by Toby Frost
Tanner grinned. ‘Now I see. Hunting party, is it?’
‘Something like that. Get some sleep and put a team together. We’ll head off at oh-seven-hundred.’
‘All right. It’s time we got some killing in.’
‘Damned right. Believe me, the orks are going to hurt before I’m through.’
‘Before we’re through.’
Straken headed back into the power station, past the network of traps and tripwires strung between the white trunks of the fungal trees.
Lavant had taken one of the old offices for his demolitions teams. He had salvaged rolls of paper from a wrecked servitor-scribe, and now the walls and tables were covered in lists and maps.
As Straken entered the room, he saw the captain bent over a pile of papers. He seemed to be cross-referencing two hand-drawn charts, making lists in his neat handwriting.
Lavant certainly looked like a Catachan, but sometimes Straken wondered whether he thought like one at all.
He coughed and the captain looked up. ‘Colonel Straken.’
‘How’s it going, Lavant?’
‘Very well, thank you.’ He turned the chart around. ‘This shows the materiel I’ve been able to source from the civilians. Dulma’lin might not have had many soldiers, but it’s got a hell of a lot of explosives. Larn Tarricus’s people have their guild supplies further down the road, and that senator who attended the meeting – Jocasta Ferrens, she’s called – has a second stash, over to the west. With that amount of gear, we could do some real damage.’
Straken looked at the map. ‘That’s a lot of dead orks.’
‘Absolutely.’ Lavant smiled and pointed to a box on the floor. ‘That’s a sample I brought up to test. You run an electric current through it and boom.’
‘This stuff?’ Straken prodded the box with his boot.
Lavant stood up. ‘Don’t touch it, please,’ he said, his voice a little tight.
‘I thought you said it needed a current to explode.’
‘Well, yes, but let’s just be careful, all right? It’s been in storage for a fair while.’
‘I’m heading off with Tanner to check the main vaults. You’re in charge while I’m gone.’
‘Right.’
Straken tapped the chart. ‘I want this put into action while I’m gone. I want Tarricus’s guild outpost turned into a second main base, so if we lose the power station we’ve got somewhere to fall back to. That means fortifying it and dividing the gear. Put the Sentinels wherever there’s a workshop, in case we need repairs.’
Lavant nodded.
‘Get the civilians moving. Have them do bayonet drill, morning prayers, whatever works. Just don’t let them stand around and mope. Make sure they know that we’re not hiding from the orks, we’re creeping up on them. And you know that tunnel between here and the guild buildings?’
‘The one that kid showed us?’
‘Yes. Get it cleared and under our control. We’ll use it to bring up supplies.’
Lavant pulled a lho-stick out of his combat vest. ‘I’ve had my demo teams working on getting the mining trucks working. Some of their machine-spirits are in a bad way, but there’s a couple still running. We can use them to move the explosives down to the power station.’
‘Good thinking. Keep them busy, Lavant. Busy and keen.’
Lavant flicked him a neat salute. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘And ease down a little. Don’t get wound up, just get the job done.’
10.
The ork looked like brutality made flesh. It wore a chipped steel helmet like a deformed pot, and between the metal visor and its protruding mantrap of a lower jaw, two bloodshot eyes glared at the ruined buildings around it. Its big hands clutched a crude, blocky gun, the greasy barrel wrapped with rags.
Straken grabbed it from behind. His metal arm slipped around its throat and he stepped back, tugging it off balance, as his other hand drove his fang-knife into the side of the alien’s neck. He hauled it into the shadows, the ork thrashing in his grip, but he knew that the thing was as good as finished. Its death throes subsided, and Straken let the brute drop.
Tanner had caught the ork’s gun to stop it clattering on the ground; now he looked at the weapon as if it were some unwholesome insect. ‘More than a beast, less than a man,’ he said.
‘What?’ Straken wiped his blade on the ork’s coarse fatigues.
‘Something I once heard a preacher say.’ He put the gun down a little way from its former owner. ‘A dead ork is a good ork – that’s my sermon for today.’
