by Toby Frost
‘You – all of you – and I are going to take the fight to the orks before they bring it to us. The orks have too many troops and too much armour to fight head-on. Instead, we will carry out guerrilla operations to weaken their hold on the city. We will cripple their morale, destroy their equipment and turn Excelsis into a killing ground. The orks have had things their own way for too long. You and I are going to take this city back for the Imperium, cave by cave, until there’s nothing left to fight.’
An arm went up in the audience. Straken had not expected this. It was the white-haired woman. ‘Question,’ Straken said, pointing with his metal hand.
‘Jocasta Ferrens, head of the Western miners’ group and former deputy to the Dulma’lin senate,’ she said. Her voice was scratchy but loud, like an old vox-phonograph. ‘You talk a good talk, colonel. But how do you plan to do it? Where’re the men, the guns, the gear to take the orks on? And say we do hit the orks hard – or rather you decide to. What then? It’ll only draw their attention. And then we’ll have every one of them on us. What’re we supposed to do about that?’
Several survivors around her nodded and murmured agreement. Tarricus took out a rag and wiped sweat from his forehead. Among the soldiers, someone made a loud, muffled comment, and there were a few laughs. Straken couldn’t make out the words, but he knew what the Guardsmen would be thinking: typical stay-at-home civilians, cowering while the Guard did the hard work.
‘Fair comment,’ Straken replied, making his voice a little louder. He looked straight at Jocasta Ferrens. She did not look away. Whatever her faults might be, she didn’t scare easily. ‘Here’s the first thing – we are taking this war to the orks together, all of us.’
‘And if we don’t?’ she demanded. ‘What’ll you do then?’
‘Why then,’ he replied, ‘I’ll do it myself. But seeing how the orks have murdered and looted your city, smashed the hell out of your beloved miners’ guild, shat in your temples and probably killed your friends in the senate into the bargain, I thought maybe you’d like to help.’
To his surprise, she grinned wolfishly and said something to Tarricus. The guildsman nodded, still sweating as if waiting for a sentence of death.
‘And now you ought to get to know my people.’ Straken pointed to his comrades. ‘This is Captain Tanner. If you want to know anything about jungle fighting, long knives and drinking beer, he’s your man.’
‘Damn right,’ Tanner said, and there were laughs from the men he knew best.
‘And this is Captain Lavant. Traps, bombs and sniping are his thing. I’m guessing you miners know how to set a fuse – you’ll have lots to talk about. These two gentlemen are going to educate you in the ways of killing orks. In return, you will be giving them and their people a tour of the city. The first thing is to find out what we’re up against. Then we’ll figure out the tools we’ve got to do it. And after that, we’ll get it done. Cavern by cavern, starting with the fields and hab-blocks, we will put the fear of the Emperor into the xenos. And then we’ll take the city back.
‘Catachans, this won’t be easy, but compared to some of the stuff I’ve seen fighting tyranids and renegades, this is nothing. I will be continuing with my mission to liberate the city, and I expect the same from you. I want this base and the guild HQ secured. I need scouting teams to check the entire lower area of the city, concentrating on the residential areas. I will be giving tasks to all officers to be carried out immediately. Any man found sitting on his arse or not pitching in enough will answer to me.
‘Civilians – first, I want you people to get me every map you have of this city, in the caves and on the surface. Second, you’re miners. That means that you’ve got explosives. I want to know the amount and location of all the equipment and people under your command.
‘We regroup here in one standard day. I want scouting teams ready to head off by then. Civilians will provide maps and rosters as good as you can make them in that time. Any questions? Good. Now, we’ve got a lot of work to do and a lot of orks to kill – so move!’
Straken watched them leave the room. The sound of bootsteps and low voices filled the hall. In the gallery, Morrell’s trench coat merged with the shadows as he moved away.
Straken caught Lavant’s eye. ‘Get some men together – a dozen should do it – and go back with the miners. Tell them you’re there to help get things in order. Make sure they don’t just muck around.’
‘Right.’
