Cain's Last Stand, page 3
‘Which way, sir?’ Stebbins asked diffidently, no doubt wondering if I was going to put him on point, although his marksmanship was so bad, being behind him would hardly be any safer than in front if we got into a firefight. (Not that tyranids use firearms, of course, but the ranged weapons they do have at their disposal are no less lethal, not to say considerably more revolting.)
‘A good question,’ I said, feeling that the familiar routine of instruction would allay their nervousness, at least for a while. ‘Anyone got an answer?’
‘Through there,’ Nelys said, pointing to the doorway in the opposite wall. ‘Where else?’
‘We could follow the cables,’ Kayla suggested. ‘They must lead to a hab area.’
Donal shrugged. ‘At least that way’s lit,’ he pointed out. Which was true. Most of the other tunnels were dark and uninviting, and I tried not to read the stealthy footfalls of a lictor into every stray sound echoing through the chamber. If there really were ’nids here, it was credits to carrots they’d be lurking in the unlit passageways, and I wasn’t about to venture down any of those without a squad or two of the PDF in front of me to find any unpleasant surprises first.
‘Well done, Donal,’ I said. ‘You too, Kayla. That service passage connects with the external docking ports, where the troopers we’re here to supervise are currently disembarking.’ At least it did if the map in my data-slate could be trusted, which was by no means certain; these mining habs had an unnerving tendency to change their internal layout faster than a noblewoman’s wardrobe. Fortunately it turned out to be reliable in this instance, as my internal compass had already assured me, and within a few moments we were making our way up a gradual slope towards the unmistakable sound of a lot of people jammed into a confined space and not at all happy about it.
‘This way,’ Donal said decisively, leading the way down a cross corridor we’d come to after a minute or two of climbing, and I found it hard to disagree. There were more cables here, and electrosconces attached to the walls at regular intervals, not to mention more of the metal doorways set into the rock: clearly we were entering one of the more frequently-used utility zones. Frequently used when the three hundred or so miners we’d come here to look for were going about their normal business, that was, and the sudden reminder of their absence set my palms tingling again. Almost without realising it, my hands fell to the weapons on my belt.
The cavern we entered was the largest we’d come to yet, which was just as well, as the PDF had done us proud: they’d promised a full platoon, and that’s what we got, five full squads and a command team, supplemented by a gaggle of heavy support troopers apparently attached at command level. They were forming up reasonably efficiently as we arrived, and I made a quick mental note of which of the ubiquitous metal doors led to the docking port, and the mineral barge beyond: a reasonably easy deduction, as the portal had been left open, and the dingy metal walls of a cargo airlock were clearly visible on the other side, their angular metal a stark and unmistakable contrast to the unfinished rock surrounding us.
‘Commissar.’ The young officer leading the rabble trotted across to me, his vox operator at his shoulder, and a trio of hard-faced troopers double-timing it behind, their lasguns already held ready for use. I’d have felt a lot happier with proper Guardsmen on the job, of course, but I have to admit that the Perlian PDF weren’t too bad for a local militia; they’d learned a lot the hard way from the orkish invasion less than a century ago, and were determined to make sure the greenskins wouldn’t get a second chance if they ever turned up again. (Which the occasional warband did from time to time, of course, as they so often do on worlds once sullied by their presence, despite the campaign to eradicate them apparently having been completely successful at the time[11].) As a result they were more battle-ready than most PDFs in the sector, a fact I suspected a good many of them had come to regret in the last few years, as they’d been comprehensively tithed for the Guard in order to make up the losses caused by the first onslaught of the tyranid assault. ‘Lieutenant Vorlens, officer commanding.’
‘Lieutenant.’ I returned the salute, trying to get a reasonable picture of the man as I did so. He was young, like most of the troopers surrounding us, but he seemed clear and decisive enough despite his inexperience. At least he didn’t gawp at me, like most Perlians catching sight of me for the first time tended to do, so it appeared he was capable of keeping his mind on the job, which was an encouraging sign. If the best of the PDF had been sent off to fight the hive fleets (or, more likely, end up as fodder for them), Vorlens at least seemed like one of the best of the rest. Which, under the circumstances, was probably the best I could hope for. ‘You have a battle plan?’
