The Last Ditch

by Sandy Mitchell

  ‘Well?’ I asked, and by way of reply my aide gunned the engine, handling the crude controls with every sign of confidence. Remembering the lessons I’d learned on Perlia, I clung as tightly as I could to the solid metal post, just as he smacked the accelerator open to its fullest extreme. The crude vehicle lurched forward, violently enough to loosen the fillings in my teeth, and I almost lost my footing despite my grip; as I’d expected, refinements like springing and shock absorbers had been unknown to the builder of the thing50. Nevertheless, despite the discomfort, we were moving away from the pursuing orks, at a rate sufficient to outstrip the ones on foot at least.

  Stubber and bolter rounds began to chew up the ice around us, and occasionally pock the thick metal of the bodywork, but I could live with that: having more sense than to try using the crude heavy weapon the buggy was equipped with, which would be all but impossible to hold on aim unaided, and could well break my shoulder with the recoil, I hunkered low, and popped off a few rounds with my laspistol, although under the circumstances I had no great expectation of actually hitting anything.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Broklaw voxed. ‘Some of the greenskins are moving off.’

  ‘They’re after us,’ I told him, ‘but we’ve commandeered one of their buggies, so we can keep ahead of them. I hope. Federer, detonate...’ I’d been intending to add ‘as soon as we’re clear,’ but the sapper captain must have had his thumb poised over the firing button, because no sooner had the words left my mouth than a quartet of fountains erupted right where we’d buried the charges. A low rumble followed, audible even over the racket of our untuned engine, and a filament of cracks began to radiate out across the ice.

  ‘It’s working!’ Broklaw told me, unnecessarily, a note of concern belatedly entering his voice. ‘Get off the ice!’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ I said, fumbling the amplivisor back up, and trying to make sense of the bouncing image it relayed to me. The ice was breaking up all around the crippled starship, just as I’d hoped, fragmenting into floes and bergs which began to collide with one another, rising and falling on the swell created by the backwash of the explosions.

  It took a moment or two for the majority of the orks to realise what was happening, and by the time they did it was far too late. Those on foot redoubled their efforts to gain a foothold on the ramp, turning on one another in their desperation, but much good it did them; most were engulfed by the freezing water in a matter of seconds, the tiny islands of ice they found themselves on tilting and sliding in the turbulence, responding to the frantic movement of those atop them. Many a greenskin plunged into the depths with his hands or jaws locked round the throat of another, while those that managed to gain the solid footing of the ramp were swiftly dispatched by the disciplined fire of the Valhallans, which had never faltered, however desperate the situation.

  The vehicles fared no better than those on foot: by the time the drivers realised what was going on, and attempted to flee, the ice was already breaking up under them. Those nearest the site of the explosion sank almost at once, while those furthest away, and with most time to react, were quickly caught and overtaken by the widening network of cracks, which seemed to be spreading with blinding speed.

  ‘How long until we hit the shoreline?’ I asked, reluctant to disturb Jurgen’s concentration at a time like this, but desperate to know if we were going to make it.

  ‘Almost there,’ he assured me, his voice a little attenuated by the comm-beads; I could almost have tapped him on the shoulder from where I was crouched, if I’d been willing to take my life in my hands and try moving about in the bouncing, rattling contraption we rode, but the noise from its engine drowned out any attempt at normal conversation. Then he added ‘Seems I was right.’

  It was only as the first few flakes of snow drifted into my face, accelerated to stinging velocity by our breakneck progress, that I recalled our earlier conversation about the looming clouds. With an abruptness which took me completely by surprise, the air became filled with whirling white flakes, which began to obscure my view of the debacle behind me. Giving up on the amplivisor, I narrowed my eyes, trying to make out what was going on as best I could unaided. The knot of orks which had broken away from the main mob to come after us was well behind, running in our wake with undiminished vigour, although whether to continue trying to engage us or to save their own skins it was impossible to tell51. At any event, it was academic now, the rapidly-expanding network of cracks easily outpacing their running feet.

