The Last Ditch

by Sandy Mitchell

  Jurgen nodded. ‘You’d want them to start again quick if you needed ’em,’ he agreed. ‘Especially if the shooting started.’ The Nusquan Chimeras were fitted with multi-lasers in their turrets, rather than the heavy bolters favoured by the Valhallans, and their powercells would swiftly become depleted without the engines running to recharge them.

  ‘Well, we’ll soon know,’ I said as the pilot began his descent.

  ‘Same orders as last time?’ he asked as we hovered over the flat roof of one of the blockhouses, which we’d selected as a landing point in the absence of any purpose-built shuttle pad.

  ‘Almost,’ I replied. ‘Keep circling, and report any sign of movement. There are supposed to be fifty or so Nusquans around73, so don’t shoot unless you’re sure they’re ’nids or greenskins.’

  ‘Will do,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘Multi-laser only.’

  ‘Or the Hellstrikes, if you feel they’re warranted,’ I said. ‘I doubt the crops are going to explode.’

  ‘Unless they’re growing those pod things Sergeant Penlan tripped over on Seigal,’ Jurgen added. ‘Took days to get the last of the goo out.’ He shuddered at the memory, or another spasm of airsickness, it was hard to be sure which.

  ‘The demiurg got the worst of it,’ I reminded him. ‘They’d have overrun us if they hadn’t got mired in the stuff.’

  ‘Can’t see it slowing the ’nids down,’ my aide said, shaking his head.

  ‘Neither can I,’ I agreed, wondering, not for the first time, how conversations with Jurgen tended to become quite so tangential to the original topic.

  ‘Nothing moving on the auspex,’ the pilot told us, although that was only of limited reassurance where tyranids were concerned, their ability to evade detection almost second to none. ‘No visible signs of life either.’

  ‘Then let’s get to it,’ I said, unable to think of any reason to delay further, despite my best efforts. ‘Any vox traffic?’ Which was a pretty pointless question really, as if the crew had detected any they would certainly have mentioned the fact by now.

  ‘None, sir,’ the navigator confirmed74, speaking directly to me for the first time. ‘Still scanning on all frequencies.’

  ‘They could be too deep to get a signal out,’ Grifen suggested, clearly no more convinced of that than I was. The vox gear in the command Chimera should be able to punch a signal through the intervening rock with no difficulty at all, allowing us to monitor the comm-beads of everyone in the cavern complex.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, not wanting to consider the alternatives too closely. Before I could say anything else the Valkyrie lurched, its landing skids hitting the rockcrete of the roof, and came to rest a comfortable distance from the vertiginous drop to the snow below. We’d chosen the largest and most central of the blocky structures to set down on, not least because of the extra margin for error the scrumball pitch-sized area allowed the pilot, and because according to the data provided by Kasteen there was an access hatch to the building, which would allow us ingress with a minimum of difficulty.

  I was also fairly sure that this would have been the entrance to the agricaves the Nusquans would have chosen, as they could have fanned out from here most efficiently, and if we followed in their footsteps we were most likely to find out what happened to them; preferably in time to avoid sharing their fate. At least if there were tyranids here we’d know what to expect: the Nusquans would have gone in as blissfully ignorant of the true threat as we had at the Mechanicus shrine, and, lacking our experience of fighting the ’nids, they’d have had no idea of how to prevail against them.

  Once again the somewhat battered boarding ramp clanged outwards, allowing full access to the razor-edged wind, which howled across the bleak wilderness surrounding us. This time we disembarked more slowly, partly because we had no fear of being shot at, and partly, in my case at least, because none of us were keen to encounter whatever flesh-sculpted horrors might be lying in wait beneath our feet. I shielded my eyes as the Valkyrie took to the skies again, and began to circle the point at which we stood, feeling as reassured as possible under the circumstances.

  ‘We’re down,’ I reported, as Magot’s team crunched across the snow which lay beyond the roughly circular zone cleared by the Valkyrie’s landing jets. After a short search of the roof they unfolded their trenching tools, and began scraping the area around the trapdoor free of the ice and snow hiding it from view. ‘Second wave ETA?’

