‘Should we check it out before we head back up?’ she asked, and I shook my head, trying to seem casual about it.
‘Better get back into contact as soon as we can,’ I said, all too aware that if the ’nids followed the same pattern of instinctive behaviour as the ones at the power plant they’d be congregating in the lowest point of the cave system, and that our chances of survival if we disturbed a swarm as big as the one I’d inferred could be there would start at non-existent before growing rapidly worse.
‘You won’t hear any argument from me,’ Grifen agreed, taking the path that led upwards, and we began our ascent as circumspectly as we’d descended, despite the urge to hurry that nagged at us with every footfall. I’ve often observed that fatal mistakes get made more often on the return leg of a recon mission than the outward one, no doubt because the simple fact of turning back creates the false impression that the worst is over; whereas the enemy is still as alert as ever. Most of the troopers with me were far too experienced in the ways of war to succumb to that fallacy, however, and we remained fully focused, a fact which was to save our lives before many more minutes were over.
We’d almost reached the next cavern when I became aware that the faint wash of static in my comm-bead was modulating slightly, and before I’d taken many more paces the vague fragments of sound began to coalesce into voices. I still couldn’t make much sense of it, but I’d been in enough tight corners over the years to recognise the clipped urgency of orders being given and received in the middle of a pitched battle.
‘What is it, sir?’ Jurgen asked, raising his melta, attuned to my moods by our long years of campaigning together. Picking up their cue from him, Grifen and Magot looked expectantly in my direction.
‘Sounds like Lustig’s arrived,’ I said grimly, ‘and the ’nids have laid on a welcoming party.’
No sooner had the words left my mouth, however, than the voice of the lieutenant himself sounded clearly in my earpiece.
‘Commissar, do you read?’ Lustig asked, sounding remarkably calm for a man I’d presumed to be fighting for his life.
‘Cain, go ahead,’ I said, my surprise no doubt evident in my tone. ‘What’s your status?’
‘Just disembarked,’ Lustig said, sounding equally surprised, ‘and securing our perimeter. You think ’stealers took out the Chimeras in here?’
‘Positive,’ I said, stopping abruptly. We’d almost reached the entrance to the next cavern, but I was damned if I was going to take another step. ‘Because I’m looking right at them.’
FIFTEEN
My companions followed my lead, freezing in place instinctively, as the sinister shadows bounded across the cavern in front of us; there must have been a dozen at least, although under the circumstances I didn’t feel particularly disposed to making an accurate head count. Long, lolling tongues curled from their fang-filled mouths, while sinister highlights flickered from the talons tipping the hands on each of their four arms. For a heart-stopping moment I thought they’d seen us, but fortunately their attention appeared to be elsewhere; in an instant, it seemed, they’d crossed the flooded floor of a hydroponic chamber in no better condition than the first we’d found, their taloned feet kicking up a mist of spray from the thin film of water, to vanish down another of the connecting tunnels.
‘That was lucky,’ Jurgen said, as though we’d just avoided nothing worse than a rain shower. ‘Another minute and we’d have run right into them.’
‘We would,’ I agreed, hoping my voice wasn’t as shaky as the rest of me. The tunnel they’d come from was the very one I’d been intending to take back to the chamber we’d arrived in. Which reminded me... ‘Lustig. The ’stealers were in the passage between your position and chamber nine on the schematic. It’s probably clear now, but advance with caution.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Lustig said, sounding even more surprised than before. ‘Where did they go?’
‘The exit for chamber sixteen,’ Grifen said, consulting her own slate78 with a frown of puzzlement. ‘And fast. Maybe you spooked them.’
I shook my head. ‘Genestealers don’t panic. Not like that. They were running towards something, not away.’ The faint echoes I’d noticed before were still in my comm-bead, and the realisation suddenly dawned. If it wasn’t Lustig’s platoon under siege, then... ‘It must be the Nusquans. The hive mind’s calling in reinforcements.’
‘Say again, sir?’ Lustig requested, evidently still too distant to hear the faint vox traffic for himself.
