[Imperial Guard 05] - Ice Guard Read online

  The cannons were out of power. Barreski yelled down at the loader below to work faster, to chug the heavy, new cell into place, to give him more shots while he could. The Chaos tanks had formed an arc in front of them, closing in, the port sponson gun was lost, and of course there was no hope of back-up out here.

  He couldn’t complain. The whole crew had known what they were getting into when Barreski had suggested this, when Grayle had confirmed that he could drive them into position, when the tank commander had approved their plan.

  They had achieved their goal, delivered a good, solid blow to the enemy and slowed their advance, and that was all they could have hoped for.

  This had always been a suicide run.

  The war on Cressida was lost.

  Trooper Mikhaelev had seen it weeks ago. There was something about the scent, the feel, of the air, as if the planet itself had given up. He had heard that whole continents had been transformed in days, verdant fields devolving into arctic tundra — and even here, where the walls of civilisation had only just begun to come down, there were patches of a freezing purple fungus sprouting amid the wreckage.

  Mikhaelev knelt on the plinth of a statue — of whom he couldn’t tell, as a frag blast had cut it off at the knees — and steadied his missile launcher against his shoulder. He saw the shape of an enemy tank, and he sent a krak missile whistling over the heads of his squad, and of nine more ranks of Ice Warriors. He didn’t wait to see if he had struck the tank, too busy with the cumbersome task of reloading. He should have had a comrade to assist him, but the last one had been cut down in the enemy’s last push and hadn’t yet been replaced.

  When he tried to fire again, the launcher clicked and jammed, and Mikhaelev let out a resigned sigh and reached for his lasgun. At the rate at which his comrades were falling, he would be on the front line soon, anyhow.

  It was all right for the clerks at Naval Command, he thought. They could afford to dither, so reluctant to lose a productive world that they had hung on to hope long after hope had died. They should have ordered this withdrawal long ago. They could have spared millions of Guardsmen to fight again — but to them, those Guardsmen’s lives were only numbers on a data-slate, so what did they care?

  It didn’t especially bother Mikhaelev that he was going to die today. It just rankled with him that it would be for nothing.

  Then a voice crackled over his earpiece, and rewrote his destiny.

  He slipped down from the plinth and made his way deeper into the hive, still lugging the useless, heavy missile launcher along with him in case a tech-priest could salvage it. He thought about the summons he had received, and it cheered him up a little to think how irritated his commander would be to let him go.

  So, Colonel Stanislev Steele was putting together a special mission, and he wanted Mikhaelev on board. The only question Mikhaelev had was… why me?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Time to Destruction of Cressida: 47.04.33

  The Sentinel walkers were equipped as power lifters, not intended for combat use. The lost and the damned had got hold of a pair somehow — either they had captured them or their pilots had simply defected, as so many Guardsmen had done during this war — and their Imperial markings had been defaced.

  The Sentinels were being used to deal death now. They were marching amid a legion of Chaos spawn and other mutant creatures, sweeping and gouging at the defenders of Alpha Hive with their single metal claws.

  Trooper Borscz’s Ice Warrior platoon was ranged along the edge of an empty residential sector. So far, they had been holding the tide back, but the Sentinels’ appearance threatened to change that.

  It had fallen to Borscz’s squad to deal with that threat. His sergeant, Romanov, was bellowing orders, instructing his nine troopers to aim their fire at the leftmost of the two leviathans. Borscz’s first beams went hopelessly wide, and he cursed the unreliable sights of his lasgun under his breath. Many of his comrades struck true, but their las-beams seemed to do little damage, at least to begin with.

  At last, their sustained barrage began to bear fruit, and Borscz saw sparks flying from the left knee joint of the bipedal machine. Without needing to be told, the Ice Warriors refocused their fire on that spot — and a long, agonising minute later, the Sentinel collapsed, and flattened a number of luckless spawn beneath its mass.

  It had taken too long.

  Sergeant Romanov shouted again, and his squad turned its fire on the second Sentinel. Before it could be felled, though, the spawn would be upon them.