Lavant gave a low whistle, and several men turned to him at once – demolitions men from the looks of them, Straken thought. Lavant moved forward to talk to them, and suddenly stopped. He froze, staring into the gallery.
Straken followed Lavant’s gaze. Three men stood up there, talking. They looked like snipers: two wore cloaks, the other had on a set of image-enhancement goggles. The two cloaked men were talking enthusiastically about something, but the third did not speak. Below the goggles, the sniper’s face had a strange, frozen quality, as if it were not quite real. Then the trio turned and walked towards the stairs leading out of the hall.
Lavant was sickly pale. He stood there for a second, then seemed to wake and turned to his men. At once the captain was back to normal. The whole incident had taken less than three seconds.
As the last of the soldiers began to file out, Straken looked at Tanner and said, ‘A word, captain.’
Tanner nodded and stepped back. From the look on his face, he knew what was going to be said.
‘I gather Zandro was a friend of yours.’
‘You gather right.’ Tanner glanced around the room, as though he were already bored. Straken wondered whether anything he said would have any effect on him.
‘I spoke to the commissar. He thought Zandro was retreating without orders, apparently.’
‘I heard,’ Tanner said. His voice was flat and dead.
‘I don’t want any trouble among the men, Tanner. Not while we’re stuck in this hole. We’ve got enough orks to worry about without turning on our own people.’
‘Since when was a commissar one of our people?’ Tanner’s voice was low and surly. Hopefully, Straken thought, he was resigned to the situation. Some hope.
‘The way I see it, this is between you and him. I don’t want people thinking that my officers are at each other’s throats.’ He paused. ‘Emperor knows this place is dangerous enough as it is. With so many orks around, a man could just disappear. Understand?’
Tanner nodded. ‘Yes, I understand.’
‘Good. Now go and help the others.’
The captain walked towards the doors. He stopped just before the exit. ‘It won’t be a problem,’ he said, and he walked out.
9.
Straken’s first instinct was to fight back, and he knew that the men felt the same. But against an enemy with the numbers and equipment of the orks, you had to work out where to attack. He had hunted enough feral grox on Catachan to know that it was death to simply run back in – and he had seen enough other regiments making ‘glorious’ last stands to know how much good it tended to do.
Lavant came back from the mining guild camp with good news: the miners had a large cache of high-quality explosives. The orks had swept through the caves, looking only for vehicles and people to kill, and the miners had hidden deep in the dark, where the xenos feared to go. Guildmaster Tarricus thought that they hadn’t known what the crates of ‘Hi.ex. administratum’ were.
Twenty-eight hours after the meeting in the power station, Tarricus gave Lavant a full estimate of the people and equipment under his control. His men numbered just over a hundred and their weapons were feeble, but there was more to it than that. Straken knew the survivors were starting to organise themselves and to think of themselves in terms of fighting men. If that could continue, they might become something more than a liability.
Straken himself checked the defences and sent out teams to prowl the local area. The forest around the power station was Catachan territory, and it was time to consider expanding
. The trick was not to hold ground, at least not in the obvious, static way Morrell would have wanted, but to make a large area too dangerous for the orks.
Tanner set out on the first scouting mission. With ten men, the captain headed west to check the lower hab-caverns and look for survivors. Straken ordered him to leave for four days, assessing the enemy in the nearest two caverns and trying to weigh up their next move. With a bit of luck, Straken reflected, a few days away would cool his rage a little.
For his part, the commissar kept as low a profile as a man of his rank and temperament could. He still did the rounds, glowering and arrogant, his shoulders permanently squared as if waiting for a fight, but the attack did not come. Men moved away from him, kept their mouths closed around him and cursed him behind his back. When not actually checking the defences, he took long stretches on watch, one hand on his bolt pistol, waiting for attack. Straken saw him standing like a gargoyle at the edge of the power station, as if daring an enemy to snipe at him, and wondered if the commissar was more mad than brave.
On the afternoon of the sixth day, leaning over a table lit by a flickering lumen-strip, Straken consulted his maps. He drew a red line around the forest. Soon, he promised himself, he’d widen that line until it covered the entire city, like a red cord around the orks. Then he’d tighten the cord, and choke the invading greenskins to death. Soon, somehow.