‘Then let’s see if he brought his friends,’ Straken replied.
They moved on, quiet and quick, keeping to the shadows. The ten Catachans advanced between rows of empty hab-blocks, six storeys high. The ground level shops had been looted, but not thoroughly. That was one of the few advantages with fighting orks, Straken thought as he crept through what had once been a clothing store: they were deadly, but disorganised. Rage made them chaotic. Perhaps that was why they had to fight other races – to stop them turning on each other. Even when they were winning, they would fight among themselves. Combat was just in their veins.
Broken glass crunched softly under heavy boots. Tanner paused to take a bearing, and Straken watched the way for him. ‘This’ll take us north-west,’ Tanner explained.
They crept through a dingy arcade and into a large shop selling candles, folding triptych shrines and cheap devotional tat. The remains of an Ecclesiarchy vending permit hung like a torn flag from the wall. The orks had smashed the place up with unexpected vigour. Perhaps they had been driven into a fit of hatred by the pictures of the saints and the Emperor – or maybe they had been angered by the lack of anything good to eat.
‘Nothing,’ Tanner said as they entered the rear of the shop. ‘The Guard took most of the population with them on their last recruiting drive. Orks must’ve done for the rest.’
Straken heard a metallic clatter behind him and whipped around. One of the Catachans, a young man with bleached white hair, froze in the act of pocketing a gold-edged pocket-viewer showing the Tribulations of Sebastian Thor.
‘The saints won’t like it if you don’t pay,’ Straken said. ‘Nor will I.’
The lad nodded and put the viewer back.
There might have been no sign of the enemy, but it was best not to use the roads. Cutting through shops and houses was the easiest and most direct way. They went carefully, as they would have done through jungle, wary of traps.
The squad spent the evening on the second floor of a hab-block, opposite a burned-out Adeptus Mechanicus station. They rested in shifts, in the empty apartment of a family long since recruited for the Ryza warzone. Straken checked his arm, using the little tool kit in his combat vest, and poured drips of sanctified oil into the hinges. He slept in a battered armchair, shotgun across his lap.
Thirty minutes into his shift, Straken heard sounds from the window. He stood up, walked to the side of the window and listened.
An engine grunted and rumbled a street away. Straken waited, and heard ork speech. They growled and spat as if imitating the noise of their vehicle. He looked around the windowsill, bionic eye zooming in.
A gang of orks were ransacking the Mechanicus workshop. An officer lumbered in the middle of them, a great hunched thing in an apron and bulky goggles. A gretchin scuttled around its legs like an excited child, pointing and chittering.
Straken stood there, watching them and wondering if the Imperium would ever be free of the orks. There was a story, whispered between superstitious Guardsmen when the priests and commissars were nowhere near, that the orks were a twisted reflection of mankind, an opposite version spewed out of the warp. Straken didn’t believe it, but at times they were like a cruel parody of men. Men without any of the virtues, he thought, driven by anger and evil glee.
The big ork hunted through the broken machinery. It seemed to be some kind of mechanic. It barked orders to its guards, and between them they began to carry object
s out of the workshop. Straken saw two of them haul out a stiff figure like a half-finished mannequin, and realised that they were taking out the remains of servitors. With the organic parts burned away, the servitors looked like scaffolding in the shape of men.
Straken felt a rush of energy, the need to run and fight. It was not fear, but a sense of readiness, as though some combat drug had begun to seep into his veins. He flexed the fingers of his metal hand. Then he turned and crossed the room.
Tanner lay on a wooden couch, boots up on the armrest. Straken prodded him, and the captain snapped awake. Together they crept back to the window.
‘Put three men with lasguns up here, giving covering fire,’ Straken whispered. ‘The rest of us go across.’
Tanner nodded, his eyes gleaming in the dim light, and stepped back.
The men woke quietly. Straken stayed by the window, hearing them move behind him: the soft sound of boots, the clicking of power packs into guns. Three bulky men approached.
‘On my shot you fire,’ Straken said. ‘Keep the orks busy till we hit them.’
