by Toby Frost
Straken took the lead, with Sark beside him. Morell was a little way back, with Mayne and Lavant beside him. They walked at a brisk pace that Sark obviously found tiring, but Lavant never stopped watching, checking not just the area around them but the soldiers moving through it. He might be overly wary, Straken thought, but the man clearly knew how to spot trouble.
They followed the road past fields of a thick crop that looked like pallid, broad-headed wheat, tall enough to hide in. The soldiers formed a rough circle around Lavant, spread out wide enough to see any danger before it could properly notice them.
They passed a few storehouses for the farms, most of them collapsed. Straken sent men out in pairs to check them. There were a few bodies: they had been shot with large-calibre bullets or killed by machete blows, by the look of it. Ork work, Straken thought. They left the bodies where they found them and moved on.
The road turned right, and the team passed under a huge arch. The archway was carved and reinforced to be the opening to a huge road tunnel, big enough to take four Baneblade tanks side by side. Straken boosted his bionic eye to its highest setting, and saw that the overhead lights had been carefully shot out.
That didn’t seem like the sort of thing an ork would do. The darkened tunnel would have been a good place to launch an ambush. Maybe the remaining humans knew something about close-range fighting. Or perhaps they had just got good at hiding.
An ork lay by the arch, next to a pile of black wreckage that had been a huge motorbike. A stripe of burned rubber led across the road towards it; the creature had obviously taken the corner too quickly and smashed straight into the wall. Lavant gave a couple of quick gestures, and two men split off and crossed to the ugly lump of a body. One covered the corpse with his lasgun, while the other crouched down and pushed the tip of his knife through the back of the ork’s neck. There was no point in taking risks.
They passed a few vehicles in the tunnel, most of them industrial. They were quarry trucks, Straken saw: ugly, practical things with high cabs reinforced with metal cages. Most were burned out. Straken whistled softly and gestured, and a trooper climbed up to check each machine’s cab and hopper.
‘We saw ones like this on the way in,’ Lavant said. ‘The orks had smashed them open. It looked like they used a walker.’
Sark pointed to a symbol stencilled on the side of one of the trucks, just visible through the soot. It showed a crossed hammer and pickaxe against a laurel wreath. ‘These are guild trucks,’ he said. He looked miserable.
Straken looked at the symbol, and then at the burned wreckage of the cab, and wondered whether someone Cordell Sark had known still sat inside. The cab looked like a desecrated coffin.
A low grunt came from the darkness ahead. In a moment Straken was alert, his shotgun raised and ready to fire. The men came alive around him. Sark shrank back and fumbled for his pistol. Morrell drew a bolt pistol and pointed down the tunnel, one arm behind his back like a duellist.
A second grunt, then a low, constant grumble. Not an animal, Straken realised. A motor. ‘Split three!’ he hissed.
Lavant made a clicking sound and flicked his arm left, then right, and the Catachans broke. They ran apart, towards the side of the tunnel, taking cover behind the wreckage, taking up positions. Straken’s heart, augmented as it was, sped up.
Two lights appeared before them, beams jutting into the dark. The grumble echoed around the tunnel, rising into the snarl of engines. And with the engines came voices: brutish, bass voices roaring and yelling to each other over the sound of their owners’ bikes.
‘Xenos filth.’ Morrell cocked his pistol.
Straken whispered, ‘Don’t fire, commissar.’
‘What?’
‘Do not fire.’
One of the orks laughed. At least, it sounded like laughter, of a sort.
And then the bikers rushed out of the dark in a wave of sound and stinking fumes, their howls and roars mingling with the noise of their machines. They weaved between the wrecked trucks one after another, like carriages on the same maglev train. Straken caught a glimpse of a steel helmet and a mantrap of a face behind it, all long, dirty teeth, and then they were gone, roaring away down the tunnel.
The engines echoed around them. Straken looked at the men beside him. Morrell had clenched his teeth. Sark’s eyes were closed in a grimace, as if he were in pain. He shuddered as the sound faded, and Straken wondered what the young man had witnessed amidst the sound of ork bikes; it was said that ork outriders were some of the most crazed of the xenos.
