The Last Ditch

by Sandy Mitchell

  The effect was immediate, the luminators shattering, and the thick electrical cables supplying them fizzling as they hit the water. The shallow pool began to froth, churned to foam by the agonised spasms of the countless organisms infesting it, and jagged lightning arced between the metal surfaces of the hydroponic troughs, electrocuting those tyranids which had the luck or quick-wittedness to be out of the water just as effectively as those caught in it. The surviving warrior form staggered, roaring and bellowing like a drunken ork, discharged its venom cannon in a final reflex (which fortunately failed to hit anything other than a couple of expiring hormagaunts), and collapsed into the boiling pool. Silence suddenly fell, broken only by the faint, sinister buzzing of the abused electrical system.

  ‘They’ve stopped moving,’ Magot said, prodding the nearest ripper cautiously with the tip of her bayonet. Those closest to us were too far from the water to have been electrocuted themselves, but deprived of the controlling influence of the hive mind, they’d simply become inert lumps of staggeringly ugly meat.

  ‘Then we’d better collect the Nusquans and get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘Preferably without boiling us in the process,’ Forres said, stowing her weapons, and looking down at us severely from her perch near the ceiling. ‘Which is something of a flaw in your otherwise impressive stratagem.’

  ‘No “thanks for saving us from being ’nid bait,” then,’ Magot muttered. ‘Snotty femhound.’

  ‘Corporal,’ I reproved, but to be honest I pretty much shared her opinion, so stopped short of an outright reprimand; an omission which, judging by her smirk, had not gone unnoted, nor my reasons uninferred. Besides, Forres did have a point: so long as the cable was in the water, we couldn’t re-enter the chamber, and the Nusquans couldn’t descend from their perch, without getting electrocuted just as thoroughly as the ’nids.

  ‘We’re being forced back here,’ Penlan voxed, just to crank the pressure up a little more. ‘We’ve laid down a flame barrier between the swarm and your tunnel mouth, but it’s only going to burn for a few minutes.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ I said, acutely aware that another tidal wave of scuttling malevolence would be bearing down on us as soon as the flames died, and that the only way forward was across the electrified pool. If I didn’t think of something fast, we were going to be ’nid bait ourselves.

  ‘There’s a junction box on the north-west wall,’ Forres cut in, pointing at something I couldn’t quite see from her elevated perch. ‘The cable from the luminator you downed seems to be plugged into it.’

  I took the proffered amplivisor from Jurgen, and focused it. She was right. Taking it out should cut the power to all the luminators in that portion of the cavern.

  I turned to the troopers as my aide shrugged his bulky melta aside and unslung his lasgun, in anticipation of my next order. If anyone among us was capable of hitting so small a mark, I was confident it would be him, but under the circumstances the sooner the power was cut the better, and we didn’t have long to try. ‘Double ale ration for whoever hits that box thing on the wall over there first,’ I said, and stood back, ready to leave them to it.

  ‘Allow me,’ Forres interjected dryly, casually putting a bolt through the box from the swaying catwalk before anyone else could pull the trigger. The explosive bolt struck true, and detonated, ripping the target to shreds, and plunging the entire cavern into darkness, relieved only by the light leaking from the tunnel mouths on either side.

  ‘Nice shot,’ I said. ‘But perhaps a slight flaw in your stratagem?’

  Magot snickered quietly as we kindled our luminators again, and began sloshing though the water, picking our way as best we could through the innumerable dead horrors choking it. The larger creatures had to be dodged around, and I kept my laspistol trained on each one as I did so, particularly the warrior forms, having learned long ago that it took a great deal to kill a tyranid, and the jolt of high voltage electricity might merely have stunned some of them.

  ‘We have to get moving,’ I said as we reached the vicinity of the dangling catwalk. ‘We’re out of the hive mind’s awareness at the moment, but it knows something’s knocked a hole in its neural net, and right where it happened; it’ll be sending more tyranids in after us as sure as the Emperor protects. Our only chance is to be gone by the time it does.’

  ‘And how do you suggest we get down?’ Forres asked, with a touch of asperity. ‘We had to take out the ladder with a krak grenade. You’ll need to get a rope from the Chimeras, bring it back, and...’

