[Imperial Guard 02] - Death World

by Steve Lyons - (ebook by Undead)

  The ork took a long, long second to die—but at last it toppled like a felled tree, and Lorenzo fancied he could feel the ground shaking with the impact of its heavy corpse. Or with something else…

  Something was coming. Something big. Lorenzo didn’t have to look, didn’t have to waste the half-second it would take him, to know it was bad, that they had to take cover. But Muldoon was slowed, having trouble standing, and Lorenzo saw that his head was cut, his eyes glazed over. Concussion.

  He reached out a hand, and Muldoon laughed giddily as he took it, as Lorenzo hauled him to his feet. “Looks like… like I owe you my life,” he giggled. Then, suddenly earnest, he gripped Lorenzo by the arms and stared into his eyes as if he had the most important information in the Imperium to impart. “Hey, Lorenzo, you noticed? There isn’t… isn’t half as many of the greenskins as Greiss said there’d be. Thirty… thirty to one, my eye! More like ten to one. And we can take down ten orks apiece, right? Hell, I must’ve killed five already.”

  That noise was getting closer… The rumbling of an engine. Lorenzo looked now, and he saw it—saw its piercing light first, through the drifting smoke of the battlefield, and then the shape of the behemoth behind it.

  It was black, daubed with crude paintings of human skulls and bones—ramshackle in appearance, but bristling with armour plating and weapons. Lorenzo had seen vehicles like this before. It was the ork equivalent of a tank—a battlewagon, they called it—manned by a greenskin mob. They howled and strained forward on the back of this unnatural beast as they saw their two exposed foes. The pilot trained the vehicle’s searchlight upon the Catachans, and wrestled its great wheels around.

  Muldoon’s mood had changed again, and suddenly he looked distant and extremely pale, apart from the livid red gash across his head. “Trouble is,” he said to himself in a hollow voice, “they got Brains. I saw him go down. So, we have to take out a few more orks each to make up his share.”

  Lorenzo couldn’t allow himself to react to this news. There would be time for mourning the dead later, when the act of so doing wouldn’t add to their numbers.

  The battlewagon had two guns, like eyes on stalks protruding before it. The one on the right flared, and Lorenzo pushed Muldoon aside as a shell whistled by and thumped into the dirt, and filled the world with light and sound again. His comrade sagged in his arms like a dead weight, and Lorenzo slapped him across the face, hoping to shock him back to alertness. More gunfire—the right-hand gun again—but the searchlight had lost its targets and the smoke from the first impact was swirling around them and ork weapons, mostly lashed together from spare parts, were notoriously unreliable anyway. Still, the impact almost knocked Lorenzo off his feet.

  Muldoon blinked as blood seeped into his eye, and coughed as smoke crept into his throat. Lorenzo tried to drag him toward the huts, but there came another explosion from that direction and they were thrown back, back into the open, and the searchlight had rediscovered them and there were more orks coming, silhouettes through the haze, from the encampment, from the jungle.

  Muldoon was pressing his lasgun into Lorenzo’s hands, saying, “Here—you can make better use of this than I can.”

  “What… what are you—?”

  He wouldn’t have had to finish the question, even had the smoke not robbed him of speech. He could see the answer. Muldoon was rummaging in his bandolier, finding a demolition charge with each hand—and although Lorenzo’s first instinct was to stop him, to save him, he held himself back because his comrade was grinning at him now. “You saved my life. That makes it my turn. And besides, I count nine greenskins on that tank. Add them to the other five, and that’s my share and a few for Brains to boot.” Looking into his comrade’s ashen face, Lorenzo saw the pain he was holding at arm’s length, the darkness lurking at the edges of his eyes, and he knew then as Muldoon surely did that this was how it had to be.

