by William King
‘I think it’s time we reported for duty with Macharius,’ said Anton. Agonised screams drifted on the wind, mingled with mad, mocking laughter.
‘Pull back,’ shouted the Guard officer.
Looking at the monstrous thing scuttling in our direction I felt very inclined to run. It was enormous, and there was something alive about it. Something so huge had to be a vehicle of sorts, but this one had the strange, semi-living look of a great deal of the eldar technology we had seen.
Just in case we had any doubts we had been spotted, shots started to ping off the rocks around us. At least the Lion Guard were in good cover, which probably saved a few lives.
‘First squad, cover us. The rest fall back. By unit and in good order.’ The officer was using his parade ground voice now. It was pointless using anything else. I saw heads turn as the members of the first squad looked back in our direction. Their commander had just pronounced their death sentence and they knew it.
In their heads they were doing the same calculations I would be making in their position. They were working out the odds of getting back to the camp if they turned and fled now. The fact that they would be shot for deserting their posts and disobeying an order would only be a small part of the reckoning. When death taps you on the shoulder even a few more minutes of life suddenly becomes very appealing.
Against the urge for self-preservation other things warred. Working against that impulse to flee were other ones, some of them coldly rational, some of them steeped in primal emotions. There was the knowledge that if they turned and fled all of us would most likely die anyway as the enemy swept over us from behind. If they stayed they would have a chance to take some of the foe with them, and their lives might at least buy the lives of their comrades. It’s hard to communicate the sort of loyalty that gets built up towards your fellows in an Imperial Guard company, but it exists nonetheless. You see men lay down their lives for each other more often than you would think and more often than a cynic would believe.
And they were proud too, of themselves and of their unit. They would stand their ground and die because they were the sort of men who could, or at least they wanted to be. They were brave, they believed in Macharius and they believed in the Emperor. They could die as cowards or walk into His Light as martyrs. One had meaning. One had not. In either case they would die.
I could see all of this pass through their minds in less time than it takes to tell. I read it in the way slumped shoulders squared and lasguns were suddenly raised to the firing position. One or two of them saluted. The one or two who wavered, seeing their companions’ resolve to stay, gave bitter smiles and hunkered down to sell their own lives dearly.
It’s at moments like this that the quality of a single man can make a difference. All it takes is one soldier deciding to flee to provoke a rout. One soldier determined to hold his ground can keep an army pinned in place if he is the right soldier at the right time. These men were the right men. It made me proud and sad at the same time, even as I turned to move off down the hill with Anton and Ivan. Behind me lasguns fired.
The slope was dark and strewn with obstacles. Ahead of us I could see the walls of our camp. I think every man present had the same idea in his mind that I had, the sensation that doom was swiftly approaching in a particularly nasty and messy form.
Behind us, the covering force were selling their lives dearly and doing their best to avoid being taken prisoner. They saved us. In the teeth of their covering fire, the eldar could not be sure of exactly how large a force they faced so they held back until the monster arrived.
Casting a glance over my shoulder, prompted by some ancient instinct, I saw a scuttling form loom, a gigantic arachnid figure with clicking claws. It reminded me of a Titan, although it was smaller and there was an obscene suggestion of something living and evil about it. There were men in the grip of those claws, screaming and shouting and still firing their lasguns. Looking at the gigantic beast and one of those tiny-looking figures, I swear I caught sight of something horrible.
The man seemed to be shrinking, dwindling, like a deflating balloon filled with blood. I don’t mean that the blood was being squeezed out of him, either. I had an image in mind of hundreds of tiny sucker mouths, leech-like, draining all life from him, all vitality. The man’s screams became thinner, more wretched, more filled with pain; and then the strangest thing of all happened. His flesh just crumbled, as if all life, all fluid, all animation had been drained out of it. It turned to dust, like an ancient corpse suddenly exposed to light and air when its sarcophagus is opened. I was filled with an ominous sense that not just the man’s body had been devoured, but his soul.
A barrage of shots hit the great monster, exploding against its side, blasting great holes out of it. The beast thrashed as though it were in pain, but it did not drop the soldiers it held. It gripped them like a drunk holding his last bottle even as the Baneblade and Leman Russ within our camp sent blast after blast stabbing into its body. More of the monsters appeared now and began to lumber down the slope. They were followed by shark-fin sailed landships loaded with eldar.
We moved as fast as we could downslope away from the great stone face carved in the cliffs back towards the lines of our main camp. The eldar on the north-west heights aimed desultory fire at us. It was as if they were not really trying, or simply wanted to terrify us rather than kill us. It suited their crazed humour.
I had strange crawling sensation between my shoulders. It would only take one of those cruel xenos to suddenly change its mind and my life would be over. If you’ve been on as many battlefields as I have you have a fine appreciation for the sort of mischances that can end a man’s days.
I noticed the turrets of our sentry vehicles were elevating their weapons to concentrate on the heights behind us.
