Traitor's Gorge

by Mike Lee

  At our next encounter, it will be my fists that bear the stain of your blood. The last words the farseer had said to him still lingered in Kantor's mind.

  Daecor bowed his head. Kantor had made his decision. 'I will gather my men,' he said.

  'What would you have us do in the meantime?' Phrenotas asked.

  'Scour the camp,' Kantor said. 'Gather all the weapons and explo­sives you can find. Especially the explosives.'

  THE FOUR CHARGES detonated in a rolling blast that reverberated in a bass drumbeat against the far side of the gorge. Roiling plumes of dark earth and pulverised stone exploded from four of the tun­nels as their entrances collapsed. The Crimson Fists waited until the dust had settled, confirming that the explosives had done their work, before shouldering their burdens and heading for the only entrance left.

  Scouring the ork camp had turned up a vast assortment of ord­nance, from primitive slug-throwers to stick bombs, rockets and strange, scratch-built energy weapons. Each Space Marine carried multiple looted guns, plus bandoliers of shells and scavenged hav­ersacks filled with grenades. Kantor also insisted on bringing a wide array of ork cleavers, axes and clubs, despite their own perfectly functional knives. Daecor and his squad mates brought up the rear, each warrior lugging along a large metal fuel drum. There was no one there to see them depart. Sergeant Victurix and his charges had departed for Gueras-403 several hours before. The afternoon was giving way to evening, and the shadows were lengthening along the bottom of the gorge.

  Phrenotas and the Sternguard entered the tunnel first, looted weapons at the ready. When they were certain the path was clear, they signalled for the others to join them.

  The tunnel was long and mostly straight, carved from the rock with chainblades, hammers and chisels. As Kantor and the rest filed inside, they were careful not to disturb the improvised charges they had set into the walls along the first few metres from the tunnel entrance.

  The Space Marines followed the tunnel for almost thirty metres before coming upon a small natural cave. Three other tunnels con­nected to the cave; from Phrenotas's preliminary reconnaissance, all of them ran deeper into the mountainside. The veteran sergeant suspected that the subterranean network was quite large. Daecor favoured sealing all the tunnels and letting nature run its course, but Phrenotas could not guarantee there was not another exit, perhaps on the far side of the mountain.

  Kantor took the eldar's warning seriously. They would leave noth­ing to chance.

  The Space Marines spread out inside the cave. Daecor and his men set down the fuel drums and shielded them with their armoured bodies. When everyone was in position, Kantor nodded to Phrenotas. The veteran sergeant raised a modified auspex unit and thumbed a flashing, red button.

  The charges at the mouth of the tunnel went off with a roar, seal­ing them inside the mountain.

  I COUNT TWELVE Brother Diaz whispered over the vox.

  Kantor lay on his back in deep shadow, his armoured form con­cealed behind a line of broken stalagmites. Slowly, a centimetre at a time, he sat upright and peered over the broken fingers of calcium carbonate.

  Dark water rushed by not twenty paces away - a subterranean remnant of the mighty glacial melt that had first carved the gorge, untold millions of years in the past. It was swift and cold as ice, flowing through a long chain of caves and tunnels that ran roughly southwards for more than two hundred metres. Kantor suspected it continued on, deeper underground, into the Altera Basin, and helped account for the fertile lands there.

  Twelve orks had crept into the tunnel from a side-passage off to Kantor's left. All of them were heavily armed, and all of them were wary. The river was a dangerous place to be, lately.

  Seven of the orks carried crude baskets in addition to their guns. They continued to creep towards the rushing water, while the other five spread out and took up positions covering them. They all eyed the water with a combination of nervousness and need. The greenskins were very, very hungry.

  'I confirm twelve,' Kantor replied. He glanced off to the right where Diaz was crouched behind another mound of rock. 'One grenade each. Wait for my signal.'

  The dark silhouette that was Brother Diaz shifted slightly as he readied a looted ork grenade. 'Confirm.'

