Chem dog, p.17
Chem Dog, page 17
Hasp cuffed her with a grunt of effort. Tilz collapsed onto her back, clutching her head, groaning.
‘Keep your eyes off what doesn’t belong to you, mongrel,’ he said.
‘I’m looking outside myself,’ said Trevain.
‘We don’t have time,’ said Hasp.
‘She is going,’ said Raiffe.
Trevain clambered out, the crunch and thuds of her boots in the rubble echoing around the cavern.
Raiffe rounded on Hasp. ‘My patience with you is running thin,’ he said.
So it proved, to Trevain’s visible irritation, that Tilz was right.
It’s as if she wanted the place to be overrun with greenskins, Rastus thought. Wanted us to be trapped in here until they found us and burned us out.
A portion of the Mordians, led by Trevain, led the ragged Imperial force out of the cavern and into the fortress proper. Then followed the Savlars with Hasp and Grukkur, and finally a second group of Mordians led by Raiffe. One by one, they clambered out of the cavern and into the Ajaxus.
When it was Rastus’ turn, he squinted even in Kruxx’s light as he finally got out. When his eyes adjusted, he couldn’t believe what he saw. It was hard to accept that this was originally an Imperial construction. Scrap, daubed with ork glyphs and sigils painted red, blue and yellow, was hammered onto every surface and made up every alien construction. Effigies to alien deities dotted the scene, their cunning, brutal faces gazing over all they surveyed. Cruel red light from hundreds of fires reflected from metal surfaces, creating eerie patterns and vicious, flickering shadows. The blazes’ smoke billowed into the air, the smog clouds forming punctuated by bursts of bright light where flyers duelled in the skies or when anti-air fire detonated. Every few seconds Rastus witnessed a wreck tumble from high above, aflame and spinning before crashing into the ground. The booms and cracks, bangs and thuds of ceaseless weapons fire reverberated around the fortress’ interior.
Rastus’ sight was not his only sense assaulted. The stench of rotting meat, engine fumes, rusting metal and burning chemicals and bodies cloyed in the back of his throat and stung his eyes. Saturating it all was the thick stink of the xenos themselves. Rastus could almost feel it seep into his skin, crawl beneath his fingertips and crisp his uniform.
A Mordian on one knee at the group’s perimeter vomited. Then another. Then Kazyn.
‘And so the cleanup begins, in the Emperor’s name,’ muttered Rastus. ‘Good, clean, honest human vomit, drowning out the filth of the alien.’
‘Rastus.’
It was Hasp. The man looked tired.
‘Sir.’
‘We’re following the wall to the right, as you can see it from the Twenty-Two-Oh-First’s original positions. Back towards the breach. We’ll find a storage bunker. We’ll remain in the same order we left in. Mordians front and rear. Us in the centre.’
‘Understood, sir,’ said Rastus.
Hasp moved to leave.
‘Sir,’ Rastus asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Where are the greenskins?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Hasp, looking around.
‘That bothers me, sir.’
‘It is out of character for them. We’ll find them or they’ll find us eventually.’
‘Hopefully the former, sir,’ Rastus said, with a slight smile. Hasp did not return it. ‘They could be planning something, commissar.’
‘They could,’ said Hasp. His voice sounded distant, as if he was only halflistening and his mind was wandering. His eyes were constantly moving, looking around and over Rastus’ shoulders. ‘Be ready for anything. They held fire long enough earlier. Something else out of character.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Rastus. He couldn’t disagree with that.
In the minutes that followed, Rastus’ heart pounded and his stomach seemed to fill his throat. His breaths were quick and short. Sweat beaded and flowed freely from his forehead, armpits and groin. On occasion the disharmonious sounds of rattling metal and weapons fire made him think he heard an ork shout or laugh. Fire and sunlight cast against crude ork constructions created shadows resembling armoured greenskin warriors or hungry, salivating squigs.
The Imperial soldiers passed refuse piles full of discarded human bones covered in rough gnaw marks where ork teeth had picked them clean of flesh. Not even the Savlars felt tempted to go through them looking for valuables.
