‘All yours, old man,’ the TFC told Quant, shifting back up the metal dome. The specialist moved in with his charge, trailing detonator cable and tools.
His charge assembled, Uncle began to back up the hull himself, a palm grip detonator in one fist. The three men backed in under the hood and put their backs against the cool hull.
‘Ready?’
Uncle nodded.
‘Should we really be standing on the command deck?’ Greco put to them at the last moment. ‘You know, if we’re gonna like, well, blow it up?’
‘It’s a directional charge,’ the demolitions man informed him icily.
‘Oh,’ Greco muttered. ‘Good safety tip.’
Uncle clasped the detonator and the hatch vomited forth skull-splitting sound and light. A peal of thunder rolled through the command deck superstructure and the armour plating immediately around the opening creaked and buckled. A cloud of blistering white smoke pumped from the hatch. Donning his gloves and hellgun, Uncle skirted down the slippery hull and vanished, making a corpsman-shaped hole in the smoke.
A few moments later Mortensen’s vox-bead crackled.
‘I’m in.’
The major grinned, adjusting the troop channel: ‘Sergeant Conklin, Corporal Vedette. Fall back by teams to the Titan command deck.’
‘Affirmative, major.’
IV
‘Send us down another dead-end and I’m going to come up there and rip you one, you hear me, flyboy?’ That was Deleval: Lieutenant, Fourth Platoon. It didn’t really matter to Krieg, although he was ashamed to admit that the Volscians all looked the same to him. There was little to pick between the officers and the men when it came to uniform and physical appearance; a complete lack of respect for Tactica formulations was equally evident in either.
Deleval was a charmer though. He was one of those tough hive bastards – the swill of corruption running in his veins. He had a hard face and unforgiving eyes that wouldn’t have been out of place on a bounty hunter. Lieutenant’s stripes or not, Deleval’s word was law amongst the men of his platoon. Anything else was simply an invitation to wake up the next morning with your throat slit: if you were unlucky enough to wake up at all. Snyder, Turkle and Goinz, the three hive-world hyenas that sat behind him would have seen to that all right.
Krieg had heard Captain Rask call Fourth Platoon the ‘Zombie Squad’, primarily because it was largely made up of the worst kind of Volscians the 364th had to offer – brutal gangers and psychotics, unable to live without the blood and carnage of the underhive and who found new expressions of their old lives in the merciless way in which they interpreted their orders. Deleval himself was rumoured to hail from the notorious Jericho Hive, the site of a spook war that had raged across several generations for nearly a century.
This was, of course, the other reason Deleval and his men had earned their moniker – regimental supplies of spook, mankweed, gladstones, PNP, hulk dust and various unlicensed combat stimulants chiefly came from the Zombie Squad and their illicit contacts and suppliers.
Deleval’s henchmen were typical Zombie Squad scum. They’d spent most of the run eyeballing Krieg and exchanging hazy slurs about the commissar. Without the reassuring presence of Golliant, barely squeezed into the seat next to him, Krieg was certain the Volscians would have riddled him with scatter shot from their combat shotguns and rolled his body out the back of the moving Centaur and under the tracks of the next. Snyder – a savage little scavver with a receding shock of wiry, ginger hair – and the loudmouth Turkle had to content themselves with goading the commissar and filling the compartment with nefarious laughter. Goinz didn’t say much – clearly out of his eyeballs on combat stimulants – but would simply chuckle nastily to himself, seemingly out of sync with the rest of the hilarity.
Blazer One had been less than helpful with directions, sending Deleval’s convoy down more than one improvised cul-de-sac, where revolutionaries had toppled structures, erected barricades and stacked burnt-out cargo-10’s and dozerloaders in an attempt to frustrate any kind of advance on the cathedra. It had worked.
Golliant had told Krieg that the convoy drivers were all handpicked Volscian ash buggy drivers, used to racing piles of scrap across the hellish and ever changing chemical wasteland that was their garrison home world. They were spoiled with the Centaur fire support variant: their pace and manoeuvrability put the universally admired Chimera chassis to shame. What the light carrier gained in handling, it lost in armour and armament, however, boasting only the snub barrels of a single, pintle-mounted assault cannon and heavy stubber up front for infantry support. The supercharged Centaurs did afford the hive drivers the vehicular verve they needed to put an armoured personnel carrier in positions conventional wisdom would otherwise state impossible. Compact enough to be slapped on the deck by a Navy aircraft, but able to hold its own in a firefight, the Centaur variant was a perfect fire support vehicle.
