‘And won,’ Magot added cheerfully.
I nodded, as if I shared her confidence, although truth to tell I was far from doing so. The frozen ground was shaking beneath my feet, and the shadow of the oncoming leviathan seemed large enough to blot out the sun. The crack of lasgun fire opened up again, still disciplined, I was pleased to note, and the termagants scuttling round the feet of the gigantic creature flinched for a moment before the overriding will of their dam drove them on.
‘Commencing attack run,’ the Valkyrie pilot voxed, and a moment later twin streaks of fire struck the monster high on its flank, followed almost at once by a double explosion which tore open its carapace. Viscera and noisome fluids gushed and fountained, and the towering creature staggered, bellowing in anger and pain. It reared up on its back four legs, flailing at the swooping aircraft like a man bothered by a fly, then staggered as its forelimbs crashed back to the ice. Its retinue began to mill around uncertainly, failing to press the attack. ‘Lucky I hung on to the Hellstrikes like you told me to.’
‘It was indeed,’ I agreed. The two warheads had inflicted a hideous wound, but the tervigon seemed far from out of the fight. It came on inexorably towards us, slipping occasionally in the spreading slick of its own ichor, exposed organs and musculature pulsing as it came. It had slowed, however, and that alone was reason enough to hope.
‘Get down!’ Grifen bellowed, having spotted the telltale quivering along its back an instant before I did. The Valhallans and I hit the snow, Forres and the Nusquans following suit a moment later, without stopping to argue or ask questions about it, which I suppose was progress of a sort. A salvo of cluster spines hissed through the air, shattering into a storm of razor-edged flechettes as they hit the ground, which pattered all around me like sinister rain, and felled a couple of the tardiest Nusquans.
‘Target the wound!’ I shouted, raising myself enough to crack off a few shots at the towering monstrosity with my laspistol, and the troopers followed suit, Valhallans and Nusquans alike.
‘You said it was pointless firing lasguns at it,’ Forres said, her tone challenging, ‘and to concentrate on the termagants.’
‘That was before. It’s vulnerable now.’ I continued to shoot steadily as I spoke. ‘If we kill it, the spawn die too85.’
‘If they don’t kill us first,’ Forres observed, as the first fleshborer fusillade fell a few metres short of our position, but she shifted her aim nonetheless, peppering the area around the gaping hole in the behemoth’s armour with a flurry of bolts86; a couple detonated against the organs inside, and the flesh mountain staggered again. The constant rain of las-rounds against exposed viscera must have been agonising, which may have accounted for the loose control it appeared to have over its offspring; they skittered nervously, firing individually, then scurrying back into the cover afforded by their parent’s legs, instead of forming a skirmish line ahead of it as I would have expected.
‘Whenever you’re ready, Jurgen,’ I said, as my aide lined up a shot with the melta. ‘Take your time.’ The shot had to be a clean one: as soon as he fired, he’d mark himself out as the greatest threat among us, and the tervigon and its offspring would react accordingly.
‘Almost there, sir,’ he assured me, shifting the cumbersome weapon a millimetre or two, then pulled the trigger. I closed my eyes reflexively, seeing the bright flare through the lids, and blinked, afterimages continuing to dance on my retina. ‘That ought to do it.’
‘I think you’re right,’ I said, in mingled surprise and relief. The shot had been a clean one, as I’d had no doubt it would be, the ravening blast of energy penetrating deep into the monster’s body. With a keen ululation it fell, legs scrabbling for traction, and crushing most of the termagants around it into the ice with the weight of its own body.
‘Forward!’ Forres yelled. ‘Finish it off while it’s down!’ Brandishing her chainsword, she ran towards it, while the rest of us looked at one another in astonishment.
‘Look out!’ I shouted, seeing its head turn, jaws which could bite a Chimera in half snapping angrily. I had no objection to her getting herself killed – in fact it would probably save a lot of lives in the long run – but just standing aside and watching it happen wasn’t the kind of behaviour expected of a Hero of the Imperium. If there was any chance of saving this miserable iceball, we needed the Nusquans to be fully committed to its defence, and convinced they could win, which unfortunately meant living up to my unmerited reputation yet again. Cursing all over-enthusiastic idiots, I charged forward, intending to drag her back; but she’d seen the danger, and her bolt pistol barked, just as the downed leviathan opened its jaws. The explosive round detonated against the back of its throat, and the entire monstrosity convulsed.