  ‘Still twenty minutes, commissar,’ Lustig voxed almost at once.

  ‘We’re proceeding inside,’ I told him. ‘If you follow the same route, you should catch up with us soon enough.’ At least I hoped so. If the entire cave system was indeed riddled with tyranids, I’d need a lot more troopers to hide behind than a single squad, already depleted to almost three quarters of its original strength.

  By the time I’d finished speaking, the troopers under Magot’s command had managed to lever the heavy metal slab open, no mean feat considering how firmly it had been frozen in place, and a telling testament to how at home the Valhallans were in this hideous environment. Despite the reservations I might normally have had about moving into harm’s way, I was down the ladder after our vanguard with almost indecent haste, my eagerness to get out of the bone-biting cold no doubt being misinterpreted as impatience to enter the fray by those around me.

  The ladder descended to a narrow catwalk, some two and a half metres below the ceiling, apparently for the convenience of those artisans charged with the maintenance of the luminators; which left sufficient headroom to walk upright, although doing so encumbered with our weapons and equipment over a drop of ten metres or more was somewhat disturbing. The net result, in my case at least, was a curious combination of vertigo and claustrophobia, all the more unsettling for experiencing either so seldom75. Fortunately the catwalk terminated in a wider platform, from which a rickety staircase descended, affording us a clear look at the floor of the warehouse as we made our way down.

  ‘We’ve found the Chimeras,’ I voxed. ‘Three of them, anyway.’ The vehicles were parked close together, near the middle of the huge structure, the rest of the space it enclosed empty and echoing.

  ‘The others must have gone to different entrances,’ Grifen said, ‘to sweep the tunnels from the other end.’

  ‘More than likely,’ I agreed. It was a tactic which would have worked well against the orks the Nusquans expected to find here, trapping them between squads advancing from both directions, and cutting off their lines of escape. It was fatally flawed against tyranids, though, simply allowing the swarm to pick off the intruders piecemeal, instead of being able to combine their firepower against it.

  ‘Something’s not right,’ Jurgen said, as our bootsoles hit the rockcrete, and we glanced round orientating ourselves. His voice echoed in the wide, high space, unimpeded by anything other than the ominous metal shapes of the abandoned Chimeras. ‘Where’s all the food waiting to be loaded?’

  A good question. A line of empty pallets stood against one wall, their contents gone.

  ‘Maybe the crawler just left,’ Vorhees suggested, ‘and they haven’t started stacking the next load up yet.’

  ‘Not according to this.’ Grifen bent to pick up an abandoned data-slate, which had drawn her attention to itself by skittering across the floor in response to an accidental nudge from her boot. ‘Crawler’s not due for another three days.’

  I glanced at the manifest still displayed on the cracked and flickering screen. According to that, there should have been about two hundred tonnes of miscellaneous foodstuffs stacked up around us, awaiting dispatch to various destinations. The implications were disturbing, to say the least, although not as much as the smear of blood still visible on the keypad of the device.

  ‘The ’nids must have eaten it all,’ Jurgen said, no mean trencherman himself, and clearly impressed. I tried to picture a swarm large enough to consume two hundred tonnes of food, and immediately wished I hadn’t; it would be orders of magnitude
larger than the one we’d already faced and escaped today.

  ‘The food stores in the warehouse have been cleaned out,’ I voxed for Kasteen’s benefit, before adding ‘so move carefully. There must be hundreds of organisms around here,’ to the troopers around me.

  ‘Let’s check out the Chimeras,’ Grifen said, beginning to walk towards them.

  ‘Pity the command one isn’t here,’ I agreed, falling in at her shoulder. ‘We’d be able to read everyone’s positions on the auspex.’ As we moved closer to the abandoned vehicles, it became increasingly obvious that something wasn’t right. The thick armour plate was rent in several places, ripped apart by powerful claws, and Jurgen and I shared a look of grim understanding as we got our first clear view of the damage.

  ‘Genestealers, you reckon?’ he asked, and I nodded, the picture of their powerful talons tearing through the Reclaimers’ Terminator armour aboard the Spawn of Damnation all too vivid in my mind’s eye.