Unfortunately the labyrinthine freightways of Corpora Mons did not play to the Centaur’s strengths. The convoy’s initial run had been impressive, the cadet-commissar had to admit, the column maintaining high speeds across deserted plazas and clear thoroughfares.
It was only when the major re-directed Deleval’s column to secure the White Thunder crash site that the convoy ran into any serious resistance. The crash site wasn’t far off their route: the massive Mortis Maximus still stood sentinel above the convoy’s armoured roofs, but the Spectre had gone down in a depository complex just south of the cathedra, at the heart of a rockcrete jungle of warehouse structures and semi-permanent giga-storage crate containers. The narrow accessways in between, like cholesterol-choked arteries, were strewn with debris and abandoned freight, creating a nightmare landscape of gauntlets and bottlenecks. There wasn’t even room amongst the mayhem for a Centaur to about face and turn around.
It was here that the rebels had hit them time and again, waiting each time for obstacles to slow the convoy to a near standstill before unleashing hell from above with lasguns, rockets and grenades. With Deleval busy upfront, relaying directions from the passenger seat and manning the belt-fed heavy-stubber, Krieg had patched through to Blazer Three, their only other air support bird, instructing the Vulture to make strafing runs on the insurgent-crowded crate container rooftops. The pilot complied but was less than enthusiastic, claiming that the mobs were sending just as many rockets their way.
The Centaur rocked violently to an unexpected halt. The manoeuvre drew a furious scowl from Deleval, but Cruz, the Shadow Brigade driver, simply pointed and began manhandling the vehicle’s chunky nest of levers into reverse. The lieutenant squinted through his cracked, blood-spattered viewport before lividly snatching the mouthpiece of his headset.
‘Convoy, all stop!’
‘What?’ Krieg snapped, leaning forward over the Cruz’s shoulder to get a better view of the road ahead.
‘Blazer One, this is Ironfire. If I’m not mistaken there is a vrekkin’ train across our route,’ the lieutenant said dangerously.
Deleval wasn’t wrong. Krieg found himself staring at a bulk freight repulsomotive, alight and clearly off its magrail. The automated hovertrain probably ran to a thousand cars or more, and would cut off routes across the line, possibly for kilometres in either direction. That wasn’t the worst of it. With the convoy at a standstill and a slow meandering reverse the only way back, rebel fire hit the Centaurs with renewed confidence and clout. The cadet-commissar found himself dropping his head, despite the fire support vehicle’s reinforced armour plating. The crew compartment filled with the cacophony of las-blast impacts and thought-shattering ricochets.
Deleval’s gunner fell back through the hatch like a sack of grain, his face and uniform a las-dappled mess of smouldering flesh and scorched webbing.
‘Get on the cannon!’ Krieg called, but his order was met with glares of venomous defiance from Deleval’s men.
�
��Are you out of your vrekkin’ mind?’ Snyder asked, leaning over the dead Guardsman. He slipped his hand into the furious light show outside and snatched the hatch shut. Turkle proceeded to strip the unfortunate gunner of spare ammunition and in all probability, valuables.
Deleval was still spitting oaths and threats down the vox-link when a shadow flashed across his viewport, causing him to jerk back and let rip with the heavy-stubber. The weapon chugged a fierce blast of lead up the street, but uncertain as to whether he’d hit anything, Deleval yelled at the driver, ‘You got anything?’
Cruz darted his pinched face around the viewport: ‘Nothing.’
‘Crenna?’ Deleval yelled.
‘Dead,’ Snyder shot back, his eyes not leaving Krieg’s own angry slits.
Everyone heard the clunk from up front and even Krieg was forced to break his livid stare. Its location was obvious from the way Cruz began clawing feverishly at his chair harness.
‘Del…’ he managed with white-knuckle panic, but the lieutenant had nothing but four words for him.
‘Fire in the hole!’
