Vainglorious, page 12
‘Looks like company, sir,’ Jurgen said at last, pointing through the windscreen at a dust plume heading directly towards us.
I squinted, trying to discern the outline of the shapes moving inside it. They seemed vaguely familiar, though somehow wrong. ‘Sentinels?’ I asked, not quite sure whether I could trust my eyes or not.
‘Looks like it,’ Jurgen agreed. ‘But not like any I’ve seen before.’
As my view of the approaching walkers became clearer within their cloud of enveloping dust, I found myself forced to agree. For one thing they moved more fluidly than any Astra Militarum equivalent I’d ever seen, or even a t’au battlesuit come to that; only the wraithbone constructs of the aeldari surpassed their apparently effortless locomotion. For another, they seemed far more lightly armoured. Through the thinning murk I could make out what I first assumed was a pilot sitting in an open cockpit embedded in the thing’s torso, only realising my mistake[88] as the trio of ambulatory weapons platforms fell into formation around us. A gunner, perched somewhat precariously on top in what looked remarkably like a Rough Rider’s saddle, behind a pair of autocannons, waved a casual greeting. I waved back, concealing a sudden flare of unease. All the skitarii at the proving grounds had been tested and cleared, but even so, their sudden appearance was unnerving.
‘That must be it,’ Jurgen said, pointing to an outcrop in the distance too smooth and regular in its dimensions to be a natural formation.
‘Indeed it must,’ I agreed, and keyed my comm-bead to the frequency Norgard had instructed me to use. ‘Approaching your outer perimeter, Bunker One. ETA…’ I glanced at my aide, who shrugged.
‘About ten minutes, sir. If this bucket of bolts doesn’t get in our way too much.’ He gestured, somewhat derisively, at the walker jogging ahead of us; as if aware of his comment, it moved off the carriageway, continuing to parallel it without any diminution of speed.
‘Seven minutes,’ I said, eliciting the faint smile from my aide I’d expected in response. As I’d anticipated, he seized on the implied challenge eagerly, accelerating to a speed that would no doubt have induced apoplexy in the enginseer normally assigned to minister to the truck he was driving. ‘And thanks for the escort.’
‘Escort?’ There was no mistaking the tone of puzzlement in the voice of whoever was on the other end of the vox-link. ‘No escort was dispatched.’
‘Turn!’ I yelled, and Jurgen took me at my word, yanking the wheel hard over an instant before both the Striders behind us opened fire. A blizzard of tracer rounds, all the more intimidating for the knowledge that each one was accompanied by four times as many[89] equally lethal companions we couldn’t see, howled through the space we’d so recently vacated. I just had time to brace myself against the door frame before the entire hauler shook, the clang of impact reverberating through the empty cargo compartment behind us like a cathedral bell, as Jurgen rammed the walker which had been pacing us.
It staggered sideways, the whine of its gyros rising to a pitch which seemed to strip the enamel from my teeth even through the bodywork of our truck, its rider clinging to his weapon mount for dear life. I just had time to hope he’d fall and break his augmetically enhanced neck before the servitor controlling its systems made the appropriate corrections, and the wretched mechanism regained its equilibrium. The rider didn’t exactly glare at us, what with his face being composed almost entirely of metal and all, but the way he crouched over the weapon mount and lined up a second salvo was eloquent enough: he really didn’t like us. He triggered both autocannons, but we were too close for him to be able to target the cab, even though he’d depressed the barrels about as far as they could go. The rounds howled just over our heads, and the cathedral bell tolled again as they ripped through the bulkier cargo compartment behind us.
‘Commissar.’ Norgard’s voice echoed in my vox-bead. ‘What’s going on?’
‘We’re under attack,’ I told her. ‘Three walkers with autocannons.’
‘Reinforcements have been dispatched,’ she assured me.
‘They’ll be too late,’ I said flatly. The numbers spoke for themselves. We were at least five minutes out from the bunker, even at the speed Jurgen could probably wring out of the vehicle we’d commandeered, which meant whatever forces Norgard had sent to help us would take at least that long to get to where we were. Even if, by some miracle, we were able to keep moving flat out and meet them halfway, that was still two to three minutes I doubted very strongly that we had. One good burst from any of the autocannons surrounding us would rip our truck apart like a ration pack spotted by Jurgen, and even he couldn’t evade all three walkers for that long. The cab juddered and shook as the abused suspension bounced over the uneven ground, and I silently blessed whichever of the saints had guided Jurgen to an off-road vehicle.