I gritted my teeth, already well aware of where this conversation was bound to lead. ‘We’re picking up faint vox signals,’ I said, ‘on Guard frequencies. If it isn’t you, it has to be be the Nusquans, what’s left of them. They must be holed up in sixteen, or whatever’s beyond it.’ Even as I spoke, my ever-reliable mental map filled in the answer; another exit to the surface. Presumably they were trying to fight their way through to their remaining Chimeras.
‘Squads two, three and five are on their way to assist,’ Lustig said, effectively sinking any hope I had of palming a heroic rescue attempt off on someone else for a change. ‘Can you recce for them?’
‘We’re on it,’ Grifen said, before I had a chance to come up with a good reason to refuse, or at least wait for another thirty troopers to catch up with us.
‘Keep an eye out behind us as well,’ I cautioned, all too aware that if any more tyranid reinforcements turned up, we’d be caught between them and the main army. Our only chance of surviving the next few minutes was to avoid the notice of the hive mind altogether, which was a chancy proposition at the best of times; although I’d managed the trick on a few occasions before79, so I knew it could be done.
Though still mindful of the need for caution, we picked up our pace as we began to follow the ’stealers, hoping that the swarm’s attention would be directed at the Nusquans it was trying to consume, rather than behind it. A risk, true, but a calculated one, and unavoidable if we were to intervene while there was still someone left to rescue.
Before long the whispers in my ear had swelled to faint voices, growing steadily stronger, and I was not at all surprised to discern Forres’s clipped and self-assured tones prominent among them. I couldn’t tell how many survivors were left standing, but damned few by this time I’d wager, and if the voices I could hear were anything to go by they’d entered that strange state of mind where the certainty of imminent death brings complete clarity and a curious absence of fear. (A sensation I’d already experienced often enough in my own turbulent life to recognise at once.) Which is all very well in its way, the lack of any sense of self-preservation sometimes enabling desperate people to achieve extraordinary things, but if I was going to be forced to play the hero again I wanted there to be someone left to appreciate it.
‘Commissar Cain to Nusquan unit,’ I voxed, knowing that the realisation that help was on its way would infuse the beleaguered survivors with fresh purpose. ‘We’re approaching with reinforcements. I need a sitrep ASAP80.’ The last thing we needed at this stage was to blunder into the middle of a pitched battle and get annihilated before we got the chance to achieve anything.
To my complete lack of surprise, Forres answered, any astonishment she may have felt at this unexpected reprieve firmly suppressed. ‘Completely surrounded,’ she replied. ‘We’ve taken refuge on the catwalk, but they keep on coming.’
‘You got as far as the blockhouse on the surface?’ I asked, impressed by her tenacity if nothing else, the memory of the narrow walkway we’d traversed from the roof still fresh in my memory.
‘The agricave,’ Forres corrected, interrupting herself with the harsh bark of a bolt pistol, exactly the sidearm I’d have expected her to choose. Loud, ostentatious, and making a spectacular mess of its target, a lot of commissars favour them because they think they’re more intimidating81, although I’ve found the solidly reliable laspistol far better suited to service in the field. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve recharged it on the fly, w
hen I’d have been long out of ammunition for a projectile weapon. ‘There’s a short one for maintaining the inlet pipes.’
‘We’ll spot it,’ I assured her. In truth I hadn’t noticed any such arrangement in the caverns we’d passed through before, my sole interest in the pipework above us being the absence of any lurking genestealers poised to pounce.
‘That’ll be where the ’stealers were off to in such a hurry,’ Jurgen said, never slow to point out the obvious. ‘Most tyranids can’t climb.’ Which wasn’t entirely true, but they were clumsy at best, having only their feet and middle limbs to do the job with, the weapons fused to their forelimbs only getting in the way. Genestealers, on the other hand, were perfectly adapted to swarming up near vertical surfaces, and if Forres and her people had sought refuge by climbing, the hive mind would have called in as many as it could to drag them down.
