Flesh And Iron

by Henry Zou

  The swift boats and gun-barges opened fire. Autocannons, heavy bolters and belt-fed heavy stubbers poured fire into the wilderness. Above the gunshots, Baeder heard the crackle of wood as trees were felled and shorn branches crashed.

  Enemy shots stitched the portside of Baeder's vessel. Sergeant Volcom threw back a tarpaulin that had diverted rain off their bow-mounted heavy bolter, stood up and began to fire. But a Carnibales sniper was already in waiting. The insurgent, unseen, fired two shots. The first spanked off the bolter's mantlet but the second entered the sergeant's sternum, throwing him back with an upward spray of blood. He fell, dead, onto the deck. Then someone ran a row of las-shots along the swift boat's deck railing, forcing Baeder into cover.

  'Frag!' Baeder bellowed. He sprinted into the swift boat's pilothouse as another las-round hissed over his head. Inside, Corporal Bellinger had knocked out one of the windows with the butt of his lasrifle and was picking shots with his gun against the windowsill. Rainwater was spraying onto the vox array and delicate navigational banks inside the boat but now was not the time to be fussy. Baeder popped out the plexi-pane of another window panel and squeezed his trigger on full auto. White las-shots beamed out from the Imperial positions, criss-crossing with the pink of insurgent las. A trio of insurgents began to set up a mortar plate beneath a stand of tendril beards and Baeder juiced his entire clip in their direction. The rain made it hard to see what he was doing, but by the time his muzzle stopped flashing, all that could be seen was a toppled mortar and no more insurgents.

  An inflatable lander exploded nearby, struck by a missile. Baeder saw the smaller craft cartwheel in the air, its black rubber flaming and shredded. It landed, belly up, the entire squad of Riverine lost to the explosion. The insurgents were targeting the troop-laden landers now with support weapons; portable missile launchers and even mortars aimed point-blank at a horizontal axis. The landers ripped across the river on outboard thrusters, disgorging Riverine Guardsmen into the shallows, ready to assault up the steep embankment.

  Baeder knew the Guardsmen rushing up towards the tree line would be scythed down by hidden gunmen unless the battalion provided accurate covering fire. The gun-barges which had, up until that point, not fired their main weapons for fear of fratricide would have to be brought into play. Risk be damned, thought Baeder.

  'Bellinger!'

  'Sir!'

  'Vox air-support then ground support. Tell him there are friendlies, danger-close, assaulting the tree line. Pick his shots and be clean about it!'

  'Sir!' said Corporal Bellinger, picking up the waterlogged vox receiver.

  Baeder turned his attention back to the men scaling the slope towards the gunmen amongst the trees. Their bayonets were fixed and they fired as they ran. Guns barked from the foliage, dropping Guardsmen back into the frothing delta. Baeder continued to shoot into the silver haze, picking out targets when he could see them, firing blind when he could not.

  THE MAIN THRUST of the ambush came up behind the 88th Battalion, jamming them from retreat. From out of the rain, motored sampans, cutters and keel-hulled trawlers carved a direct path towards the rearguard. These were a motley collection of vessels, up-armoured with sheets of hammered metal, but there were lots of them. Collectively dubbed ''spikers'', these boats had been prevalent since before the war as the chosen transport of estuarine bandits. Now they were the mainstay of insurgent raiders, crude yet simple to produce in great numbers.

  Sergeant Pulver found himself firing the stern-mounted heavy stubber as Trooper Sceri fed the belt ammunition. Both enemy and Imperial vessels manoeuvred tightly in the river confines. The constant swerving and jinking of the motored vessels caused las-fire and gunshots to lacerate the air wildly.

  'Keep this thing moving! They're all over us!' Pulver bellowed at his coxswain.

  A motored sampan laden with insurgents firing auto-guns streaked past them, stitching the hull of the swift boat as they passed. Pulver tried to track them with the mounted stubber but the sampan was much lower, and the swift boat was moving at great speed. As they passed each other, the stream of tracer went wide, streaking over the insurgents.

  'Damnit,' Pulver swore as he corrected his aim.

  The insurgents were using the speed of their smaller vessels well. They never stopped moving, churning the water white as they twisted and turned around the swift boats, hitting and running. Pulver's coxswain pivoted their boat as another sampan ripped past, spraying ammunition. As the boat settled, they found themselves face on with another spiker.

