Hero of the Imperium, page 67
Despite the obvious drawbacks, I’d decided to attach myself to Sulla’s command squad for the duration of the mission. For one thing there were only five of them, which meant that even with all the extra vox and sensoria equipment cluttering up the passenger compartment there was still a lot more room for Jurgen and myself than if we’d been jammed in alongside half a score of troopers, and for another I thought we might actually acquire some useful intelligence if I was around to restrain her generally commendable impulse to slaughter everything in sight that was not wearing an Imperial uniform. I suppose we could have tagged along in the Salamander, which would probably have helped my mood, but only at the expense of frostbite. One look at the open-topped vehicle was enough to resign me to Sulla’s company as by far the lesser of two evils.
‘Rooster one to mother hen,’ a voice crackled in my comm-bead. After a moment I recognised it as Sergeant Karta, whose recent elevation to the leadership of first squad had opened the way for Magot’s problematic (and probably temporary, knowing her record) promotion. ‘Objective two’s a bust. Proceeding to three.’
‘Acknowledged, rooster one.’ Sulla sounded vaguely affronted, as though the heretics were somehow cheating by not coming out to play according to the plan. It was no surprise to me, though; conditions were hellish out here, the landscape unstable, and the first site on our list had turned out to be nothing more than an icefall of quite epic proportions. Our third group, squads four and five, had had no more luck than the rest of us, and the young lieutenant was visibly champing at the bit. (An analogy which occurred quite naturally to me, since her long narrow face bore a distinct resemblance to an irritable horse at the best of times.) I have to say, though, had I realised just how soon her craving for action would be satisfied I would have been considerably less casual about my next remark.
‘Stay sharp,’ I cut in, more to remind everyone that I was there than because I had anything useful to say. ‘Every site we eliminate brings us closer to the real one.’ As I spoke I narrowed my eyes against the swirling snow, sure I’d caught a glimpse of yellow light out here where none should be. It could have been nothing, of course, but I didn’t get to my second century and an honourable retirement by ignoring the slightest presentiment of danger.
I switched frequencies to the local tacnet, bringing in Sulla, Sergeant Lustig in the other Chimera, and the three sentinel pilots. ‘Kill the lights,’ I ordered.
‘Commissar?’ Sulla sounded curious, but the spotlight of our own vehicle went out immediately, as did the one on second squad’s transport and the sole sentinel I could still see. I peered through the obscuring flurry of whiteness, seeing nothing for a moment, and had almost convinced myself I’d imagined it when the momentary gleam came again.
‘There’s something out there,’ I said, ducking back behind the armour plate, and regaining the blessed warmth of the passenger compartment. (All right, the temperature had been adjusted by Valhallans, so it was still pretty cool by most objective standards, but after a moment or two outside it felt positively hot.) ‘Two o’clock relative, moving slowly.’
‘Got it,’ the auspex operator confirmed after a moment. ‘Big, metallic, heading for town. Doing about forty klom per hour.40’
‘Captain, if you wouldn’t mind?’ I asked the comm-bead.
‘My pleasure.’ Captain Shambas, commander of our sentinel troop, ordered his squadron into the attack with the gusto I’d come to expect from him. ‘You heard the man. Last one to bag a heretic buys the beers. And try to leave a couple alive for the commissar to interrogate.’
‘Yes, sir.’ His flankers acknowledged, and I watched the screen of the auspex tensely as the three dots of the fast-moving sentinels peeled away from us to intercept the contact.
‘Tea, sir?’ Jurgen appeared at my shoulder, pouring a cup of steaming tanna from the flask he’d produced from one of the equipment pouches he was habitually festooned with. I took it and sipped the warming liquid gratefully.
‘Thank you, Jurgen,’ I said. The auspex operator flinched away from him, momentarily blocking my view of the display, so I heard rather than saw the engagement begin.
‘It’s a crawler,’ Shambas reported, to my total lack of surprise. ‘Looks like an ore truck. Jek, take the tracks.’ The distinctive crack of ionising air told me he’d triggered his own multi-lasers an instant ahead of his subordinate’s lascannon.