As we got our first sight of the cavern, it was just as obvious where the Nusquans were as the junior commissar had promised. A huge, swaying pyramid of intertwined tyranids rose from the floor beneath a fragile-seeming catwalk, to which a dozen determined survivors clung grimly, pouring lasgun fire into the seething mass of flesh below. So far it was about three metres high, and growing inexorably, already well over halfway to its goal.
‘Single shots!’ Forres shouted. ‘Pick your targets!’ Suiting the action to the word, she picked off a termagant teetering near the top of the pile, which was just bringing its fleshborer up on aim, with commendable accuracy. To be conserving ammunition in straits this dire they must be almost out, an impression reinforced a moment later by one of the Nusquan troopers, who gave up pointing his gun at the horde of horrors below, and began fixing his bayonet.
‘I’m out,’ his voice crackled over the vox, confirming my deduction.
‘Look up there,’ Jurgen said, and following the direction of his grime-encrusted finger, I was able to pick out a whisper of stealthy movement among the stalactites above our heads.
‘Well spotted,’ I commended him, and activated the vox. ‘Forres, you’ve got ’stealers above you. Three groups, one, five, and nine o’clock.’
The Nusquans redirected their fire towards the new threat, and a couple of the taloned horrors fell, bursting like foul and overripe fruit as they hit the floor and the hydroponic troughs, the impact raising small fountains of water and viscera. The water frothed where they’d hit, as uncountable writhing serpentine forms swarmed to tear them apart, greedily devouring the still-twitching corpses with single-minded diligence.
‘Rippers,’ Vorhees said simply, in horror-struck tones, recognising the razor-fanged worms with a shudder of revulsion. The flooded floor was carpeted with the foul things, as far as the eye could see.
‘We’ll need flamers,’ I voxed the approaching troopers. ‘The more the better. The whole cavern’s infested.’ If we could advance behind those, and a solid barrage of lasgun fire, we might be able to force our way over to the Nusquans and get them out before the tyranids recovered the initiative. Possibly. So long as we maintained the element of surprise until we were ready.
‘We can’t target the genestealers from this angle,’ Forres told us, matter-of-factly. ‘The stalactites are in the way. You’ll have to pick them off from the floor.’
‘If we do that, the hive mind will know we’re here,’ I pointed out. ‘As soon as we’re ready to extract you we can...’ Before I could finish the sentence the ’stealers swarmed forward, charging as quickly and easily as if they were running on solid ground; another second or two and they’d be on the swaying gantry, carving their way among the troopers like kroot through a meat locker. ‘Frak it, fire!’
Our lasguns crackled, and Jurgen’s melta added its sinister hiss, wreaking havoc among the brood clinging to the ceiling; more fell, riddled with las-bolts or baked by the melta, these last raising clouds of steam where they hit the floor, or crashed into the flooded troughs. Not all were killed outright by the fall: several stirred, trying to rise, while one in particular pulled itself to its feet with a grasping hand on one of the troughs, despite the loss of a limb and a deep crack in its carapace through which some noisome fluid seeped. It turned its head slowly, seeking the source of the unexpected interference, its eyes seeming to lock on mine; then it began a lumbering charge, managing two or three halting paces in our direction before the water frothed around it, and the serpentine scavengers closed in. Like the rest of its brood it was torn apart and consumed in seconds.
‘Why did they do that instead of letting it attack us?’ Jurgen asked, but within a heartbeat we had our answer; all round the cavern, ’gaunts and the hulking warrior forms which gave them volition were turning, as though suddenly made aware of our presence.
‘Because the rest are about to,’ I said, preparing to run. We’d done our best, but there was no point in allowing ourselves to be devoured along with the Nusquans. If we were fast enough, maybe we could get behind the protection afforded by the flamers the troopers behind us were bringing up. A few gouts of burning promethium would fill the corridor, holding the hideous creatures off long enough for us to make it back to the Valkyries uneaten. I hoped. ‘Valhallans, where are you?’
‘Chamber nine, commissar,’ Jinxie Penlan told me, her voice overlaid with the unmistakable sounds of combat. ‘There’s a whole swarm of them coming up from the lower levels. We’re holding them off with the flamers, but we can’t get through to you.’