‘Hold on, sir,’ Jurgen said, as though I hadn’t been whitening my knuckles already, and swung the wheel again. As before he timed it to a nicety, the barrage of fire from the two walkers behind us ripping through the air where we no longer were. To my elated surprise they clipped the third one, still turning to try to follow us, blowing out one of its knee joints. It went down hard, still kicking, raising a cloud of dust from the hammering of its single functional leg against the ground.
‘Well done,’ I said grimly. We’d been damned lucky, that was for sure, but I was all too aware that our luck wouldn’t last. Right on cue the entire truck shook as a renewed barrage slammed into the rear compartment. A faint, ominous hissing sound made itself heard over the cacophony of impacting cannon rounds, the roaring of our overstressed engine and the juddering rattle of our abused suspension.
‘Cabin breach,’ Jurgen remarked, as though I hadn’t been able to work that out for myself. A compartment in the dashboard, surrounded by red and yellow chevrons, popped open to reveal a couple of breather masks, and I grabbed the nearest. Instinct demanded that I don it myself, but I overrode the impulse with a positively Macharian act of will, holding it out to Jurgen instead; if he passed out at the controls of the hurtling vehicle, neither of us would survive in any case. He glanced at it and nodded. ‘Just a moment, sir. Bit busy.’
He slammed the brake on, and the loudest clang yet reverberated through the abused cargo compartment, even attenuated as it was by the thinning atmosphere in the cab. The truck lurched and bounced forward, almost pitching me through the windscreen, then my aide accelerated again.
‘Thank you, sir.’ He took the mask and donned it one-handed, the other continuing to work the controls. ‘You might want to hold on for this bit.’
Though the impulse to make a grab for the other breather was almost overwhelming, my lungs beginning to labour as they sucked at the thinning air in the cab, I took the hint and followed his suggestion – decades of being driven by Jurgen made hanging on and hoping for the best pretty much second nature in this sort of situation, in any case. The cargo-8 lurched again, spinning almost on the spot, to face more or less back in the direction we’d come from. Jurgen kicked up a gear, and we began accelerating towards the road we’d bounced off a moment or two before.
The nearest of the walkers was marching steadily away from us, the servitor controlling it reduced to a mangled mess of flesh and augmetic components by the impact, still stirring feebly in an attempt to steer the thing. The gunner perched on top of it was working feverishly to try bringing his autocannons to bear, but couldn’t swivel it far enough, blocked by his own body from being able to target us. Serves him right, I thought, rummaging for the second breather unit through the faint wisps of grey fog beginning to cloud my vision. My fingers closed on it, and after a second or two of fumbling with the fastenings, I felt my lungs inflate again. I glanced round, looking for the enemy. ‘Two down,’ I said, more in hope than expectation.
‘Looks that way,’ Jurgen agreed, bouncing us back onto the carriageway. The damaged walker was still plodding relentlessly towards the horizon, but looked unlikely to make it that far, on account of the ravine between us and the proving grounds, over which a long, narrow bridge soared. To my surprise the other one was pacing its fellow rather than coming after us, but under the circumstances I’d take whatever respite the Emperor was kind enough to throw in our direction.
‘What’s he doing?’ I wondered aloud, the gunner on the sole undamaged Strider leaning towards the other, reaching out a hand to his compatriot. Their hands touched, clasped, and the gunner of the walker plodding blindly towards the precipice stood up in his saddle.
‘He’s not going to make it,’ Jurgen opined, as the gunner, red robes flapping around him as he rose from behind the shelter of the autocannons, made a stumbling jump towards the other walker. He almost did, but just as he took off, the Strider’s leading foot came down hard on the edge of the cliff. Rock and sand gave way, and the plodding mechanism pitched forward, tearing his hand from the other skitarius’ grasp.