‘That should put an end to it,’ she said, in a self-congratulatory fashion, holstering her weapon as she turned to meet me.
‘It was dying anyway!’ I expostulated, catching a glimpse of movement behind her. It may have been down, but it was certainly not out, spawning a fresh brood of termagants to take revenge on its behalf. A small knot of them was moving out of the shadow of their parent, their carapaces still glistening with the fluids of the nutrient sac they’d been cocooned in during their dormancy, fleshborers raised. I fired my laspistol, turning to flee, then the snow gave way beneath my boot.
I pitched forward, falling free for a moment, then slammed into a steep slope of ice, down which I slithered for a second or two, doing my much abused uniform no favours in the process. Above my head I could hear the crackle of lasgun fire, and the distinctive hisssss crack! of Forres’s miniature bolter, then everything abruptly went silent.
‘Commissar!’ Grifen’s voice echoed in my comm-bead. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I replied, after a second or two to make sure of the fact. Dim blue daylight reflected off the ice all round me, so I was able to make out my surroundings with little difficulty. I was in an icy cleft, some three or four metres deep and of indeterminate length, roofed over for the most part by a thick layer of compacted snow. ‘Just found one of those crevasses Jurgen warned me about. What’s going on up there?’
‘It just died,’ Grifen said. ‘And the termagants with it. Just rolled over in the middle of the firefight.’
‘Any casualties?’ I asked, because it never hurt to look as if I cared.
‘No fresh ones,’ Grifen assured me, ‘although one of the Nusquans is in a pretty bad way from the cluster spine barrage. Can you climb out the way you fell in?’
‘Don’t think so,’ I said, taking out my luminator and shining it around in an attempt to get a better picture of where I was. The slope I’d slithered down was too sheer and slippery to even think about trying. ‘There might be a cable or something in the crawler’s toolkit.’
‘Already on my way back to see, sir,’ Jurgen cut in, as reliable as ever, and, reassured, I began to make my way along the crevasse. At least I was out of that damned wind, for once, and although it could hardly be described as warm, at least I felt more comfortable than I had on the surface.
‘I’ll see if it gets any easier further along,’ I said, by no means certain that it would, but at least going to find out would give me something to do while I waited for rescue. The reflective nature of the ice surrounding me made the luminator appear much brighter than it would normally do, and I made good progress, in spite of the treacherous surface underfoot.
As I went on, I began to notice occasional patches of discolouration in the translucent ice, and, moved more by idle curiosity than anything else, I stopped by one which seemed clearer than most. There seemed to be something solid embedded in it, and I held up the luminator, rubbing the smooth surface with my glove as if trying to clear the condensation from a misty window. It achieved nothing, of course, beyond making my palm wet, but as I moved the hand holding the luminator a little more to one side, the angle of the beam shifted, throwing the entombed object into sharp relief.
‘Emperor’s bowels
!’ I expostulated, with an involuntary flinch backwards. The serpentine form of a tyranid ravener, twice my size, was coiled through the ice, seemingly poised to burst out and attack. A moment later, as the hammering of my heart died back to more normal levels, I began to breathe a little more easily. The foul creature was clearly inert, entombed like the tervigon had been. It might even have been dead, but after what I’d seen earlier, I doubted that; it only needed the presence of an active synapse creature to rouse and join the ever-swelling ranks of the tyranid invasion.
‘Say again, commissar?’ Grifen asked, with an air of puzzlement.
‘There are ’nids down here,’ I said, all too aware of the consternation my words would be causing back in Primadelving. ‘Hibernating or dead, although my money would be on the first. If they all wake...’ I let the thought trail off, unwilling to verbalise it.
Kasteen, however, had no such scruples. ‘We won’t stand a chance,’ she finished for me.