  ‘Too precise for one of the big ones,’ I agreed; the hulking monstrosities would have crushed and dented the hulls, tearing their way inside with far less finesse. As I studied the damage to the trio of vehicles more carefully my eye fell on the unit markings of the nearest, half obscured by a slash of parallel talon marks. ‘That can’t be right.’

  ‘What can’t?’ Grifen asked, then her eyes narrowed as she made out the almost obliterated identification code. ‘That’s the command vehicle. But where are the vox and auspex antennae?’ They should have been obvious and distinctive, marking it out instantly to the naked eye.

  ‘Sheared off,’ Drere reported, from the top of the crippled Chimera. She picked up a tangle of metal and threw it down for my inspection, raising a clangor of echoes in the vast space as it hit the rockcrete floor. A look of consternation crossed her face, as it dawned on all of us simultaneously that if there were any tyranids in the immediate vicinity she’d just announced our presence to them in no uncertain manner, and everyone tensed, readying their weapons; but, after an agonising wait of a minute or two, no tide of chitin came scurrying out of the depths to challenge us, and the tension began to ease.

  ‘Sliced through cleanly,’ I said, somewhat reassured by the failure of the ’nids to slaughter us all instantly where we stood, and returning my attention to the ravaged vox array. The edge was straight, the metal bright, and faint indentations further up the strut betrayed where the ’stealer responsible had gripped it with a couple of its other limbs to steady the assembly before hacking through it. ‘They took out the comms on purpose.’ The reason for which was obvious; with the relay in the command vehicle down, the comm-beads carried by the Nusquans would be blocked by the layers of rock between the caverns, isolating the squads from one another, and making it impossible to coordinate them.

  Reminded, if I ever needed to be, that the hive mind was at least as cunning and capable of subtlety in its tactics as any other foe the Imperium faced, although it was all too easy to forget this when faced by the endless sea of bestial creatures it controlled, I looked at the solemn faces surrounding me. If Drere’s moment of carelessness had indeed attracted its attention, our only chance of survival was to be somewhere else when the genestealers returned; and hope our reinforcements arrived before they caught up with us.

  ‘No signs of life,’ Drere reported, after a cursory look through the top hatch of the ravaged Chimera. She grinned mirthlessly. ‘Big surprise there.’

  ‘The others are empty too,’ Magot reported, trotting back from investigating them with a couple of her troopers. ‘Unless you count a lot of bloodstains.’

  ‘Then let’s get moving,’ I said. Well-lit ramps led off from each edge of the chamber, disappearing into the depths below, and I picked the nearest more or less at random. There was no telling which one Forres and her people had taken, so one tunnel was as good as another so far as I could see.

  ‘Move out,’ Grifen said, as happy to follow my lead as anyone would be under the circumstances, which was not a lot, and we set off.

  To my initial surprise, my overriding impression as we made our way through the cavern system was one of space, although I suppose that shouldn’t have been all that unexpected, given the purpose to which it had been put. The tunnel we took was wide and high, about four metres by three, and well-lit; the reason for which became obvious soon enough.

  ‘Is that a truck?’ Jurgen asked, in tones of surprise which quite accurately reflected my own.

  ‘More or less,’ I agreed. It would have looked pretty much at home on the city streets of any world with a more equitable climate, although the open cab would have been inconvenient when it rained. It had crashed into the tunnel wall, crumpling the bodywork and breaking an axle, which was a shame; commandeering the thing would have moved us all a lot faster. ‘It must have been ferrying food up to the loading area.’

  ‘Till the ’nids decided to eat here,’ Vorhees added, with a grimace at the rust-coloured stains disfiguring the ripped-up driving seat.

  I nodded thoughtfully. The driver had clearly been fleeing the swarm, losing control as it overwhelmed him; the suddenness and ferocity of the attack could have left no more eloquent a testimony. ‘Stay sharp,’ I admonished, quite unnecessarily I’m sure.

  ‘I’ve got all the sharp I need,’ Magot said, running a thumb along the edge of her bayonet.