The others waited for him at the top of the stairs. Now the need to fight had arisen, they looked ready and dangerous. Keeping low, Straken crept downstairs into the hab-block’s lobby.
He peered through the ornate handrail, through the lobby windows and across the road. The ork mech was still growling orders to its assistants. As Straken watched, one of the ork soldiers brought it a metal drum, from which a length of bent tubing protruded. It looked like an exhaust. The creature snatched the object, turned it over in its hands and hurled it away with what sounded like a curse.
Straken amplified his night-vision. What the hell were the orks looking for?
With a low growl, an ork vehicle rolled up to the front of the workshop. It was an ugly, stripped-down six-wheeler, open at the back. The driver emerged and lumbered over to his comrades, and a grunting conversation ensued.
‘With me,’ Straken whispered, and he crept across the lobby to the front door. He glanced over his shoulder. Several of the raiding party had slung their lasguns and wielded machetes and knives. The rest had fixed their bayonets. There was no need to ask if they were ready to attack.
Straken put his hand on the door. ‘Don’t let any of them escape,’ he said.
He yanked the door open and ran out.
A shape moved at the back of the truck. ‘Hey!’ Straken called, and as the ork turned he blasted it full in the chest. The shot tossed it against the side of the truck and it flopped onto the ground.
Two orks dropped the broken servitor they carried and went for their pistols. Straken shot one, throwing it aside, and Sergeant Pharranis leaped onto the second ork, pinning its arms while a Guardsman drove his blade into its chest.
Straken’s men fired from the window behind him, lasguns cracking and hissing. A shot punched through an ork’s shoulder and, instead of flinching, it bellowed at the windows like an ape issuing a challenge. A second later a las-beam caught it straight between the eyes.
Blue light flared from the back of the workshop, illuminating it like a metal cave. A man cried out and fell. Straken ran into the workshop – and something jumped at him from the shadows, scratching and jabbering, a scrawny, monkey-like creature scrabbling for his eyes. Cursing, he fended an arm off with his shotgun, reached out and crushed the gretchin’s head in his metal fist. His men charged past, Tanner at their head, and in a flurry of blades the ork mech was knocked down and hacked to death.
Gunfire ripped out of a neighbouring building. Straken ducked behind the truck and peered round the side. A fat, bare-chested alien waddled out of the doorway to a hab-block, carrying a bipod stubber. The weapon bucked and spat, flames roaring out of ventilation holes down the length of the barrel. Straken’s men in the window threw themselves down, and the ork gurgled with laughter.
Straken glanced left, and saw Tanner and one of his team finishing off a downed ork with their knives. He pulled a grenade from his belt, tugged out the pin and rolled it under the truck.
The fat ork was enjoying the sound of its gun much too much to notice the grenade hitting the side of its boot. The blast threw it off its feet and knocked the stubber out of its hands, but didn’t kill it. A moment later, as the alien sat up, Straken ran in and finished it with a single shotgun blast.
The last greenskin made a run for the truck. It got halfway into the cab before las-fire from the hab-block hit its back. It fell, thrashing and snarling, and one of Tanner’s men stepped in and killed it with a blow that almost split its head in half.
And then the street was silent. Straken wiped his metal hand on a rag and cursed the damned gretchin for getting its filthy blood on him. Then he saw a man lying beside the wall, and remembered the blast of blue fire.
The shot had been plasma, from the look of it: a mercifully swift kill straight through the chest. Two soldiers took point while the team dragged the ork bodies into the workshop. They placed the dead man carefully to one side; the orks they dumped in a heap at the back. Tanner took off his bandana while one of the soldiers recited the Emperor’s Grace. Straken collected the dead man’s dog tags and prepared to move on.
Tanner stood over the dead mech, both disgusted and intrigued. ‘What is all that stuff on its face?’ he said as Straken approached.
Straken shook his head. ‘Tech stuff. Some kind of mechanic, maybe.’
Tanner made a low whistle. ‘An ork enginseer. What was he doing here?’
‘Looking for something. I don’t know what.’ Straken bent down. The ork’s apron was covered in pockets. A folded scrap of paper protruded from the largest one.