The detonation was sharp, deafening and somehow worse inside the confines of the small vehicle. When Krieg brought up his head he found to his heart-striking dismay that he couldn’t, leading him instantly to the sickening conclusion that he was trapped or worse – paralysed. What he found was that Golliant had leaned over to shield him and it was the weight of the monstrous aide that was actually pinning him.
Turkle, Snyder and Goinz had somehow managed to crawl out the back door and the extra ventilation cleared the acrid smog that filled the compartment. As the smoke disappeared Krieg found himself glaring at Deleval, who looked exactly the same as he had done a few seconds before. He was fiddling with the fire support’s fried comms and playing with the limp and useless levers of the driver’s station.
Cruz hadn’t been so lucky. The magtube had been small but enough to disable the near side track and crack open the Centaur’s armour plating. The vehicle’s controls and steerage had been completely mauled and the unlucky driver had had his backside blown through the top of his head.
The grizzled lieutenant was back to his helmet vox-link and climbing into the crew compartment. ‘Time to go,’ he told the commissar simply. Then into his vox-link, ‘This is Deleval. Ironfire is combat ineffective. Falling back to Baptism.’
To their surprise the three men met Snyder, Turkle and Goinz clambering back in the back of the Centaur. Turkle screamed something but it was lost in the split-second rumble and blast of Baptism behind. The detonation smacked Ironfire’s back door closed, but Deleval viciously kicked it back open. The second Centaur was no longer behind them – just a flame-swathed wreck.
Krieg jumped down with Deleval, his hellpistol out and humming furiously by his side. Golliant followed with the bodies of Cruz and the Centaur’s gunner over each broad shoulder and laid them against a nearby wall.
As with Ironfire, the rebels had been attempting to disable the second carrier’s tracks, this time with a rocket from above. The lieutenant sent his men off with a bark, to extricate the survivors, before switching back to his vox-link. ‘Staff Sergeant Bronstead, give me a perimeter and some suppression fire. We’re going to have to load bodies.’
Las-fire chugged up the dirt road around them, forcing Krieg and the lieutenant to trot alongside the convoy with Golliant bounding calmly behind. They passed a glass-eyed Goinz who was crouched with his back to one of the massive crate containers, occasionally blasting his pump action skyward in an attempt to keep the insurgents away from the roof edge immediately above them. Turkle and Snyder were rolling one of Baptism’s crew in the dust and grit nearby, his flak jacket and uniform alight. The rest of the Volscians were pouring out of the carrier’s rear, seemingly unscathed. Once again it was one of the carrier drivers that had paid the price.
‘Gator’ Bronstead trudged up the freightway with thick-set indolence. His helmet was crooked and he leaned his stocky shotgun across one shoulder as though he hadn’t got the slightest intention of using it. A bulbous nose ring and belly added further colour and a scaly patch of skin running down the side of his sweaty neck – the remnant of some underhive pestilence and origin of his nickname – completed the picture. Bronstead and Krieg hadn’t met and the sergeant, like the rest of his hive-kin, didn’t fail to give the cadet-commissar a stabbing glare.
Dwarfing Bronstead for girth and even Golliant for height, a colossal mountain of flesh appeared behind the sergeant. This was Pontiff Preed, Krieg suspected. Dressed in acres of simple white robes and trailing holy relics, tomes and trinkets of faith from his thick, leather belt the priest seemed preoccupied with hiding his gargantuan bulk behind the Shadow Brigade vehicles. He was the breathing definition of an easy target.
The officers formed a circle in the shadow of Steel Sanctuary while Volscians dropped down from the vehicles and formed a hasty perimeter along the outside of the convoy. The air sang with las-fire but the Guardsmen seemed unconcerned. Only Krieg and the Pontiff appeared aware of their vulnerability: the cadet-commissar from a tactical viewpoint and Preed by virtue of pure self-preservation.
‘Right, I’m going to make this fast,’ Deleval began with authority, ‘Recover the bodies and scuttle the forward Centaurs. I don’t want insurgent scavengers using our own weapons and equipment against us. Fall back to the main avenue and continue as planned to the rendezvous.’
‘What about the Spectre crew?’ Krieg threw in above the din of the ambush.
‘They’re on their own. We tried.’