  ‘Let’s hope you don’t need,’ I rejoined, eliciting grim smiles from most of the troopers around me.

  Though we found plenty of traces of the tyranids’ passing as we penetrated deeper into the cavern system, the creatures themselves remained worryingly elusive. Shortly after stumbling across the abandoned truck, we found ourselves entering the first of the agricultural caverns, a cathedral-sized space still displaying the cracked and fissured walls of a natural rock formation. The floor had been smoothed, however, and powerful luminators mounted on pylons spaced at regular intervals around it; finding my boots splashing in a thin film of water, I resolved to give them as wide a berth as possible, since a loose cable on any of them would turn the shallow pool into an instant deathtrap.

  There was no question of where the water was coming from; the whole cavern was filled with metal troughs, mounted on stanchions driven into the floor, and which had at one time no doubt contained it. Now they were bent and shattered, their contents spilling all over the cave.

  ‘Hydroponics,’ Kasteen explained, as I reported what I’d seen for the benefit of the approaching platoon, and the analysts back in Primadelving. ‘We grow most of our food like that on Valhalla too76.’

  ‘No sign of any plants,’ I said, my apprehension growing as the realisation sunk in of what that meant. I had no idea how much vegetation the cavern had contained yesterday, but if all these troughs had been full, it was a huge amount, and my already pessimistic estimate of the size of the swarm we were facing increased by another order of magnitude. If all the other caverns had been stripped too...

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ Grifen said when I verbalised the thought, and I nodded reluctant agreement.

  My knack of remaining orientated in an underground environment proving as reliable as ever, we moved on, down another of the wide tunnels to the next cavern. This was considerably deeper, the subterranean road connecting them descending in a wide spiral, so that the open space was hidden from us until we were almost on top of it.

  ‘At least our feet are dry,’ Jurgen said, moving his head slowly as he scanned the open space in search of a target.

  I nodded, taking in the panorama of ripped and shattered animal pens. I had no idea what manner of creature had been reared down here, but I was in no doubt of what had happened to them, butchered along with their keepers to feed the insatiable hunger of the hive mind. Even the dung had gone, the ’nids being fastidious when it came to garnering raw material for the creation of more of their kind.

  ‘The animal pens in cavern twelve are empty,’ I reported, hearing only the faint hiss of static in my earpiece by way of reply. Our ra
pid descent down the spiral way had evidently taken us too deep for our comm-beads to remain connected to the vox-unit of the Valkyrie77, and I felt a brief surge of panic, which I fought down briskly. The important thing was to return to the higher levels as quickly as possible, where we could re-establish contact and join up with Lustig’s platoon.

  For a moment I debated going back the way we’d come, but as we’d fanned out across the open space we’d moved a fair way from the tunnel mouth we’d entered the cave by, and another pair in the far wall were almost as close. One led up upwards, I was sure, looping round through a couple of other nexus points, to bring us back to the entrance building we’d started from by another of the tunnel mouths leading off from it. Doing so would complete our recon sweep in a manner comprehensive enough to look as though we’d done our duty, and enable us to join up with Lustig’s command squad, which I had no doubt a soldier of his experience would leave where it was least likely to make contact with the enemy. (Something Lustig was never averse to personally, but I knew he took his new-found responsibilities seriously enough not to risk compromising his ability to coordinate the squads under his command by having to fight off hordes of ’gaunts at the same time.) No doubt Forres had developed the same idea, parking the Chimeras well behind where she expected the battle lines to be: but unlike her we knew what we were up against, and, more importantly, how to fight it.

  ‘This way,’ I said, angling towards the tunnel mouth leading upwards.

  Magot glanced down the other, the gently inclined floor of which led even further into the bowels of the planet, and wrinkled her nose. ‘There’s that smell again,’ she said.

  Turning my head in her direction, I was able to catch a faint whiff of sulphur on the air currents wafting up from the cavern below. ‘This place connects to the volcanic vents too,’ I explained, as though I hadn’t just learned that myself from the information Kasteen had supplied. ‘They use the heat to warm the place and help the plants grow.’