[Imperial Guard 02] - Death World

by Steve Lyons - (ebook by Undead)

  It seemed to take an age for him to reach that first danger point, that first gangway between two huts, to be able to edge forward and peer down it, to reassure himself that it was empty. It seemed to take an age—although he knew it had only been a few minutes. But Lorenzo wasn’t impatient. He lived for moments like this.

  There was something in the trees ahead of him.

  He froze.

  It was taller than a man, but hunched, enormous arms hanging down to its knees, its shoulders broad and muscular. It was wearing dulled armour—and, although the darkness made it difficult to pick out colours, the skin that showed through the metal plates had a decidedly green tint.

  The ork didn’t seem to be trying to hide. Lorenzo wondered, for a heart-stopping moment, if it was searching for him, if it had heard something. Any closer, and he feared it might catch his scent.

  Then it turned away from him, grunting as it fumbled with its protective metal layers, and he realised it had only come out here to relieve itself. Lorenzo would never find an enemy more exposed, more helpless, he could attack it from behind, wrap a cord around its throat and strangle it. But orks were a sturdy breed, and it would certainly have struggled loudly as it died. Reluctantly, he let it be—and when it had done its business, the ork shuffled away and faded into the shadow of a metal hut.

  Lorenzo crept forward again. He stepped over another tripwire, and waited to point it out to Muldoon. Glancing ahead, he saw that he was almost there, almost past the camp. Maybe they’d call him “Sneaky” Lorenzo. No, he wasn’t sure he liked that. “Shadow” Lorenzo? “Sly” Lorenzo?

  Voices.

  They were hushed—but against the muted sounds of the night, they sounded unnatural, harsh and as loud as las-fire discharges.

  He thought one of the voices belonged to Greiss. There was an urgent tone to it, almost a plea. Lorenzo looked to the ork camp, certain that the voices must have carried that far, but nothing was stirring. Not yet. He ached to know what was happening, but he knew he ought to maintain his position. He sheathed his knife and fingered his lasgun, ready to draw it if necessary.

  The explosion caught him totally unawares.

  The night erupted into daylight, too quickly, too shockingly, for Lorenzo to avert his gaze, to protect his night vision. He was half blinded.

  But, as the echoes of the explosion died away and his deadened ears popped, he could hear movement and grunting from the encampment just a few footsteps away. And the shadows, the only things he could make out now, were shifting.

  Lorenzo’s mind raced. Had his comrades blundered into a trap he had missed? Had something else found them? Was it his fault?

  There had to have been casualties, he realised, his throat drying at the thought. The explosion had been centred right at the spot where he’d heard Greiss’ voice. It had sounded like a frag grenade.

  The shadows were converging on that spot now, orks snarling and roaring with battle lust as they rushed to defend their territory.

  A wave of despair passed over Lorenzo as he realised it didn’t matter now which of his comrades were alive or dead. The orks knew where they were—and as Greiss had said, the orks outnumbered them thirty to one. They had nowhere to run, trapped between the encampment on one side and the acid swamp on the other.

  There was no doubt about it. They were all dead.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The orks were an oncoming mass, one indistinguishable from the next, at least to Lorenzo’s compromised sight. The air was filled with noise, and the ground shook to the staccato flashes of more explosions: makeshift grenades, hurled over the heads of the orks’ front ranks by those in the rear.

  In response, las-fire barked out of the jungle, striking the foremost orks and passing through them into their comrades. Lorenzo felt like cheering. At least five, six, seven of his fellow Catachans were alive and fighting back—and the next explosions blossomed in the heart of the orks’ own ranks. The Jungle Fighters’ frag grenades were more effective than the orks’ bombs, because the greenskins were packed so closely together, each of them more likely to take a shrapnel hit. Their armour, and their thick hides, would protect them from the worst of it, but many would be injured, some badly. Some were knocked off their feet by the concussive force of the blasts, as Lorenzo’s eyes cleared, he saw orks stumbling over each other, trampling on the fallen, pushing each other aside—and yet still advancing.

  They didn’t know where he was.