‘Let’s move,’ Straken said. ‘Mayne, get on the vox and tell Tanner to look out for greenskins coming his way. Tell him to stay out of sight. Now let’s go, Catachans! We’ve not got all day. You, Guardsman – found something good on the ground there? No? Then get up and get moving!’
Morrell stared back the way they had come, the way the orks had gone. Straken could see what the commissar was thinking from the snarl still on his face.
‘We could have taken them,’ Morrell said.
‘Don’t worry, commissar,’ Straken replied, as the group got moving again, ‘there’ll be plenty of orks for all of us.’
Two hundred and seventy-five metres on, a side route branched off the main tunnel. Sark led them into a maintenance passage – still big enough to fit a Chimera troop carrier – and past a barricade of junk. Lavant caught Straken’s eye and nodded to a string across the floor. It ran to a bell mounted on a heap of broken metal: not a sophisticated warning system, Straken thought, but functional.
Shapes loomed in Straken’s vision, lumps of machinery and rubble. A wrecked bus lay side-on to them. Below its empty windows, the paint had peeled away. A litany against malfunction was crumbling off in flakes.
The side of the bus moved, very slightly. Something scurried past the windows, almost invisible in the gloom. It was the back of a man bent-over double.
Straken gestured to Sark. ‘Hey.’
The lad looked round quickly, as though caught doing something bad.
‘Tell your friend there to stand up. It’d be a shame if we mistook him for an ork.’
‘Oh.’ The boy looked embarrassed. ‘Right.’
Sark approached the bus, and a dark form rose up inside. The man came out sheepishly, an aged laslock rifle in his mittened hands. He wore a black blanket like a cloak, and heavy night-vision gear, presumably miner’s kit; but for all that, Straken realised, the fellow could have been caught by a Catachan child playing hide-and-seek. Locals, he thought, and he remembered General Greiss saying that most of the non-essential personnel had been recruited for the Ryza campaign. That would include all the best local soldiery.
The sentry had a beer gut and the oldest gun Straken had seen for some time. It took several minutes to explain to him that, firstly, the Catachans were actual Guardsmen and not mercenaries, and, secondly, that the rest of the army had not yet arrived.
‘They always think it’ll be the damned Cadians,’ Sergeant Dhoi muttered. ‘Little toy soldiers with shiny uniforms. When we show up, looking like we can get the job done, locals always think we’re after their women and beer. Of course, if they want to give us their women and beer, that’s fine with me…’
They moved on, deeper into the compound. Figures appeared at the edges of the dark, grubby people in old overalls and hard hats painted black, the warning stripes chipping through. Some wore flak jackets, like those the more staid Guard units used when setting detonation charges. All carried autopistols, and a few had autoguns and laslocks. One optimistic young man held a powered stone-cutter with a circular blade.
Flanked by their strange new guards, Straken and his team walked into what could well have been the largest human settlement on Dulma’lin.
The place looked like what it was, Straken thought: a mining camp. Leaving aside the rough barricades, the bad attempts at covering fire-points and the dangerous-looking vox-comm system that someone had recently improvised, it looked like a transitory work camp f
or non-indentured employees, the sort of thing seen on a thousand peaceful worlds of the Imperium. A few large plant machines stood around the edges. Several mounted heavy stubbers. Surprisingly, someone had scratched kill marks onto the side of a truck. It was more likely they had been racked up by driving over orks than by shooting them.
All in all, a shabby, brave, amateurish mess.
Lavant shook his head. ‘What a tip,’ he whispered. ‘I could take the whole thing out with one standard charge.’
‘At least they’re trying,’ Straken replied.
‘Trying what? These people couldn’t fortify a ration pack.’
Straken turned to Sark. ‘Go and tell your commander that we’re here.’
A long cabin stood towards the rear. It too looked temporary, the sort of standard template building put up by settlers for tens of thousands of years, and probably unloaded from a truck. There were a hell of a lot of vehicles in the mining trade, Straken thought. That meant a lot of combustible fuel. The orks would have loved that.