EIGHTEEN
‘Well, at least we know where the greenskins went,’ Broklaw said, with a typically sardonic grin. ‘The ’nids have been eating them.’
I nodded, although none of the other faces ranged around the conference table in a room adjacent to the main command post seemed to find anything remotely amusing in the situation. Kasteen, Broklaw and I were seated along one side of the polished wooden slab, while Colonel Brecca, her second-in-command (whose name I still hadn’t managed to catch), and Forres faced us, looking fidgety and uncomfortable, which I could hardly blame them for. At the rate things were going, they wouldn’t have a regiment left to lead before too much longer87. Clothilde was at the head of the table, as protocol demanded, surrounded by a small clot of advisors, who, for the most part, seemed well aware of how out of their depth they were, and were sensible enough to stay quiet as a consequence. The PDF contingent was on the same side of the table as the Nusquans, which seemed reasonable enough as it was their damn planet and they were used to working together, which left the Adeptus Mechanicus delegation (headed of course by Izembard), and the other Imperial institutions88 on ours.
‘Thus replacing one problem with another,’ Clothilde remarked, with a glance towards the PDF general staffers, who for the most part looked as far out of their depth as she did.
‘We should be able to turn this to our advantage,’ Forres said, with the calm assurance of total ignorance. ‘If we can manoeuvre the tyranids into directly confronting the orks, they’ll eradicate the greenskins, and be weakened enough for us to pick off the survivors easily.’
‘Except that every ork they consume makes the whole swarm stronger,’ Kasteen pointed out89, ‘not to mention their own casualties. Trying to use the ’nids against the orks is about as sensible as trying to hide a scorch mark in the hearthrug by burning the house down.’
‘A colourful analogy,’ I said, to forestall any heated response from Forres, ‘but the point is essentially correct. The orks are a sideshow now, and they’ll keep. We need to turn every resource we possess against the tyranids, while we can still make a difference.’ Kasteen and Broklaw were nodding in agreement, knowing all too well how big a threat the creatures posed compared to the one we’d been sent here to deal with. To my relief Clothilde was nodding too, evidently convinced by our argument.
‘What I want to know is where the horrid things came from in the first place,’ she said. ‘Our auspexes haven’t recorded any unusual activity in the system, have they?’
This last question was addressed to a woman with iron-grey hair, in the uniform of an admiral of the System Defence Fleet; judging by the strain her girth imposed on the fastenings, her days of active service in the cramped confines of a warship were long behind her.
‘Nothing,’ she responded at once, ‘although that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. Tyranid vessels are notoriously difficult to detect at long ranges. The SDF is mounting a reconnaissance sweep of the inner system, but that’ll take some time to complete.’
‘Especially as the entire fleet consists of two customs cutters and a courier boat,’ Kasteen muttered, sotto voce90.
‘If there is a hive ship in system,’ I said, ‘it must be alone. Astropathic communication hasn’t been disrupted by the shadow a fleet would cast in the warp.’ Something I was completely certain about, having dispatched a brief summation of the situation to Amberley at the earliest opportunity, on the assumption that the sudden appearance of tyranids far in advance of the oncoming hive fleets was bound to be of interest to her particular branch of the Inquisition91. The chances of her turning up to sort out the matter in person were unfortunately minimal, however, which left us on our own to deal with it.
‘That’s something, anyway,’ Clothilde said. ‘At least we can call for help.’
‘Already done,’ Kasteen said crisply, with a nod at the grey-robed astropath sitting at the far end of the table. ‘Reinforcements should be on their way from Coronus. How long they take to arrive, though...’ She shrugged expressively, all too familiar with the vagaries of warp travel, not to mention the inertia of the Munitorum, and the pressing need for far more troopers in far more places than the Guard actually possessed.
‘That’s most encouraging,’ Clothilde said, ‘but it still hasn’t answered my question. Why have the tyranids suddenly appeared out of nowhere?’
