[Imperial Guard 02] - Death World

by Steve Lyons - (ebook by Undead)

  Greiss was firing at him, pumping las-round after las-round into the warboss’ chest, and Lorenzo didn’t think it would be enough—but then there was las-fire from behind Big Green too, and a bedraggled, soot-blackened figure emerged through a haze of dust—and even as the ork leader reached his targets, as he made to bring his axe down, it was one of Guardsman Braxton’s rounds that finally sizzled through his skull and put out the feral light in those eyes once and for all.

  Lorenzo had thought he’d feel different when the ork leader died at last. Lie had expected to feel… something. Relieved, perhaps. Or dismayed, that another man had delivered the killing blow. Somehow, he had thought mere would be silence, and time to reflect—but as another great chunk of rock was dislodged from the cavern roof to thunk into the ground beside him, he knew it was not to be.

  Braxton helped Lorenzo to his feet, and they both turned to give Greiss a lift, but the grizzled sergeant waved them away stubbornly. “We’ve got to get out of here, sergeant,” insisted Braxton as Lorenzo retrieved his gun and slapped a new pack into position. “This place won’t hold up much longer. Most of the orks have already run for it. Where’s Patch?”

  Lorenzo shook his head. “Bullseye and Wildman?”

  “Dead,” said Greiss, flatly. “Me and Braxton, we stumbled across their bodies on our way in. Looks like they found Big Green before we did, more’s the pity.”

  “I’m sure they put up a good fight,” said Lorenzo, almost automatically. “I’m sure if it hadn’t been for them, if they hadn’t weakened—”

  “Time enough for eulogies later,” growled Greiss. “Looked like the greenskins were mostly headed back up to the clearing, but we found another way out.” He nodded in the direction from which he and Braxton had appeared. “We take that, chances are we’ll run into less opposition along the way. That is, if the whole tunnel hasn’t collapsed by now.”

  “Let me lead the way,” said Lorenzo.

  Greiss snarled. “Like hell! In case you hadn’t noticed, trooper, I am not dead yet—and I’m still in charge of this squad, what’s left of it.”

  “That’s not what I meant, sergeant. I’ve been having a… a… I don’t know how to describe it, some kind of an instinct about the quake. Like I know how the earth’s going to move, where it’s safe to step, where…” Lorenzo tailed off, embarrassed at how implausible the words sounded out loud.

  But Greiss just regarded him coolly for a moment, then nodded and grunted, “Step to it, then.”

  Lorenzo set off sure-footedly, affecting confidence while inwardly he half-expected his luck to run out at any moment. Then, there it was again: that indefinable feeling, that tug in a certain direction. Greiss indicated a tunnel mouth ahead of them, but Lorenzo balked at a direct approach, and picked out a circuitous path towards their goal instead. His caution was rewarded as a lava stream bubbled and spat its contents straight up like a geyser.

  The Jungle Fighters hugged the wall, keeping just out of range of burning droplets, until they reached the tunnel and stumbled gratefully into its stale but cooler embrace. After that, their progress was a little easier, because there were no lava streams up here and because they could lean on the walls for support. To some extent, anyway. A particularly violent shudder pinballed the trio from one side of the passageway to the other and back, and made Greiss curse and demand to know why Lorenzo hadn’t felt that one coming.

  Darkness enveloped them, and Lorenzo snapped on his helmet light, which luckily still worked. They passed several junctions, with Greiss bellowing directions at each one—and they found their path strewn with crushed ork bodies, and had to squeeze their way around more than one partial cave-in.

  It was Braxton who first voiced the feeling that they were being followed, though when Lorenzo shone his light behind them they could see nothing. Greiss urged them on, and eventually he directed them into an upward-leading passageway that was smoother and straighter than the others, obviously worked, like the one they had followed down from the clearing.

  The first set of wooden struts they came across had slipped and buckled but, miraculously, held, they climbed past them gingerly. The second had broken into splinters, but fortunately the roof was staying up by itself.

  It was just past the third that their luck ran out.