They walked up the cabin steps. Straken rapped his metal knuckles on the doorframe and strode in without waiting for an answer.
Sark stood beside an old desk. A small, middle-aged man sat behind it. The little man stood up as Straken entered, and Sark said, ‘This is them, boss.’
The little man scurried round the desk, smiling. ‘Emperor above, it’s good to see you!’ He ran a hand through his thinning hair. ‘Should I shake hands or salute?’
‘Can’t say I much mind,’ Straken replied, and the little man tentatively put out a hand.
‘Larn Tarricus. I’m the mining guild burgher for this canton, master-miner second class,’ he said. ‘I’m in charge here. At least, I have been up to now, I suppose.’
Straken glanced at the wall behind him. Letters and prayers were pinned to a noticeboard. Beside it, a creased poster showed an Imperial Guardsman gazing bravely into the distance. ‘Your Labour Keeps Him Strong!’ the picture said.
Straken could see what Tarricus had expected, and wondered whether his soldiers looked like a disappointment or a threat to him.
‘So, um, Colonel Straken,’ said the guildmaster. ‘Have you got an army with you? Is that how it works?’
‘No, but I’ve got one following. We’re the advance guard – a whole regiment of us. We’re up in the fields around the power station. From the intelligence I’ve been given, Excelsis City is like a fortress. With the doors closed, it’s a hell of a job to get inside. We’re here to get the doors open so the rest of the Guard can get in and drive the orks out. How’s that sound?’
Tarricus grinned. ‘Emperor, that sounds good! What can we do?’
‘I’m going to need maps,’ Straken said. ‘All the plans and maps of the gatehouse you can get. I intend to brief my men in one hour, so you’ll need to work fast. And I believe the captain here may be interested in some of your demolitions equipment.’
‘That’s right,’ Lavant said.
Tarricus nodded. ‘We’ve got plenty of maps, and as for blasting gear – well, we’re miners. How much do you want?’
Straken shrugged. ‘Everything you’ve got.’
6.
‘Listen up and gather round!’ Straken pointed to the map, two and a half metres square, pinned to the wall in front of him. ‘Much as I’d like to, I can’t do this mission alone, and so some of you sleepy-eyed wasters are going to have to back me up.’
He stood in the assembly room of the power station, under the half a dozen flickering lamps that they had managed to get back online. Around the room sat and stood thirty of the regiment’s best: not just the officers, but lower ranks as well, people who would be leading teams and carrying out special roles. Some smoked, one or two chewed ration bars, but all watched the colonel as he pointed to the map.
‘This here’s Excelsis City, the delightful hole in the Emperor’s own ground that the orks have been using as a latrine for the past few months. As you can see, the city’s made up of a set of interlinked caves arranged around a central vault. This power station stands in one of the smaller caves, to the south-east. The big cave in the middle is called the Mommothian Vault. It’s about eight kilometres long and contains administration, enforcer buildings, central government and comms gear. My guess is that it’s also where the ork command will be bunked up.
‘Radiating out from that are what they call the Greater Cantons, caves given over to living areas, which in turn means hab-blocks and related stuff. Owing to the recent draft, a lot of the residential districts are empty anyway – by now, the orks will have stripped them for food. Further out from the centre, you’ve got the Lesser Cantons, which are industry, farming and so on. Assuming you’ve opened your eyes since we arrived, you’ll be aware that most of the so-called Lesser Cantons are still bigger than the warship that brought us here.’ He pointed to various smaller tunnels, reaching out from the city like the roots of a tree. ‘These are under construction. There may be more survivors hiding out there. It’s hard to tell, and from the looks of it the orks have figured out that the locals won’t do much except hide in the dark and hope it all goes away.’
Someone snorted with contempt. Straken recognised the man as Lieutenant Zandro, a friend of Tanner’s and a fellow veteran of the Miral operation. Straken waited for a moment as the usual derisory comments were made: the inevitable muttering that happened whenever local defence forces, High Command or the Departmento Munitorum were mentioned.
‘Quiet down,’ Morrell barked. A bulb flickered above his head.