The xenos were obsessed with maws and fangs. Even their shelters look like jagged fangs in some hungering mouth, Rastus thought. The walls of the ramshackle structures in many places zigzagged, resembling how a child would draw the sharp teeth of a monster.
Just come for us, Rastus thought many times. Emperor, bring your enemies to us so we can kill them.
But they didn’t.
Ahead, the Mordians identified ork traps – most being metal jaws designed to snap shut around an ankle – and disabled them.
When at last the Mordians and Savlars did encounter the orks, the moment was not what Rastus had imagined. They were not suddenly attacked from the flank or behind, hacked down by xenos with heavy, rusting cleavers or their bodies pumped full of heavy ork shot. They were not eaten alive by a herd of squealing squigs bursting free from some cage out of insatiable hunger for meat. They were not torn apart by war machines in a hail of fire and lead.
Instead, they nearly bypassed a patrol completely that was taking a path parallel to them. Trevain had had the sense to halt the formation. There were only a dozen xenos.
The Mordians and Savlars ambushed them.
After they brought down every last ork with las fire, the Imperial troops took to them with bayonets and entrenching tools. Tension, terror, rage, hatred – the Savlars and Mordians unleashed it all upon the aliens, wounded or dead, determined to ensure none lived. Some laughed, others cried. This was some small manner of vengeance for them, for what the orks had done to them, and they all partook. Grukkur crushed skulls beneath his boots. Kazyn sat astride one, driving her bayonet into its chest so many times the flesh and bone were all but pulverised. For Rastus’ part he did the same, punching his blade into the face of a greenskin, popping eyes, cracking fangs, mangling brains.
When a hand grabbed him by the shoulder, he roared, bared his teeth and raised his knife.
He stopped when he saw it was Hasp.
‘Get a frekking hold of yourself,’ the commissar snarled through gritted teeth. He pressed his forehead into the Savlar’s and grabbed him by the throat. ‘More could come any minute, you mongrel idiot,’ he spat. Rastus shook his head and wiped his eyes. Raiffe and Trevain were each in their own ways knocking heads together.
They were all more focused after that. The danger was real, but it was invisible; it was not hiding around every corner waiting to pounce. It was killable, it was defeatable.
Rastus put a las burst into the grot’s sunken chest. The diminutive creature slumped to the ground, its bulging belly concealing its face from him. With no chance to reload, he drove his bayonet into the back of the next creature as it ran from him howling in fear, catching it in the nape of its neck. The alien’s legs gave out the moment the blade severed its spine. Rastus stamped a boot down onto the xenos’ back, twisted the weapon and pulled it free. He wiped the blood on the grot’s filthy tunic before checking to ensure the blade was still firmly affixed to his lasgun’s barrel.
‘Two more down,’ he said.
There were dozens of them in the munitions bunker they had found. With no more around him, he reloaded his weapon.
The Savlars butchered them with ease.
‘It’s a frekking treasure trove,’ said Judd with a laugh.
‘You’re frekking right,’ said Rastus. Once the grots were dead he had a better chance to look around. There were hundreds of artillery shells and mortar rounds they couldn’t do anything with, but in one chamber there was enough small-arms and ammunition for an entire Savlar battalion, taken by the orks from the destroyed garrison.
The Savlars all helped themselves to charge packs, pistols and knives, many from regiments and forge worlds they’d never heard of. Rastus took a laspistol with the stamp of Mars itself and an autopistol with the words For Andriia, for the Emperor etched into the side. Was Andriia a world, or a person, perhaps the beloved of the weapon’s former owner?
Doesn’t matter, a story means someone’ll pay more, Rastus thought as he stashed it.
The Savlars laughed and hooted as they filled their packs with dog tags, assorted personal effects and heirloom weapons belonging to dead Imperial soldiers.
Szank swished a fine officer’s duelling cutlass through the air. Tilz bagged up a bandolier of smoke bombs and examined scopes from a dozen different marks of long-las. Judd was scooping up any jewellery he could find. Xiv hefted a new shotgun and strapped two melta bombs to her chest. Judd and Rec collected handheld vox-units.