  As the orks closed in on Lorenzo’s squad, he realised they were passing him by, in his solitary position ahead of the others. The others were dead anyway. He had a chance to save himself, to sneak away, maybe take a report back to Lieutenant Vines so that the next men sent out here would know what lay ahead of them.

  He didn’t consider it for a second.

  Lorenzo broke cover, letting out the loudest, wildest war cry in his repertoire, his finger locked around the trigger of his lasgun so that it fired repeatedly into the enemy mass. He didn’t care how accurate his shots were, chances were they’d find a few orks wherever he aimed them. He just wanted to draw attention to himself. Maybe—with luck—convince the greenskins that he was more than one trooper, that their enemies had surrounded them in a pincer movement. The more of them he could distract from his squad, the better their chances would be, the worse his own chances.

  He was dead anyway, he told himself. They were all dead. But the longer the Jungle Fighters survived, the more orks they could take down with them. The more orks they took down, the greater the chance there’d be stories told of them back home. Assuming that, by some miracle, this story made it back home at all.

  The nearest orks responded with alarm and confusion to Lorenzo’s attack, took a moment to pinpoint the source of it, and aimed their weapons: crude, solid-shot guns. They were too slow. Lorenzo had already dived into the sheltered gap between two huts, and he was still running as bullets pinged off metal behind him. He heard grunts and howls and footsteps, and he knew he’d succeeded in drawing the attention of a few dozen orks. Now he just had to survive the consequences of that success.

  He ducked and weaved and twisted between huts at random. The longer he could keep his pursuers searching for him, the fewer orks the others had to contend with in the meantime. But he couldn’t disappear completely, couldn’t flee back into the jungle, because the orks might just abandon their hunt in frustration and return to the combat. Lorenzo let out a whoop and fired his lasgun three times into the air, drawing his foes further into their own camp. He rounded another corner and disturbed a knot of gretchin, who screeched and jabbered in their own crude, incomprehensible tongue, and came at him.

  Lorenzo brought up his lasgun, fired, downed several targets—and then the rest were upon him, or streaming around to attack him from behind. They were kicking and scratching, squealing for their masters. He swung his lasgun like a club, dislodging two of them. He kicked and punched at the others, he reached over his shoulder, seized a gretchin that had clung to his back, and slammed it into the ground. He tried to run, kicking more of the creatures out of his path, but they dogged his heels. He spun around, fired, claimed two more kills, and the rest of the gretchin scampered out of sight. They emerged again as soon as Lorenzo had turned his back.

  Their cries drew the orks, as he had known they must.

  The first of them appeared ahead, and barred Lorenzo’s path. It snarled at him, as if to intimidate him with its presence. That worked, he had heard, against some men, the ork, with its sloping brow, its jutting jaw and its recessed, baleful eyes, cut an imposing figure—and his eye line was level with its fearsome tusks and its slobbering lips. To a man who had faced down a Catachan devil, though, a single ork was nothing special. It might walk and talk, but to a Deathworlder this green-skinned monster was just another thing to be killed.

  Lorenzo snapped off a round, the shot narrowly missing the ork though the flash sent it howling and reeling in pain—but he’d pay for the second’s distraction it had
caused him. The ork’s comrades had found him too, and they came at him, rounding the ramshackle buildings from all directions. More than one of them mimicked the Catachan’s earlier actions, kicking aside the gretchin that had summoned them. The pathetic, stunted creatures slunk away, their job done.

  Surrounded and outnumbered, Lorenzo concentrated his fire in one direction, hoping to clear an escape route for himself. His one advantage was that the greenskins couldn’t use their guns without hitting each other—though, given the speed at which they were coming, that wouldn’t keep him alive for long. He finished off two of them, but the lasgun’s power pack whined and died as the third bore down on him. He tried to impale the ork on his bayonet, but it wrestled his gun away and tossed it aside. Another ork smacked into Lorenzo from behind, and he rolled with the blow, drawing his knife as he hit the ground and twisted out of the way of a descending axe blade. It sliced into the earth a whisker from Lorenzo’s ear. Its wielder wasn’t far behind it, choosing not to retrieve its weapon but to leap instead on its fallen prey and rend him with its bare hands. Lorenzo threw up his knife so the ork’s own momentum forced the blade through the roof of its mouth and into its brain.