A soot-blackened shuttle slid into the docking bay of the Radix Malorum and its aquila-shaped wings folded into the landing position. As the ground crew ran forward, the side hatch opened and the great bulk of Nork Deddog squeezed out.
The ogryn looked around the hold, sniffed the smoke-filled air and glowered at an approaching tech-priest. ‘Safe,’ he grunted, and he lowered his ripper gun.
General Greiss followed him out, his dust-covered boots clanging on the ramp. Three tech-priests ignored him and hurried to the shuttle, eager to check its efficiency.
The hold, six hundred metres square, was in disorder. Half a dozen landing-craft lay in various states of repair on the plasteel floor. Most had been riddled by the heavy cannon fire the orks used; several had taken hits from energy weapons. The landers had been on the edge of the deployment zone, for the most part, and had escaped the worst of it. A modified Sentinel stood beside a wrecked troop ship, holding up a piece of twisted fuselage to allow soldiers to emerge: plasma had sealed the hatches shut. Three growling tractors dragged a massive engine away. Metal squealed, and under it, men called out and screamed.
An officer of the Selvian Dragoons ran over and saluted. Greiss found their uniforms hard to tell apart. He had never got to know them much – he realised that he never would now. ‘General. Lieutenant-Colonel Frayling reporting, sir. Colonel Richello’s up in medicae, sir. Head wound – it doesn’t look good.’ He glanced round the hold. A Chimera helped pull a battered Leman Russ out of its drop-ship. The ship looked like a cathedral after a bombing raid. ‘We’ve pulled as much materiel as we can off-world. The Navy’s given the order to fall back out of orbit as soon as you’ve arrived.’
‘Good. You’re doing a good job, Frayling. I’m glad you made it out.’ There was dust on the colonel’s uniform, Greiss saw. The feather in the man’s cap had broken, and dangled down at a foolish angle. Greiss walked away from the shuttle, Nork by his side. ‘What’re our losses?’
Lieutenant-Colonel Frayling licked his lips. ‘It’s… it’s hard to tell at the moment, general. But I’ve been counting my tanks back in – and it’s heavy, heavy.’ He glanced away, and for a moment Greiss thought the man was going to curse. ‘The orks got the jump on us, sir. There was nothing we could do.’
‘So I saw.’ It had been so damned simple. The orks had used the storms on Dulma’lin to hide their approach. At their height the xenos had raised a purpose-built vehicle from the planet’s surface, a misshapen mix of spaceship and aircraft parts, built so that its underside covered as wide an area as possible. They had flown it through the storm, over the Guard tanks as they started to disperse – and cut the engines. The ork craft had been destroyed, but it had done its work: entire battalions had been flattened by the impact. Greiss could see them clearly in his mind, the numberless ork soldiers swarming from the wreckage to finish the job.
Greiss felt a twinge of pain in his knee, and quickly transferred his weight to the other foot. Why in the Emperor’s name did I go down there at all? he wondered. Some vainglorious idea of leading from the front, no doubt. Too much hanging around men like Straken. Catachan habits died hard.
A medicae team ran in and got to work, trying to drag men out of one of the transport ships. A high-ranking Mechanicus priest put out its metal arm to bar their way. An argument began.
It was time to ask the question Greiss had been dreading. He felt his stomach twitch at the thought, his heart seemed to rise in his meagre chest. ‘What about the Catachan Second? Did they make it back?’
Frayling said, ‘No, sir. They didn’t.’ He paused a moment. ‘General, the Navy wants to pull out of orbit. There’s artillery on the planet that could breach orbit, sir, not to mention ork ships.’
Greiss kept on walking. The lift to the command deck seemed miles away. Somewhere to the left, the vox-comm reminded anyone listening that standard penalties for cowardice and weapon loss still applied.
He stared across the hold. The argument between the medicae team and the Mechanicus priest had intensified. The lead medic was shouting and pointing. The tech-priest had simply raised the volume of its artificial voice.
‘Look at this,’ Greiss said. ‘Get that metal-faced priest out of the way. I want the medics to have a clear path, Frayling.’