‘On it,’ Jek acknowledged. A moment later his voice took on a smug note. ‘Tracks frakked.’
‘They’re popping hatches,’ a female voice added, an instant ahead of a confused babble of noise. A moment later she was back. ‘Sorry commissar. They had a rocket launcher.’
‘Can’t be helped, Paola,’ I said, pleased that the momentary hesitation before I recalled her name had been so slight. But then there were only nine sentinel pilots in the entire regiment, and, in the nature of things, their names tended to cross my desk rather more frequently than most of the other troopers.41
The third sentinel in the squadron carried a heavy flamer, so there was no point in asking if there’d been any survivors; the gout of burning promethium would have flooded the cab, incinerating anyone inside. ‘Better them than one of you.’
‘My sentiments exactly,’ Shambas said, the bright dots of the sentinels peeling away across the auspex display to rejoin us. A moment later the stationary blip disappeared and a dull whump punched its way through the hull to reach our ears.
‘Oops,’ Paola said, with the flat tone of someone who doesn’t really mean it.
I shrugged. ‘Well I guess that answers the question of whether they had any more weapons back at the cache,’ I said.
‘And where it is.’ Sulla had been busy at the chart table behind us, and directed my attention to the hololithic image displayed there.
My heart sank. Our position was on a line almost directly between Glacier Peak and the next objective on our list. There could be little doubt that we were heading directly for the heretics’ outpost.
‘I think you’re right,’ I said, doing my best to sound casual. I shrank the scale of the holomap to the point where the other two groups appeared, far too far away to have any hope of joining us until long after we’d reached the objective. Sulla watched curiously.
‘Do you want me to bring the others up to join us?’ she asked. I nodded as though I’d been thinking about it, which of course I hadn’t. We knew for certain there were heretics where we were going, so waiting an hour or so to assault them with a full platoon instead of two squads, one of them half strength,42 was the only sensible thing to do as far as I was concerned. Mildly embarrassing if the outpost turned out to be deserted, of course, but I thought that would be something I could live with.
‘That might be prudent,’ I said, as though her raising the point had been the thing to make up my mind. ‘Normally I’d be inclined to push on and see what’s there, just as we planned, but now that we know there’s a heretic stronghold of some kind up ahead I’d like to be sure we’ve got them properly surrounded before we move in. No point in letting any of them slip away if we can avoid it.’
‘Of course,’ Sulla said, slouching over to the vox unit as though I’d just insisted she finish her homework before she could go out. She gave the orders as crisply and efficiently as any other officer, though, and I was relieved to see both icons respond by changing course to join us. Group three (fourth and fifth squads along with sentinel squadron three) was the closer and had the advantage of clearer terrain to boot, with any luck they’d be with us in half an hour or so. Group one had a crevasse field to negotiate so would take at least twice as long.
As I listened to the brief exchange of messages, however, another thought struck me. Surely there hadn’t been time to get another crawler out here, loaded, and halfway back to town in little more than a day? The shipment we’d intercepted was probably a replacement for the one Sulla had destroyed, which meant the heretics manning the outpost had somehow known that it had failed to reach its destination and had dispatched a replacement. And that meant…
‘Scan all the frequencies,’ I ordered the vox operator, rounding on him so suddenly he visibly started. He hastened to comply, while Sulla watched me curiously.
After a moment the man began to nod. ‘I’m getting some traffic,’ he said. ‘Hard to pin down, but it’s local. They’re trying to contact someone called Andros.’
‘The heretics,’ I said. ‘They must be trying to raise the crawler.’ Which at least meant they hadn’t got a call off before Paola toasted them. But since they were too busy being dead to reply, it wouldn’t take their friends long to realise something had gone seriously ploin-shaped. Sulla looked at me, an expression of eager expectation on her face, and I nodded slowly. ‘We’ve run out of time.’