  ‘End up in a digester pool like the rest of the poor frakwits you led in here,’ I interrupted. ‘When we get to the Chimeras we’re firing them up and driving them out. Come along now if you don’t want to get left for the ’nids.’

  ‘They’ll be here any minute,’ Grifen added, with an apprehensive glance at the tunnel mouth we’d come in by.

  ‘We can’t jump from up here, we’ll be killed!’ one of the Nusquans objected.

  ‘No you won’t.’ I swung my luminator round to spotlight the pile of tyranid corpses beneath the catwalk. It wasn’t as high as it had been, but it would do. ‘If you hang by your hands first, it’s only a couple of metres to drop to the top of the heap, and you can climb down that fast enough.’ The chitinous exoskeletons wouldn’t exactly supply a soft landing, but they’d be a lot more comfortable than a five metre fall to solid rock, that was for sure.

  I expected more argument, but the Nusquans had evidently learned the lesson that a slim chance is infinitely preferable to none as well as I had by this time, and followed my suggestion without further ado. Forres watched them for a moment, then tucked her weapons away and simply jumped, her black coat flapping like a gargoyle’s wings as she reached out for a hold among the mound of monstrous corpses, and swarmed her way down them talon by tusk. ‘Are you always that inventive?’ she asked, and I shrugged.

  ‘Sometimes you have to be,’ I said. ‘The manual doesn’t cover everything.’ I glanced at the tunnel we’d entered by, certain I’d heard the first faint scuttling of a new horde back in the throat of it. ‘Now let’s get out of here, before the rest of them arrive.’

  SIXTEEN

  ‘I can see them!’ Magot reported, her team having taken point as we scurried up the tunnel as fast as our legs could carry us. Grifen’s team had taken the rearguard, leaving the Nusquans in the middle, as by this point they’d expended so much ammo they had little to defend themselves with beyond withering sarcasm, which in my experience tyranids were seldom bothered by. ‘Two Chimeras, still parked.’

  Though my natural instinct was to run for the safety they represented as fast as I could, I’d dropped back a little to confer with Forres; partly because it would be expected of me, and it was vital to pass her report back in case we failed to make it out of here, but mainly because if the ’nids had managed to outflank us and were waiting in ambush I’d rather not be the first one to find out.

  ‘They just came at us out of nowhere,’ Forres said, her voice steady, but her eyes still numb with the shock of what she’d been through today. ‘We deployed for a sweep through the caverns, but as we’d found no sign of the greenskins on the surface we assumed they must already have withdrawn. By the time those creatures appeared, we’d got sloppy.’ Her jaw tightened. ‘I should have kept a tighter rein, kept everyone up to the mark. But I got careless too.’

  ‘A dozen of the troopers with you survived,’ I said, partly because I’d got so used to boosting morale over the years that an encouraging word at times like these had become almost second nature to me, and partly because our conversation was being monitored and that was the sort of thing a Hero of the Imperium was supposed to say, instead of ‘What the frak were you thinking, strolling around a war zone like you were on leave?’ I had a reputation to consider after all, even if I didn’t deserve it. ‘Under the circumstances, I’d say that’s a pretty strong testament to your leadership. Where did they come from?’

  ‘Up from the lowe
r levels,’ Forres said, looking a little happier now that I’d thrown her a bone. I could still remember my first assignment as a newly-inducted commissar, one which had also been interrupted by the sudden appearance of a tyranid horde, so I suppose I may have felt rather more sympathetic towards her than I might otherwise have done; although I doubted that her first impulse had been to head for the horizon while the going was good, like mine had been. ‘We were deep enough to smell the volcanic vents, but before we could descend any further they just started pouring out of the tunnels, and we could hear the other units screaming over the vox. Lieutenant Caromort ordered the survivors to link up with her command squad, but we couldn’t get through to join them, and the main group was wiped out. I told Sergeant Lanks to pull back and return to the Chimeras, but the swarm caught up with us before we could make it, and cut us off. I spotted the gantry under the pipework, and got everyone who was left up onto it.’

  ‘Which saved their lives,’ I pointed out. ‘Well done.’