‘Not much of one,’ he admitted, which, paradoxically, I found distinctly encouraging; overconfidence kills more soldiers than las-bolts do. ‘Anything complicated would just fall apart in a place like this anyway.’
‘You’re right about that,’ I agreed, to the young officer’s manifest surprise and relief. ‘I’ve been on sweeps like this before, and any kind of large-scale deployment is right out.’
‘That’s just what I thought,’ Vorlens said. He produced a data-slate of his own, and brought up a copy of the map I’d been looking at a few moments before. ‘So I’m dividing the platoon up into squads, and assigning them each a sector, fanning out from here along the main access tunnels.’ Several of the principal corridors turned blue, indicating the main line of the planned advance. ‘As they reach the side passages they can detach a fireteam to reconnoitre along them, while the other half of the squad remains at the junction to cover their backs[12].’ He glanced sideways at me, clearly prepared for my disapproval, and hoping I wouldn’t overrule the unorthodox tactic.
‘Just what I’d do,’ I assured him. I turned to the cadets behind me. ‘You’ll be assigned as we discussed in the shuttle. One per fireteam.’ I noticed a hand twitching, before the impulse to raise it was suppressed. Good. They might not be fully-fledged commissars yet, but drawing attention to the fact would hardly help morale. ‘Kayla, you have a question?’
‘Yes, commissar.’ Vorlens blinked, suddenly registering the fact of her gender. ‘Two of us per squad leaves two over. What will they be doing?’
‘Well, someone needs to keep an eye on the heavy weapons teams,’ I said. I glanced at Vorlens. ‘I assume you have some idea of how you want to deploy them?’ Two sets of autocannon crews were setting up their weapon mounts as we spoke, flanking the doorway leading to the airlock and the docked freighter beyond, and the young lieutenant nodded.
‘Right here,’ he said. ‘They can’t lug that kit around in the main tunnel complex without getting in everyone’s way.’ Picturing the clumsy heavy weapons in such a confined space, I certainly couldn’t argue with that. ‘And that rust bucket’s our only way off this rock. If there really are tyranids running around loose up here, I want it defended.’
‘Me too,’ I agreed. I picked a cadet at random. ‘Garvie, that’s your assignment.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he replied, looking both serious and resigned, and I favoured him with a smile.
‘Don’t think you’re missing out on the fun,’ I assured him. ‘If the ’nids realise how vital this chamber is, you’ll see plenty of action.’ Garvie nodded again, his face set, and trotted off to get in the way of the gunners guarding the airlock.
‘You think they’re definitely here, then?’ Vorlens asked.
‘I’d put money on it,’ I said. ‘Three hundred miners don’t just vanish.’ For a moment a chill fragment of memory flitted across my synapses, and I shuddered at the recollection of a similar conversation some seventy years earlier. I’d gone looking for a few missing miners on Simia Orichalcae, and ended up blundering into a necron tomb, managing to survive only by the narrowest of margins and a ridiculous amount of luck. Recalling myself to the present with an effort, I chided myself for allowing the thought to spook me. Compared to the necrons, even the prospect of facing a genestealer brood seemed positively welcome.
‘Then where are they?’ Donal asked, looking around with a faintly theatrical air.
‘You’ll see them soon enough,’ I assured him, more presciently than I knew, and returned my attention to Vorlens. ‘They’re stealthy. They’ll hide in the shadows, and they’ll attack on sight. Your men should keep their luminators on at all times, and check every nook and cranny they come across. Even ones which seem far too small to hide in; believe me, they can squeeze in anywhere.’
‘Thanks for the advice,’ the young lieutenant said. ‘Anything else we should bear in mind?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘Keep an eye on the ceilings, too. Some of them can cling on up there, and drop on you when you’re passing.’ I glanced at Nelys, whose expression was one of incredulous disbelief, and felt a flare of irritation in response. ‘I’ve seen them take out an entire squad of Astartes that way.’ No point mentioning that the luckless Space Marines in question had been wearing Terminator armour, and the genestealer swarm had ripped them apart regardless; the troops surrounding us were keyed up enough already, without me scaring them half to death before we even got started.