  'Ram the fragger!' Pulver shouted.

  Their target was a fat-hulled trawler, its prow augmented with a beak of cold-rolled iron so that it resembled a broad, frilled fish. Pulver's swift boat cut a sharp angle and sped straight forwards. The bladed profile of a swift boat was streamlined for ramming and all fifteen metres of hull cut into and over the spiker. The trawler was shaken apart under the impact of the larger vessel and forced underwater. Insurgents, many of them broken by the collision, were swept up by the rushing waters.

  Pulver slid on the slick deck and fell as the swift boat jammed hard in another evasive manoeuvre. A missile missed them, skimming across the foredeck to explode far out in the trees beyond. The river fighting had become so dense that it was hard to tell whether the missile had been friendly or insurgent.

  Nearby, close enough for Pulver to reach out and touch, a swift boat met an incoming spiker head on. They missed each other by a matter of centimetres, both vessels moving at full throttle. They passed each other firing, but the Imperial bow-gunner was better. He laced a cord of fire perpendicular to his boat so that the insurgents sped face first into it. At eight hundred and fifty rounds a minute, the heavy bolter emptied the canoe of all enemy life in seconds.

  Twenty metres out, Pulver saw an assault lander collide with a keel-hull. Riverine Guardsmen immediately boarded the enemy vessel, piling on with bayonets fixed. The insurgents could not match the aggression of soldiers who had trained for years if not decades. They were Guard, damn it! Pulver couldn't help but laugh at the absolute chaos of the engagement. Regaining his footing, he dragged himself up behind the heavy stubber and rattled off a short burst. It was only then that he realised his ammo-feeder, Trooper Sceri, was no longer in sight. The trooper must have been thrown overboard at some point, inbetween the weaving and ramming. Cursing as only a sergeant knew how, Pulver continued to blast tracer into the fray. He would avenge Sceri by punishing the insurgents. He would make them regret their decision to ambush the 88th Battalion. He wanted to know that, when the survivors returned to their camps, they would have lost more than they gained - that was the Ouisivian way.

  UP ON THE embankment, amongst the shuddering rashes, Major Mortlock fell off the bow of his swift boat and onto the soil. His was the only swift boat that had joined the assault landers in charging inland, but there was no way he would miss this.

  Immediately, las-shots drilled into the ground around him. The hard rain blurred his vision and he could see shapes flitting amongst the trees, snapping shots at them. The enemy were well dug-in, hidden amongst shallow ditches and even up in the trees. Coordinated gun nests were chopping down his advancing men, tumbling them back down the sloping riverbank as they appeared over the top. They were killing his boys and that made Mortlock irrationally mad.

  'Come on, Riverine,' Mortlock roared. 'Are we soldiers? These are dirt farmers! Show them how it's done!'

  A grenade went off in the trees nearby. For a moment his world blurred and spun. Clods of dirt filled his vision. Mortlock tumbled, fell, staggered back up and lifted his weapon of choice - a fen-hammer. In reality it was a small four-kilogram carburettor, stripped from a boat motor and hot-welded onto a metre of solid steel piping. The weapon was crude, weighty, and common on Ouisivia for crashing ork skulls. Swamp orks were known to survive multiple bayonet stabs, but a blow from a fen-hammer could lay down even the toughest greenskin.

  Mortlock crashed into the undergrowth, half-blinded by
rain and bomb shock. He lashed his hammer in wide arcs, the valves and ridges of the hammerhead tearing chunks of wood from a gum-sap. Insurgent gunmen, surprised by the Guardsmen in their midst, began to flee. Mortlock brought his hammer down on the back of a sprinting insurgent, bringing him down heavily. He swung again, mangling the barrel of a lasgun that had swung up to aim at him. Wielding the weapon two-handed, Mortlock chopped like a lumberjack, his shoulders and forearms rippling with hard muscle. Insurgents scurried in his wake, screaming of a skull-faced ghost that could not be killed. Mortlock chased them, splintering, breaking and pounding.

  Riverine Guardsmen followed Mortlock through the break he had carved in the insurgent position. They fell amongst the slit-trenches of their enemies, engaging in close-quarter fighting. The rain reduced visibility and churned the ground slippery with mud. It was a savage tussle, the conditions and terrain negating all skill. Grenades exploded, point-blank. Bayonets and knives glinted in the grey.

