01.1 - Knee Deep Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 STORY

  KNEE DEEP

  Imperial Guard - 01.1

  Mitchel Scanlon

  (An Undead Scan v4.0)

  The sewers of Broucheroc were a lesson in endurance. Granted, the hardships were not the same as in the city itself. Above ground, Broucheroc was caught in the merciless grip of another harsh winter. Blizzards hounded the city remorselessly. Shrill winds screamed through the desolate streets. The city’s defenders huddled together for warmth, or else suffered miserably in icy foxholes. Only the dead did not feel the cold.

  The sewers were different. The air in the tunnels was sharp and biting, but the temperature was above freezing. In the sewers, there were other hardships, other adversities.

  In the dank dark spaces of the underground world, the damp was all-pervasive. Moisture gathered on the walls and dripped down to join the filthy river of sewage that ran throughout the system. The tunnels seemed endless. They burrowed deep into the earth, stretching outward for tens of kilometres in every direction. To walk them was to know the most ancient and primal of fears. Even with the advantage of a portable luminator, the darkness felt stifling. Shadows moved strangely. The slightest sound cast weird echoes that travelled back-and-forth across the tunnels. The sewers possessed an almost palpable sense of menace. It was as though they stood at the gates of the underworld, on the threshold between life and death.

  “So this is hell?” Davir said, surveying the scene in the beam of the luminator clipped to the underside of his lasgun. “Who could have guessed it would be so wet?”

  Seeing that the way ahead looked clear, he raised a hand to signal down the tunnel and resumed trudging wearily through the knee-high waters. The other two members of Fire-team Three, his comrades Bulaven and Scholar, were beside him. Bulaven hefted the imposing bulk of a flamer while Scholar carried a hand-held auspex unit. The three of them were on point duty. The rest of a platoon of Vardans followed behind in single file. The men moved cautiously, keeping their lasguns at the ready and sweeping the barrels from side-to-side as they advanced through the tunnels.

  “I don’t like this,” whispered Bulaven.

  “You don’t like what exactly?” Davir countered.

  He was in a bad mood, as ever, and the hulking figure of Bulaven made an easy target. They had only been in the sewers for a few hours, but it felt like days. Tempers were running ragged.

  By common consent, sewer patrol was the worst duty in Broucheroc. The battle against the orks raged every bit as fiercely underground as it did on the surface. In order to prevent the enemy from gaining a foothold beneath the city, regular patrols were sent into the sewers on search-and-destroy missions to sweep them clear of ork infiltrators.

  In the case of the Vardans, the new posting seemed doubly cruel. They had just served three times the normal rotation on the frontlines, facing multiple enemy assaults on a daily basis. By the unwritten law of Broucheroc, it was their turn to be assigned to less arduous duties in a more peaceful sector.

  Instead, they had found themselves suddenly reassigned to the sewers on an emergency basis. Two patrols had vanished in the same section of tunnels. Much to their displeasure, the men of the 902nd Vardan had been chosen to follow the trail of the missing patrols to see what had happened to them. As an aid to the quest, they had been issued with an ancient, hopelessly outdated map of the sewer network. By common opinion, however, the map was next to useless.

  “Is it that you don’t like being in the sewers on an ork hunt?” Warming to his theme, Davir sneered at Bulaven. “Maybe you don’t like the cold? The damp? You don’t like getting your feet wet? Well? Spit it out. After all, we’ve already been given the worst available posting in this whole damned city. It would be the icing on the cake to have to listen to you complaining about it like some mewling infant. So, tell me, fat man. What is it that you don’t like?”

  “This is all wrong,” Bulaven said. “We shouldn’t be here in the sewers. We should be back topside. We should be looking for Larn.”

  “Larn?”

  “The new fish, Davir. He’s only been missing for two days. You can’t have forgotten him already.”

  “I make it a policy to forget anyone I will never see again,” Davir scowled, but for once he took no pleasure in puncturing the fat man’s illusions. “The new fish is dead. You said it yourself. It has been two days. If he were coming back, we would have seen him by now.”