My knees felt sore as we pounded downslope. I kept my head down and studied the broken ground with care, knowing that tripping up now might be the death of me. I did my best to weave through the low boulders and shards of broken rock, as they would provide at least some cover to the lower half of my body. Driven by a sudden premonition, I threw myself flat behind a rock and risked a look back upslope, I saw the ground crowded with silent, swift-striding eldar soldiers and their equally quietly moving vehicles. Shots were going off all around. They were moving much faster than we were, and I knew that they would soon overtake us. That was the last thing I wanted.
The rocks made a kind of cave. They had tumbled together so that a slab of stone formed a roof over some more. I wriggled in underneath out of sight. I heard heavy breathing and noticed that Ivan and Anton had slipped into place beside me. They had come back for me. It was kind of touching.
‘Planning on making a heroic last stand in these rocks?’ Ivan asked. ‘Just you and the hordes of eldar…’
Anton said, ‘Bastard! I thought maybe you had twisted your ankle or something and needed to be carried as usual. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with you. You’re just getting lazy.’
‘I thought I would cover your retreat,’ I said. ‘You were making very good time as you ran away.’
‘Get your head down and have some kip while we did all the fighting more like,’ Anton said. He was studying the eldar along the ridgeline carefully. Any moment now he was going to unlimber the sniper rifle and start taking potshots. ‘As usual.’
‘What are you thinking?’ Ivan asked. His metal face was impassive, but he knew how desperate our situation was. We were stuck here in this little island of rocks while all around us the eldar moved forwards to assault our position. Our force at the gulley mouth beneath the face had already been overrun, and there was no way just the three of us could fight our way back through the xenos.
‘I’m thinking we’re stuck here with those xenos bastards commanding the heights above us. It’s not like Macharius to make a mistake like this.’
‘What else could he do? He wanted to hold these temples. We don’t have the force for defence in depth.’
‘There’s more of them than I count,’ he said.
‘So more than five then,’ said Ivan.
‘Ha-bloody-ha!’
‘He can get to twenty if he uses his toes,’ I said.
‘If he takes his boots off,’ said Ivan.
‘When you two have finished your sad attempt at comedy you might want to consider how we’re going to get back down the hill without getting shot.’
‘They weren’t trying to hit us, Anton,’ I said. ‘If they had been we’d be dead now.’
‘Then why–’
Another long scream drifted down the wind. It sounded like a soul in torment. It rang ever higher until it broke on a horrible insane gibbering note, as if the mind of the man screaming had been broken by whatever torture he was enduring.
Anton shot me a scared look.
‘I think they wanted to take us alive,’ I said. ‘Though we might not stay that way for long afterwards.’
‘Any time might be too long,’ said Ivan.
‘What we going to do?’ Ivan asked. As usual, when the chips were down, the other two were looking to me for guidance. I turned our options over and over in my mind. We could not stay here. We had very little water in our canteens, and sooner or later we were bound to be spotted by one of the eldar. If they had not already spotted us and were just letting the suspense build before they took us…
‘We wait until it’s dark and then we try and sneak through their lines,’ I said.
‘You mad?’ Anton asked.
‘You got a better idea? If we stay here, it’s only a matter of time before they find us.’
‘Our own sentries will shoot us,’ Ivan said.
‘We’ll just need to risk it. It would be better than falling into the hands of those xenos scum.’
‘No arguments from me there,’ said Ivan. More screams sounded, echoing down the valley. They appeared to be amplified. Maybe the eldar were broadcasting them to break the morale of our men. Maybe it was just something they did for relaxation.
Anton looked me right in the eye. His face was pale. ‘If it looks like they are going to take me alive, shoot me…’
‘It will be my pleasure,’ I said, but the joke did not seem so funny any more.
Twenty-One
A tall shadow fell into the rocks where we crouched, telling us that one of the alien warriors was standing there. It seemed like all he would need to do was turn his head and see us. I kept the shotgun clutched very tight in my hands, not sure whether I would use it on him or myself. I felt Anton and Ivan tense beside me.
I glanced sideways. Sweat dripped from Anton’s pale, narrow face. The scar was visible on his forehead. I felt my muscles coil. Part of me suspected that the xenos might be able to hear the drops of perspiration falling on rock. After what felt like an aeon, the eldar finally moved off. Even as it did so I wondered if it had seen us, and was now toying with us as a felid toys with a nest of vermin.
As the day wore on the butcher shop stench of the battlefield drifted to my nostrils. I wondered whether eldar corpses smelt like ours when they died. I wondered whether anybody back in our camp had noticed we were not there. I wondered about Anna and about a thousand other things I could do nothing about but which all suddenly were very important to me.
Darkness came very slowly. My stomach felt as though it were full of acid. My heart pounded against my ribs. My mouth was dry. I wanted to empty my bladder but found I could not. All around us, I could hear the strange sounds of the eldar army moving. I noticed the eerie whine of their vehicles moving less than ten strides away. I felt currents of air displaced by the motion swirl of their sails. Sometimes I caught the scent of cinnamon and some sour-sweet perfume, sometimes what smelt like incense, sometimes something that smelt like an accident in an abattoir.
Eventually, the stars glittered coldly overhead like the eyes of watching daemons. The sounds of combat continued in the distance. I decided it was time to risk a glance out.