  Then he was gone, tearing himself from Lorenzo’s grip before he could think of a word to say. He was racing into the light—and before the orks knew what was happening, he was too close for them to train their gun upon him, but not too close for them to bring their other weapon—the one on the left—to bear…

  It was a flamethrower. That explained what this single wagon was doing out here, thought Lorenzo, why the orks had assembled it in the depths of a jungle that would only impede it: they’d been using it for clearance operations. A fierce jet of flame licked around Muldoon now, and although he seemed to avoid the worst of it, and though Lorenzo’s vision was obscured by smoke and by the battlewagon’s glaring light, he was certain that Muldoon had been winged, that he’d been burnt, and yet like the relentless orks themselves he kept going.

  He vaulted over the guns onto the front of the tank, planting his feet and his fists into the faces of the orks at the triggers. Those behind saw the threat to them and, snarling, drew their own guns, and one of them leapt at him but he turned its momentum and its weight against it, and threw it over his shoulder and off the moving vehicle. The others fired, and Muldoon’s body twitched and jerked as their bullets ripped into him, and Lorenzo feared that he too would fall and die in a splatter of mud and blood, but he was climbing—climbing onto the back of the battlewagon as if animated by willpower alone, and he fell into the midst of the ork mob and they leapt upon him and tore him apart, but by then his final goal had been achieved.

  The charges blew the battlewagon apart from the inside, and eight orks died screaming.

  By that time, Lorenzo had replaced the depleted pack in the lasgun his comrade had given him, and he was firing at the shapes that loomed about him, making sure he kept moving, an impossible target amid the sensory chaos. He felt a grim sense of triumph as he claimed his tenth kill of the night, and he thought of Sharkbait Muldoon and knew he would have been proud.

  But he also knew he was surrounded, and the orks were homing in on him now, closing him down. They came at Lorenzo from all sides, moving in to close combat as usual, trusting in their greater strength and numbers against his greater dexterity. This time, he knew, he had no right to expect a reprieve, no Marbo to save him. He had used up all his luck. So he dropped his gun and hurled the last of his grenades, and he thought about how bravely Muldoon had died—and Donovits too, he didn’t doubt—and he drew his Catachan fang.

  And finally, Lorenzo ran to greet his enemies, with his trusty knife in his hand and a defiant roar in his throat.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The fighting seemed to have gone on forever.

  Lorenzo remembered the first tint of sunlight touching the sky, remembered how amazed he’d been that only one night had passed because it seemed so long since he’d thought of anything but blood and smoke and fire. Yet when he looked back on that time, much of it was no more than a blur of sneering ork faces and knife thrusts and death. Lots of death. He thought that, at one point, he’d stood back to back with Sergeant Greiss, but he couldn’t be sure. Once they’d moved into hand-to-hand combat, he’d had no choice but to surrender himself to his instincts. Otherwise he’d have thought about the tiredness in his muscles and the aches from his bruises and the still-overwhelming odds against him, and he would have lain down and died. Or, worse still, he’d have thought about dying.

  He could have died, and he’d probably have known nothing about it. Just wound down like a spring, from a wound he hadn’t yet felt, and that wouldn’t have been so bad, would it?

  Lorenzo was fighting in his sleep, muscle memory twitching his arms in response to an imaginary parade of blood-crazed enemies. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought he must have wondered if he would ever wake up, or if he would fight this nightmare struggle forever.

  Yes, it had been a glorious battle.

  And it was made all the more so by the fact that, in the end, Lorenzo felt sunlight touching his face, and he opened his eyes and knew that he had lived.

  It took him a moment to work out where he was. The light was bright, but his surroundings seemed dim.
He realised that the light was streaming through a small window, to be swallowed by the dust and the dirt in here.

  An ork hut. Lorenzo was lying on a makeshift bunk, really no more than a pile of junk draped with rags, and he was swaddled in stinking furs. He was hot, burning up. It crossed his mind only briefly that the orks themselves might have brought him here, as a hostage. That wasn’t their style. The fact that he was here meant his small squad had achieved the impossible. They had won. But at what price?

  Lorenzo felt a stiffness in his side, and sent a tentative hand under his bulky coverings to investigate. His questing fingers found a hard knot of synth-skin, between the ribs in his right side, and he winced at the sudden white hot memory of an axe blade scything through his flesh. His memories were disordered, still vague, but that pain, he felt sure, was among the most recent of them. He sighed regretfully. He would have liked to be found standing, at the end.

