The Last Ditch

by Sandy Mitchell

  ‘I see you,’ I responded calmly, while continuing to look all around us for the first sign of hostile movement. It was a bit early for that, of course, but under the circumstances, I felt, a little paranoia certainly couldn’t hurt. ‘Anything on the auspex?’

  ‘Nothing but friendlies,’ Sulla assured me, although if I hadn’t been sure of that, I’d never have begun this trip in the first place. The Valkyries were continuing to fly sorties over the convoy routes and the major concentrations of tyranids, and their pilots hadn’t seen anything close enough to our intended line of travel to afford any serious concern. Nevertheless, I remained ill at ease, obscurely convinced that I’d missed something; tyranids should never be underestimated, I’d learned that the hard way.

  ‘Let’s hope it stays that way,’ I said, although of course it didn’t.

  Editorial Note:

  Cain’s casual mention of his mode of transport, and occasional details in the subsequent part of his narrative, don’t make it entirely clear how much the passenger vehicles which plied between cities on Nusquam Fundumentibus differed from their more utilitarian, and generally smaller, cargo-carrying cousins.

  Accordingly, the following extract has been inserted here, in the hope that it may prove illuminating.

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

  Given the abominable climate, the only practical manner of visiting centres of population, other than the one at which the shuttle bearing the curious wayfarer may have landed, is by means of the snowliners which ply between them on a regular basis. These are large and comfortable enough to be tolerable for all but the longest of journeys, being typically arranged on three decks: the lowest devoted to the engine, promethium tanks, and stowage for the luggage of passengers; the middle to seating, of variable comfort depending on price, and the sleeping compartments which long distance travellers would do well to avail themselves of, despite their rudimentary nature; and the upper to an observation lounge, from which the landscape may be observed for as long as it remains of interest, along with dining areas offering basic sustenance of one sort or another.

  Needless to say, a plentiful supply of reading matter is essential.

  TWENTY-TWO

  By the time darkness fell, I have to confess, the novelty of the landscape had begun to pall. No doubt my travelling companions, Valhallans and Nusquans alike, were able to distinguish subtle beauties in the endless vista of ice and snow which had escaped me, but I was finding it increasingly dull; and the slow encroachment of night brought its own worries. Every patch of deeper darkness could conceal a tyranid, and I kept an anxious vigil, despite the periodic bursts of conversation in my comm-bead which assured me that our escort remained alert, and that so far there was no sign of the ambush I dreaded.

  By great good fortune, the clouds which obscured most of the sky for so much of the time had parted, allowing the faint bluish radiance of the stars to shimmer from the ice around us, every surface reflecting and refracting the glory of the heavens. This was supplemented by a more diffuse yellowish glow, which puzzled me for a while, Nusquam Fundumentibus being devoid of a moon, until I discerned a point of light in the sky far brighter than the stars surrounding it; then the coin dropped. The orbital docks we’d come so close to obliterating in our headlong plunge from the empyrean were large enough, and in a low enough orbit, to reflect a little of the sunlight they caught to the planet below.

  Though this was sufficient to prevent the darkness around us from becoming entirely stygian, it left far too many patches of utter blackness, in which anything might lurk, for my peace of mind, and I was heartily glad to see the bright beams of the searchlights mounted on our Chimeras and Sentinels swinging constantly around us, ever alert for any threats.

  None came, of course, and the weary, sleepless night dragged on. A few times I rose from my seat, hoping to restore some vestiges of circulation to my lower limbs, but movement was all but impossible; the snowliner had been built to carry around a hundred people in reasonable comfort, but was now jammed with nearly three times that number, so even a visit to the head involved negotiating an obstacle course of bodies and belongings which choked the aisles. Reaching the upper deck would have been completely impossible, even if there was anything to be gained by making the attempt, the refreshment facilities which would normally have been there having been ripped out to make room for more passengers. This left us reliant for sustenance on the supplies Jurgen had secreted about his person, with his usual diligence; Guard-issue ration bars, with their usual lingering flavour of nothing identifiable, washed down with a more than welcome flask of tanna.