  Something bumped Mortlock from behind and he reeled, instinctively lashing out with a backfist. The punch narrowly missed Colonel Baeder.

  'Sir?' Mortlock yelled above the clashing.

  Baeder was already bleeding from a cut above his brow and his lower body was grey with mud. 'I came as quick as I could. Didn't think I'd let you do all the work, did you?' Baeder said, flexing the fingers of his power fist. It was a standard design issued to staff-officers, with an external power pack that limited its battery life. Baeder kept one in the vessel's stow trunk and only unpacked it when the situation was bad. It was now very bad.

  There was no time for further talk. An insurgent splashed out from a nearby slit trench with an outthrust bayonet. Baeder swatted at the weapon with the palm of his power fist, tearing the weapon away from the insurgent and breaking his wrists with the kinetic force. With his free hand, Baeder fired two shots into the insurgent's chest, dropping him down onto his rear. The battalion had already lost too many men that day and Baeder was determined to inflict heavy casualties on the insurgent force, deterring them for the weeks to come.

  Together, Baeder fought back-to-back with Mortlock as insurgents melted out from the smoke and downpour. Although he could not match Mortlock's strength or ferocity, Baeder considered himself an infantryman first, and an officer second. He fought until his limbs felt loose and hollow. He slid in the mud, fell to his knees and even took a stinging war club in the thigh, but he kept a constant pace of attack with fist and pistol.

  'Is this what you wanted when you woke up this morning?' Baeder bellowed at the enemy. His troopers joined their voices in an enormous roar. Baeder fired his autopistol into the trees, banging out six or seven shots for emphasis. Mortlock continued to press on with his rhythmic striking. Slowly, step by grinding step, the Imperial Guardsmen dislodged the enemy from their positions.

  'EIGHT EIGHT, THIS is Angel One. Report status, over.'

  'Angel One. Holy frag! We are taking some heavy fire. Insurgents all over us along the east bank and up our arses.'

  Lieutenant Duponti's fighter was hovering some eight hundred metres over the canopy below. He had ghosted the region flying back and forth in the rain, watching his fuel gauge with anxious attention. The weather conditions were bad and high winds hammered his craft, rattling the cockpit. After what had seemed like hours of inaction, it was finally happening. Below him, amongst the sprawling greenery, he could see strobes of light dancing along the Serrado Delta. Ambush.

  Yet there was little he could do. With nervous frustration, Duponti tuned his vox frequency to the battalion channel and listened to the wash of screams and gunfire down below. The insurgents were too close to the flotilla for him to use his arsenal, so he paced across the sky, describing impatient circles amongst the storm clouds.

  Finally, unable to handle the wait, Duponti nursed his Lightning through the slamming gale and horizontal rain to a lower altitude. There, he could make out distinct explosions, the firepoints of gun barrels and even the flaming wreckages on the delta. Just being so close to the fighting made his fingers itch over the firing stud of his flight-stick. His practised eyes could spot the Imperial battalion making a counter-assault along the riverbank. White las-beams like flickering spider webs criss-crossed the enemy positions. Pink beams of enemy fire stung back. The fighting went on like that for some time until the pink las-fire began to wither and die away. On the Imperial vox-channels, he could hear that the insurgents were breaking away.

  'Angel One. This is eight eight.'

  Duponti started in his seat. This was it. 'I read you, eight eight. What can I do?'

  'We've got them reeling. They're peeling off. Can you chase them down and clear them out? We can't afford to have any stragglers coming back later for more when they feel brave again.'

  'Sir, I'll scare them so much they'll turn themselves in.'

  'Loud and clear. Make them hurt.'

  With that, Duponti threw his Lightning down towards the rainforest. It came down fast with his machmetre needle hovering at close to four hundred metres a second and the view outside the cockpit a blur of melted greys and greens. He clipped up and banked at the last fraction of a second, skimming up across the canopy before slowing and announcing his presence with a volley of hellstrike missiles. Explosions rolled away underneath him. He was going too fast to make out targets, but he knew where to hit so he dived back and forth over the trees. He heard enemy fire snap past. Ground gunners blazed up at him. In reply, Duponti spread lascannon fire through the canopy.