  “Hey, Lorenzo? You moving under all that lot?”

  The familiar voice drew Lorenzo’s gaze to his left, to the next bunk, where lay Woods. He must have been injured too, though Lorenzo wouldn’t have known it from the cocky grin on his face. “Bout time too,” said Woods. “Been lying here awake on my own the past couple of hours, while you’ve been snoring away. What’s the point in winning the biggest damn scrap this squad’s ever seen if you can’t jaw about it with your buddies afterwards, huh?”

  “We… did win, then?”

  Woods raised an eyebrow. “I’ll put that down to your being flak happy. Of course we won, Lorenzo!”

  “What I mean is… I heard about Brains.”

  Woods pouted. “Yeah. We lost Brains. And they’re starting to give up on Sharkbait, too. Been looking for him all morning.”

  Lorenzo’s mind’s eye flashed up a picture of Muldoon racing into the light of the ork battlewagon, and he felt a pang in his stomach. “They won’t find him,” he said numbly. Woods fixed him with an inquisitive, almost needy gaze, and Lorenzo realised that it was up to him to tell Sharkbait Muldoon’s last story, to keep it alive. He had that honour, and that responsibility. So he took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment as he picked his words, and he told it.

  He emphasised how brave Muldoon had been. He mentioned the gash in his head, because it made him seem all the more heroic for having overcome such an injury—and he exaggerated the number of orks on the wagon, that he had killed, because after all it had been dark and there’d been so much smoke and there could have been fourteen or fifteen of them, and Lorenzo didn’t want to sell his comrade short. Woods listened to the story with growing admiration, and when it was done he breathed in through his teeth and agreed that Sharkbait had died well. Lorenzo felt an odd sort of pride at having been there, at having seen something so inspiring, but most of all at knowing he’d done justice to his fallen comrade’s memory, and somehow everything seemed a little brighter then.

  “A couple of the others saw how Brains went.” Woods related in return. “There were a few of them together, and the orks were searching the jungle, and they hadn’t had time to find a proper hiding place what with everything going to hell so fast. They say Brains let the greenskins find him, because a couple more steps and they would’ve stumbled right onto Wildman and maybe Bullseye. He gave his own life to buy the rest of us time. Course, he came out firing. I have to confess, sometimes I didn’t have much time for old Brains, thought he yapped too much when he should’ve been getting on with it—but the way the others tell it, he would’ve done Marbo proud last night. Took on ten, twelve orks by his lonesome, and stayed standing long enough for the others to retrench, to start fighting back.”

  “What happened?” asked Lorenzo. “What started it, I mean? We were almost there, almost past the encampment, and then…”

  “Oh yeah,” said Woods, screwing his face up into a scowl, “I almost forgot you were up front, missed it all. I bet you can guess, though. I bet you can guess who was brainless enough to step on an ork trap, blow himself right up.”

  “Mackenzie?” Lorenzo hazarded. The disdain in Woods’ voice and expression had been something of a giveaway.

  “Mackenzie,” he confirmed. “The commissar.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought even he—”

  “It was the blue light. Came up on us all unexpected like. I felt it in my head for a bit—just a second—like it was scanning me, reading my mind, then it moved on. Mackenzie… I figure what happened was, the light picked on the weakest of us. Mackenzie got up, started walking towards it like he was in a trance or something. The sergeant tried to stop him—brought up his lasgun, told Mackenzie he’d shoot him dead if he took another step, though I don’t know why he cared, can’t say I’d have shed a tear if Mackenzie had gone on, if he’d sunk into the swamp and never come out again. But Old Hardhead seemed to be getting through to him. Mackenzie just froze, and he was looking at Old Hardhead, and at the blue light, all confused—and it was Bullseye, I think, who saw the wire. Mackenzie was standing with one foot in front of it, one foot behind. God-Emperor knows how he hadn’t tripped it already. Old Hardhead, he motioned to the rest of us to get back, and he kept talking to the commissar, all quiet and calm. Mackenzie, he was listening, he could see the sergeant was making sense, but he still wanted to go to that light, you could tell. He kept asking why he should trust any of us. He talked about what happened at the river, and he accused the sergeant of wanting him dead. I knew we were in trouble right then, knew he’d bring the orks down on us eventually even if he didn’t trip that wire. Old Hardhead was whispering, trying to hush the commissar, but he was getting hysterical.”