  At that, I suppose, we did better than many of the poor wretches surrounding us, who appeared to have brought nothing at all to keep them going. To my carefully concealed relief, none of the refugees made any attempt to engage us in conversation; no doubt due to Jurgen’s miasma, which I’m bound to note became progressively less noticeable as the hours passed and the fetor of so many bodies in such close proximity began to grow, and to the weapons we both carried so openly107.

  At length, dawn began to break over the desolate landscape, the rising sun once again washing the snowfields in a vaguely sinister crimson glow. As I yawned, regarding it balefully, one of the outcrops of ice in the middle distance suddenly crumbled, sliding gently to the ground beneath it in a cascade of glittering crystals.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I asked Jurgen, who for some time had been fully occupied in picking his nose.

  ‘See what, sir?’ he asked, raising his eyes from the porno slate he’d been reading in a faintly desultory fashion.

  Before I could elaborate, Sulla’s voice burst into my comm-bead. ‘We’ve got ground shocks, incoming,’ she told me, the shiver of excitement at the prospect of action I’d learned to dread not quite suppressed in her clipped, professional tones. ‘Reads like a burrower.’

  ‘What kind?’ I asked, with an apprehensive look at the frozen landscape beyond the window. I rose to my feet, and craned my neck, hoping for a better view.

  ‘Can’t tell yet,’ Sulla said, ‘but it looks like it’s alone at any rate.’

  ‘Another probe,’ I said, beginning to relax a little. We might still be in for a fight, most of the tyranid burrowers being huge and well armoured, but at least it wouldn’t be an all out attack, and once our escorts were in a position to concentrate their fire it wouldn’t last long. ‘Testing our defences again.’

  ‘That’s how I read it,’ Sulla agreed.

  Before I could reply, the entire snowliner lurched beneath my feet, eliciting cries of alarm from the civilians surrounding us; a chorus of apprehension I’d have been happy to join in with if it hadn’t been for my audience108. A moment later, something huge reared up beyond the window, thick plates of chitin encasing a serpentine body a couple of metres or more thick, before a head like a daemon’s nightmare smashed into the glaze. I stumbled back, impeded by the chair behind me, as razor-sharp shards of the stuff fell all around where I was standing, and drew my laspistol reflexively.

  ‘Frak off!’ I shouted, the sudden influx of freezing air almost as keen as the fragments of the window, and cracked off a few futile shots, which impacted harmlessly on the armour of the monstrous creature before me as it reared back and prepared to strike again. ‘It’s just surfaced!’ I added, over the vox-net.

  ‘Acknowledged,’ Sulla said crisply. ‘Surround and engage,’ and an encouraging number of Valhallan voices assured her of their intention to comply with the instruction as rapidly as possible.

  ‘I can’t get a shot, sir,’ Jurgen said apologetically, ‘you’re in the way.’ Which was where it looked as though I was staying, unless the ghastly thing ate me, as I couldn’t get through the seats hemming me in on either side, or back past my aide to safety. A mouth wide enough to swallow me whole swooped in my direction, surrounded by far too many fangs and tusks, and impelled by instinct I jumped through the gaping hole in
the ruined window, the only avenue of escape left open to me.

  For a moment I thought I’d left it too late, dooming myself to a lingering and agonising demise as the giant worm’s stomach acid slowly digested me109, but I missed its strike by a hairsbreadth, or so it seemed to me, ending up winded and gasping in a snowbank some three metres below. A bright flash behind me, a roar of pain and frustration and the stench of charring flesh was enough to tell me that Jurgen had taken full advantage of the sudden clearing of his sight line, and the creature reared back again, shaking its head and bellowing.

  ‘Commissar! Can you hear me?’ my aide asked, sounding remarkably agitated, even for a man who’s just potted a gigantic carnivorous worm at point-blank range, and it belatedly occurred to me that perhaps he attributed my sudden disappearance to having been eaten.