‘Because they’ve always been here,’ Izembard said, his flat mechanical drone adding to the drama of his announcement. ‘Preliminary analysis of the specimens found by Commissar Cain, and the depth of the ice around them, would suggest that they were frozen approximately seven thousand years ago. Assuming a relatively even rate of ice formation, of course.’
‘Long before the planet was colonised,’ Brecca put in, for the benefit of those of us from offworld.
‘They must have been stranded here,’ Izembard went on, unperturbed by the interruption. ‘Finding nothing to consume, they returned to the dormant state in which they’d travelled between the stars, becoming buried by the drifting snow.’
‘But people have been living here for millennia,’ Forres protested. ‘How come nobody’s stumbled across one before now?’
‘Because it’s an iceworld,’ I said. ‘People stick close to the cavern cities or one of the outposts, unless they absolutely have to. That’s how the orks disappeared so thoroughly after the invasion.’ Then, struck by an even more unsettling thought, I added: ‘Besides, maybe someone has found a ’nid from time to time. If one got roused by the presence of prey, it’d go dormant again after feeding, wouldn’t it?’
‘Perhaps,’ Izembard said, his artificial monotone failing to disguise his scepticism.
‘That still doesn’t explain why so many of them have woken up now,’ Broklaw objected, ‘right after we arrived...’ His voice trailed off as a rather large coin suddenly dropped.
‘It was us,’ I said. ‘When our ship crashed, it melted the ice all around the impact site, and there must have been a few tyranids close enough to be thawed out.’ All of a sudden the movement I remembered spotting in the water, and in the snowstorm when Jurgen and I had found the abandoned ork vehicles, took on far greater and more sinister significance.
‘Then why didn’t they just attack you while you disembarked?’ Forres asked, clearly impatient with so wild a flight of fancy.
‘Because they’ve been biding their time,’ I said. ‘Picking off the orks for biomass, and digging out more of the buried ones.’
‘So now we’re facing an army of the things,’ Kasteen concluded.
‘I’m afraid we are,’ I said. ‘The only good news is that we’ll be getting reinforcements and they won’t.’
‘We can’t just sit back and wait for the troopships to arrive,’ Forres said, making her first intelligent contribution of the day. ‘The tyranids could have overrun us by then.’
‘We’re stretched pretty thin already,’ Brecca put in, ‘and there are hundreds of sites around the Leeward Barrens we need to protect. If we pull our picket lines b
ack, that’ll give us more units to redeploy, but the rest of the orks can just rampage across the province.’
‘The orks are not the problem,’ I reiterated, amazed that she hadn’t seemed to grasp that yet. ‘If they do advance, they’ll just keep the ’nids busy while we evacuate as many of the outlying settlements as we can, and get on with reinforcing the garrisons in the main population centres.’
I exchanged an uneasy glance with Kasteen and Broklaw as I spoke. We all knew from experience that concentrating the population in larger groups was doing little more than setting up a smorgasbord so far as the tyranids were concerned, but at least it would mean fewer sites to defend.
‘That still leaves us stretched damnably thin,’ Brecca said, reasonably enough. ‘What we really need is some way of predicting which sites are most at risk of attack.’
‘Magos?’ Clothilde asked, looking down the table at Izembard. ‘Have you any suggestions?’
‘We are working on a predictive algorithm,’ the tech-priest assured her, ‘but the variables involved are both numerous and difficult to calculate.’
‘It might help if we knew why they attacked the sites they did,’ Forres said, which made two sensible comments in a row, a record so far as I could see.
‘And how,’ I added. ‘The external doors to the power plant were all sealed when we arrived.’
‘Same with the agricaves,’ Forres said.
‘No mystery why they struck there,’ Broklaw put in. ‘All that biomass would seem like the motherlode to a ’nid swarm.’
‘That doesn’t explain how they detected it,’ Brecca said. ‘Or how so many of them were able to get inside without anyone noticing.’
‘They do have some specialised organisms bred for infiltration,’ Izembard put in helpfully.
‘But we didn’t see any of those,’ I replied. ‘Just ’gaunts and genestealers, with a few of the warrior forms to keep them focused.’
The Last Ditch Page 19