  Borscz weighed up his options, and then lowered his gun. He caught Romanov’s suspicious glare, and he shrugged his broad, muscular shoulders.

  “Sorry, sergeant,” he yelled, “the machine is kaput, it jams up in the cold. What is a trooper to do?” Then he drew his long-bladed knife, lowered his head and took a single giant step forward to meet the first of the charging mutants.

  It cannoned into him, rebounding from his bulk, and Borscz thought he could read surprise in its twisted face. While it was still reeling, he seized it, kicked its legs from beneath it, and sent it sprawling against two more mutants behind it. Two more came up alongside him, and he dodged their clumsy swings, and threw one of them over his shoulder into the other.

  Borscz knew that the mutants were stronger than he was. He was using their unwieldiness against them, keeping them off-balance, but he couldn’t keep it up.

  He didn’t have to.

  The second Sentinel was upon him, towering over him, more than three times his height. It had raised its foot to stamp on him, to crush him, and the mutants were trying to hold him still, wrapping their disgusting tentacles around him.

  Borscz loosed a great roar from his powerful lungs, and hacked at the tentacles with his blade. He slashed and tore them, ploughing forward as one great foot slammed down in the spot where he had just been. Then he whipped a krak grenade from his belt, and with a grim flourish, he slapped it against the armoured stanchion of the Sentinel’s leg.

  The mutant saw what he had done, and even their tiny minds told them to run from the predictable explosion. This gave Borscz the chance to run too, back towards the rest of his squad, who were watching in astonishment and backing him up as best they could with las-fire.

  A second later, there came a tremendous bang, and the shadow of the teetering Sentinel fell across him. Borscz twisted out of its way as it crashed to the ground, its cockpit beside him now. He could see his reflection in its cracked front shield, his wild black beard split by a white maniacal grin — and behind that shield, the pilot, the cockpit’s lone occupant, his face white with terror as he realised that his unexpected plunge had taken him right to his enemy.

  He was operating his controls feverishly, employing the only weapon he still had. The Sentinel’s giant claw pivoted back on itself, and came snapping, grasping for the Ice Warrior. Borscz ducked underneath it, and drove his meaty fists through the plexiglas shield. He grabbed the pilot by the scruff of his tunic, tore him from his seat and drove him headfirst into the unyielding ground, breaking his neck.

  Robbed of their advantage, the mutants and spawn were being driven back once more. His cheeks flushed, Borscz took his place among his comrades and drew his gun. He was alarmed to feel a firm hand on his shoulder, and, turning, he found himself fixed by the glowering eyes of an Imperial commissar.

  For a moment, Borscz feared he was to be disciplined for disregarding orders. He and his sergeant had an understanding born of long service together — Romanov knew that, unconventional though his methods were, Borscz got results — but he knew that an outside observer might see things differently.

  To his surprise, the commissar didn’t want to talk about his behaviour. He had a message for Borscz, although, to judge by his scowl as he delivered it, he wasn’t at all happy about it. It was a summons from Colonel Steele.

  Trooper Anakora heard the Chaos hounds before she saw them, the scampering of their clawed feet in the tunnels and their ravening howls a
s they scented fresh meat even over the underhive’s stink.

  She whirled around, and saw the first of them, its twisted black bulk, in the light of the beam from her lamp-pack as it leapt on Petrovski and tore out his throat.

  There were three more behind it. Anakora swore and abandoned the limpet mine she had been struggling to adhere to the crumbling wall of a slum building.

  Her squad of eight had been sent down here on a demolition mission. Their commanders were concerned that as the Imperial Guard withdrew from Cressida, there weren’t enough men left to hold all fronts in the ongoing war. By collapsing strategic sections of these underground levels, they could at least close off one route to the heart of Alpha Hive, preventing the Chaos forces from coming up beneath them.

  Their enemies, it transpired, were a step ahead of them. They had penetrated deeper into the underhive than anyone had known. Anakora and her comrades hadn’t planted even half their mines yet.

