[Imperial Guard 02] - Death World

by Steve Lyons - (ebook by Undead)

  He eyed the precarious wooden struts—most of them just branches chopped to size, still sprouting offshoots and leaves—that were wedged into the passageway supporting the increasing weight of the earth above their heads. He didn’t trust them.

  The ground shook again then, as if to underscore his fears, and Lorenzo swallowed as the makeshift struts rattled fiercely and a shower of loose soil fell about his ears. He couldn’t tell if this tremor was lighter or heavier than the first two, he only knew that it felt more ominous down here, where it wasn’t just below him but around him and above him too, and where he knew there would be nowhere to hide from a more severe quake, no way to avoid being buried alive.

  “You realise,” said Braxton, putting Lorenzo’s own thoughts into words as the tremor subsided, “if this place caves in, we’ll have come all this way for nothing. Rogar will have dealt with Big Green for us.”

  “Maybe,” grunted Greiss, “and maybe not. Maybe he’ll just slip away through his escape tunnel, wherever that is, and maybe it’ll take us a year to find him again. No, I don’t care if this whole damn world blows itself apart around us—I for one am not backing out of this on a ‘maybe’. Far as I’m concerned, that brute’s still alive until I clap my own eyes on his stinking corpse!”

  Lorenzo became aware of a sick ache in his stomach, and he fought down a surge of bile in his throat. His skin felt hot, prickly, and he was short of breath. The symptoms came from nowhere, and at first he thought the tunnel must have caused them, this unfamiliar, claustrophobic environment.

  Then he remembered the effigy, and its spines.

  His precautions had done him no good. Rogar III’s poison was coursing through his veins. He knew he should tell the others, warn them in case he went crazy like Muldoon had, became a threat to them. But then they would probably have left him behind, to die on his back like Woods, and he couldn’t face that. Not when they were so close to their goal. Not when he was so close to a chance to earn his name, at last.

  He would earn his name. Lorenzo swore that to himself. He didn’t know how—but if he couldn’t find a way down here with a world against him, then where could he? A way to surrender his life for his squad, for his cause, for a chance to be remembered, and he knew he wouldn’t hesitate this time. Because, this time, he had nothing to lose. This time, he was dying anyway.

  Might as well go out in a blaze of glory.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sergeant Greiss swore under his breath.

  The orks’ mine tunnel had opened into a cave—and Lorenzo could see, from the lack of wooden props and the uneven texture of the rock where Storm’s light fell upon it, that it was natural. Passages snaked from the cave in all directions—ominous black holes in the walls.

  “Looks like the greenskins have bust their way into a whole underground complex,” Greiss grumbled. “Could spread for kilometres.”

  “What do we do now, sergeant?” asked Braxton.

  Before Greiss could answer, Myers let out a “Ssshh,” and held up his hand for silence. A second later, they all heard it: lumbering footsteps, echoing from the walls until there was no way of knowing which direction they came from.

  Storm snatched off his helmet, snapped off the light, and the Jungle Fighters dispersed, navigating by memory in the total darkness, finding nooks into which they could squeeze. Lorenzo found himself in the mouth of a narrow, twisting passageway, and feared for a moment that it was along this very route that the orks were approaching. Then the footsteps—two sets, he estimated—seemed to move around him, and he saw the bobbing beam of a helmet light, and then there were two hulking shapes in the cave, striding toward the exit tunnel.

  Then the Jungle Fighters were upon the orks, Storm reaching them first, leaping onto the back of the nearest and drawing his blade across its throat. Greiss and Braxton crashed into the second creature, staggered it, and Lorenzo lent his shoulder to their efforts and it fell, three knives plunged into its chest and stomach.

  “You notice something?” asked Armstrong, as the others confirmed their kills. “These two were going up to the surface, but they don’t have barrows. No pickaxes, no spades, just guns.”

  “You think they suspect something?” murmured Greiss darkly.

  “I think Big Green’s maybe starting to wonder what’s been happening to his barrow boys. Or maybe the sentries up top were supposed to report in. Either way, I’ll bet these two were coming to investigate.”