  Out at the water's edge, the seven foragers set down their baskets, and, more reluctantly, their guns. With nervous glances back at their erstwhile protectors, they tugged grenades of their own from their belts. The xenos grunted to one another quietly, then jerked the pins on the stick bombs and tossed them into the water as far up­stream as they could manage. Seconds later they went off in a string of dull blasts, each one sending up a small plume of white water.

  The orks studied the surface of the water intently, rubbing their hands together in anticipation. Suddenly, one of the greenskins let out a shout and plunged into the water. The xenos waded out into water almost chest-deep, its hands reaching for the stunned cave fish floating along the surface. The rest of the foragers joined in, leaping into the river. They began snatching up the fish with their wide hands and cramming them into their mouths, eliciting howls of protest from the guards.

  Kantor smiled coldly. He rose silently to his feet. A belt-fed ork gun lay on the ground next to him, along with a sack full of gre­nades. 'Guards first,' he said, picking up one of the stick bombs.

  'Ready.' Diaz replied.

  The Chapter Master pulled the ring on the grenade and tossed it aside. 'Now!'

  Both grenades flew end-for-end towards the guards. Kantor bent and retrieved his looted gun as they detonated, turning the orks' shouts into agonised screams. He brought the weapon up as he dashed around the line of stalagmites, prioritising targets. Three of the guards were down, their bodies shredded by flying shrapnel.

  Kantor sighted on one of the remaining greenskins and squeezed the trigger. The big weapon bucked and chattered, spitting out a stream of shells at an impressive rate. The ork twitched and stag­gered under a hail of impacts, spinning halfway around before falling onto his back. The last guard turned and managed to spray a wild burst of his own before Diaz was able to cut him down.

  The foragers bellowed in shock and began wading for shore, hands outstretched toward weapons that lay frustratingly out of reach. Kantor moved to the water's edge, raking them with the ork gun. Shells kicked up sprays of water around the greenskins, and two pitched over backwards, shot through the head. It never occurred to the xenos to dive underwater and escape the hail of fire. They hated and feared the water like nothing else, for they were poor swimmers, and their dense bodies sank like stones.

  Brother Diaz moved to join Kantor, killing another ork with a torrent of shells. The four survivors had changed course and were wading downstream as fast as they could manage. Kantor shifted his aim to the ork furthest away and opened fire. The crude xenos gun spat two rounds and then jammed.

  Kantor muttered a curse and started wrestling with the weapon. Diaz moved past him, keeping up fire on the fleeing orks. Another of the greenskins let out a howl and sank beneath the water. The remaining three were almost to a bend in the river course that would take them out of sight. That was when the other two members of Kantor's ambush team rose from cover at the bend and opened fire, gunning the foragers down at close range.

  The echoes of the last shots faded quickly. Silence rushed in, borne along by the whisper of the ancient river. The Space Marines moved along the shore quickly and quietly, making certain the ork guards were dead.

  'That was the largest foraging party yet,' Diaz observed. He studied one of the fallen orks, then raised his boot and stamped down on the back of the greenskin's skull.

  Kantor inspected the foragers' baskets. They held a pitiful amount of the purple moss that grew along the walls in the tunnels along the river. Barely enough to feed a single greenskin, much less an entire camp. The Crimson Fists had gone to great lengths to scrape up the moss wherever they found it. Some of it they ate themselves. The rest they let the river carry away.

&
nbsp; For a full week after they sealed themselves inside the tunnels, Kantor and his hunters did nothing but conduct reconnaissance, mapping the tunnels and caverns as thoroughly as possible and gaining an understanding of their enemy. There were between four and five hundred greenskins trapped inside the mountain, but the subterranean network was large enough to hold three times that number. There were a dozen camps of varying size, situated in the largest caverns, though half were abandoned now. The network pro­vided everything the xenos mobs needed - except for food.

  The orks realised they had been trapped within hours after the tunnels had been collapsed. Kantor had been content to let the mobs try to claw their way through the rubble, certain that the enemy had neither the tools nor the expertise to deal with the tons of fallen rubble. Every day the greenskins dug, the hungrier they grew.

  Once the Space Marines' reconnaissance was complete, the ambush campaign began. Kantor split his force into four teams, and began laying in wait for greenskin foragers along the river. Not every foraging party was ambushed. Some mobs came up empty-handed, while others managed to bring back a few baskets of fish and moss - just enough to stoke resentment and anger amongst the enemy, and little else.

