The Emperor's Finest

TWELVE

LUCKILY FOR US, and unluckily for the greenskin, my weapons were already in my hands, and with reflexes sharpened by paranoia I cracked off a couple of las-bolts the second I saw it. Both rounds hit their mark, inflicting wounds which would have crippled or killed a human, but which only seemed to annoy the ork. Not for the first time, I found myself marvelling at their resilience even as I cursed it. The shots did serve to distract the brute, however; as it pushed its way through the narrow gap, the frame of the hatchway deforming to admit the full width of its shoulders, it staggered from the impact, catching its foot against the threshold. Pivoting adroitly out of the way of the toppling slab of bellowing, spittle-spraying malevolence, I decapitated it neatly with a single stroke of my chainsword, and turned to run before either segment of the creature had hit the deck plates.

'What are you waiting for?' I shouted, finding my way blocked by Mira, who, to my amazement, was trotting towards the downed ork with an expression of grim determination on her face.

'I need a weapon,' she said, stooping towards the outflung hand which still clutched a huge, crudely made pistol.

'Not that one!' I shouted, knocking her out of the way just as the cadaver's terminal muscle spasm tightened its finger on the trigger, and the spot she'd been standing on abruptly became a hole in the deck and a blizzard of razor-edged metal shards. Even if she could have prised the ork's hand open, a dubious proposition at the best of times, grabbing the gun wouldn't have helped her much in any case: she'd have had trouble even lifting the thing, and any attempt to fire it would simply have dumped her on her well-padded aristocratic arse, probably breaking her arm in the process[65]. Now was hardly the time to be explaining all this, though, so I simply pointed at the howling, frenzied mob of greenskins fighting one other to get through the gap in the wall, while the brighter ones began to dismember their erstwhile comrade in an attempt to get past the obstructing corpse to reach us. 'Run!'

Stubborn and argumentative she may have been, but Mira was no fool. She was hard on my heels as I pelted along the corridor, intent on nothing more than opening up as big a lead as I could before the orks could force their way past the cadaver, and one another. A brief burst of gunfire behind us spurred me on, indicating as it did that the question of precedence had now been settled in the traditional orkish fashion, and that the vanguard was probably already in pursuit.

'What's your plan?' she panted.

'Don't get eaten,' I said. I'd be the first to admit it wasn't much of one, but it had always worked up until now. I activated my comm-bead. 'Cain to bridge, contact confirmed, hostiles engaged.' (Which I thought sounded a lot better than ''run away from after a lucky hit''.)

'Oh, and the Viridian envoy's still with me.'

'Acknowledged.' The Astartes captain sounded a little distracted, even given the current emergency. As he paused, the faint sounds of combat drifted through the tiny vox receiver in my ear. It seemed the orks were assaulting the bridge, just as I'd feared, but had yet to break through the defences I'd seen being erected on my way out[66]. 'All units are currently engaged.' In other words, good luck, you're on your own.

'May the Emperor protect,' I said as I signed off, which he was welcome to interpret as encouragement if he liked. I had someone a little closer in mind for His attention, and couldn't help wishing He'd had a few spare Astartes to make the job easier.

'I'm on my way, commissar,' a new voice cut in, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit to feeling a sudden surge of relief at the familiar sound of Jurgen's phlegm-thickened tones. Here, at least, was aid I knew I could rely on, even if it was going to take a while to get here.

'We'll save a few greenskins for you,' I assured him. No Valhallan Guardsman would relish sitting on the sidelines while there were orks to be shot, and I was certain he'd been chafing under my orders to remain where he was. 'Any sign of them down there?'

'Not even the sniff of one,' Jurgen said, his faintly resentful tone confirming my guess.