As the stricken Strider toppled into the depths, its erstwhile rider plunged after it, scrabbling desperately at the lip of the precipice for traction as he slid downwards, arresting his fall at the last possible moment.
Jurgen shrugged. ‘My mistake.’
The surviving Strider turned, apparently just on the brink of following its crippled fellow, and its foot slammed down on the struggling gunner. Blood and lubricants sprayed the sand, and then he was gone, following his mount down into the depths.
Jurgen and I winced in unison, then turned our attention to the war machine sprinting vengefully towards us.
‘Fast would be good,’ I remarked, and Jurgen nodded, the overstressed engine whining pitifully as he fought to wrench a few more kilometres an hour out of it. We were almost at the bridge now, and rising dust in the distance indicated that Norgard’s promised reinforcements were on their way, but another burst of autocannon fire from our persistent pursuer soon put paid to any hope I might have been beginning to feel that they’d be with us in time.
‘Fast it is, sir,’ Jurgen agreed, jinking just in time to send the shots wild, where they chewed up the ground, adding a fresh flurry to the pall of dust hanging in the air around us.
‘Frak this,’ I said, popping the door and squirming around in my seat as far as I could while still constricted by the crash webbing. I could have got a better angle on the mechanism sprinting after us if I’d unfastened it, of course, but given the speed we were going and the violence of Jurgen’s evasive manoeuvres I’d almost certainly be pitched out of the truck within seconds if I tried. I squinted through the miniature dust storm being whirled up by our progress, and cracked off a couple of shots from my laspistol, which whined off into the distance in the general direction of the enemy without any discernible effect.
‘Just coming up on the bridge, sir,’ Jurgen assured me, as another fusillade of autocannon rounds ripped into our vehicle, which leapt and juddered as though being electrocuted. Only the steady grip of my augmetic fingers kept me from losing the laspistol, and I clutched at it convulsively, thanking the Throne for the solidity of the seat restraints. Our suspension had evidently taken some damage, which I suppose was hardly surprising under the circumstances, as the shuddering through the chassis continued, and Jurgen was wrestling with the steering wheel, which seemed determined to rip itself out of his hands. His brow furrowed. ‘Can you smell something?’
‘Promethium!’ I yelled back, after a glance behind us. The last burst of autocannon fire had ruptured our fuel tank, and a slick of it was spreading out behind us, turning the dust into thick, foul-smelling porridge. If a tracer round hit us now, we’d go up in a fireball Norgard would be able to see from her command bunker. ‘Time we were leaving!’
‘Very good, sir,’ Jurgen said, as though I’d simply asked for another bowl of tanna. ‘I’ll slow down a bit.’ Which we didn’t exactly have a choice about, if we wanted to avoid breaking our necks when we made a jump for it. He slammed on the brakes, yanking the wheel hard around as he did so. The lorry slewed sideways across the road, began to tilt, then, just as I was bracing myself for it to fall over entirely, wobbled back to slam its wheels hard down on the transitway, blocking the approach to the bridge.
‘Nicely done,’ I complimented Jurgen, smacking the quick release of the crash restraint as I did so, and cracking off a few more shots in the direction of the war machine still charging down on us. This time my aim was a bit better, a couple actually impacting against the bodywork, but doing no discernible damage as they did so. They achieved what I set out to do, though: the gunner ducked back behind his gun shield, which kept him occupied for the few brief seconds we needed to bail out. Jurgen was already out of the driver’s door, his lasgun in his hands, and I made to follow him, squirming across the intervening seats as he opened up on full-auto from behind the cover of our wounded transport. Finding the melta getting in my way, I seized it and thrust it ahead of me as I dived out of the open driver’s door.
‘Good idea, sir,’ Jurgen said, slinging his lasgun and taking the weapon from me as I emerged. ‘That’ll give the rust-licker something to think about.’
‘And us,’ I said, with an expansive wave at the pool of promethium still spreading from our ruptured fuel tanks. ‘One spark here and we’re done for.’ I gestured towards the bridge behind us. ‘Just run.’