  ‘Not well enough,’ Forres said grimly. Some people you just can’t help, and now was hardly the time to try and talk some sense into her, so I simply nodded formally, and moved up to join Magot, whose fireteam had reached the floor of the blockhouse we’d been aiming for and begun to fan out across it.

  ‘Doesn’t look good,’ she greeted me, with a baleful glare at the Chimeras. I can’t say I was surprised to find them in much the same condition as the ones we’d found on our arrival, but the disappointment was profound nonetheless; as so often when things looked really dire, I’d clung to the shred of hope that they might not have been quite as bad as they appeared.

  I turned to look at Forres, who had moved up with the rest of the party and was staring at the wrecked vehicles as though someone had just shot her puppy. Concerned murmuring began among the Nusquans, incipient panic not far beneath the surface, and she rounded on them, her expression becoming severe and unemotional as abruptly as the flick of a switch. ‘Stay focused,’ she snapped. ‘We’re getting out of this.’ It was a good performance, but I’d seen enough to realise she was as terrified as any of them. Me too, come to that, but I was even better at concealing how I felt than she was, having notched up many more years of practice.

  ‘Did you know the crews were dead?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘I knew we’d lost contact,’ she said, not quite answering the question. ‘But I hoped we could get moving without them if necessary.’

  ‘That’s not the problem,’ I said, pleased to note that Grifen and the sole surviving Nusquan NCO, Lanks I imagined, were already setting up to cover the tunnel mouth as effectively as possible with the limited resources at our disposal while we spoke. ‘Jurgen and Magot can drive Chimeras.’ After their own idiosyncratic fashion, admittedly, but under the circumstances I wouldn’t quarrel with my aide’s propensity to jam the throttle as wide open as possible, with a complete disregard for whatever else might be in the vicinity. I gestured at the ripped and battered metal in front of us. ‘The problem is that these heaps of scrap aren’t going anywhere, however many drivers we’ve got.’

  ‘It might not be as bad as it looks,’ Forres said crisply, before glancing into the driver’s compartment of the nearest, the controls of which had been comprehensively mangled in the ’stealers’ attempts to wrinkle out the morsels within. Her face fell. ‘Oh.’

  ‘“Oh” pretty much covers it,’ I agreed, looking round at the rest of the cavernous space. It was smaller than the one we’d entered by, though not by much, and almost as empty. ‘We’ll have to get out through the main door, and hope our pilot can pick us up from the open ground before the ’nids get too close.’ I was no keener to face the bone-chilling cold of the surface than I’d been before, but given the alternative it seemed positively inviting. Unfortunately, the Valkyrie which had brought us here was now providing air cover for the retreating Valhallans, if the transmissions I’d been monitoring in my comm-bead were anything to go by, and it would take several minutes to disengage, circle round, land, and embark us; minutes I was by no means sure we had. I glanced hopefully at the ceiling, but there was no sign of a trapdoor there, or anything by which we could have accessed one even if there had been.

  ‘There’s movement on the surface,’ the pilot added, as I heard the first unmistakable scrabbling in the depths of the tunnel which meant the swarm beneath our feet was on the move again too. ‘Closing on Blockhouse Four. Is that your position?’

  ‘It is,’ I confirmed, as the lasguns opened up again behind me. The external doors were solid, but they wouldn’t hold an entire swarm back for long, and with another horde of drooling malevolence doing its best to swamp us through the corridor, we couldn’t divert any of our rapidly-dwindling firepower to defend against an attack from the outside anyway.

  I walked round the Chimeras, which had blocked my view of the far side of the entrance chamber, then stopped, staring, almost unable to believe the evidence of my own eyes. A cargo crawler was parked there, its loading doors open, and its bodywork miraculously unmarred by the furrowing of genestealer claws.

  ‘Jurgen!’ I called, sprinting towards it. ‘Can you get this thing started?’

  ‘Looks easy enough,’ my aide said, clambering up to the cab with remarkable agility, given that he was still burdened with the bulky melta. ‘Why isn’t it ripped apart like the Chimeras?’