‘Move in,’ she ordered, and the Chimera jerked violently as the driver floored the accelerator. I grabbed the chart table for support and enlarged the scale again to the point where we, the other Chimera, and the trio of sentinels appeared as separate runes. She started to hoist herself up into the cupola, then hesitated. ‘Commissar. Would you care to…’
‘Ladies first,’ I said. ‘And I wouldn’t want to inhibit your ability to command in any way.’ Not to mention stick my head out from inside a nice solid box of armour plate while we engaged Emperor knew how many heavily-armed heretics.
‘Thank you.’ She shot me a grin and scrambled up into the top hatch. I glanced at the tactical display again. The walkers were pulling ahead, splitting to flank the heretics’ position and transmitting what data they could back to our command transport. Grainy images began to form on three pictscreens above our heads, snow and static mingling to render them almost incomprehensible.
‘I’m picking up heat sources,’ Shambas reported after a moment. ‘Could be humans.’ Or something like them, I found myself thinking. Not all followers of Chaos qualified any more, if they ever had to begin with. ‘No sign of habitation though.’
‘I’m guessing it’s that.’ Jek’s pictcaster twisted to settle on a large snowdrift, far too regular to be a natural formation.
One of the Valhallans next to me snickered and hefted her lasgun. ‘Shoot the camo party,’ she said. I could understand her amusement. If even I thought the mound looked suspicious, to the natives of an iceworld the heretics might just as well have painted it orange and put up a neon sign saying ‘We’re over here!’.
‘I’m sure somebody will,’ I assured her, getting a wide grin in return.
‘Could just be,’ Shambas responded to his subordinate. ‘Paola, find anything?’
‘They’ve been busy.’ She was over on the other flank, with Jek between her and the captain, which explained why he’d seen the mound first. ‘Don’t ask me why, but there’s a cleared space here the size of a shuttlepad.’ Her pictcaster showed me she hadn’t been exaggerating – someone had gone to a lot of trouble to clear a large area of rock and level it off. Of course it was knee deep in drifting snow by now, which on a sentinel is roughly up to the chest, but even so it had obviously been prepared with great care. Determining why it had been done, though, would have to wait until we’d taken the place.
We struck with a gratifying amount of surprise, the two laser-armed sentinels striking the dome from the flanks while both Chimeras opened up with their heavy bolters. As the covering of snow boiled away, flashing instantly to steam from the laser hits, I could see the unmistakable outline of a prefabricated hab dome identical to Emperor alone knows how many others scattered across civilised space.43 Jagged rents were appearing in the rockcrete surface as our bolter shells gouged and chipped away at it.
‘Found the main entrance,’ Paola voxed, the image from her pictcaster showing a swarm of thickly-bundled figures boiling from it like ants from a kicked-over nest. A bright orange flare of burning promethium gouted from somewhere below the imager, sending them scattering and plugging the gap. I found myself hoping that there was nothing too inflammable beyond it, like another ammo dump. That would be all we needed, another pile of smouldering wreckage in lieu of answers.
‘It won’t be the only one,’ I cautioned, having seen enough of the structures facing us to be familiar with its layout. There would be four in all, equidistantly spaced around the circumference, access to the cargo area opposite the main personnel door Paola had just blocked and two auxiliary ones between them. All, I knew, would be heavily defended; a guess which was confirmed a moment later as our Chimera slewed to a halt, small-arms rounds pattering from the armour plate of its sides. Our turret-mounted bolter traversed to return the favour and the familiar dull roar echoed through the interior of the transport.
‘We have to get inside,’ Sulla voxed. ‘Second squad, disembark and prepare to assault the side entrance.’ She was right, unfortunately, the success of our mission depended on penetrating the building and recovering what intelligence we could, but the price was going to be high. Lustig’s troopers were going to take some heavy casualties getting past the guards on the door. Worse still, I’d have to go in with them or lose the good opinion of the lord general. I debated internally for a moment whether to join them now and hope I could hang back enough to keep out of the way of the worst of it, or try to make some work for myself in the command Chimera until they’d cleared the way and risk giving the heretics a chance to regroup while I floundered through the snow once the noise had stopped.