  ‘Loud and clear,’ I assured him. ‘Just getting my breath back.’ Not to mention my wits; a moment later I was forced to scuttle deeper under the belly of the snowliner to avoid being mashed into the snow by one of its track assemblies, which rumbled past on guide wheels taller than I was. ‘Where’s the ’nid?’

  ‘Burrowing again,’ Jurgen said. ‘Maybe I scared it off.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. And maybe the Traitor Legions would come to their senses, renounce the Ruinous Powers, and return to the light of the Emperor, which seemed almost equally likely.

  ‘They hunt by vibration,’ Sulla reminded me, as though that were something liable to have slipped my mind under the circumstances. ‘It’ll be homing in on your footfalls.’

  And it would have headed straight for the biggest source of noise and vibration in the convoy too, of course, which meant it would keep coming back to the snowliner until we somehow managed to get rid of it.

  Unnecessary as Sulla’s advice had been, it was sound enough. I needed to get off the snow, and fast. Seeing a step on the side of the track assembly which had so recently almost reduced me to an unpleasant stain, apparently there to facilitate maintenance while the huge vehicle was at rest, I broke into a sprint, managing to catch it up in a handful of strides; after which it was only a moment’s work to scramble up to a narrow metal walkway, in uncomfortable proximity to far too much machinery capable of ripping me to shreds if I fell into it. Almost as soon as I’d reached the dubious sanctuary, I noticed a rippling in in the ice below, exactly where I’d been standing a few seconds before; then a huge fanged maw appeared, snapping disappointedly for a moment, before sinking again, once more lost to view. Abruptly reminded of the narrowness of my escape, I felt a shiver pass through me unconnected with the bone-chilling cold.

  ‘It just broke surface under the snowliner,’ I said, warning the escorts as best I could. The most disconcerting thing about this particular subspecies of tyranid was its ability to strike upwards from below without warning, and when it did so it could easily cripple a vehicle, tearing the tracks to pieces, and ripping through the relatively thin armour of the floor to get at the crew inside. Fortunately, the hulking passenger crawler seemed too big for it to try the trick on, its great bulk and low centre of mass making it almost impossible to turn over. Which didn’t mean it wouldn’t have better luck with one of the other crawlers in the convoy, of course; fortunately it was acting entirely on instinct, lacking the intelligence to work that out for itself. The only thing capable of diverting its attention would be the distinctive vibrations of potential prey on foot, as I’d just come so close to demonstrating.

  Then something odd about the situation struck me. This would be a pretty pointless test of our defences if there wasn’t a synapse creature somewhere around to relay the news of the burrower’s success or failure back to the hive mind for evaluation. ‘Captain,’ I said, ‘there must be something else close by, pulling this one’s strings. Stay alert.’

  ‘We will,’ Sulla assured me, no doubt convinced that my wits had been addled by the fall110, but before she could continue one of Shambas’s Sentinel pilots cut in.

  ‘Movement on the ridge line, looks like warriors. Five confirmed, but there may be more behind them.’

  ‘Jek, Rowen, check it out,’ Shambas ordered, before Sulla could get a word in edgeways for once111. The designated pilots went trotting off, and, so far as I could tell from the subsequent vox chatter, had a thoroughly enjoyable time using their superiority in both speed and the range of their weapons to carve up the warriors like sides of grox112.

  Despite the advent of the warriors, the mawloc continued to circle the snowliner instead of making for easier prey113, and I began to realise that my perilous refuge was even more precarious than I’d feared. The next time the huge creature surfaced, a mouth wider than I was tall snapped at the tracks, leaving deep, bright scores in the rusted metal; if I stayed where I was, clinging to the huge crawler’s undercarriage, sooner or later it would manage to grab me by sheer blind luck. ‘Can’t someone get this bloody worm off my back?’ I asked, hoping I didn’t sound too petulant.