‘Just keep them off our backs for as long as you can,’ I said, cursing under my breath. No retreat that way.
I glanced up at the Nusquans on their precarious perch, where a desperate struggle was going on against the two or three ’stealers which had survived our intervention: Forres was engaging one with her chainsword, and looked like getting her face bitten off, until she jammed the muzzle of her miniature bolter under its chin and pulled the trigger, while a luckless trooper at the other end of the gantry was slashed almost in two, and fell, flailing, to be torn to pieces by the waiting swarm the moment he hit the ground. We’d get no help from up there, either.
‘Pick your targets,’ Grifen said, sounding oddly like Forres for a moment, before adding some rather more pertinent advice, ‘and aim for the large ones every chance you get82. If we can disrupt the swarm we might have a chance.’
‘If the little frakkers don’t rip our toes off first,’ Magot said, looking at the thrashing killer worms, her face contorted with revulsion. It was no idle comment; under the influence of the hive mind, they were abandoning the corpses and the remains of the crop which used to be here (some kind of root vegetable, judging by the few partially intact examples I could see), and were already swarming towards us, while the specialised combat forms began to untangle themselves from the ungainly circus act beneath the catwalk, and trot in our direction behind them. The leading warrior aimed its deathspitter at us, and a second later the water a metre or so in front of my boot began to bubble and hiss furiously as the ball of acid it had fired started eating its way into the cavern floor.
‘Fire!’ I commanded, abruptly reminded that our sole remaining advantage was the superior range of our weaponry, and that we’d almost squandered it already. ‘Before it can get another one off!’ The synapse creature was promptly riddled, and went down, but instead of pausing to feast on the corpse the rippers continued their remorseless advance, slithering towards us with malign intent. ‘Two more over there!’
‘One,’ Jurgen said, nailing the left-hand one neatly with the melta, reducing the devourer it carried to a mass of charred meat, but the hideous creature rallied, and came on, clearly intent on dicing us with its scything claws instead: in the unlikely event of the screen of smaller creatures it and its companion were lurking behind leaving anything larger than mincemeat, in any case.
‘Full auto, take down the ones with the guns,’ Grifen ordered. ‘Before they get close enough to use them.’ Our erstwhile companion’s gruesome death fresh in our minds, we needed no further urging, unleashing a witheri
ng hail of fire as we retreated step by step up the tunnel, while the tide of slithering, ankle-high fangs continued to snap at our boots as we went, the bloated serpentine bodies behind them writhing over the wet footprints we left on the rockcrete floor.
At which point, belated inspiration suddenly struck, as I recalled my idle thought about the lighting pylons in the first of the flooded chambers we’d found. ‘Jurgen!’ I shouted. ‘Can you bring down one of those luminator rigs?’
‘No problem,’ my aide assured me, scanning the narrowing view of the chamber in front of us, which each retreating step closed in a little further. ‘Any one in particular?’
‘The easiest to hit,’ I said, wanting to leave as little to chance as possible. Jurgen’s marksmanship may have been exceptional, but so was his ability to take whatever I said to him literally, and if I was any more specific he’d continue grimly plugging away at whichever one I’d designated even if that meant having to bring down half the swarm to get a clear shot at it.
‘Right you are, sir,’ he responded, as if I’d asked for nothing more troublesome than a fresh bowl of tanna, and I closed my eyes reflexively just as he pulled the trigger. ‘Frak it, get out of the way! Sorry, sir, just winged that big one instead.’
He must have done more than just winged it, because the tide of squirming death at my feet checked its advance for a moment, the cohesiveness of the hive mind disrupted; then, with the inconvenient obstruction out of the way, he fired again.
As the supporting girder work flashed into incandescent vapour, the metal around it softening and buckling, the metal pylon lurched sideways, and began to sag. ‘Again!’ I began, but before I could complete the command, gravity overwhelmed the weakened structure and it toppled gracefully to the cavern floor.
The Last Ditch Page 16