Straken pointed to the map. ‘The main gate is at the north end of the Mommothian Vault. We will be attacking the gatehouse – here.’ His metal finger tapped the map. ‘Tanner?’
The captain pushed a display unit over on a high trolley. Once it had dispensed inspiring information about the Imperium and thoughts for the day; now a more detailed map was taped across the broken screen.
‘The gate’s at the end of a main street,’ he said. ‘It’s wide enough to get a whole load of armour in at once – enough to knock out whatever defences the orks have got. There’s a fortified gatehouse that we’ll need to take to get at the controls. You can bet the greenskins will be hiding inside it. Chances are, we can get through the city and close to the gatehouse without much trouble – they’re not expecting us, and they’re probably too busy getting drunk and smashing things to see us coming. But once they know we’re there, then…’ He grinned. ‘It gets nasty.’
The soldiers glanced at each other and nodded. They reminded Straken of hungry men who have heard that food is about to be served up.
‘We need to take the gate and hold it long enough for our forces to get inside,’ Straken said. ‘The main force is going to get up close, rush the gatehouse and kill every ork inside. Distractions will be caused shortly before the attack by Captain Lavant’s demolitions team. I hope you’ve got some fireworks for us, Lavant.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Lavant replied. ‘I’ve made plans.’
‘Meanwhile, a forward attack squad, under Captain Tanner, will seek to knock out any ork vehicles parked around the gatehouse. That’ll take out a lot of their heavy weapons, and stop them sending out for help.
‘While that’s going on, a support force, headed by Lieutenant Zandro, will be covering the road. Once they’ve realised that we’ve taken the gatehouse, it’s likely that the orks will try to bring up vehicles to get it back. Zandro’s force will set up roadblocks and mines to destroy or at least slow any reinforcements until we can get General Greiss’s tanks into the city. Commissar Morrell will be with that force.’
A rumble of disgust ran through the men. Corporal Newsen, Lavant’s assistant, turned and spat on the floor. Someone said, ‘Damned leash.’ Zandro scowled.
‘Anyone got any problems with that?’ Straken asked. ‘Because if you do, I’m listening.’
‘So am I,’ Morrell said. The commissar pulled his cap down. ‘We’re all in this together, troopers. We will carr
y out the Emperor’s will. I’ll make sure of it.’
‘That’s very reassuring, commissar,’ Zandro said. ‘I can’t tell you how reassured I am.’
He glanced at Tanner, who chuckled and quickly disguised it as a cough.
Morrell looked as if he was sucking on something sour.
‘That’s enough,’ Straken said. ‘In case anyone happens to have forgotten, you’re doing what the hell I say. Lavant, once the distraction’s gone up, and once you’ve hit the vehicles, Tanner, I want both of your forces converging on the gatehouse to back us up. Then we open the gates.’ He looked across the row of faces, meeting eyes, daring them to disagree. They looked like a hard, mean crew, he thought, fighters by habit and by preference.
‘Get your teams briefed up and ready. We move out in three hours,’ Straken said. ‘We open the gates in six.’
Morrell lit a candle, said a short prayer to the Emperor, and took the notebook out of his coat pocket. He sat on a metal chair, in a drab backroom of the power station. It smelt of dust and rats. He checked his chrono and opened the book. Morrell wrote in cipher, his handwriting big and neat.
Two hours before we head off. Straken intends to split the force: two distraction parties, one attacking force and one to support it. I shall be overseeing the support unit. It makes good enough sense – no doubt the Catachans will be eager in the assault, but they lack discipline. They will need a strong hand to make them stay put if things become difficult. I shall be on the alert for shirking.
Everything I have been told about them and Straken is true. He leads from the front, and his men follow without question, the way a pack of hounds follows the biggest dog. He has a little more cunning than I expected, but by and large his men are as I thought: coarse, impious, vulgar and tough, more like savages than soldiers. I know they hate my presence, probably because I remind them of the duty to the Imperium they would rather ignore. By my faith, the only time I have heard the Emperor’s name mentioned is as a curse. I have watched for infringements, but there has been nothing definite as yet. Straken lets them get away with too much. But I will watch, and if there is anything–