  Then, abruptly, they were gone; the ice lifting for a moment, as though some huge aquatic beast was surfacing beneath it, before subsiding again, to leave nothing but a pool of open water, which swiftly began to scab over with a fresh froth of ice.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ I asked involuntarily, wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing, but there was no time to consider the matter further, as a fresh rain of stubber rounds clattered against the armour plate protecting me. I turned my head, squinting through the thickening blizzard, to see a truck loaded with roaring greenskins coming up fast on our right hand side. It was flanked by a couple of half-tracks, with a buggy bringing up the rear; a moment later this too upended abruptly, disappearing in its turn through the disintegrating ice.

  ‘More orks,’ Jurgen informed me, apparently under the impression that the sudden burst of incoming fire had prompted my rhetorical question. How he managed to stay ahead of the spreading pattern of cracks I’ll never know; he was an iceworlder, of course, with an innate affinity for environments like this, and no doubt was able to steer us wherever the ice was strongest, instead of making a headlong rush in a straight line and hoping for the best, as most of the greenskins seemed to be doing with a conspicuous lack of success, but that would have been no mean feat under ideal conditions. Aboard a ramshackle, barely controllable ork machine, with thick snow obscuring his surroundings, it was little short of a miracle.

  I returned fire again, with the same lack of success as before, achieving nothing beyond provoking another storm of inaccurate rounds from the orkish gunners. With a thrill of horror I noticed that the ice between us was breaking up now, which at least had the positive effect of forcing our paths to diverge.

  ‘Hang on, sir!’ Jurgen called, as if any other course of action was remotely feasible, and to my inexpressible relief I felt the first of a series of bone-jarring jolts, which my previous experience of riding in vehicles like this told me could only be the result of us finally travelling over solid ground. I tried to keep our greenskin escort in sight, but the blizzard was descending in earnest now, and a series of jagged ice ridges and snowdrifts intervened, so within seconds they’d vanished completely.

  Jurgen cut the engine and we rolled to a halt, my spine finally beginning to unkink itself. My ears were still ringing from the deafening racket, so it took a moment for me to begin to distinguish ambient sounds; when I could, I frowned, in some perplexity. The faint rattle of orkish firearms was drifting towards us on the wind.

  ‘Sounds like they’re arguing about whose fault it was they lost us,’ Jurgen said, an unmistakable tone of satisfaction in his voice. If there’s one thing a Valhallan relishes almost as much as killing greenskins, it’s the notion of greenskins killing one another.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. My palms were too numb to tingle, but I was pretty certain that they should have been. Even orks would have taken a little longer than that to find something to squabble about after seeing an entire warband annihilated in front of their eyes. ‘But perhaps we should check it out.’

  All my instincts were urging me to find somewhere comfortably warm to hole up in until the ice froze hard enough to rejoin our companions, but the prospect of being ambushed by belligerent greenskins was hardly an inducement to relax; I’d long ago learned that knowing precisely where your enemies are is the only way to be sure of avoiding them, and that meant scouting our immediate surroundings as quickly as possible.

  We took a few moments to secure the buggy, in
case we needed it again, routines which had become second nature nearly two decades ago on Perlia coming back to me as though it had only been yesterday. I even felt a pang of nostalgia for the scorching desert we’d battled through in the early stages of our long and terrifying journey to safety, but a faceful of snow flung by a sudden gust of wind brought me back rapidly to the present, and we set out in the direction of the gunfire without further ado. The intense cold was beginning to make itself felt in earnest now, and it was all I could do to keep my frozen limbs moving though the knee-high drifts and the almost solid wall of wind-driven flakes which battered away at us.