  Kantor kicked the baskets into the river, one by one. 'They're growing desperate,' he said. 'It will only be a matter of time now.'

  'Until what, my lord?' Diaz asked.

  The Chapter Master smiled grimly. 'Until the beasts decide to look elsewhere for their food.'

  Their work done, the Crimson Fists spent several minutes care­fully sweeping the area, ensuring that nothing had been dropped during the brief fight that might be found later and give them away. Satisfied, they departed in silence, following the underground river to a new ambush spot some distance away.

  The bodies of the ork guards were left where they had fallen, chewed by ork grenades and riddled by ork bullets, for the xenos to find and draw their own conclusions.

  FIGHTING BROKE OUT within the week. Though there was no proof who had been ambushing the ork foragers, in the end it came down to which mobs had food, and which did not. Starving ork raiding par­ties attacked the camps of other mobs, drawn by the smell of food. Reprisal raids followed. Soon, gunfire and explosions echoed from one end of the tunnel network to the other. The Crimson Fists with­drew to their operating base, a series of small, half-flooded caves in the lowest and least hospitable part of the tunnels, and listened to the storm rage overhead.

  The orks tore at one another for days. Work on the collapsed tun­nels ground to a halt as every greenskin eagerly joined in the battle. Only the largest and the most heavily-armed mobs continued to send out foraging parties, but their every movement was watched, and often they were forced to fight their way back to their camps with what little food they had been able to find. The rest made do by eating the bodies of the dead, as greenskins were wont to do then there was no other food to be had.

  Entire mobs were wiped out. From time to time, Kantor would send out a pair of scouts to count the empty camps. Within the first five days, nearly two hundred orks were dead. Ten days after that, another hundred. The fighting began to dwindle at that point, as the survivors were the largest, best-armed and now the best-fed of the surviving xenos.

  Kantor and his hunters had been sealed inside the mountain for six weeks when Sergeant Phrenotas and Brother Diaz returned from a scouting mission in the upper tunnels. 'It's over,' the veteran ser­geant reported.

  The Chapter Master leaned forwards, resting his elbows on his knees. The sunken caves were too low for a normal human to stand upright, much less a Space Marine. The warriors crouched on their heels or sat with their backs to the rough walls, keeping their minds occupied with meditative routines, or keeping their crude weapons maintained in the damp environment.

  'What did you find?' Kantor inquired.

  'There are perhaps a hundred of the xenos left,' Phrenotas reported. 'One large camp of about seventy, and a smaller, satel­lite camp made up of survivors from the other mobs. The larger mob has moved to the big cavern closest to tunnel five, and is using the survivors at the satellite camp as labourers to move the rubble.'

  Kantor nodded thoughtfully. This was what he had been waiting for. 'Do you know what this means, sergeant?'

  'The orks have finally gotten themselves organized.'

  'Which means they have a new leader,' the Chapter Master pointed out. 'An ork with intelligence, but one that wasn't powerful enough to assert itself until the fighting had created the opportunity it needed.'

  Phrenotas cocked his head slightly. 'I fail to see how this is a good thing, my lord.'

  Kantor waved the question away. 'How are they using these labourers?'

  This time, it was Diaz who spoke. 'They work for twelve hours per day, under light guard, then they are escorted back to their camp and fed.'

  The Chapter Master nodded. 'And the other camp?'

  'Mostly they just sit around, sharpening their knives and waiting,' Phrenotas said.

  Kantor turned to Diaz. 'And you said that the labourers were under light guard?'

  The Sternguard nodded. 'Six to eight orks from the big camp. No more. And they're paying no attention to the tunnel approaches. We could sweep in and wipe out the lot of them in less than a minute.'

  'A very inviting target,' the Chapter Master agreed.

  Phrenotas caught the tone in Kantor's voice. 'You think it's an ambush,' he said.