  “When they don’t come back either…” breathed Myers. “Alright.” Greiss nodded. “We’ve got—how long would you say?—a few minutes before all hell breaks loose down here. Meantime, we need to make inroads into these caves, make sure the warboss can’t go nowhere without getting past us first. Anyone else hear that? Sounds like digging?”

  Myers reported that he did hear it—and, screwing up his face in concentration, Storm agreed. Lorenzo didn’t hear a thing, and he scrabbled at the insides of his ears in frustration, evacuating more of Rogar III’s mud. The effort disturbed his equilibrium, and his brain performed a lurching spin. The sickness in his stomach made another surge for his throat, and he swallowed it down.

  Greiss and Myers followed the digging sounds to the right-hand side of the cave, and Myers located a tunnel that was wider and straighter than the others, its floor a little smoother. “I’d say there’s been a few barrows pushed up this way, sergeant,” he reported—and, standing at the tunnel entrance, even Lorenzo could now hear the distant clink of metal against rock from somewhere below.

  “Right,” sighed Greiss, “this is how it’s going to have to be. We split into three teams. Patch and Lorenzo, you follow this tunnel here. Braxton, you’re with me—we’ll take the passage those two orks came up from. Bullseye, Wildman, you wait around here a while, stick to the shadows. Chances are, there’ll be more greenskins along soon, and I’m betting once they find their buddies’ corpses littering the place, they’ll send word back to the big boss.”

  “We can follow ’em,” concluded Storm. “Right, sergeant.”

  Everyone seemed happy with that plan, and Lorenzo didn’t want to be the one to object. Still, he felt numb. His chances of being the one to find the warboss had just been slashed by two-thirds. He pictured himself dying quietly in a dark tunnel somewhere, while Greiss and Braxton, or Myers and Storm, stumbled upon their target and grabbed all the glory. He wouldn’t let that happen.

  Greiss handed him the miner’s helmet from one of the dead orks, and Lorenzo jammed it onto his head and practically dragged Armstrong away, down the tunnel towards the digging sounds. “Steady on,” whispered Patch in his ear, “you’ll run straight into the greenskins at this rate.” But Lorenzo wasn’t listening. He’d had a lifetime of being too cautious. All he cared about now was covering as much ground as he could. More ground than the other two teams could cover. Being the first to find the ork warboss. Earning his name, before it was too late.

  There were lights up ahead—harsh, like the lanterns outside. Lorenzo switched off his helmet beam and crept forward, Armstrong at his heels.

  The tunnel they were following took a sharp dip, its gradient so steep that they were half-walking, half-sliding. The sounds of picks and shovels were unmistakeable now, and there was something else. The squeak of a wheel. Armstrong tapped Lorenzo on the shoulder and indicated a side passageway, narrow and level, also well lit. Lorenzo nodded, and they slipped into it, and pressed themselves against its walls so the light wouldn’t cast their shadows across the junction.

  An ork appeared, grunting as it strained to push a loaded barrow up the slope. Lorenzo’s hand moved to his lasgun, knowing that if the creature saw them their cover was blown. It only had to yell out. To his relief, it moved on. Let Myers and Wildman take care of it when it reached them, he thought.

  They moved further down the side passageway, until the right-hand wall fell away and they were in a natural gallery, looking out across a vast cavern. Its floor lay some ten metres below them, its far wall w
as four times that distance. The cavern was swarming with orks, hefting tools, battering at the walls, breaking off chunks of rock that gretchin gathered and piled into waiting barrows. The area was lit by six lanterns, squeezed into niches at varying heights, connected by tangles of thick cabling. There was a lantern beside the Jungle Fighters, on the gallery, lying on its side—and they crouched behind it so any ork that glanced their way wouldn’t see them behind its intense light.

  Lorenzo scanned the throng with his eyes, fervently hoping to find an ork with cleaner, better armour than the others, an ork that was giving the orders, an ork perhaps a little larger than its fellows. He was disappointed.

  “Another nine, ten passageways off this chamber,” breathed Armstrong. “This place is like a maze!”