  “You can’t be certain that…”

  “Yes, I can. The new fish is dead, Bulaven. It is better that you grow accustomed to the fact. Forget the idea of scouring no-man’s-land for him. You’d only end up as dead as he is.”

  “Davir is correct, you know. Statistically, the probability of someone surviving for two days in no-man’s-land is nearly non-existent.”

  Drawn by the discussion, Scholar had waded over to join them.

  “It is a matter of facing realities,” he said, not without sympathy. “Larn disappeared in one of the most hotly contested sectors in the city. That patch of ground has been fought over, blanketed with gunfire and subjected to artillery bombardment at least half a dozen times in the last forty-eight hours. It is the nature of the war here. Often, when two sides are in stalemate they struggle with ever-greater violence to achieve a resolution. Paradoxically, it creates a war where nothing of consequence ever happens, and yet men are constantly fighting and dying, giving their lives for as little as a few centimetres of territory. The militarist Hsu Chan discusses the irony in one of his tactical works, The Book of…”

  “No. Stop right there,” Davir held up a warning hand. “I have heard enough, Scholar. The day I need you to fight my battles for me, it will be because I have already been reduced to a drooling basket case. I don’t care what the subject is—I don’t want to hear another of your yammering, pointless lectures. I swear, between listening to you and Bulaven, it is a wonder I don’t go skipping off into no-man’s-land myself in the hope the orks will put me out of my misery. Whichever philosopher said that hell was other people, obviously he had you two in mind.”

  “Frankly, I’d imagine he was talking about all three of you,” a voice said, behind them.

  It was Sergeant Chelkar, the Vardans’ leader. He had advanced forward from the rest of the platoon without Davir and the others hearing.

  “I’m sure this is a fascinating discussion,” Chelkar regarded them coolly. “But you will understand it is probably better left to another time. There is the small matter of the enemy. I’m aware the relevant manuals claim that orks have poor hearing, but I’d rather not trust our lives to it. The three of you were arguing loudly enough to forewarn the deaf. I want silence from now on. There are no complaints, I take it?”

  Chastened, Bulaven and Scholar shifted uneasily. Only Davir did not give ground before the sergeant’s gaze. It was not in him to accept discipline gracefully. He respected Chelkar like no other leader he had ever known, but it was Davir’s nature to try to have the last word in every situation.

  “Complaining? I wouldn’t dream of it, sergeant,” Davir smiled sweetly, showing an ugly mouthful of broken and crooked teeth. “I was merely remarking to my comrades that we are in a sewer, wading knee-deep through ork shit. If I was of a more poetic inclination, I might almost think of it as some form of extended metaphor for our lives here in Broucheroc.”

  From the corners of his eyes, Davir saw Scholar and Bulaven goggling silently at him in disbelief. If he had spoken that way to an officer, a commissar or any other sergeant, he knew he would have faced a charge for insubordination—to likely later be flogged to death or shot, depending on the whim of the offended party.

  Chelkar was not like other commanders, however
. The sergeant was difficult to read, but at times, he seemed to find a dark humour in their situation. He was not a by-the-book soldier, nor a shrieking parade ground martinet. In contrast to most of the men who held authority of any kind in Broucheroc, the sergeant knew how to laugh. Sometimes, Davir supposed it was part of what had helped to keep Chelkar alive.

  “A touching sentiment, Trooper Davir.”

  A gallows smile twitched at Chelkar’s mouth, confirming Davir’s suspicions.

  “Perhaps we should meditate on it at length later,” the sergeant continued. “In the meantime, however, one of the advantages of a policy of operational silence is that I would hate it if the orks killed such an original thinker. It is better if they don’t hear you coming. That way you can surprise them with such pithy comments when they least expect it. It is a widely known fact that nothing frightens an ork more than a well-constructed put-down.”

  The sergeant made to turn away, before glancing back and tapping at the comm-bead in his ear.