  Lorenzo heard the orks ahead of them before he saw them. There were a half-dozen of them, jabbering in panic as they tried to dig through a pile of rubble that had completely blocked the tunnel. They were succeeding mostly in getting in each other’s way: as the Jungle Fighters watched, one ork accidentally embedded its pickaxe in the skull of another.

  They were sitting ducks for a volley of las-fire, the narrow confines ensuring that even through the quake most of the Jungle Fighters’ shots found a target. The orks, in turn, didn’t seem to be armed—and, taken by surprise, they jostled with each other in their haste to close with their attackers, more than one of them stumbling in the melee and being manhandled aside. A single greenskin made it within knife range—and this, Lorenzo made short work of with his Catachan fang.

  As he yanked his blade out of the ork’s chest, he stumbled, brushed the tunnel wall with his bare arm and recoiled from its unexpected heat. Greiss had felt it too, and he gave Lorenzo a quizzical look. “Lava,” he confirmed. “It’s alright—it hasn’t built up enough pressure yet to cause a burst. We’ve got a few minutes.”

  Greiss nodded, and asked, “How far to the surface?”

  “Almost there. Just the other side of that cave-in.”

  “Guess the orks had the right idea, then,” said Greiss—and the Jungle Fighters rummaged amid the corpses of their enemies to retrieve their pickaxes and spades, and set about the blockage with gusto and a great deal more efficiency and teamwork than the greenskins had demonstrated.

  Lorenzo was worried about Greiss. He had retied his bandana like a bandage over his head wound—but the bleeding showed no sign of abating, red rivulets rolling down his cheek. None of this seemed to lessen the zeal with which he swung his pickaxe, but then Lorenzo had learned to expect no less from him.

  “Looks like you were right, Braxton,” Greiss murmured—and Lorenzo swung around, and this time his light beam did pick out something. A lot of somethings, no longer bothering to hide.

  Ork zombies, shuffling up the tunnel behind them. They could only fit two abreast with their broad shoulders, but their ranks extended further back than Lorenzo could see—and, at their heart: the chilling sight of an even bulkier creature that could only have been the warboss himself, his skull half-caked with mud but stripped to the bone beneath this.

  There was still too far to dig, no way they could escape in time. There were too many sources of fresh corpses for Rogar to use against them, even discounting those orks that had been melted in lava or whose bones had been shattered. Lorenzo found himself averting his gaze from the oncoming army—not through fear of their strength and numbers, but lest he glimpse the familiar shape of a lost comrade among them.

  “Looks like this is it,” growled Greiss.

  “No, sergeant,” protested Lorenzo—though he knew it was hopeless too. “Not now. Not when we’re so close!”

  “I didn’t mean the end for all of us. Just me. About damn time!”

  “What… what are you…?” Lorenzo began—but Greiss hefted his pickaxe, and Lorenzo saw that gleam in his eyes, saw where it was focused, and suddenly he knew what the sergeant was planning. And, impulsively, he laid a restraining hand on his shoulder and he said, “Let me.”

  “What’s wrong with you, trooper?” snapped Greiss. “That’s twice you’ve questioned my orders, and I’m telling you, I don’t like it!”

  “You’ve taken worse hits than this, sergeant. I know you have. You aren’t going to let some dumb ork get the better of you, are you?”

  “Too damn old,” grumbled Greiss. “This was always going to be my last outing. And you, Lorenzo, you got a job to do. You’re the only one who can tell Patch’s story. I’m
only sorry I won’t be around to hear it.”

  “I… I’m dying too, sergeant. Poisoned.”

  Greiss looked Lorenzo up and down, and said curtly, “You look alright to me.” Lorenzo couldn’t argue, because Greiss was right—because, exhausted and hurt though he was, he realised only now that the effects of the effigy’s venom, the nausea and the dizziness, had receded.

  Then Greiss clapped him on the arm and smiled grimly. “Live for me. Tell everyone I did it, got my blaze of glory. And don’t be so damn impatient for yours. Way I see it, you got a lot of stories in you yet, you only just earned your name.”

  He turned and, before Lorenzo could say anything else—before he could think what to say—he was charging at the front rank of zombies with a bloodcurdling scream. As he reached them, as they grabbed and clawed at him, he smashed his pickaxe into the wall beside them, again and again, until the first crack began to show… and to widen… and explode.