  ‘Nobody hiding inside it, I suppose,’ I said, not really caring. It was intact enough to run, and that was all that mattered to me. I hauled myself into the cab after him, finding it a little cramped competing for space with my aide, his body odour, and our mutual collection of weapons, but I’d take a little crowding in preference to ending up as regurgitated biomass in a digestion pool any day.

  Jurgen began poking around on the dashboard and I popped my head back out, cracking off a couple of shots at the termagants in the shadows of the tunnel mouth. It seemed that the hive mind had learned to be wary of us, and, unsure of how we’d managed to eliminate so many of its meat puppets in one fell swoop, wasn’t keen to commit them to a massed assault just yet. The Valhallans, Nusquans and Forres had hunkered down behind the wrecked Chimeras, and the two sides were exchanging largely ineffectual potshots. From my elevated position I was able to pick off one of the termagants with a, frankly, lucky head shot, before wondering belatedly if attracting their attention was such a good idea, but it raised morale and, more importantly, made it clear that I was getting stuck in along with everybody else. A second or so later, Forres, not wanting to be outdone, blew another apart with a shot from her toy bolter, which neatly established her as a higher priority target in any case.

  ‘That’s done it,’ Jurgen said a moment later, and the crawler’s engine rumbled into life. ‘Just need to get the outer doors open.

  ‘There should be a remote override somewhere in the cab,’ Lanks put in helpfully over the vox83.

  ‘Come on, then,’ I urged, cracking off another couple of covering shots as the Nusquans began running for the rear cargo doors. It was going to be pretty uncomfortable back there with nothing to sit on, but given the alternative I wasn’t expecting anyone to complain.

  ‘Pull back, by fire and movement,’ Grifen ordered crisply, and Magot’s team trotted after the Nusquans who’d begun scrambling up behind us, while Grifen’s switched to full auto, laying down a barrage to cover their retreat. Confident that I’d done enough to be seen to be participating, I ducked back inside the cab and scanned the unfamiliar dashboard.

  ‘This, you think?’ I prodded a large button speculatively, and flinched as an ear-splitting klaxon rebounded from the walls around us.

  ‘Try that one, sir,’ Jurgen suggested, indicating another, helpfully annotated ext. access. Slamming the cab door behind me I pressed it, while Magot’s team and the few Nusquans left with an effective firearm started laying into the encroaching swarm with commendable vigour from inside the cargo compartment, and Grifen’s people ran for the crawler as if Abaddon himself was after them
. After what seemed like an agonising wait, but was probably no more than a handful of seconds, the great doors at the end of the hall began to move slowly apart, with a grinding of frozen metal and a crackling of ice still dimly audible through the metal and armourcrys enclosing the cab.

  ‘Here they come!’ Grifen called, and a torrent of tyranids burst from the tunnel mouth, as the coin belatedly dropped that the prey they’d believed trapped was on the verge of getting away. A volley of sustained fire met them, ripping into the front rank, and several of the creatures fell. The rest charged on, their headlong rush barely checked as they trampled the fallen underfoot in their eagerness to get to us.

  ‘Go!’ I shouted, but Jurgen had already slammed the cumbersome vehicle into gear and was accelerating away, leaving the hormagaunts which had broken free of the pack bounding fruitlessly in our wake. Howls and cheers of relief and derision echoed in my ear, until Forres restored vox discipline with a few choice words and some pious humbug about serving the Emperor to the best of our abilities. For a moment I feared we wouldn’t make it through the still-widening gap, but Jurgen judged it to a nicety as always, and our spinning tracks barely grazed the thick metal slabs on either side before finally biting down in the thick snow for which they’d been designed. ‘Hang on back there,’ I voxed. ‘It’s going to be a rough ride.’

  A prediction which, had I but known it, would turn out to be all too true.

  ‘Incoming,’ Jurgen said, pointing through flurries of wind-driven snow. A dark mass seemed to be moving towards us, flowing across the frigid surface, and with a shudder that had nothing to do with the ambient chill seeping through the insulation of the cab, I realised what it was. The swarm the pilot had warned us about had arrived.

  ‘Can you avoid them?’ I asked, and Jurgen shook his head, gunning the engine to a pitch which would have had our enginseers wincing in sympathy.