'Then we'll meet you halfway,' I told him. It appeared I'd been right about the guest quarters being as close to a safe refuge as anyone could find aboard the Revenant under the circumstances, so it seemed a pity not to take advantage of the fact. Jurgen may have lacked my affinity for three-dimensional mazes, but his straightforward mental processes would more than make up for that. I'd have bet my pension (which, like every other commissar in the field, I never really expected to be claiming in any case) that he'd simply head for K fifteen by the shortest possible route, and Mork[67] help any greenskin standing in his way.

'Meet who, halfway to where?' Mira demanded, only having heard one side of the conversation, and I filled her in as rapidly as I could.

'Jurgen, the guest quarters. There's fighting going on all over the ship, so it seems the best place to keep you safe.' There were always the saviour pods, of course, but taking to them would definitely be the last resort: our chances of surviving in a system crawling with orks were negligible. The Revenant, on the other hand, was our home ground, albeit infested with greenskins. If they weren't reinforced again too quickly, we might yet turn the tide.

As if to mock my hopes, the voice of the auspex operator rang in my comm-bead almost as soon as I'd completed the thought. 'Incoming torpedo volley. Stand by to repel more boarders.'

'Like we're just going to ignore them,' I muttered irritably, receiving a sharp look from Mira, who probably wondered if I was finally cracking under the strain. Before she could distil her disquiet into a typically acidic comment, however, the rather more welcome voice of Drumon crackled in my ear.

'Enginarium purged. Transiting now.'

Hardly had he finished speaking than the synapse-wrenching sensation which usually accompanied entry to the warp swept over me, more strongly than I could recall ever having felt it before; clearly, whatever the Techmarine had done, he'd done in a hurry, without time to complete all the necessary rituals. As the wave of nausea pounded through my body, I still found it in me to thank the Emperor that he'd managed it. The wave of reinforcements the auspex op had just detected would be passing harmlessly through empty space by now[68], instead of injecting another dose of poison into our reeling vessel, and the balance of the battle had just tipped decisively in our favour. Now it would just be a matter of tracking down the ones who'd already made it aboard, and eliminating them.

'What the hell was that?' Mira asked, her face preternaturally pale after depositing her supper on the deck plates.

Checking the impulse to respond 'Looks like it used to be florn cakes,' I shrugged. 'We're back in the warp. Drumon got us out in the nick of time.'

'Well he could have been a bit more careful,' Mira shot back. 'I feel awful.'

'You'd have felt a lot worse with another wave of greenskins rampaging through the ship,' I pointed out, perhaps not as tactfully as I might have done, but I still wasn't feeling too good myself, don't forget. Hardly had the words left my mouth than a bellow of triumphant rage behind us reminded me that there were still more than enough orks aboard to be going on with. 'Run!'

'Run? I can hardly walk!' Mira snapped back, clearly well on the road to recovery. She turned her head, and apparently decided she could run quite well after all, as she caught sight of the mob of orks rounding the last turn we'd taken in the corridor. There were five of them, the two in front filling the passageway from side to side, all brandishing shootas[69] like the one I'd dissuaded Mira from picking up in one hand, and equally crude axes in the other.

The one in front had a metal jaw, which I'm bound to say hardly improved his appearance, and more scar tissue than Gries. Clearly the most dangerous, and therefore the new leader. The rest were little better, particularly the one who seemed to have taken a bath in acid some time in the past, who glared at the world through a single, red-rimmed augmetic eye, and whose stance at Metaljaw's shoulder was enough to tell me that the two of them had fought together long enough to watch each other's backs as effectively as a greenskin could.

Before I could get a decent look at the rest, bolts and solid slugs began making a mess of the wall near where we stood, but fortunately they appeared to be no better shots than most of their kind. It could only be a matter of time before they got lucky, though, so I ducked down the nearest cross passage, Mira at my heels.

'Why didn't you shoot back?' she demanded, with a single glance over her shoulder to see if the greenskins had reached the junction yet. I didn't bother, secure in the knowledge that a renewed fusillade would announce their presence as soon as they could see us again, and turned into the first cross corridor which would take us back towards our original route. The last thing I needed now was Jurgen missing us because of the impromptu diversion.