To his credit, Jurgen needed no further urging, falling in behind me as I sprinted for the viaduct. We were only a score or so metres from it, and the abyss it spanned, and I glanced up at the approaching dust cloud in the distance. Norgard’s reinforcements were so close now I could distinguish moving dots within the murk. For a moment I dared to entertain the hope that the rogue unit behind us would see the game was up and make a run for it, but I’d underestimated the single-minded tenacity of the augmetically enhanced. No sooner had the thought occurred to me than another burst of autocannon fire chewed up the ground around us.
‘Down!’ I yelled, fitting the action to the word. Trying to cross the bridge would be suicidal, the flat decking offering no cover at all, but there were rockcrete piers at either end, anchoring the structure to the solid ground on both sides of the chasm. Jurgen and I scurried behind the nearest, throwing ourselves flat as a fresh fusillade of autocannon rounds ripped through the air. The shells gouged craters into the rockcrete in front of us, so close I felt my eyes stinging from the pulverised residue.
‘Come on then,’ Jurgen muttered, adding a couple of orkish oaths for good measure, as he snuggled the stock of the melta into his shoulder. The walker had reached the abandoned truck by now, mostly hidden by the mangled bodywork, its rider appearing to bob up and down behind the wreck like a target in a fairground shooting gallery. Now I’d got a good look at our erstwhile transport, I was astonished it had made it as far as it had – it resembled nothing so much as a wheeled colander, the metalwork of its cargo compartment ripped and shredded. Fortunately there seemed to be some cargo still left in the back, which Jurgen had apparently missed in the course of acquiring it, and which had absorbed a lot of the incoming fire. What it might have been before the Striders started using it for target practice was anybody’s guess, but, I supposed, it accounted for the fact that we were still here at all. Without the protection it offered, the cab would almost certainly have been penetrated, which would have done my aide and I no favours whatsoever.
‘Steady,’ I cautioned, quite unnecessarily given the number of times we’d been in situations like this over the decades, but Jurgen didn’t seem to resent my interest, if he even noticed it at all, simply slowing his breathing and tightening his finger almost imperceptibly on the trigger. ‘Wait for it to move into the open.’ I had no doubt that it would, the rider circling wide to get a clear shot at us, without the wreckage intervening.
I was right. Emboldened by our lack of response, and likely thinking we had nothing to defend ourselves with apart from our lasweapons, which had so far failed to have any effect on the Strider’s armour plate, the rider directed it into the open with an almost casual air, not even bothering to put down a bit of suppressive fire to keep us pinned. Not that I could blame him for that; with the cliff edge right behind us we had nowhere else to go in any case, and moving into the open ourselves would be instantly fatal. He probably thought he had all the time in the galaxy to line up a killing shot, so why hurry?
‘Cocky gretchin-fondler,’ Jurgen said, and squeezed the trigger. Forewarned, I closed my eyes against the weapon’s actinic glare, which, as ever, punched through my eyelids, leaving vivid green after-images dancing across my retinas when I opened them again. He’d aimed for the servitor, clearly visible dangling from the thing’s chest like a monstrous infant in a parental baby sling,[90] reducing it instantly to charred meat and shards of fused mechanica. The Strider staggered, now bereft of even the most rudimentary direction; bizarrely, though, it continued to trot towards us, wavering slightly from side to side like a trooper returning to barracks after a two-day bar crawl. To my great relief the gunner seemed too preoccupied with hanging on to be able to shoot at us again. His resultant contortions meant he was no longer completely protected behind his gun shield, though, so I lined up a shot with my laspistol, hoping I’d be able to get in a lucky hit before he regained his balance.
Then I had a better idea, and switched aim at the last minute to send the las-bolt straight into the wreckage of our gallant cargo-8. The vapour rising from the spilled promethium erupted in a fireball, ignited by the spark of impact.
The battered truck converted itself instantly into a more than serviceable bomb, the smaller fragments of bodywork becoming a lethal blizzard of shrapnel, while the larger pieces of wreckage battered the staggering mechanism like a pugilist’s fists. The gunner’s flapping robes caught fire, although I suppose that didn’t inconvenience him too much considering his metal to flesh ratio, the flickering flames appearing like highlights on the russet weave. After a few more frantic attempts to cling to his mount, the shockwave from the blast pitched him to the blazing sand beneath, where he vanished from our sight among the flames.