‘What’s that?’ Tanner asked as Straken unfolded it. It was a map, hand-drawn, and covered in scrawl as if a centipede had dipped itself in ink and marched over the paper.
‘Looks like a list of places to loot. We’ll check it later.’ Straken tossed the paper back down. He turned to the men. ‘Let’s go.’
They left the area quickly and headed north. If any of the soldiers were tired from having their rest interrupted by the orks, they did not show it.
The city around them was not so much ruined as left to decay. Many of the shops meant nothing to the orks and had been left alone. Others seemed to have been damaged purely out of spite. Passing through a civic hall decorated with banners and iron cherubim, they found a stash of canned food that some citizen had been unable to retrieve. ‘Grox meat,’ Tanner said, peering at the labels. ‘No wonder no one’s touched it.’
By half seven in the morning, local time, the artificial sunlight lit up the city, and the empty homes looked sad as well as menacing. Straken found his eyes flicking to the windows and doorways, sure that the orks would lack the skill to lie in wait but uneasy nonetheless. He thought of Miral, where he had lost his arm: the cities cut into its ever-encroaching jungle, and the fierce, cold eldar that he had hunted there, creatures that killed relentlessly according to their hard code of honour, regarding men as less than apes.
They reached a courtyard. In the centre, a statue of Lord Solar Macharius raised a staff to the heavens. As they walked around the edge of the yard, keeping to the shadows, a great trumpet-blast rose up from the west.
Guns flicked up. Men braced themselves to fire. They glanced around for incoming enemies, checking for cover. As they stood there, ready to repel an assault, the trumpets sounded once again, and marching music blared across the habs.
Straken was astonished to realise that he recognised the tune. It was ‘The Emperor Gathers His Own’, a popular battle-hymn. He listened as the sound swelled around them.
‘It’s the Guard,’ one of Tanner’s men breathed. ‘They’ve come back for us!’
Sergeant Pharranis spat onto the pavement and tightened the strap of his plasma gun. ‘Stow it. I’ll believe that when I damn well see ’em.’
Straken leaned across to Tanner. ‘Did you hear this when you were out here?’
‘No. Not at all.’
The trump
ets stopped abruptly, mid-blast, as a recording was cut off. The sudden silence was unnerving. ‘That kid you brought back mentioned a father,’ Straken said. ‘Maybe it’s a church. Let’s get to higher ground. We must be near the cavern entrance – we ought to be able to see into the next vault soon.’
Tanner pointed to the north-west. ‘There’s a vox tower over there. We didn’t go any further than it, though. When we reached it, I took my people back to hunt orks in the lower hab-zone.’
‘Fair enough. We’ll use it as a vantage point.’
The walls of the cavern, usually kilometres apart, began to close in on them. That meant that they were approaching the entrance to another vast cave. Straken felt wary, not just because of the orks. The sheer unexpectedness of the hymn blasting across the rooftops had put him on edge.
They heard nothing more until they reached the vox tower. A sign across the entrance read Statio Vox Minutori: the broadcast station for the mining guilds. The tower itself was seven storeys high, rising to a point from the cavern floor like a plasteel stalagmite. A wad of communications gear protruded from the top of the building, like a copse of dead trees. The windows in the control room at the top of the tower were dark.
‘Looks like the power’s down,’ a trooper said. He was missing one eye, the pupil white. He pointed to the control room. ‘Long way up.’
‘You’ve got legs, Orlow,’ Straken replied. ‘We’ll take the stairs. I’ll go first. The rest of you keep up and be glad you’re not hauling a load of bionics around.’
Straken ripped the lock out of the side door with his metal hand and immediately began to climb the access stairs. There were no signs of violence. From the looks of it, most of the personnel had been taken in the Guard’s recruitment drive. Straken climbed quickly and didn’t stop to let the others rest. After all, anything that Iron Hand Straken might put himself through, he was entitled to ask of his men.
At the top of the staircase, seven floors above the street, Straken finally stopped. The team shared a ration stick and swigged from their canteens.