  “Oh, and a word to the wise. You may have noticed the comm-net has fallen quiet. It is the tunnels—they interfere with the transmissions. Our comms are as good as useless, so if you run into orks you will have to communicate with the rest of the platoon by more old-fashioned methods. I leave it to your discretion whether screaming or waving your arms is the better choice. Either way, it should serve to attract our attention.”

  The first encounter with the enemy came a little over an hour later. By Davir’s reckoning, it was at least four hours since they had entered the sewers. The members of Fire-team Three had reached a juncture where several tunnels met. In common with the other members of their platoon, they had left their greatcoats at the surface, expecting to find them cumbersome while wading through the waters. Now, they keenly felt their loss as a vicious cross-draught blew through the junction, cutting through the relatively thin material of their uniforms and setting their teeth chattering.

  “Contact!”

  Suddenly, the auspex in Scholar’s hands emitted a series of high-pitched beeps. In an instant, all the discomforts of the sewers—the cold, the damp, the claustrophobic closeness of the tunnel walls—were forgotten. Davir, Scholar and Bulaven readied their weapons, removing the waterproofed barrel smocks that protected their guns from corrosion in the wet environment.

  “I’m reading multiple contacts ahead of us,” Scholar’s face was given a ghastly glow by the green light of the machine’s display screen.

  He looked towards Davir, the most senior man in the fire-team and, technically, its leader.

  “There’s a lot of them. And the sensor traces look too big to be anything other than orks.”

  “Which tunnel?” Davir asked as he waved a frantic arm to draw the attention of the other Vardans following them.

  Ahead, the sewer branched off into three separate tunnels.

  “The middle one.” Scholar’s long fingers worked at the auspex’s controls, calibrating the readings. “They are directly ahead. I estimate the distance as no more than two hundred metres.”

  Without warning, Sergeant Chelkar was beside them once more. The rest of the platoon had advanced to their shoulder. Instantly sizing up the situation, Chelkar signalled silently to the men around him.

  With a firefight in the offing, a mood of grim seriousness had descended on the Vardans. They had been fighting orks for ten years, ever since they had first been posted to Broucheroc. They moved with a measured precision, as well ordered and disciplined in the face of potential combat as any more spit-and-polished unit.

  The standard ten-man squads of Imperial Guard doctrine having long ago proven unwieldy in the close confines of the streets of Broucheroc, never mind its sewers, the Vardans were divided into a number of five-man fire-teams. At a series of hand signals from Chelkar, three fire-teams peeled off from the main group of the platoon—one to cover the Vardans’ rear and the other two to guard the entrances to the tunnels on either side.

  The remaining teams entered the middle tunnel in groups of four abreast, the selector switches on their lasguns turned ready for rapid fire. Davir, Bulaven, Scholar and Sergeant Chelkar were in the lead.

  “We are getting closer,” Scholar said. The tunnel had widened, seeming to grow larger with each step as he counted down the distance to the enemy. “I estimate contact in one hundred metres… Ninety metres… Seventy-five… Fifty… Thirty-five…”

  “Where are they?” Chelkar said. “We should be able to see them by now.”

  The tunnel ahead was illuminated in the glare of more than a dozen lasgun-mounted light sources. It appeared to be empty of life.

  “I don’t understand it,” Scholar fidgeted with the controls of the auspex. “According to these readings they are right in front of us. We should be face-to-face with them.”

  “You must have read it wrong,” Bulaven said. “Maybe they are not in this tunnel, but in the next one along.”

  “These contacts. Are they stationary or moving?” Chelkar asked Scholar.

  “Stationary, sergeant.”

  Scholar advanced further down the tunnel, waving the auspex slowly from side-to-side. The beeping from the machine grew louder.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Scholar gazed around quizzically. “Unless… Wait a second… The display of the auspex can only show information two-dimensionally, as dots on a screen-map. But we are in a three-dimensional environment. Perhaps Bulaven is right. The orks could be in another tunnel, maybe directly below us. Or even….”

  He paused, an expression of horrified understanding slowly dawning on his face.