  One of the hounds came for her, but with remarkable precision she fired a las-beam through its left eye and killed it. The momentum of its pounce kept it coming, and it hit with enough force to knock her from her feet. She crashed to the ground with the hound’s slavering tusks in her face, and gagged on its last gasp of rancid breath as she hauled herself out from beneath it.

  She had dropped her lamp-pack, breaking it, but the tunnel was lit by the criss-crossed beams of her surviving six comrades and the staccato flashes of their lasguns. The latter created an eerie kind of stop-motion effect in which Anakora saw the remaining two Chaos hounds dosing with their chosen prey.

  She shouldered her weapon again, looking for a clear shot. When a second comrade fell, his broken body tossed in the air to be caught in the mantrap jaws of his feral killer, she let out a strangulated cry and pulled on the trigger for all she was worth, furious with herself for her well-meaning hesitation.

  Two more squad members had the same thought, and the hound was struck from three angles at once, twisting and melting in the sizzling las-beams, slumping dead at last with a Valhallan leg still clamped in its mouth.

  The third hound got past Sergeant Kubrikov’s defences. It bore him down, and its claws pinned his shoulders before he could stand. Once again, Anakora couldn’t fire without endangering her comrade, but this time she didn’t waste a second. She leapt onto the creature’s back, and felt its jagged spines digging into her thighs. She turned her lasgun around and slipped it over the Chaos hound’s head so that the barrel was resting across its throat. She clenched her teeth and pulled for all she was worth. She could feel thick, knotted neck muscles resisting her, but she was determined not to fail, not to show herself to be weak again. At last, she felt bone snap. The monstrous black body sagged beneath her, and a grateful Kubrikov tore himself free from its dying grip.

  In the time this had taken, Anakora’s comrades had dealt with the final hound, although two more of them had been eviscerated in the process. The danger was not over, however. New shadows were looming, growing on the tunnel walls: dark, ominous shadows. A scant moment later, the first of their owners came marching around the bend, and Anakora’s breath caught at the sight of them.

  Clad in baroque armour and hailing from the Eye of Terror, the giant warriors exuded a palpable air of menace and power that turned men’s blood to ice. They raised and fired bolt pistols, and Anakora flung herself against the wall, using the tunnel’s slight curvature to shield her body. She returned fire, knowing that it was hopeless. The Ice Warriors were outgunned — outmatched not just by a little, but ludicrously, almost laughably so.

  Sergeant Kubrikov knew it too, and he was screaming at his three remaining troopers to fall back. There was something else too: another sound, an insistent buzz in Anakora’s earpiece. A voice, its tone urgent but its words drowned in a sea of static.

  She didn’t have time to worry about it. She was pinned down by the bolt pistols, but the glimmer of an idea formed in her head, and she screamed at Kubrikov, “The mines, sergeant! Blow the mines!”

  Kubrikov was ahead of her, already fumbling with the detonator. The buildings to each side of the Chaos Space Marines blew out, and a cloud of dust billowed towards Anakora. She was already running when it caught up to her, engulfed her. She could hear the throaty growls of chainswords starting up behind her, and she knew that the explosion hadn’t been enough, not nearly enough — that their pursuers were still standing, still ploughing forwards, and that all the Ice Warriors had gained was to slow them a fraction and to make themselves a harder target for their ranged weapons.

  She almost wished that wasn’t the case.

  There were just two of them left, her and Kubrikov. Anakora reached the ladder first, glanced back, and saw her sergeant’s eyes glazing over. Blood poured from his mouth, and then his body separated into two pieces along a horizontal line. The dust parted for a second to show the dead face of a Chaos Space Marine behind him, jerking his sword free of his victim’s remains.

  Then she was climbing, hand over hand, foot over foot, expecting at any moment to feel cold fingers closing around her ankle, dragging her back. Bolts pinged off the ladder, and she dropped a frag grenade to discourage another burst. Then she could see the open manhole above her, and she knew that she could make it. She ought to have been relieved — because now at least her comrades could be forewarned, that the Chaos Space Marines were about to emerge into their midst — but her stomach sank instead, because she knew that her mission had failed. Her squad was dead.