  'I think this ork leader is smart,' Kantor replied. 'I suspect it's been working in the background for some time now, gaining its strength and waiting for an opportunity to assert itself. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if this is the ork that is responsible for these tunnels, for surrounding us during the attack on the main camp, and for the change in tactics back on the hilltop, weeks ago. It's been advising the warbosses all along. Fortunately for us, the bosses only listened when things became desperate.'

  Phrenotas considered this, and nodded slowly. 'I'm looking for­ward to meeting this ork.' he said grimly.

  'What shall we do?'

  'We wait until the end of the work shift,' Kantor said. 'Then we break out the barrels.'

  FOUR HOURS LATER, the work on tunnel five came to a halt. Ork guards bellowed at their starving labourers, chivvying them along with curses and kicks as they were lined up and led back to camp for the day.

  Mumbling and grunting, the labourers shuffled down the long tunnel, exhausted from hours of frustrating, impossible work. The guards were bored and none too hungry themselves, looking for­ward to returning to camp and filling their bellies with whatever was roasting on the spit that evening.

  None of them saw the ambush coming.

  The Crimson Fists knew the exact route the orks would take back to the labourers' camp, and chose their ambush point well. As the work party passed through the same large cave where the Space Marines had sealed off tunnel five weeks before, Sergeant Daecor and his reduced squad attacked the group from two sides. Bundles stick bombs were tossed from the side tunnels, filling the cave with storm of razor-edged shrapnel; then the Space Marines raked the stunned and wounded orks with savage bursts of automatic fire. The staccato roar of gunshots echoed down the connecting tunnels, punctuated by orkish screams of rage.

  The sounds of battle travelled far, funnelled by the winding pas­sageways to the primary ork camp. The mob was on its feet at once and racing towards the noise. Few had believed their new boss's suspicions of hard-shells hiding inside the tunnels, but now there was no doubt. It was time to spring the trap!

  The camp emptied out in less than a minute. Kantor and the Sternguard waited another minute more, then crept into the cavern from a side tunnel and went to work.

  THE ORK AMBUSHERS reached the site of Daecor's attack within minutes, coining upon a cavern choked with smoke from grenade blasts and gunfire. They waded into the murk, guns blazing, only to discover that their foes had long since broken off their attack and withdrawn into the maze of tunnels. They left behind fifte
en dead orks and ten more injured, a number that increased to almost twenty when the would-be ambushers accidentally traded shots with the labour crew in the smoke and the confusion.

  The new warboss restored order quickly, however, ordering the surviving labourers to take their dead and badly wounded back to their camp. Then small groups of orks were sent off into the tunnels in hopes of catching the attackers, but to no avail. After two hours of fruitless pursuit, the warboss ordered its warriors back to camp.

  THE CAVERN HAD been in use by one ork mob or another for some time. High-ceilinged and roughly thirty metres across, its stone floor was covered in refuse and bits of discarded rubbish. A trio of smoul­dering cook fires in the centre of the cavern filled the space with a thin haze of greasy, bitter smoke. Patches of luminescent mould splashed across the walls and ceiling lent the cavern an eerie yellow-green glow.

  There were a total of four passageways connecting the cavern with the rest of the tunnel network. Kantor and the Sternguard chose to make their stand in front of one that lay nearly opposite the entrance that led to tunnel number five.

  The first orks that came stomping into the cavern were cut down in a storm of full-auto fire. Bellows of shock and rage erupted from the rest of the mob; they surged towards the sound of the guns, shouldering the bodies of the dead aside in their eagerness to get at the Space Marines.

  Scores of greenskins poured into the cavern, filling the space and blazing away with their guns as they charged at the eight Crimson Fists. Kantor and the Sternguard held their ground, dropping one xenos after another with short, rattling bursts.

  'Get ready!' Kantor called over the vox when the orks were half­way across the cavern. 'Phrenotas?'

  The veteran sergeant stood to Kantor's left. Firing one-handed, he pulled out his auspex unit. 'Ready!'

  Ork rounds buzzed and snapped through the air around the Space Marines. Several of the veterans staggered under multiple hits; other shots passed by and ricocheted from the cavern walls Kantor let out a grunt as one shot struck him in the chest and punched through a weak point in his breastplate. He coughed, tasting blood.