  “They could be above us…”

  As one, the Vardans followed the line of Scholar’s eyes in peering upward. Someone pointed a luminator at the ceiling of the tunnel, revealing the mouth of a vertical shaft, hidden in the shadows and rising in a diagonal line above them. Caught in the glimmer of the light, red eyes stared from the darkness. Dozens of orks hung like bats from the shaft wall, waiting to spring an ambush.

  “Pull back!” Sergeant Chelkar yelled out as, all around him, the Vardans opened fire. “Back to the junction! Don’t let them get into close combat!”

  It was too late. Releasing their hold on the shaft wall, the orks dropped among the Vardans with the guttural roar of alien battle cries.

  Firing his lasgun, Davir scrambled to get out from under the avalanche of falling orks. He saw grotesque and muscular forms, glimpses of green skin peeking out from underneath layer upon layer of savage war paint.

  The enemy were everywhere. Lost in the haze and confusion of battle, Davir barely had time to think as he fired a succession of las-blasts at the nearest ork. The noises of battle were deafening. He heard screams, the high-pitched whine of lasguns firing at full auto, the whoosh of Bulaven’s flamer and the thoom of Chelkar’s shotgun—all made more intense by the enclosed environment. Abruptly, one sound cut through all the rest. Davir heard a snarling war cry behind him.

  Instinctively, he dropped forward into the sewer waters. The movement saved him as a blade whistled close by his head. Spluttering out a mouthful of rank and foul-tasting liquid, Davir twisted in the water and tried to bring his gun to bear. The ork was standing over him, an enormous cleaver raised in its hand.

  Against a human opponent, Davir might have lashed out with the butt of his gun to break the target’s knee. Ten years in Broucheroc had taught him the folly of trying the manoeuvre on an ork. He fought the urge to panic, taking careful aim at the greenskin’s face. With the added force of a hotshot power pack behind it, he fired a single las-shot that burned through the creature’s left eye and into its brains, the rear of its skull exploding in a blast of steam and red gore as the shot exited the head.

  Even as the monster fell, Davir was back on his feet. Crouched up to his chest in raw sewage, he scanned the tunnels in search of another enemy to kill. He chose his targets carefully, conserving the punch of the hotshot pack for where it would have the most effect. He was no sniper, but he was cool
and accurate under pressure. Experience had taught him that the man who panicked in combat was lost. It was one of the wisdoms of warfare he had learned in Broucheroc; a key, in its own small way, to his continued survival.

  He fired his lasgun a half-dozen times, each one a headshot, each one another dead ork. The scrum and press of the melee between men and orks had begun to lessen. The skirmish had turned in the Vardans’ favour. The last of the enemy were dispatched without mercy.

  As quickly as the fight began, it was over. As ever, in the aftermath of battle, there was a moment of strange and eerie calm—a quiet instant of disbelieving silence as men struggled to come to terms with the fact of their survival.

  “Davir?” Bulaven came splashing through the waters towards him. They had become separated in the fighting and he looked down in concern. “It is you under that filth? Are you all right?”

  “No thanks to you, pig face.”

  Brushing at his uniform, Davir did his best to dislodge the worst of the muck he had inadvertently collected in his brief submersion in the sewer waters. It had not improved his mood.

  “Where were you, fat arse? You realise I nearly had my head cut off by an ork with a meat cleaver? It is the whole point of being in a fire-team together that we are supposed to watch each other’s backs.”

  “We couldn’t help it,” Bulaven gestured helplessly. “Before we knew what was happening, there were orks all over us. There were more of them hiding further down the tunnel. They attacked at the same time as the ones from the shaft.” Bulaven reached over his shoulder to tap the fuel tanks on his back. “If it hadn’t been for the flamer, we’d have never been able to hold them back.”

  “Excuses,” Davir snorted. “It is always the same with you. ‘Oh, the greenskins attacked. Oh, I couldn’t help it.’ Listening to you, you’d think you were the only one who ever had to fight an ork.”

  His eyes narrowed as he glanced past Bulaven to see Scholar approaching.

  “And you needn’t look so pleased with yourself either, you long streak of grox piss. If you’d read the auspex better, I wouldn’t have had to go for a swim in a river of shit.”