  'Angel One is dry,' Duponti voxed. He spat out the last of his hellstrike missiles and began to gain altitude. The ground forces voxed something in reply but Duponti could only hear the howl of blood in his ears as the speed of his attack runs crazed his circulation. Looking down, a swathe of rainforest was burning bright and hot. As a veteran pilot, Duponti never ceased to be awed by the destruction he was capable of inflicting. He banked his strike fighter around and checked his fuel gauge again.

  'Eight eight, this is Angel One. I'm all out of shots and low on fuel. Anything further?'

  'No, Angel One, we've got them running. Thank you. Out.'

  With that, the vox-link clicked dead. Although it was unspoken, Duponti knew the gratitude of infantry when he heard it. Still running on the residual adrenaline, Duponti crested his plane high, tore off his flight mask and whooped loud. He promised himself one hot brew when he returned to the Argo-Nautical. He deserved that at least before he refuelled and flew out once again.

  THE INSURGENTS FLED, chased by fire into the hills.

  Dead men were scattered alongside broken trees. An entire section of the rainforest, mostly along the water-line, had been deforested by intense gunfire. On the delta, three swift boats and five assault landers were now flaming rubber carcasses reflecting orange onto the river surface. Of the men, nineteen had been killed in action with a further five injured. Slighter injuries were common amongst almost all the Guardsmen who had assaulted the riverbank.

  Colonel Baeder moved along the shore, crouching by each dead Riverine laid out in neat rows. He made sure to find out which of the men in his battalion were killed. He had gone to great lengths to remember each and every man in his battalion by name, even though most did not know that, and he would at least make the same effort to know who had died.

  Through the billowing smoke, medics rushed back and forth bearing drip bags and field dressings. Most of the flotilla was moored by the riverbank as injured men were ferried off their vessels. Many Riverine sat in a daze along the sloping embankment as the adrenaline of combat was replaced by exhaustion.

  Baeder found himself standing before the body of a trooper called Beldia. Baeder remembered him as a support gunner of Three Platoon, Serpent Company. He had even listened to Beldia's story about blowing up an ork swamp hovercraft with a heavy stubber just weeks ago in the company mess hall. Although Baeder had never known Beldia personally, he knew the man had been a boastful soldier but an accurate shot. The body before him had a
laswound in his throat and a filmy glaze in his eyes.

  'Beldia. He was a stout one,' said Sergeant Pulver, picking his way through the broken undergrowth.

  'Yes, I knew of him.'

  'You didn't know him,' Pulver said flatly. In his fist, the sergeant gripped a clutch of ident-tags, red and gory. He held the metal tags in front of Baeder and threw them on the ground at his feet. 'These are all the men who died today because you did not stick to the main route.'

  The sergeant's lacerating words stung Baeder into shock. 'Sergeant. This was an ambush. The enemy were well dug-in and waiting.'

  'And you fed us straight to them. What the frag were you thinking? Were you thinking at all?' Pulver spat.

  Baeder curled his power fist in anger. Baeder knew Pulver was a veteran soldier - a lifer - there was no way he could honestly believe Baeder was responsible for the ambush. He knew it and Pulver knew it. There was something else that had ignited the sergeant.

  A handful of Riverine squatting in ditches turned their heads curiously. It would not be long before the entire battalion knew of this exchange. 'Sergeant Pulver,' Baeder began, choosing his words carefully. 'If you have something to say to me, then say it directly. But no soldier in his right mind would believe I was the cause of this engagement.'

  'You are a glory hound, sir. This entire engagement, this entire mission is a result of your hunt for rank,' Pulver said accusingly.

  Baeder gritted his teeth. 'Sergeant, this mission was not of my choosing. It was simply a task assigned to me and one that I intend to complete. Your job is to liaise between myself and the soldiers under my command. You are a senior soldier, act like it.'

  Pulver spat his dip into the river, a wild hateful look in his eyes. 'You have not earned your right to be my commanding officer.'

  In any other regiment, Baeder would have had his sergeant major executed by a commissar. Hell, Baeder had every military right to shoot Pulver himself then and there. But this was not any other regiment. It was, time and time again, not the way things were done on Ouisivia. Besides, his men adored the sergeant major and such an act would damage morale if not incite outright mutiny.