  And the worst of it all, the hardest thing for Anakora to accept, was that she had survived… again.

  Trooper Grayle stumbled over the rubble, hacking and coughing from the smoke in his throat, his arm gushing blood from a stray piece of shrapnel. His eyes and ears had been deadened, but he fired his lasgun blindly over his shoulder as he staggered on, just hoping and waiting — waiting for Barreski to let go of him, to stop dragging him along, so that he could fall over.

  He didn’t know how they had got this far. His recent past was a blur of bangs and flashes, the only clear impression being of the searing, agonising pain he had felt when the controls of the Leman Russ had blown up in his face.

  Then he was on the ground, staring up at Cressida’s grey sky, the last flakes of the sputtering snowstorm wetting his cheeks and soothing his burns. His chest was heaving and his arm was throbbing, and he wondered for a moment if this was it, if Barreski had been gunned down and if he was to be next.

  Then he saw his comrade’s concerned face looming over him, his skin a livid pink too, the stubble on his chin singed and even more ragged than usual.

  “Did… did we get the last of them?” stammered Grayle.

  “I reckon so, yeah,” said Barreski. Then something made him tense up, turn, and fire a burst from his lasgun at something Grayle couldn’t see — though he did hear the scream that followed the blast, a scream abruptly curtailed. “Yeah,” repeated Barreski, turning back to him, “yeah, we got the last of them, now.”

  Not many cultists had followed them back into the ruins. Those that had survived were mostly licking their wounds, shell-shocked from the fury that had just erupted around them. The Ice Warriors were safe from the enemy tanks — assuming that none of their drivers had Grayle’s skill, which was a pretty safe bet.

  “I think the captain made it,” said Grayle, chasing a confused memory. “I think I saw him with… with someone else, I couldn’t make out who.”

  “Kampanov, probably. As soon as he heard the evacuation order, he was out of that hatch like a snow leopard with a frag grenade up its backside.”

  Grayle pulled himself up onto his elbows, catching his second wind, and said, “They took out the turret guns, I’m assuming?”

  “Cold got the first, shrapnel the second. Think I’d be here if I still had a lascannon to fire? They were works of art, they were. Another minute with them, I could have polished off two more tanks, no problem.”

  “Never mind, eh, Barreski. I’m sure we can find
you a new toy to play with soon, maybe an even bigger one.”

  “You think they’ll let us have another vehicle?” asked Barreski. “We didn’t take such good care of the last one. Of the last three, in fact.”

  Grayle smiled at his fellow tanker with the smug air of one who knew an important secret. “Oh yeah,” he said, “I think we’ll get another vehicle. I expect we’ll be back in action before you know it.”

  Then he told Barreski about the message. The one that had come in through the Leman Russ’ vox system, just before it had exploded. Grayle had never had the chance to acknowledge the message, nor to relay it to its intended recipient, the battle tank’s captain — but it had now been heard by both of the Ice Warriors name-checked therein.

  “Better get yourself back on your feet then, my friend,” said Barreski, “because if we want to report to Colonel Stanislev Steele on time, I’d say we’ve got a long, dangerous walk ahead of us.”

  Calchas Spaceport was teeming with Guardsmen, many of them lost, unable to hear their orders over the roar of an incoming lander. The ship was trying to squeeze its bristling form into a tight spot between a near-identical vessel and an older, scarred Ironclad. The Navy had assigned all the craft it could spare, all that could reach Cressida in time, to the evacuation effort, whatever their usual function.

  The lander set down, at last, and its engines cut out, but those of another, departing ship had already fired up. Sergeants yelled themselves hoarse to be heard over the continuing racket, marshalling their troopers to the loading ramps. From the window beside Trooper Blonsky’s head, the Guardsmen looked like coloured ants, streaming across a concrete bowl into the bellies of the great metal behemoths.

  His interrogator delivered a backhanded slap to his face, drawing a little blood and snapping his attention back to the small, grey room in which he was seated.