'Because I'd have to be damn lucky to bring one down, and the rest would be on us by the time I did,' I explained, reminding myself that she'd never seen the creatures before, so she wouldn't have anything like the hard-won appreciation I did for their resilience and ferocity.

No doubt recalling the exaggerated stories she'd heard about my exploits on Perlia, Mira nodded briskly. 'Can we outrun them, then?' she asked.

'I doubt it,' I said. We might stay ahead of them for a while, but their superior strength and endurance would tell against us in the end.

'Then we need an edge.' She slowed, and looked speculatively at the nearest of the ubiquitous access panels, to which a prayer slip had been affixed by a wax seal, the freshness of both mute testament to the diligence of the Revenant's enginseers. 'Can you get one of these open?'

By way of an answer, I swung my chainsword, chewing through the thin metal in seconds and a shower of sparks. No doubt the tech-priests would be horrified by so casual a desecration of even this minor a shrine to the Omnissiah, but it was nothing compared to the damage the orks would do to the ship if left unchecked. Or to us, come to that, which I must admit was of rather more pressing concern to me. 'What have you got in mind?'

Mira smiled, for the first time since I'd run into her. 'An old hunter's trick,' she said, starting to pull wires from the gap between the walls.

I have to admit I'd had my doubts about the wisdom of going along with this, every second we delayed eroding our hard-won lead, but I stayed to cover the corner around which I expected the orks to come at any moment while Mira busied herself with the cables she'd extracted. It seemed that despite my earlier scepticism in the bunker below the palace in Fidelis, her hunting trips had indeed endowed her with some knowledge and skills which might be of use to us in the present emergency. Her marksmanship, quite exceptional for a civilian, I already had good reason to be grateful for, so it seemed worth the risk to tarry a moment or two to see what else she had up her sleeve. Besides, I was confident that I could run faster than her if push came to shove, and our pursuers got too close.

'Finished,' she said, after a tense few moments, and not before time, as the clatter of iron-shod feet against deck plates was beginning to reverberate through my spine. 'Can I borrow this?'

Before I could even ask what ''this'' was, she snatched my cap from my head, and reached up to hook it on a length of wire she'd thrown over a pipe running along the centre of the ceiling. My purloined headgear swung in the middle of the corridor, a little above my head and about face height for an ork. I didn't have the faintest idea what she intended to achieve by it, other than drawing their fire perhaps, but my neck seemed a great deal more important than my hat, so I simply started running again.

'Not too far,' Mira said, laying a hand on my arm. 'You'll be round the next corner before they can see us.' Well, that sounded fine to me. She seemed to have some idea of what she was doing though, so I slowed my pace a little and took refuge behind the next junction, levelling my laspistol back the way we'd come. Letting them see us was one thing, but I wasn't stupid enough to stand out in the open where they'd have a clear shot. Even an ork can hit the target occasionally.

They burst into view in a clump, jostling for position as they always did, which no doubt had slowed them down considerably and bought us enough time for Mira to do whatever it was she'd been doing. I flexed my finger on the trigger, tightening it to the point where the slightest movement would be sufficient to fire. My hours of practice against the hovering cyberskulls in the training chapel had paid off handsomely, my grip on the weapon as assured and instinctive with my new augmetic fingers as it had ever been with my original ones; even more so, if anything, as I'd found it easier to remain precisely on aim without the faint tremors no amount of training and discipline can quite eliminate[70]. I held back, though, wanting to be sure of a target. I still hadn't the faintest idea what Mira had been up to, and the last thing I wanted to do was throw away whatever advantage she'd brought us by precipitate action.

The first thing the greenskins saw was my hat, of course, all of them staring at it with expressions of vague confusion, which is the closest their kind can come to any form of cerebral activity. Their headlong rush slowed, and they began to move down the corridor towards us, grunting and barking in their barbarous tongue, which I was familiar enough with to gather that the one I'd killed had indeed been their leader, and that his successor was still attempting to impose his authority on the others[71].