  “I don’t know,” Lorenzo muttered. “Most of those tunnels, I think the orks dug themselves—and I think they’re still digging them. See how the gretchin keep coming back along them with more rubble. I’m betting most of them are dead ends.”

  “Doesn’t mean we won’t find Big Green’s quarters down one of them.”

  Lorenzo conceded the point, but nodded towards a wide tunnel entrance below them to the left. “Seems to be a lot of coming and going through there,” he remarked, “and the passageway we’re in heads in that direction. I think it’s worth a look.”

  “Your call,” said Armstrong.

  They crept on, until rock closed in around them again and their passageway dipped and narrowed and came to an abrupt end. Its floor didn’t quite meet the wall, however, and Lorenzo peered through the gap thus created and saw another passageway below. Even as he watched, an ork passed along it, he could almost have reached down and touched its head. He listened a moment, but the only sounds he could hear came from the main chamber behind and below them. He glanced at Armstrong, who nodded—and Lorenzo lowered himself through the hole, until he was hanging from his fingertips, then let himself drop.

  The world gave another spin as he hit the ground, and he lost his balance and fell. He picked himself up quickly, humiliated, and gestured up to Armstrong that he was alright. He had guessed right. This tunnel sloped back down to the main chamber in one direction, climbed more gently into darkness in the other. He could only see a short way in the lantern light that bled up from below, but it was enough to see that the tunnel walls were riddled with openings.

  At Lorenzo’s signal, Armstrong joined him, hampered by his dead arm but still affecting a more graceful landing than his comrade had managed.

  Two orks were coming their way. Quickly, they clucked into the nearest of the openings, and found themselves pushing through a tattered curtain. Beyond this, a small cave was littered with skins and debris, and Lorenzo realised that orks had been sleeping here. Fortunately, there were none present at the moment.

  A little further up, the tunnel levelled out and split into three, and they followed the left-hand branch. They found more quarters, some rumbling with the grunts and snores of sleeping residents, some apparently empty. Some had lights within, spilling around the edges of their curtains—and in one, the curtain was pulled aside and four orks sat around a flat-topped boulder, playing with knuckle dice. Lorenzo and Armstrong didn’t dare risk passing that cave, so they backtracked and chose another path from the three-way junction.

  Lorenzo felt angry. What the orks were doing here—it was wrong. At least, when the men of Catachan tamed a deathworld, it was a fair fight. They didn’t burrow under its skin, try to destroy it from within like a virus. The thought of it made him itch, made the sickness rise in his stomach… He wasn’t sure why, didn’t know where these feelings were coming from, because it wasn’t as if the Imperium had never strip-mined a world. Maybe just not a world like Rogar III…

  They came across a particularly large entranceway and Lorenzo hesitated, wondering if this could be the cave to house the warboss. He didn’t want to poke his head around the curtain, though: he’d have been unlikely to see anything in the dark and he might have disturbed somebody. Anyway, he could hear at least three different snores from within—and it was probable, he thought, that the orks’ warboss had a cave to himself.

  A moment later, however, more footsteps—shuffling unexpectedly from an unseen tunnel, little more than a fissure in the rock—forced the two Jungle Fighters to duck into another cave. And this one was occupied.

  Lorenzo held his breath, and not just because of the stink of ork bodies around him. He could just make them out: three festering lumps crammed together on the floor. He had almost stepped on one as he’d entered, and he eased his foot away from it. For a moment, he thought he had left Armstrong behind outside, so silent was he—but then he saw the glint of a single eye in the darkness, and was comforted.

  The footsteps shuffled up to the cave entrance, and for a moment Lorenzo feared he might have had the bad luck to have taken cover in the wandering ork’s own quarters—but then the moment passed and the footsteps were receding. Heading for the main chamber, he guessed.

  But there was still something wrong—badly wrong—if only he could put his finger on it. Lorenzo’s spine prickled with dread.

  He realised what was about to happen a second before it did, and he knew that his luck had turned bad after all. As bad as it could have been.