  Its dead weight smacked onto him, winding him, pinning him down, but providing him with cover and a moment’s respite. By the time two other orks had hoisted their dead comrade aside, Lorenzo was ready to act. On hands and knees, he slipped between the legs of one of his attackers, and tripped it in the process. The orks fumbled and stumbled and generally fell over each other in their eagerness to apprehend the slippery, squirming Catachan—but any green hands that found him were rewarded with a slash of Lorenzo’s fang.

  Then, joyously, he was through them all, open space looming ahead of him, and he was pushing himself to his feet, snatching his stolen lasgun, reaching for a fresh power pack from his bandolier and a meaty hand grabbed him by the back of his jacket and pulled him back, twisted him around, slammed him into the metal wall of a hut, and while he was still trying to get his breath back from that, a giant ork fist pounded into his stomach and Lorenzo coughed up blood and felt his legs giving way.

  He managed to block another axe thrust with his las-gun—the last time it would save him. The blade embedded itself in the gun’s furniture, and came free with a cracking and a splintering and a last sullen fizz of energy. Lorenzo found an ork snout with his bayonet, drawing blood and making the creature squeal and fall back, but then he let the gun go and it was just him and his Catachan fang, and he knew that at best he’d be able to kill one more ork before they killed him.

  He focused on doing just that. He picked his target, pushed himself away from the wall behind him, ducked beneath a pair of flailing green arms. He locked himself into a deadly embrace with the luckless ork, denying it the chance to swing its axe or raise its gun. He buried his knife in its stomach, twisted it, cutting through the ork’s guts, feeling its blood spilling out, soaking into his own clothes, at the same time, its fingers closed around his neck, cutting off his oxygen, fading his surroundings to black. A deadly dance from which neither partner would ever break.

  Lorenzo wasn’t sure at first if the pops and cracks he could hear as if from the end of a long tunnel were those of his own bones breaking—but the orks were reeling in confusion again, and the grip on his throat was loosened, and he thought he could see a lithe, dark-haired figure hurling grenades from the roof of a nearby hut, although he might have imagined it.

  He raised his fang to make the most of his reprieve, thinking he might claim another ork life, but the world was still darkening and the commands from his brain didn’t seem to be reaching his muscles… and now Lorenzo was sliding to the ground, falling in slow-motion but still too fast to put out a hand to save himself. He was lying facedown, and his back was showered first with hot shrapnel and then an ork body landed on top of him, hiding him, and he just lay there, clinging to consciousness, his face sticky with blood but he didn’t know whose.

  A long time after that, it seemed, Lorenzo heard the orks moving away from him. They were turning their attention to a new enemy, leaving him for dead, and he couldn’t have said for certain that they were so wrong. It was only after a long minute had passed and he was still breathing, his heart still beating and his head clearing as his lungs heaved precious oxygen into his bloodstream, that he knew he would fight on. Only then that Lorenzo breathed a grateful prayer to the God-Emperor for sparing his life, until he recovered his wits and realised he ought to thank Sly Marbo instead.

  He didn’t know why Marbo had chosen to save him, above the others. Maybe he’d just been lucky—in the right place at the right time. Knowing Marbo, it was possible he’d been on that roof all night, waiting for his moment. Whatever the reason, Lorenzo was determined to return the favour, or to pass it on.

  Marbo, he decided, had the right idea. Find high ground.

  He pulled himself up onto the roof of the nearest hut, finding plenty of handholds in the old, pitted metal but almost falling as his muscles protested at being put to so much effort so soon. He’d half-expected to find Marbo up there, but he had moved on, of course. Lorenzo lowered himself onto his stomach, and craned his neck to see over the edge of the building without being seen in return.

  Much of the fighting had now moved out of the encampment. The Catachans had drawn their more numerous foes into the jungle environment they knew best, though with the acid swamp at their backs they had precious little room to manoeuvre. From here, Lorenzo couldn’t see any of his camouflaged comrades—but he guessed, by the positions of the orks, that they’d separated along the perimeter line, making themselves harder to find. The orks, in turn, seemed to be everywhere, shaking trees, firing into bushes, doing everything they could to beat their foes out of hiding.