‘Your best tactic is to make sure you’ve got clear firelanes, and as much distance as possible between you and any possible concealment. They’ll bunch up nice and tightly in these narrow tunnels, and they generally charge in a swarm, so you should be able to gun most of them down before they get close enough to do any harm.’ Assuming we weren’t facing ’nids with ranged weapons, of course, and even then most close-combat forms were hellishly fast and agile, but it wouldn’t be tactful to mention that either, so I didn’t. The troopers around us, who were all conspicuously failing to look as though they weren’t listening avidly to the conversation, were at least starting to take heart from my carefully-phrased pose of confidence, so it looked as if we were about as ready as we were ever going to get.
‘Then we may as well get started,’ Vorlens said, gesturing to his vox man. ‘Move them out, following the assigned routes.’ He glanced in my direction. ‘As soon as you’ve got your people deployed, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I said, pleased to note that he’d fallen quite naturally into the ideal relationship between soldier and commissar; he was prepared to listen to any advice I had to offer, and make use of any he felt valuable, but wasn’t going to let my presence undermine his own authority with the troopers under his command. Quite right too; we were there to boost morale, not give orders[13]. I just hoped Nelys would realise that, and stay on the right side of the line.
Well, that, at least, I could do something about. I beckoned him over. ‘Nelys,’ I said, ‘you take First Squad. Liaise with the platoon sergeant.’ I had no doubt that the most senior NCO present would be more than capable of reining him in if he got too cocky; in my experience they didn’t get to that position by suffering fools gladly. And just in case that wasn’t enough… ‘Kayla, go with him.’ She had enough common sense for the pair of them, I hoped.
‘Commissar.’ She gave me a thanks-for-nothing look as she saluted, no doubt divining my purpose in pairing them off, which fortunately Nelys missed, being too busy preening at being assigned to what he no doubt thought was a prime position. The two of them peeled off to join their squad, which promptly moved out of the cavern, their feet raising echoes from the enclosed walls of the tunnel they were searching. I was pleased to note that the soldiers comprising it were covering each other even at this stage, taking nothing for granted, and began to feel a little easier about the assignment. Vorlens’ boys might have been wet behind the ears, but they’d clearly been paying attention in basic training.
‘Stebbins, Frister, you’ve got Second Squad,’ I said. The two of them were friends, and worked reasonably well together. ‘Maklin and Dallory, you take Third. Heskin and Klarch, Fourth. Tilar and Briel, Fifth.’ One by one, the remaining squads, reinforced by the pairs of commissar cadets, moved out, until only Jurgen, myself, and the command team was left. And Donal, of course. I turned to him. ‘You’re with the lieutenant,’ I told him, unnecessarily.
‘I’m flattered by your confidence in me,’ he replied, which was uncomfortably close to the sort of answer I would have given at his age, and which confirmed my judgement in not letting him out of my sight. He turned to Vorlens. ‘Are you intending to monitor the operation from here?’
‘No.’ To my well-concealed horror, the young lieutenant was shaking his head. Up until then I’d been taking it for granted that staying put and co-ordinating the sweep a stone’s throw from the safety of the airlock had been part of his plan; it certainly would have been in any of the Guard regiments I’d served with. But of course there wasn’t a nice cosy command Chimera to sit in here, full of vox gear and auspex arrays to make that work; just a data-slate and his vox operator. In fact I was probably more on top of things myself, thanks to the network of comm-beads linking me to Jurgen and the cadets. ‘We’ll be pushing on to the main habitation area. If there are any survivors, that’s where we’re most likely to find them.’
‘Sounds good to me,’ Donal said, drawing his laspistol, and glancing in my direction. ‘Will you be accompanying us, commissar?’
‘Of course,’ I said, drawing my own. As usual, my completely undeserved reputation for extravagant heroics was about to drag me into mortal danger, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to back out of it without fatally undermining my authority with the cadets.
‘Then, if you’re ready,’ Vorlens said, ‘let’s go hunt some ’nids.’