  A deluge of lava crashed into the passageway, and surged downhill. It subsumed Sergeant Greiss and the zombies, swept them away, and Lorenzo knew that this time there wouldn’t be enough left of any of them for Rogar to reanimate. He turned away, couldn’t watch, concentrated on the blockage in front of him, swinging his pickaxe in time with Braxton’s, driving himself on, ignoring the pain in his fractured wrist, not letting himself think about anything but the task at hand because if he did think about it, what had happened to Greiss and Armstrong and Myers and Storm and all the others, if he really thought about it, he might have been overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. Why them? Why them and not him?

  Lorenzo thought about their sacrifices, and his greatest fear was that they would all be for nothing.

  His pickaxe rose and fell, and he could feel the heat from the lava at his back and the rock walls closed in around him, and his pickaxe rose and fell, and there were tears in his eyes but that might have been the dirt. He remembered the ship, out in warp space, so long ago now, and that feeling of being trapped, surrounded by hostile forces, helpless to influence his own fate, and he longed for the open air but feared he would never breathe it again.

  Lorenzo’s pickaxe rose and fell, and he felt as if he had been doing this forever, getting nowhere. He could sense the planet, his enemy, a living presence in his thoughts, and he knew it had won, defeated him, that he would never find his way out from inside it—that Rogar III would bury him as it had buried the rest of his squad. Just swallowed them up, left no trace of them. No one to tell their stories.

  No one to remember…

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Daylight.

  Lorenzo hardly registered it at first, couldn’t bring himself to believe in what might have been a cruel trick on the planet’s part. It was only a pinprick, after all, not enough to make out any details of what might be out there. But it was daylight, nonetheless, and its touch invigorated him.

  His right wrist was bruise-blackened, stiffening, and he couldn’t wield the pickaxe anymore without suffering a lance of pain up his arm. But he and Braxton had chipped most of the bigger pieces of rock away, and Lorenzo’s knife was now sufficient to whittle at the packed soil that remained. To make that pinprick wider.

  Finally, thankfully, after what seemed like an age in the dark, they pushed their way through a curtain of loose earth and emerged, stumbling and choking, into the dew-pregnant morning. Only a few hours, Lorenzo calculated from the height of the sun, since they had entered the ork mine—but what a difference those few hours had made.

  The earth had stopped shaking, Lorenzo didn’t know when. Maybe Rogar III had expended its energy—or maybe it was just content with its fresh kills, for now. Nothing stirred in the jungle—and, after so much noise, the silence felt eerie. It heightened Lorenzo’s creeping sense of loneliness.

  There was a shape in the undergrowth. An ork, lying face-down. He thought it was sleeping at first, but on closer inspection it proved to be dead. He recognised the multiple scorched entrance wounds of las-rounds on its green skin. A short way from it, he discovered another two greenskin corpses, and a gretchin that had evidently tried to run and had been cut down from behind. They must have escaped the mine before the tunnel collapse, he thought, to find a greater peril waiting outside. He was grateful. In his current condition, even a trio of orks, if they had taken him by surprise, might have proved too much.

  Lorenzo sensed, rather than heard, movement behind him, and he knew it could only be one man. He turned to greet Sly Marbo with a cool nod.

  The legendary Catachan stood just a few metres away, but Lorenzo could hardly make him out against the greens and browns of his background. He recognised his dead, white eyes, though, and his deep voice, empty of emotion.

  “Did you get him?” asked Sly Marbo.

  “Big Green?” said Lorenzo. “Yes, yes, we got him.”

  Marbo nodded. He had heard what he needed to know. He left without a footstep or a rustle, seeming to melt into the jungle without moving at all. For a moment, Lorenzo fought the discomfiting feeling that he hadn’t moved, that he was still there, watching with his white eyes. But that was just paranoia, he knew. Marbo was gone—and it was unlikely Lorenzo would see him again.

  Braxton, meanwhile, had sagged to the ground, and was sitting with his back to a tree, knees up to his chest. “I could sleep for a week,” he moaned.