  If it hadn’t been for Jurgen I’d have been irretrievably lost almost as soon as I’d set out, but his sense of direction in this desolate terrain seemed as reliable as my own inside a tunnel system, so I plodded in his wake, marvelling at his sure-footedness. He placed his feet carefully, maintaining his balance apparently without effort on the treacherous surface, and I felt certain that had he not felt obliged to keep pace with my own floundering progress, he would have been halfway to the horizon by now. Though visibility was remarkably poor we could still hear sporadic outbreaks of gunfire, and proceeded with all due caution in their general direction, having no desire to walk into an ambush, or the middle of whatever internecine squabble the orks had found to amuse themselves with.

  ‘Good news,’ Kasteen voxed me, as I slogged through a particularly deep patch, which Jurgen had negotiated with far less effort. ‘We’ve managed to get through to one of the PDF patrols in the area. They’re inbound to assist, and they’re relaying our vox messages.’

  ‘Good,’ I said, stumbling in something which could have been a rodent burrow, and adding something profane under my breath.

  The vox circuit must still have been open, because I was answered by an unmistakably feminine chuckle. ‘Any luck with the ork hunt?’

  ‘We can still hear gunfire,’ I said, not entirely accurately, as the shooting had ceased while we’d been talking, ‘and Jurgen’s pretty sure he can locate where it’s coming from.’

  ‘Don’t take too many chances,’ she cautioned. ‘You must have used up most of your luck ration by now.’ Which was certainly true, and had been for a long time by that point: but despite the odds, here I still am, decades later. I had no idea of that at the time, of course, so I simply shrugged.

  ‘You can count on that,’ I agreed, wiping a thin veil of melted slush from my eyebrows, and trying to focus on Jurgen in the distance. He was climbing easily up a jagged outcrop of ice, as though it were no more slippery than a grassy knoll, and I sighed inwardly at the prospect of having to follow him. He’d take an easier route if I told him too, of course, but he knew this landscape far better than I ever would, and if he felt that was the way to avoid contact with the orks, it was fine by me. At which point I turned, attracted by a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye, but when I looked at it directly, all I could see was a whorl of wind-driven snow.

  In retrospect, of course, the thought of how close I was to death at that point is a horrifying one, but by luck or the Emperor’s grace I must have been hidden equally effectively by the blizzard, and was to remain in blissful ignorance for a little while longer.

  ‘I can see something,’ Jurgen said, his voice in my comm-bead hushed and urgent. ‘Looks like they’ve abandoned the vehicles.’

  Thanking the Emperor for the thin crust of snow now clinging to my greatcoat, the most effective possible camouflage in this desolate landscape, I scrambled and slithered my way up to join him, expecting some hulking greenskin to come bellowing out of the murk brandishing a combat blade at any moment. But none did, and I hunkered down next to Jurgen, fumbling the amplivisor into place once more.

  Fortunately my augmetic fingers were immune to the numbing effects of the cold, enabling me to hold the device in place without blurring the image by shaking too much, and I studied the vista below with some bafflement. My aide had been right, the truck and the two half-tracks had clearly been abandoned, something I knew their drivers would never contemplate under normal circumstances. I studied them carefully, taking particular note of any pitting which marred the armour plate, but all the marks of combat damage I could see were old, a patina of rust masking the telltale brightness of fresh hits.

  ‘If they were shooting at each other, they’d left the vehicles first,’ I concluded, which made no sense at all, even for orks, which were hardly the most rational of creatures to begin with.

  After a few more minutes of watching nothing happen, and losing the last vestiges of feeling in my feet while we did so, I decided we might as well make a closer examination of the abandoned transports. There was no obvious sign of damage on any of them, or at least no more than you’d expect, although we did find traces of orkish blood in a few places.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Jurgen remarked, looking at a pool of disquietingly dark ice in one corner of the truck’s passenger compartment. ‘If one of ’em got shot here, you’d expect to find near misses all over the tailgate.’

  I nodded, equally familiar with the vagaries of greenskin marksmanship. ‘Must have been taken out hand to hand,’ I concluded.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Jurgen said. ‘But if he was the one doing the shooting...’