I looked down into a sea of shadows on the reverse side of the slope. The eldar were still there. I could see their strange landships and something else, something massive and vaguely scorpion-like. I knew it was another of those monstrous life-drinking beasts. I spotted movement as dim, humanoid outlines moved with inhuman speed, their elongated forms suggesting shadows and daemons and things from fever-induced nightmares. Nearby were a few metal poles with crossbars. Flayed forms hung from them. The stench of blood and raw meat and opened bowels hung in the air, the scent of an operating theatre where the patients were sent to be painfully killed rather than to be healed.
I studied the concentration of forces. There were scores of vehicles and thousands of eldar, and those monstrous things with claws, whatever they were.
Something flickered at the corner of my eye and I realised there were other xenos, far closer to us than those in the camp, scouts or pickets. It was pure chance that they had not picked our hiding spot as their own sentry post.
I froze on the spot, hoping that I would not be noticed. A warm form popped up beside me, and I looked around to see Anton. He was scanning the area beneath us through the scope of his sniper rifle. It had a night-sight attachment. Crouched beside him was Ivan. I could catch the faint glimmer of moonlight even on the dirt-smeared metal of his cheeks.
A long straggling line of Lion Guard stretched along the perimeter wall below us. Here and there weapons emplacements bulged. At various gaps in the walls, armoured fighting vehicles were used as makeshift gates.
We had only a few hundred metres to go to reach our camp. Looking at that force it might as well have been a thousand leagues. The ground between the two forces was a killing field.
I dropped down again and the other two fell into position beside me. I kept my ears pricked up, waiting to hear the telltale sound of a weapon barrel against rock or stone slithering against stone. All I heard was my own soft breathing. It was almost drowned out by my drum-beat heart.
‘You still want to try for our lines?’ Ivan asked. His voice was flat and emotionless as ever.
‘You got a better idea? We’ve been lucky so far. I wouldn’t count on that luck holding a second day.’
Anton let out a long sigh. ‘We’d better get it over with then.’
‘We climb down out of here and we circle left,’ I said. ‘It looks like there’s a gap in the eldar line in the direction of the eastern heights. We’ll head for the gate made by the Baneblade.’ I liked the sound of that. Call it superstition but Baneblades always gave me a feeling of security, even after I had one destroyed underneath me.
Ivan shrugged. One direction seemed as good as another to him. Anton nodded. ‘I could use a lho-stick,’ he said. It had the sound of a man making a last request.
‘Yeah, go on,’ I said. ‘Maybe you’d like to smoke it as we sneak along.’
‘I’m not that stupid,’ said Anton.
‘We could try a few marching songs as well,’ Ivan suggested helpfully. ‘Gone for a Soldier or The Cadian Boot Song. A few rousing choruses would certainly raise my morale.’
‘Maybe you’d like to set off a flare,’ I said. ‘We could see better that way.’
‘A torch is what we really need,’ said Ivan.
‘I just said I would like a smoke. There’s no need to make a meal out of it.’
We fell silent. We had just been spinning it out to put off making a start.
Suddenly the sound of shooting came from off to the east. Explosions as well. The turrets along the wall had opened up, blasting at the ridge below us.
‘Looks like our lads are trying a counter-strike,’ Ivan said.
‘Good news for us,’ I said. ‘A bit of a distraction. Emperor watch over you!’
With that I sent myself diving out of cover before I had a chance to think and regret my action. I slithered down the rocks, half crawling, half scrambling, praying to the Emperor that the sounds of that distant attack had gotten the eldar’s attention. As soon as I was off the rocky island, I threw myself flat on my belly and wriggled down a narrow gulley.
Off to my right, not twenty strides away, were a group of xenos. They had their backs to me, but for all I knew that meant nothing. They might have sensors on those battle-suits capable of three hundred and sixty degree scanning. Hell, maybe they had senses we did not know about that would let them spot us without ever seeming to look in our direction. Who knew what the alien bastards were capable of?
I forced myself to lie flat for a minute, and I felt something touch my boot. I fought down the urge to kick out, turned and saw Anton lying there. Behind him was Ivan. They had both smeared more dirt on their faces to make them less visible. I listened. The sounds of distant fighting intensified. Heavy artillery tore up the earth. I found something else to worry about. What if they suddenly decided to target the area we were moving across? I could feel the ground vibrate against my cheek.
I wriggled on, trusting the others to follow me. Maybe it was a dried up stream bed. Maybe it was something else, but the gulley we were in ran a long way, downhill. I decided to trust my luck and stick with it.
Another hundred strides of wriggling took us under the shadow of one of those gigantic scuttling war machines. The cinnamon smell was stronger and there was a dreamy sort of perfume with a sour under-tang of blood. A massive tail lashed the air, making a lazy whip-crack sound. A long, low, musical tone cut through the sound of gunfire, and I thought for one brief, heart-stopping instant that we had been spotted and an alarm had been given. Of course, it was mere paranoia. The machine, if that is what it was, turned and began to scuttle off in the direction of the fighting.