  ‘We can’t get a clear shot,’ Sulla said, a trifle huffily, as though I was deliberately keeping all the fun to myself. ‘Every time it surfaces, it’s hidden beneath the crawler.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to get it out into the open,’ I said, before once again realising that my mouth had betrayed me. There was one very obvious way of doing that, which I’m sure occurred to everyone on the vox-net at pretty much the same instant.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ Sulla asked, in the faintly awestruck tone of someone who not only expects the answer to be yes, but can’t conceive of the possibility of a refusal. If I baulked now, it would be all round the regiment in a matter of hours that Cain was losing his touch, and the unearned respect I relied on so much to keep my back covered and my hide intact would begin to erode. Before I knew it, people would start to question my motives at every turn, and it wouldn’t take long for the whole charade to come crashing down around my ears.

  ‘Not in the least,’ I admitted, secure in the knowledge that at least it would be taken as a joke, and tensed; if I didn’t move fast, my body would lock up, to prevent me from doing anything so potentially suicidal. ‘But if I stay here it’ll have me for sure.’ Just to emphasise the point, the giant worm chose that moment to surface again, the whole sinuous length of it rearing up against the underside of the snowliner. The huge vehicle shuddered, and I grabbed a convenient stanchion to prevent myself being pitched into the grinding cogwheels mere centimetres from my face. Definitely time to go. ‘Just make sure you’re on target.’

  ‘We’ll be there,’ Sulla assured me.

  I could see no point in delaying any further, and jumped, landing as lightly as I could on the churned-up ice where the gigantic creature had come and gone. Something as big as that would take a moment or two to turn round and come after me once it had filtered the distinctive vibration of running footsteps from the interference provided by the convoy, and by the time it did, I hoped by all that was holy to have found another refuge. Luckily, I had the perfect one in mind.

  No sooner had my boots hit the ground than I started running, angling towards the slowly brightening daylight on the other side of the grinding track assembly. As I rounded the back end of it, and emerged fully into the open air, I breathed a sigh of relief; the ramshackle transport crawler I’d noticed the evening before was still where I remembered, rumbling along close to the snowliner, which loomed over it like a Baneblade surrounded by Salamanders.

  ‘Commissar!’ a voice called, and I glanced up to see Jurgen’s familiar and grime-encrusted face looking down through the broken window, his melta still ready for use. ‘It’s coming round again!’ I followed the direction of his grubby finger, seeing a rapidly-approaching bow wave of snow and ice, and my breath seemed to freeze in my chest for a moment; it was bigger, and faster, and a lot nearer, than even my most pessimistic imaginings.

  ‘Grenades!’ I voxed, sprinting for the rust-encrusted cargo crawler. ‘Do you have any?’ Which wasn’t such a strange question as you might ima
gine, given my aide’s tendency to prepare for any contingency he could possibly foresee.

  ‘Frag or krak?’ he asked, as I leapt for one of the towing chains which had caught my eye before, and which looped low enough to be grabbed with a little effort.

  ‘Krak,’ I said, swarming up the rusted metal with some difficulty, despite having returned the useless laspistol to my holster by this point. Though the links were large enough to afford reasonable hand and footholds, the whole thing was swaying in a manner I can only describe as alarming, and I found myself even more grateful than usual for the firm grip afforded by the augmetic fingers on my right hand. ‘I need something that’ll make a dent in the bloody thing’s armour.’ A job my laspistol most decidedly wasn’t up to.

  Then the mawloc burst from the ground again, right where I’d been before my desperate leap for the dangling chain, and Jurgen nailed it with another blast from the melta; a deep score appeared in one of the plates of chitin protecting its back, but failed to penetrate the thick armour. He’d clearly had a little more success the first time, however, as a livid wound had been raked along the edge of its jaw, and it clearly flinched, despite being unharmed by the strike. As it put its head down and began to burrow again, a multi-laser burst caught it in the flank, vaporising more chitin, and biting deep into the flesh beneath before the ghastly creature vanished from view once more.