Then my nose caught the familiar scent of Jurgen, approaching to retrieve his tanna flask, and a third alternative occurred to me. He was carrying a melta, as was his custom whenever we were expecting to run into trouble (which seemed to be most of the time these days).
I cut into the command circuit. ‘Wait a moment,’ I said. ‘I’ve had an idea.’ After a brief exchange of words with Sulla and the sentinel pilots, I steeled myself as best I could and piled out into the bitter cold, pausing barely long enough to adjust my snow goggles. (I’d been caught in the open without them once before, on Simia Orichalcae, and I wasn’t about to make that mistake again.)
The shock of it punched the air from my lungs and left every exposed part of my face stinging like the aftershock of a neural whip, but I kept going by sheer force of will, slogging through the knee-deep snow as if my life depended on it (which of course it did). Jurgen waded after me, sure-footed as only an iceworlder could be in these conditions, and I found his presence as reassuring as always. I glanced around, seeing the looming bulk of second squad’s Chimera a few metres away, which felt like kilometres to traverse, and plodded doggedly towards it. So focussed had I become on reaching my goal that I had almost forgotten the presence of the heretic defenders, until a gout of snow flashed into steam a few centimetres ahead of my foot.
I whirled, drawing my laspistol and seeking a target, grateful for once for the black uniform of my office, which would be nicely blurred in the all-pervading darkness. A flicker of motion caught my eye as a heavily-muffled heretic raised a lasgun and I shot him or her through the chest. The heretic fell back, wounded or dead, I couldn’t tell and didn’t care, and a moment later I gained the lee of the Chimera and the welcome cessation of that pestilential wind.
‘We’re ready when you are, commissar,’ Lustig said, his voice attenuated by the perpetual howling of the gale and the crackle of small-arms fire which told me the sentinels were doing a bang-up job of keeping the defenders busy. I’d got them circling the dome, moving fast so they’d be difficult to hit, and laying down fire as they went. Chances were they wouldn’t hit much (except possibly Paola), but that wasn’t the point; they’d keep the heretics’ heads down nicely, well dug in by the doors, sure they could keep us out indefinitely, which they probably could, under most circumstances. Unfortunately for them we didn’t need a door to get inside.
‘Whenever you’re ready, Jurgen,’ I said, after a short dash (for the Valhallans anyway, my progress was a bit slower and a lot less elegant) had brought us level with the gently curving wall.
‘Commissar.’ He levelled the melta and triggered it, while the rest of us flinched back and protected our eyes from the actinic flash of activation as best we could. The rockcrete burst into vapour, leaving a rapidly-cooling hole just wide enough for a trooper to get through.
‘Pyk, Friza.’ Lustig directed a couple of troopers through, and they took up position inside covering the corridor in each direction. Nobody shot them so I was next into the building, grateful for the sudden warmth despite the agonising cramps of returning circulation as my sluggish blood rushed back to my extremities. I began to take in our surroundings.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find inside, but this certainly wasn’t it. Soft carpets covered the floor, growing soggy from the snow flurrying in through the gap, and the walls were covered with murals depicting acts of sensuous depravity which left my mouth momentarily hanging open in stunned surprise. Most of the troopers seemed hypnotised by them, with the single exception of Jurgen; which, given his fondness for porno slates, was quite an astonishing feat of self-control.
‘I don’t believe that’s possible,’ Penlan said, with a trace of envy.
‘It’s not,’ I assured her, ‘and even if it was it would be against regulations.’ A thick, cloying scent was in the air, wrapping itself around my senses like the flimsiest of gossamer scarves, and a nagging sense of familiarity began trying to surface at the back of my mind. As my aide raised the melta and took up his accustomed place at my side, I found my head beginning to clear, although whether this was due to him masking the narcotic musk with his own earthier bouquet or his innate gifts blocking some insidious miasma of warpcraft I couldn’t be sure. In either case the priority now was to get the squad moving, and Jurgen was the key.