  “That’s what the light does to you,” said Lorenzo sombrely. “It plays on your hopes, your fears. And Mackenzie was already so afraid…” He fell silent as he realised what he’d said. He’d admitted to a weakness, in front of Woods of all people—a soldier who, if he’d ever feared anything, would certainly not have confessed to it.

  It didn’t seem to matter. “Makes sense,” said Woods. “I think, deep down, Mackenzie maybe wanted to believe—he wanted to be convinced—but that light was just too damn strong for him.”

  “What about Braxton?”

  “Give him his due.” Woods conceded, “he tried. He crawled forward, put himself in the danger zone, just so he could talk to Mackenzie, back up what Old Hardhead was saying. But as soon as he opened his mouth, Mackenzie, he just… it was like he freaked out good and proper. He accused Braxton of betraying him, said he was alone now and he wasn’t going to listen to anyone anymore. He closed his eyes, put his hands over his ears, like he was in pain, and he was screaming for everyone to stop talking, to leave him alone, to let him think.

  “Well, it was all over then, of course. Braxton started forward—I don’t know why, like maybe he thought he could drag Mackenzie to safety or something—but the commissar had made up his mind.”

  “Or rather.” Lorenzo murmured, “the light had made it up for him.”

  “And the rest, like Commissar Mackenzie, is history.”

  “And Braxton?”

  “Oh, he’s alright. Old Hardhead grabbed hold of him, pulled him back, damn near got himself killed in the process. Now, that—that would’ve been a tragedy!”

  “I shouldn’t have stopped him,” said Lorenzo. “Sharkbait. At the river. He would’ve killed Mackenzie, but I thought… I don’t know what I thought. If I’d kept quiet, if I’d let him… Sharkbait would still be alive. And Brains.”

  “Doesn’t work like that,” said Woods, with more understanding than Lorenzo would have expected from him. “No one made Sharkbait do anything he didn’t want to do. You made him think, is all. He let Mackenzie off the hook for the same reason any of us would’ve done it: because when the commissar’s harness went and he grabbed for that rope and he held on, he surprised us all. You were right, Lorenzo. You can’t deny a man a second chance after proving himself like that.”

  “Even so…”

  “If the light hadn’t got Ma
ckenzie,” said Woods, “it would’ve worked its influence on someone else. Braxton, maybe. Or… or… I told you, Lorenzo, I felt it in my head. I felt it calling to me—and in that second, I think I would’ve done just about anything it told me to do.”

  That sealed it. This wasn’t the Woods that Lorenzo knew. He turned to his comrade with a new anxiety prickling at him, and he said, “You never told me about yourself. How you ended up… I mean, how you went on. Last night.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about me,” said Woods cheerfully. “I did okay. Really. Just tired myself out, is all—and you know Greiss: he likes to think he’s looking after us. He said if I didn’t come in here for a lie-down, he’d knock me out himself.”

  “Right,” said Lorenzo, not quite buying it. He was just starting to realise how pale his comrade seemed where the daylight fell across him. Sweat beaded his brow, as if he was feverish—or perhaps he too was just hot in his ork furs.

  “Seriously,” said Woods, “you think this looks bad, you should see the ork that did it to me. I should say, the twenty orks!” And he launched into a detailed and bloody account of every punch he had thrown, every shot he had fired, every thrust of his devil claw against the ork hordes.

  Lorenzo stopped listening after a time. He tuned out the words, and strained to catch the distant, muffled sounds beyond the hut’s walls: footsteps, scraping, the odd snatch of conversation. He felt as if he had been lying in this bed for an age, and he longed to feel fresh air on his face, to catch up with the comrades he had thought he would never see again. To see what fresh challenges had arisen in his absence.