‘That’s not acceptable, lieutenant,’ Krieg informed him.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ Deleval hissed, clearly riled, ‘but there is a train across our path. What the hell do you want me to do about that? Look, we were ordered to swing by, which we’ve tried to do. Chances are if those Navy boys weren’t killed in the crash they’re gonna wish they had been – the way these mungers are coming down on us.’
‘If it were the other way round, Navy aircraft would be directed to search for us, would they not?’ Preed insisted.
Krieg found himself nodding in surprise. He shouldn’t have been. The corpulent Preed was like some massive herbivore that had no natural predators. He’d outgrown the danger of his circumstances and had little to fear from the average hiver; besides, everyone knew that he had Captain Rask’s ear. He could afford to disagree.
‘And we’ll probably have to if we remain here for much longer,’ Bronstead said gruffly.
‘We’re out of time here,’ Deleval told the group. ‘If we don’t move, and I mean now, we won’t make the Titan on time. How happy do you think the major will be then? He grabs the targets but has no convoy to transport them. With all due respect, Holy Father, you and Krieg here are on your first outing. This is what we do. We’re going after the targets. The Navy boys are on their own.’
The lieutenant went to walk away – a clear signal that the impromptu meeting was over. Bronstead began to peel away also.
‘Give me a couple of your men,’ Krieg called after him. His voice was thick with grit and it was difficult to tell whether he’d made a request or given an order. ‘We can make our way on foot and work up to the crash site. If we can get the survivors back to your original route on the other side of the track, so be it. You’ve got to negotiate the train anyway. If not, you can go on, as planned, and make the pick-up.’
The platoon leader turned on his heel, a savage stream of las-fire cutting in between them. The mighty Preed shrugged affirmation. The lieutenant’s face was screwed up with hate and annoyance, but the deep lines gradually faded as he took in the young commissar from boot to cap. Something seemed to suddenly amuse him.
‘Done. I’ll go one better. You can have three men,’ Deleval told him, before yelling across his shoulder at the Guardsmen behind. ‘Turkle, Snyder, Goinz, front and centre! You’re going
with the commissar.’
Krieg had expected a stream of complaints and oaths or even a downright refusal from the hivers. What he got was sly looks, through slitted eyes and a maniacal snigger from Goinz.
‘Thanks,’ Krieg mumbled, a little off guard.
‘See you on the other side,’ Deleval taunted and walked off with Bronstead at his side. Preed nodded slowly at Krieg, readjusted his monocle and then turned to follow.
The three Volscians slid their backs against the wall of a nearby cargo container for cover and had begun feverishly slotting fat cartridges into the breeches of their shotguns. Golliant was back after a brief absence. He’d deposited the Ironfire’s casualties in the back of one of the other Centaurs and had liberated Deleval’s heavy stubber from its forward mounting inside the blasted fire support vehicle. The weapon was a real monster, boasting a pistol grip and carry handle on the top of its belt-fed body and a long, fat, air-cooled barrel to deliver the bad news to its unfortunate targets. Krieg’s aide had also stripped the vehicle of available ammunition, draping spare belts of bullets across each shoulder.
‘Goll, you don’t have to come. Go with the convoy…’
Steel Sanctuary and the column were already rolling backwards, out from under the thunderstorm of rocket-propelled grenades and las-beams the seditionists were pelting at them.
‘How am I supposed to protect you from in there?’ the hulking aide hissed with simple logic, his voice straining above the gunfire. He swung the elongated barrel of the stubber over the cadet-commissar’s head and joined the three corpsmen against the corrugated wall of the container. Snatching his hellpistol from where it sat snugly in its holster, Krieg darted after him.
V
Vertigo came in hard, low and fast.
‘Benedict, cleared to fire?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Let’s do our worst.’
Like some vision of angelic vengeance the Spectre tore across the industriascape. Holding the stick loose but firm in one hand Rosenkrantz cycled the ammunition drums on her wing-mounted autocannons and primed both weapons with the other. Her thumb did the rest, stabbing at the fire stud and releasing two blazing streams of certain death and tracer fire across the depot roof.
Honour Imperialis - Braden Campbell & Aaron Dembski-Bowden & Chris Dows & Steve Lyons & Rob Sanders Page 39