hard-headed Greaves is going to fight to the last man, taking his criminals into hell with him. But then movement from our end of the front trench, the left flank, shows men and women clambering up die back walls before the orks can fight their way along the trench to them. I reckon Greaves's own instincts for self-preservation must have kicked in. I can see him urging his troopers on, waving his arm towards us as he hauls himself tiirough the snow.

  'Covering fire!' the order is shouted from further up the trench. Poal starts snapping off shots to our right, spotting a few dozen orks tiiat have broken from the trench and are charg­ing after Greaves's men, trying to cut them off. The staccato roaring of a heavy bolter joins the snap of lasguns, and a hole is torn in die crowd of orks.

  Colonel Greaves leads his men to our left. We're on the right flank of the second trench, about five hundred of them, half of the first-line force. The orks don't pause to consolidate their position in the front trench; they pour over the fortifica­tions and spill up towards us. I pull my laspistol free and start snapping off shots - the orks are densely packed, I can't miss, even at this range with a pistol. The greenskins begin to dis­perse, trying to attack along a wider frontage, some of them breaking to our left in a bid to get around the left flank and encircle us.

  Return fire starts sending up sprays of snow and Poal and I jump back down into die trench for shelter. The orks are spread into a dunning line now, concentrated more in front of us, but stretching out to die left and right.

  'Prepare for hand-to-hand combat!' The wardens' bellows cany up the trenchline.

  We cannot hold the trench,' I hear Schaeffer say next to me.

  'Sir?' I ask, turning to look at him.

  'One on one, these men cannot fight orks/ he explains quickly. 'Once the orks are in the trench, we cannot concentrate our numbers on them. And they will be very hard to get out again/

  'Counter-attack, sir?' I suggest, reading the Colonel's mind, horrified by the thought of hastening any confrontation with the brutal aliens, but seeing there's litde hope otherwise. 'Hit them in the open?'