  I nodded again, my jaw cramping painfully from the effort of preventing my teeth from chattering. Orks are resilient, as I knew only too well from personal experience, but very few of them can stand up to a burst of heavy-calibre fire at point-blank range. It was hard to envisage an assailant getting close enough to get stuck in; or, for that matter, the ork being charged not to just drop his weapon to meet the challenge head-on.

  ‘It wasn’t just him,’ I reminded my aide. ‘It sounded like most of them. At least to begin with.’

  ‘I suppose they’d have whittled each other down quickly enough,’ Jurgen mused, and I glanced around us, at the shifting white blanket of wind-driven snow flowing across the relatively open space. It was beginning to drift against the abandoned vehicles, but as yet had got no higher than the rims of the tyres.

  ‘If they’d done that, the ground would be littered with corpses,’ I pointed out. The drifting snow would bury any cadavers in the area quickly enough, but there had hardly been sufficient time to cover a dozen or more without the slightest trace in the handful of minutes it had taken Jurgen and I to get here (even though it had felt a great deal longer to me, you can be sure). And even if it had, I knew Jurgen’s feeling for snow was reliable enough for him to have noticed the telltale signs of their presence beneath the surface. ‘Can you see any tracks?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ he told me, shaking his head regretfully. ‘Wind’s too strong. They’d have been gone in no time.’ To emphasise the point, he gestured back the way we’d come, the bootprints we’d made on the way here already erased by the scudding snow.

  After a few more moments of desultory, and increasingly uncomfortable, poking about failed to uncover any further traces of the greenskins, or clues to their fate, we began our return to the dubious refuge of the Fires of Faith, spurred on, at least in my case, by the thought of fresh tanna in the largest mug imaginable. No doubt if that particular image hadn’t been so insistently uppermost in my mind as we trudged across the rapidly refreezing lake, I would have been brooding on the mystery with a considerable sense of disquiet; but as it was, I barely gave the matter another thought until it was far too late.

  Editorial Note:

  Since, at this point, Cain’s narrative makes one of the chronological jumps characteristic of his account of events when he deems little of interest to have occurred in the interim, this seems as good a point as any to insert the following extract, which may make some of what follows a little clearer.

  From Interesting Places and Tedious People: A Wanderer’s Waybook, by Jerval Sekara, 145 M39.

  Nusquam Fundumentibus is well named, being both some distance from the main warp routes, and as desolate as iceworlds generally tend to be.
Nevertheless, it has a good deal to recommend it for those discriminating wayfarers prepared to look beyond its most obvious characteristics.

  For one thing, it has a surprisingly high population for such a superficially unattractive world, who, for the most part, are to be found in the dozen or so cavern cities scattered around the globe. The largest, and by far the most comfortable, of these is Primadelving. The planetary capital boasts theatres, opera houses and duelling pits equal, both in the opulence of their decoration and the quality of the diversions they offer, to those of many a better favoured world. Its parks and gardens are plentiful, some occupying entire galleries of the vast underground complex, each devoted to the flora, and in a few cases fauna, of a different neighbouring star system.

  Despite their troglodytic existence, the citizens of Primadelving enjoy a good deal of light, warmth and space. The first of these is provided by a complex arrangement of shafts and mirrors, through which the ambient light of the sun is directed to every corner of their subterranean habitat, preserving the diurnal round; when night falls on the surface, luminators and waylights are kindled, just as they would be in any open air metropolis, enabling life to continue in a properly civilised fashion. Though the average Nusquan prefers a degree of chill in the air, as one would expect, they are cosmopolitan enough not to assume similar tastes in their off-world visitors, and every establishment catering to them contains heaters which can be adjusted to levels bordering on the tropical, if so desired. It’s advisable not to increase the temperature to quite this extent, however, if patronising a hotel on one of the upper levels of the city, as it may well be hollowed out of the ice itself, rather than the bedrock beneath it, with consequences which can be all too readily imagined.