Hasp can say what he likes, thought Rastus. Those are mission-critical.
‘The Emperor rewards His victors!’ Kazyn cried, and they all laughed.
The supa-lobba and krusha kannon crews scrambled for their weapons as Grukkur burst from an alleyway near their position. The ogryn blasted one ork apart with his ripper gun before it had even stood up, leaving a pair of severed lower legs sticking out of their brown leather boots. A pair of gretchin were quicker, but Grukkur caved in one’s skull with a single punch and skewered the other with the ‘bayonet’ affixed to the end of his gun, which was more akin to a huge cleaver. The ork was obliterated by the ogryn’s thrust, and Grukkur pushed through its broken corpse and out the other side in an eruption of gore before throwing the mangled body off his weapon and onto the ground.
Hasp, Xiv, Judd and several Mordians were several yards behind the ogryn, and the abhuman’s size ensured he increased the distance with every pace. The Savlars’ reprieve in the cache had been short indeed.
The commissar blew out an ork’s chest with a shot from Reaper. He batted away a cleaver swing from another with his power hammer before backhanding it down through the alien’s skull. The creature crumpled as its eyes popped and melted from the heat of the weapon’s power field behind them.
The Mordians and Savlars unleashed as much las fire as they could into the remaining greenskins. The xenos returned fire, some holding weapons over the top of barricades and shooting blind, or else standing in defiance, unloading at full-automatic from the hip.
The ork artillery pieces were set in a large emplacement with stacks of enormous shells. They were surrounded by ork scrap-shanties that looked as if they could collapse any minute, and several other alleys led to it.
Their attack wasn’t to secure the gun site; there were too few of them to do that.
‘Lay down the smoke now!’ Hasp ordered, looking to Xiv.
Several yards to his left, Xiv pulled a smoke grenade from a pouch at her hip. She pulled the pin and stood up. As she held the grenade back to throw it into the middle of the ork artillery, an ork burst from an alley, wielding a pair of axes. Before she knew what was happening, the beast drove an axe through the side of her head, cleaving it in two. In rapid succession it hacked the other weapon sideways through her back and out through her guts.
The grenade fell.
Judd roared and charged the ork, firing shell after shell from his shotgun into the creature. Its knee, shoulder and head exploded in bursts of bone and gore. Judd picked up the grenade and threw it as the first puffs of blue smoke snaked their way out of its plastek casing.
The moment the grenade left his hand, dozens of ork warriors appeared from several other alleyways.
‘Retreat!’ bellowed Hasp. ‘Rally point gamma!’
Judd made to pick up Xiv’s shattered, lifeless remains.
‘Leave her!’ Hasp shouted as Grukkur fired a salvo at the oncoming xenos.
The commissar fired Reaper as he stepped back, attempting to cover Judd and the Mordians. Two of the latter fell in quick succession, struck in the back and behind the knees. Both screamed in pain on the ground. Hasp lowered Reaper and gave them the Emperor’s Mercy.
‘God-Emperor, take the souls of these loyal men into your bosom. May they bathe eternally in your glorious light.’
He drew a vox-unit from his waist.
‘Commissar Raiffe, this is Commissar Hasp. Target marked. Tell the Ironbarrels to follow the colour of Mordian. There is death to be meted out there.’
Two minutes later, a dozen Earthshaker shells landed where the ork artillery had been. Xenos were blown to nothing, even their teeth becoming dust. The krusha kannons and supa-lobbas were rent into pieces by the explosions, and the shells lying around them were caught in the bombardment. A colossal ripple of gargantuan detonations followed, blowing apart shanties for a hundred yards in all directions.
Hasp heard the sound, and felt the ground shake beneath his feet, and smiled. But he saw none of the damage. They already had another target.
‘How many?’ asked Hasp.
‘At least three hundred,’ said Rastus.
‘You can smell them from here,’ said Tilz, still looking down the scope of her long-las. ‘Could be more, sir. They’re all moving about, and the shanties and that statue of theirs blocks some of the view.’