  There were more of them, of course, among the buildings, searching for the long-gone Marbo, liable to find Lorenzo instead.

  His eyes alighted upon one building in particular: a small metal structure, built with a little more care than most, no windows cut into its walls, its door secured by thick chains. Ammo store, he guessed. He strained to reach his backpack, unfastened it, and rummaged out the two demolition charges with which he’d been equipped. They weren’t really for combat use—the Catachans employed them to clear hard-going areas of the jungle when they were in a hurry and stealth wasn’t such an issue—but they were just what he needed now.

  The first charge landed with a plop beside the chained door, when no orks were looking that way. Lorenzo set the second to detonate only two seconds after, and he felt his palm sweating as he held the cold sphere in his hand, counting down.

  He let the second charge go even as the first explosion shook the buildings around him. By the time its vibrations overtook him, he was running, but they made him mistime his leap to the next hut across. Lorenzo pedalled empty air, desperate to propel himself that vital centimetre further, and somehow he caught the protruding edge of the roof as it passed him, and almost yanked his fingers out of their sockets as they caught his falling weight.

  There were two orks below him, and they turned their guns upwards. Before they could squeeze their triggers, they were knocked off their feet—and Lorenzo felt it simultaneously: a furious Shockwave of heat and sound, like a hurricane raging around him, in which it was all he could do to grit his teeth and maintain his hold on the parapet while his back was peppered with debris.

  The hurricane lessened, and he strained and pulled himself up, attaining his new perch at last. He rolled onto his back, breathless, but raised himself on his elbows because he couldn’t resist the chance to inspect his handiwork.

  It looked like the sky was on fire. The building he had just leapt from had collapsed, along with several others, and Lorenzo could see the burning, smoking hole where the ammo store had been. Evidently, he’d guessed right about its contents. His first charge had blown off the door, the second must have bounced neatly through the resulting aperture. Its detonation had sparked a chain reaction, just
as he had planned. The sturdy walls had absorbed much of it before they had given, else he would have been dead. To his satisfaction, several orks—presumably reacting to the first explosion, too late to stop the second—had perished, their burnt corpses twitching and steaming in the midst of the devastation.

  Dozens more orks were turning from the jungle, streaming back into the camp, looking for the enemy that had penetrated their home. Lorenzo couldn’t have hoped for a bigger distraction—and it had certainly been well timed for at least one Jungle Fighter. He saw a blur of activity, heard the howls of stricken orks, and then Muldoon came streaking out of the foliage, his lasgun firing. From this distance, Lorenzo couldn’t see what had happened, but he could guess. One of Muldoon’s favourite tricks: he would gather up a cluster of deadly creepers, secrete himself in a tree and, when the enemy got too close, let the creepers go. Lorenzo could see orks dancing and twisting as they fought to disentangle themselves, as the creepers stung them and burst their poisonous pustules in their grotesque faces.

  But he was exposed now, left with nowhere to run but out into the open where his painted skin couldn’t camouflage him. Like Lorenzo before him, he raced for the shelter of the ork huts, miraculously untouched by a hail of bullets—but one great brute of an ork had avoided his trap, and it came charging after him, and cannoned into him from behind.

  Lorenzo was on his way before Muldoon hit the ground. He leapt onto the sloping roof of the next hut, almost lost his footing on its slick surface, righted himself and jumped again. His fingers hovered over his bandolier, over the pockets that held his frag grenades—but unless more orks moved in, unless they formed a living shield between Lorenzo and Muldoon as they had between him and Marbo, a grenade could do more harm than good. His lasgun was gone. That left him with his knife.

  He launched himself from the last roof, at the ork’s broad back, and he let out a cry—enough for it to hear him coming and half-turn its head, not soon enough for it to bring around its gun and pick him off in midair. Enough for it to take its eyes off Muldoon for a moment. The ork jerked backwards, easing its weight off its fallen prey, as Lorenzo’s fang sliced down between its shoulder blades—and in that same moment, Muldoon drove his night reaper up into the ork’s throat.