‘The Mechanicus won’t like it, sir.’
The old man stopped and whirled around so quickly that Nork lunged in to steady him. ‘I don’t care!’ Greiss snapped. ‘I sent them down there, and I’d like some of them back! And tell the commissars that I want to speak to them. Maybe they’ll listen to me before trying to shoot half their own side. Do you understand?’
Astonished, Frayling said, ‘Yes, general.’
‘Good. If anyone is bothered by that, they can come and discuss it with me personally.’
‘Yeah,’ said Nork. ‘And me.’
‘Emperor, what a mess. Let’s just hope the leashes don’t make it any worse.’ Greiss looked away and resumed his walk towards the lifts. ‘I blame myself for this,’ he muttered.
‘No!’ Nork Deddog cried. ‘It was the orks what did it. Hate orks,’ he added. ‘Gonna smash ’em.’
‘General,’ Frayling said, ‘I need to know about that order. The Navy will want–’
‘I know.’ Greiss seemed to shrink. Suddenly, he felt nothing like the leader of an invading army, even a defeated one. He was just a weary old man, about to betray a friend. ‘Pull back.’
Tanner’s team returned to base with five civilians. ‘These four we found hiding out in the ruins,’ he explained, pointing to a grimy family. ‘They used to run a repair station, mending the machines for the mushroom farms.’
Straken nodded. ‘Useful. Send them up to the others. See if we can get some of these mining trucks moving again. What about the orks?’
‘The main vault’s full of ’em. Packed full. There’s a few orks in the hab-caverns out west of here, but if you’ve got a load of armour and a big mouth, it looks like the centre is the place to be. I reckon the city must’ve emptied out when we went to the gates, otherwise we’d have been fighting all the way there.’
‘That makes sense. Killzkar would have wanted them all out ready to fight when our army arrived.’
‘Yeah. That’s the other thing – they’re bringing in tanks. Our tanks, hundreds of ’em. Some I saw were just scrap, but others were almost undamaged. I didn’t stay long but I saw Chimeras, Leman Russes, a couple of things I didn’t even recognise – and not one of them driven by the Guard.’ He sighed. ‘The army took a bad kicking out there. Hell, I’d be surprised if there’re any Guardsmen left on the planet
except us. They must’ve got the drop on our people in a bad way. I suppose there’s one good thing about it.’
‘What?’
‘Well, they’re too busy to come looking for us. Right now, they’re pretty distracted with the stuff they captured. The main vault’s like a riot. They’re driving tanks round, getting drunk, fighting each other, smashing the place up… for now.’
‘All the more reason to go looking for them before they decide to come looking for us. You find anything else?’
Tanner nodded at the civilians he’d brought in. ‘The girl here’s the strange one,’ he said, pointing. The child wasn’t much more than ten, Straken thought, although it was hard to tell. She had cut her hair short, and wore dark overalls and a laspistol on her belt, as if someone had dressed her up as a soldier for a joke. ‘We found her further in, near some kind of vox-station. Says she was with the “father”. He got angry so she ran away.’
‘Her father?’
‘No. Sounds like a priest, somewhere out in the ruins with a bunch of followers. A Ministorum preacher might be a good thing to have. He’d put a bit of fire into the civvies. Might be useful when the time comes.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
Tanner glanced over Straken’s shoulder, searching for something. His eyes scanned the dark behind the colonel, and then looked back. Straken had a good idea who he was looking for.
Straken said, ‘I’m going to take a trip out. I want to see the main vaults and find out what’s going on there. You’re coming too.’
‘Fine. I’ll need to get some gear together.’
Good, Straken thought. The sooner both of us are hunting orks, the better. Besides, if Tanner was going to try to take revenge on the commissar, the last place he would want to do it was the middle of camp. No, if Morrell died it would be somewhere quiet, on some patrol. He would be snatched away, apparently by orks, or killed in a freak cave-in, or would simply disappear.
‘I want a good guide,’ Straken said. ‘That means you. And bring some good soldiers. Fresh people, good at going quietly.’