  “Go ahead,” said Lorenzo, checking for jungle lizards in the grass before he sat down beside him. “For an hour or two, anyway. I’ll keep watch—but I think it’s safe. I think it’ll take Rogar a while to gather its strength, to be ready for its next move.”

  “How can you know that?” asked Braxton.

  Lorenzo shrugged. “I just do. It’s like I can feel it in the back of my brain. Like I could feel, underground, when the earth was going to move, where the lava was flowing… I’ve been feeling it ever since the effigy poisoned me.”

  “You told Sergeant Greiss you were dying.”

  “I thought I was. But this was something different. A part of the planet in me. I think it was trying to… In some weird way, I think it wanted to… communicate.”

  “Didn’t stop it trying to kill you,” remarked Braxton. “Or any of us.”

  “No,” agreed Lorenzo. “I think—I feel—it didn’t have much choice in that.”

  “And I expect it’ll try again.”

  “I expect it will.” It felt strange to say the words, to accept something that a few days earlier he’d have sworn was impossible. If Brains had been here, he reflected, he’d probably have been able to make it all sound rational. As it was, there was only one way Lorenzo could make sense of all he’d been through. “Remember,” he said, “when the zombies were stalking us, you said something about the planet itself being intelligent.”

  “It seemed that way, at the time.”

  “Yes, it did. To all of us. But I’m not sure that was quite right. No, I don’t think Rogar III is intelligent as such—not in a calculating way. It’s more like… like it’s just been reacting. To what’s been happening on its surface. To the orks. To us. To the fighting. Like it can’t help it.”

  “Like some kind of an allergy,” suggested Braxton. “The more we fight, the more we harm the planet, the more deadly the defences it evolves. New plants and animals, springing up on its skin like rashes. Or antibodies.”

  “Yes. Like that. And whatever it is, whatever’s caused this, I doubt it’s something that can be mined. The orks are wasting their time.”

  “That’s what Rogar wanted you—wanted all of us—to understand,” said Braxton. “We’re all wasting our time.”

  Lorenzo looked at the Validian, and he remembered the nervous, apologetic adjutant who had joined their squad four days ago, the stranger whose intrusion he and the other Catachans had so resented. “You did well,” he said. “I mean, really well. All the men, good men, who died trying to see this mission through to the end—but you’re the one who finished it. You struck the killing blow.”

&nbs
p; Braxton waved aside the compliment. “I did nothing. It was a team effort. You took on the ork leader by yourself, and crippled him. And Sergeant Greiss—if it hadn’t been for him, we’d both be dead. I just blundered along at the right moment.”

  “You made it this far,” said Lorenzo, “when most didn’t. I guess that makes you one of us, after all.”

  “It isn’t over yet,” said Braxton. “We’ve got a four-day trek ahead of us, if we’re to make it back to the encampment.”

  “Even if we don’t,” said Lorenzo, “Marbo will. They’ll know we did our job. They’ll know Big Green is dead.”

  “Maybe,” said Braxton, “but they ought to know more than that. They ought to know about Old Hardhead and the others, what they did for us—what they did for everyone. Don’t suppose I’ll get to write that story, though.”

  Lorenzo grinned. “You could always try. You get drummed out of the Imperial Guard, I’m sure the Jungle Fighters would have you.”

  They sat there, side by side, for a long time, warmed by the sun, exchanging no words but sharing a deep bond of comradeship forged in the fires of their mutual experience. Eventually, Braxton got up and searched the dead orks, finding a water bottle and taking a long swig from it before he passed it to Lorenzo. The Catachan hadn’t realised how thirsty he was, and the cold liquid felt blissful against his parched throat.

  “So, what do I call you now?” asked Braxton, sitting beside him again.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he lied.

  “Now you’ve earned your name. I heard what Greiss said.”

  “He didn’t want me sacrificing myself instead of him. He wanted his blaze of glory. He was just telling me what I wanted to hear.”

  “You really think?” Braxton raised an eyebrow. “Maybe I didn’t know Old Hardhead as well as you did—but tell me this: in all the time he led your squad, did he ever once just tell anyone what they wanted to hear?”

  Lorenzo let out a bark of a laugh, and conceded, “Suppose not.”