CHAPTER THREE
I don’t know if Vorlens ever realised how ironic his words were but I was all too aware, as we set off into the labyrinth of tunnels, that if there was any hunting to be done, it was going to be done by the tyranids. I’d been in similar situations to this far too many times to count, and none of them had ended well, beyond the faintly surprising fact of my continued survival. At least we were heading along one of the primary access tunnels, which was relatively wide and brightly lit, so we’d have plenty of warning of any lurking organisms up ahead. Or so I hoped.
‘Sector twelve clear,’ Stebbins reported, his voice a little attenuated in my comm-bead by scores of metres of intervening rock, a moment before Vorlens’s vox man began to relay an identical report from the sergeant in charge of Second Squad. ‘Moving on to sixteen.’
‘Acknowledged,’ I said, keeping my voice steady with an effort. None of the other teams had found anything yet either, and the longer we went without contacting the enemy the less I liked it. Which, if you’ve read much of these ramblings of mine, will probably surprise you but I don’t mind admitting I was getting thoroughly spooked by this time. I was all too aware that to have taken out over three hundred people before someone managed to get to a vox and yell for help would have required a significant number of attackers, so we should have stumbled across a few of them by now. The fact that we hadn’t meant that they were probably concentrated somewhere up ahead, perhaps even waiting in ambush, which was far from a comforting reflection.
‘Perhaps they’re dormant again,’ Jurgen suggested. ‘Like the nest we found on Utoxita.’
‘That’s possible,’ I said, hoping he was right, but privately doubting that we’d be that lucky. I turned to Vorlens. ‘If they are, they’ll be concentrated in a cavern somewhere, digesting what’s left of the miners and waiting for dessert to turn up.’
‘How big a cavern?’ Donal asked, taking out his data-slate.
I shrugged. ‘That depends on how many there are. My guess would be somewhere between thirty and sixty, but with ’nids you can never be sure of anything.’
‘That’s a lot of tyranids,’ Vorlens said. ‘How could that many stay hidden for so long?’ He looked dubious. ‘One or two might have been able to evade the search teams, but I don’t see how a swarm that size could possibly have managed it.’
‘The fighting to cleanse this place was pretty intense,’ Donal said, showing that he’d at least skimmed through the briefing materials at some point on the shuttle trip, or wanted me to think that he had. ‘If one of the galleries collapsed, I suppose an entire brood might have been overlooked behind the rockfall.’
‘Just waiting for some frothead to come along and dig them out,’ Vorlens said. He glanced at me, briefly, before returning his attention to the shadows between the luminators spaced along the tunnel. ‘When we get to the main administration section we can look for a work schedule. That ought to tell us if anyone’s reopened a sealed-off shaft recently.’
‘Good idea,’ I responded, taking a slightly tighter grip on the butt of my laspistol. My palms were itching again, and I couldn’t account for it consciously, but something about the corridor up ahead seemed subtly wrong. Then it struck me. All the doors we’d passed so far had been closed, delaying us for several minutes while we checked a plethora of storerooms and side shafts, most of them dead ends, before resuming our march towards the heart of this tumbling death trap; but the portal a dozen or so metres ahead of us was ajar. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck begin to bristle, and dropped back a pace or two, ensuring that Vorlens and a couple of his troopers were ahead of me.
‘There are two hundred and seven caverns large enough to hold a swarm of the size you suggested,’ Donal said, glancing up from his data-slate. ‘None of them are recorded as having been sealed off, but this is an old map…’ His voice trailed away, and he stowed the slate hastily in a pocket of his greatcoat. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘That doorway,’ I said, drawing my chainsword, and indicating the portal ahead of us. To his credit, the lad was quick on the uptake; he drew his own weapons at once. Vorlens gestured to his troopers with the barrel of his laspistol, and two of them took up position on either side of the hinged metal slab, while the third covered it with his lasgun. That left the rest of us hanging back a little, which was fine by me, although I must confess to glancing up and down the echoing tunnel, straining my ears for the telltale skittering of claws on rock that would warn us of the approach of a pack of gaunts.