  The tremor shook the soles of his feet, then seemed to rise through the walls and meet again above his head. One of the sleeping orks stirred instantly, and Lorenzo was trapped. He didn’t think it had seen him or Armstrong yet, but that could change in an instant, if they moved—and the footsteps outside the cave had come to a halt, so where could they have gone anyway?

  The waking ork was fumbling for something, and Lorenzo wondered if there was a chance, a tiny chance, that he could reach it and muffle it before it yelled out, plant his hand over its mouth and his knife in its throat. But that tremor wasn’t subsiding—and as he took his first step, the earth bucked underneath him and he fell, put out his hands to catch himself, ended up sprawled across one of the two sleeping orks. Which, of course, was awake too now.

  The first ork had found a miner’s helmet, and it snapped on the light, shining it around the cave.

  Armstrong let loose with a las-bolt volley, which kept the ork pinned down but didn’t prevent it from letting out an alarm howl.

  So now the third ork was clambering to its feet, blinking, reaching for its weapon, and Lorenzo was still trying to avoid the flailing grasp of the second. It caught him by the arm, and he was trying to pull away from it, dragging it to its feet after him, its fingers digging painfully into him. He turned, braced his shoulder against the ork’s chest and tried to throw it. It was too heavy, shifting its weight to counter his move, but in so doing it relaxed its hold, and Lorenzo wrenched himself free from it, though it felt like he had lost a handful of his flesh.

  Then he and Armstrong were running, as the third ork found its gun and fired—in entirely the wrong direction, confused by the shifting shadows and its wounded fellow’s dancing beam of light. The Jungle Fighters burst out into the passageway, where the ork they had been hiding from was waiting, its gun raised. Lorenzo lowered his head, rushed it, and a bullet pinged off his helmet, then he cannoned into the ork and it gave a few paces but braced itself. They were fighting for the ork’s gun, and Lorenzo feinted, let the greenskin have the weapon but unbalanced it in the process. It stumbled, and fell onto his freshly drawn knife, impaling itself. Planting his foot in the ork’s stomach, he pulled the blade free. It was still alive, but he didn’t have time to finish the job.

  There were more orks in the passageway, pouring out of the openings on all sides, reacting to the clamour, and the only thing that kept Lorenzo and Armstrong alive was the fact that the earth was still shaking, and with increasing ferocity, confusing the issue, giving the orks more to worry about than just them. Armstrong made to flee back the way they had come, Lorenzo’s impulse was to go deeper into the mine, find the ork leader, and they both came up short as they realised they were
pulling in opposite directions.

  Lorenzo knew, just knew they were in danger, and he threw himself at Armstrong, barged him into the wall as the roof caved in. They were coated in soil, disturbed dust tearing at Lorenzo’s throat, making his eyes water, but they had avoided the worst of it and the orks were reeling around them, and Lorenzo grabbed Armstrong by the hand and pulled him along, guiding him through the chaos by instinct, at a loss to explain where that instinct had come from.

  The tremor was more than a tremor now. It was a fully-fledged earthquake—and Lorenzo knew, with a gut-wrenching certainty, that this was only the beginning. The tunnel was shaking so fiercely, it felt like he had double vision, cracks were opening in the walls, the floor was churning itself up, tossing him about like a wild grox, and the roof was groaning and grinding and collapsing in stages. Rogar III was taking its revenge on the orks that had defiled it, driving them out of itself or just burying them. Lorenzo had lost all sense of direction, but he was moving broadly with the ork flow, and he knew that this meant he was headed back to the main chamber, and from there to the mine entrance. As if the planet itself was herding him that way. What hope did he have now of finding the ork warboss? What hope for him at all in that lantern-lit clearing, with a hundred evacuated greenskins waiting for him? Even assuming he could make it that far.

  He was looking for another option, a way to cheat his fate, when an ork reared up in front of him, a spade levelled at his throat like a knife. Lorenzo swung his fang, but the quake made the ork appear to be in ten places at once, and his thrust passed through its ghost image. He didn’t know which of its ten spades to avoid.

  But then, with a tremendous crack, the wall behind the ork split, and Lorenzo caught his breath in the face of an explosion of fire.