'If you wouldn't mind shooting them?' Mira asked irritably, so I took careful aim at Metaljaw, since he was the one shouting the most, which is usually a reliable indicator of status among greenskins, and squeezed the trigger. I'd only intended getting their attention, which was presumably what Mira had in mind, but I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations: I fired just as my target opened his mouth to bellow at a recalcitrant subordinate, and by great fortune my las-bolt hit him in the back of the throat, exiting through his skull and taking most of his brain with it.

For a fraction of a second the surviving greenskins stood in stupefied astonishment, watching another leader topple to the deck plates, then as one they reacted, charging forwards with a roar of 'WAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!' Despite this, I felt a faint surge of optimism. I'd seen many times on Perlia that once a group of orks falls below a critical proportion of their original number they tend to lose heart for the fray, breaking off to seek out another mob to join instead of pressing their attack. If I could just pick off another, that might be enough to shake the resolve of the rest.

But before I could squeeze the trigger again, the space beyond my sights was suddenly devoid of ork. The whole group of them had fallen, sprawling across the deck plates like drunkards in a drinking den, thrashing and bellowing with rage as they tried to rise, hampering each other as they flailed around like tantrum-throwing toddlers.

Mira looked at them with a faint air of disappointment. 'I was hoping they'd drop their weapons,' she said.

'That was your brilliant idea?' I asked, with a touch of asperity, getting ready to flee again. There was about as much chance of an ork dropping his weapons as deciding to take up flower arranging. 'A tripwire?' Which explained why she'd needed my hat, of course: the first principle of setting a booby trap is to direct the victim's attention elsewhere.

'Mostly,' she admitted.

'Then shouldn't we be running again?' I asked, with a hint of impatience. The only point of a tripwire would be to delay our pursuers, and standing around while they stood up and dusted themselves off would throw away that momentary advantage.

'Maybe,' Mira said, still looking back down the corridor with an air of vague expectation, and showing no signs of movement. Acidface had scrambled to his feet by now, bellowing imprecations at the others, and swatted at my dangling cap with the axe in his hand, no doubt relieving his feelings in the most direct fashion he could.

As the crude weapon smacked into my headgear, a blue-white arc of energy sparked across to the metal blade, and the ork spasmed, roaring and bellowing as he suddenly completed a circuit with the cable Mira had strung across the corridor. His comrades were caught in the discharge too, thrashing on the metal floor like fish on a griddle, their own ululations echoing loudly enough to pain the ears.

'That went about as well as could be expected,' Mira said, her expression now smug in the extreme.

I looked at her, then back to the twitching pile of smouldering orks.

'Why didn't you barbecue yourself while you were setting that up?' I asked, in some perplexity.

Mira shrugged. 'Rubber-soled boots,' she said. 'Saves time rigging the shock fence round a camp. It's an-'

'Old hunter's trick,' I finished for her. 'Next time you see that old hunter, thank him for me.'

Before she could reply, the abused power feed finally shorted out, and the standing greenskin collapsed on top of his comrades, with a faint clatter of falling weaponry. A fresh odour, pungent and familiar, forced its way past the stench of charring ork, and I turned to greet my aide.

'Jurgen,' I said. 'Prompt as always.' I indicated the feebly stirring mound of incapacitated greenskins behind me. 'If you wouldn't mind?' I could quite easily have put a las-bolt through each of their heads myself, but I'd promised to save him a few, and he'd only have sulked if I didn't.

'Of course, sir,' he said, and trotted off to administer the coup de grace to the fallen with every sign of enthusiasm. A few moments later he returned, bearing my cap, which he handed to me with a faint air of puzzlement. 'I'll have to see what I can do with this,' he said, 'but I'm afraid it's a little singed.'