The three of them lay on their bellies, looking out of a ‘window’ in an abandoned ork tower that overlooked large swathes of a shanty town. The building’s metal sheeting and rusting fittings rattled and clanged every time the greenskin artillery fired within half a mile. The whole tower swayed, and the wind blowing through it howled and roared as it reverberated from the metal floor, walls and ceiling. Such was the size of the Bastion Ajaxus that the orks had erected whole districts of habitations only to abandon them later. A few hundred yards away the greenskins were keeping hundreds of squigs.
‘I will see,’ said Hasp.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Tilz. She unscrewed the scope from her rifle and passed it to Rastus, who was in between them, who passed it to the commissar.
He looked through it.
There they were, hundreds of the red, scaled monsters whose enormous jaws occupied more space than the entire rest of their body. Hasp’s lip curled. Filth. Emperor, may the galaxy one day be rid of these abominations.
With the scope he could count the fangs in their gaping maws, see the rotting meat between their fangs and their purple, warted tongues. All of them were criss-crossed with scars – whether from the whips of ork herdmasters or the claws of their own kind. At any one time several dozen were fighting, ripping chunks out of each other with vicious bites or powerful kicks from their clawed feet. The creatures were thickly muscled. Though much of their mass was concentrated around their enormous heads and immense jaws, their thighs rippled with tension.
Hasp looked around. The creatures were kept in a pen with razor-wire-lined scrap-metal walls some twenty feet high that curved inwards at the top. Holes dug by the squigs all around the perimeter suggested the orks buried a similar height of wall to stop the monsters from burrowing their way out. The wall was a foot thick at least, with numerous support girders set at right angles. When Hasp saw a squig charge the wall headfirst, he watched it bounce off, then collapse dazed. It was clearly still alive, but this moment of weakness was all the opportunity its kin needed to pounce upon it and begin ripping it apart for an unexpected – but very welcome – feast. They punctured scale, snapped bone and tenderised meat with sickening ease.
The commissar could not help but notice what a dent the creature had left behind in the wall. But the structure was still sound.
Observing the monsters renewed and reinforced his sense of disgust at the thought of the alien.
Truly a blight on all that is good and holy, deserving only total elimination.
It also gave him an idea. He eyed the gates and the support girders.
Directly in front of Rastus was an ork standing with its back to him.
Then its head snapped forward, and the creature crumpled to the ground.
As Rastus ran past, he glanced at the back of its head – there was a small, round, bloody burn mark.
Thank you, Tilz.
The sniper was providing overwatch as Rastus, Kazyn, Judd and several Mordians with demolition charges ran to some of the support girders where the squigs had been pummelling the wall of their pen the hardest.
They were navigating the alleys, and Tilz couldn’t cover them all the time.
An ork burst out of a building, eyes wide with rage, spittle flying as it roared, yellow fangs bared. It was unarmed, and barrelled into one of the Mordians, burying its teeth deep in the woman’s neck. She screamed as blood gushed from inches-wide puncture wounds, thrashing her limbs helplessly in her shock, terror and agony. Judd pumped his shotgun and fired into the xenos’ back, shredding it. The creature instantaneously slumped, dead, on top of the Mordian, who was gone when Judd checked her. He shook his head at Hasp. Then he moved to take what of her gear he could.
‘Just the demo charges,’ Rastus said. ‘We need them. Otherwise we keep moving.’
Judd stared at him, eyes wide in disbelief.
Rastus knew what he was thinking. A Savlar never told another Savlar not to take if they could take.
‘If we get killed trying to take a few las packs and trinkets, then you won’t get to enjoy your loot anyway,’ he said.
Judd muttered angrily to himself as he took the dead Mordian’s demo charges. Her comrades stared at him as he did so, fingers on triggers.
That’s the last thing we need, thought Rastus.
Over the following half an hour of navigating the orks’ labyrinthine settlement, every corner and doorway held the possibility of gruesome death.
Kazyn was nearly cut in half by an ork spinning a cleaver around with a blade the length of her torso, but was saved at the last second when a Mordian thrust his bayonet into the beast’s neck.
