[Imperial Guard 05] - Ice Guard Read online

  “I asked you a question, Blonsky.” The lieutenant was from a Validian regiment. Royal Validians, they called themselves. His uniform was red with highlights in polished gold, and he displayed the same superior attitude that Blonsky had seen in so many of his breed. He was probably also one of the most senior officers on Cressida. Most of the rest had been aboard the first ships to leave — Blonsky’s Valhallan commanders excepted, of course.

  He glanced down at his cuffed wrists, resting in his lap. Then he looked up to meet his interrogator’s glare, and he said calmly, “With all due respect, sir, I think I have answered it. I have given you a full account of my actions this morning. I executed Sergeant Arkadin—”

  “You killed him,” the Validian spat, “killed him in cold blood!”

  “I executed him,” restated Blonsky, “because he was a deserter.”

  The lieutenant’s nostrils flared. “Arkadin was a good friend of mine. If you had reason to doubt his courage, you should have come to me or to one of his other commanders. What evidence do you have, what evidence could you have, to support this claim?”

  “I have the evidence of my own senses, sir. My platoon was fighting a horde of mutants when I was separated from them by an explosion. I took cover in an old storage depot. That’s where I encountered Sergeant Arkadin. I believe he had been hiding in there for some time.”

  “Did he tell you that?” asked the lieutenant sharply.

  “No sir,” said Blonsky, “but it was evident from his body language that—”

  “I don’t want to hear about his body language.”

  “Very well. The mutants must have seen me entering the building. I had barricaded the door as best I could, but they were starting to batter it down. I was prepared to meet them with las-fire, but Sergeant Arkadin threw down his gun and tried to climb through the window.”

  “I won’t accept that!” The lieutenant drove a frustrated fist into the table between them. “You made a mistake, Trooper Blonsky. Sergeant Arkadin is — was — an excellent tactician. No doubt he thought that, if he could escape from the depot, he could circle behind your attackers and—”

  “He had thrown down his gun, sir!”

  “What right do you have to judge one of us?” the Validian hissed.

  “May I ask again, sir,” said Blonsky, “if my commanders have been informed of my detention. By rights, one of them ought to be here.” He could tell from the lieutenant’s stony silence that the answer to his question was no.

  He sighed, and restated for what seemed like the hundredth time, “Sergeant Arkadin was a deserter. I shot him, in accordance with standing orders, before he could—”

  “No!” the lieutenant bellowed. Blonsky stopped talking. No one was listening anyway.

  A long silence followed, during which his interrogator stared out of another window at the activity in the spaceport below. Perhaps he was worrying about his own place on one of those ships, wondering how much longer he could afford to wait behind.

  “You were lucky,” said the lieutenant at last, in a somewhat quieter voice, “that my platoon was in the area, that those mutants died before they could break down the door and reach you. I only wish they could have been in time to save my sergeant.”

  “I wish that too, sir.”

  “As far as I am concerned, Trooper Blonsky, you killed Sergeant Arkadin without reason. I don’t know why. Perhaps you were the would-be deserter, and he was standing in your way. The only way to be sure would be to convene a formal tribunal with, as you say, your commanders present. Under the circumstances, that would take some time. It would also mean blackening a good man’s name, by airing these scurrilous accusations against him.”

  “If you say so, sir.” Blonsky could see from the lieutenant’s bearing, the way he could no longer quite meet his prisoner’s eye, that he wanted to believe what he was saying, wanted it so much, but that he couldn’t be entirely sure.

  The lieutenant let out a heavy sigh, and said, “Go on. Get out of here. It would be a mercy to keep you off the front line anyway. You belong to the Valhallan 319th, yes? The regiment that is to stay behind, that is to be sacrificed. Well, then, Trooper Blonsky, if you are so zealous, so damn loyal to the Emperor, then this is your chance to prove it, isn’t it? This is your chance to make sure you die for Him!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Time to Destruction of Cressida: 45.57.14

  The sight of the Termite stirred something in Sergeant Ivon Gavotski’s heart.

  It was just a small vehicle, its chassis almost outweighed by the great cylindrical borer it supported — but it had been given a distinctively Valhallan make-over, painted with white and green snow camouflage patterns. Six flamer emplacements had been added to its sides and four more flamers mounted on the borer itself.

  Gavotski had heard the story many times, of course — about how, after his home world had been hit by an asteroid, after its lush fields had become frozen wastelands, his distant ancestors had struggled to survive. An ork invasion must have seemed like one misfortune too many, back then — but it had given the Valhallans a reason to fight back, a tangible goal to achieve.

  The precise schematics of the ice-boring vehicle they had developed had been lost to history. But this Termite was the nearest thing, in the modern world, to the vehicle that had won the Valhallans their war — the nearest thing to the vehicle that had given them mastery of their changed environment, allowing them to tunnel through the hearts of the glaciers and to strike at the ork mobs where they least expected.

  A single Termite wouldn’t win this war — but with Cressida becoming more and more like Valhalla each day, it could at least carry one squad of Ice Warriors to where they needed to be. That was, if Gavotski could find it a squad to carry.

  He had sent out the orders over two hours ago. Trooper Mikhaelev had been the first to report in: a quiet, lean, thin-faced man, not at all what Gavotski had been expecting from a heavy weapons expert. Anakora had arrived next, her face impassive, her eyes dead even as she had told Gavotski what an honour it was to be assigned to him. Then Blonsky had come in, his narrow, black eyes forever darting about him, alert like a hawk.

  That, so far, had been it, apart from a few garbled vox messages. Two of Gavotski’s draftees were listed as dead, three as missing in action, although efforts were ongoing to locate them. Of the remaining four, including his reserve choices, he had heard and seen nothing. It was with some relief, then, that he greeted the approach of a Chimera, although even the jaded sergeant couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at the sight of a squat, muscular trooper hanging from its side.

  The hitchhiker didn’t wait for the vehicle to stop. He hopped down and ambled up to Gavotski, his broad, toothy grin a bright white behind his black beard.

  “Trooper Borscz, sergeant,” he introduced himself. “Apologies for my late arrival, but your first message did not get through. Machines, you know.”

  Gavotski introduced himself in turn, held up a hand to stem Borscz’s eager questions, and indicated that he should wait beside the Termite with the others. As the newcomer moved to obey, the sergeant noted that his eyes flickered, as all their eyes had, towards the brooding figure of Colonel Stanislev Steele.

  Steele stood a few metres away, his power sword at his hip, observing all with a cool but shrewd gaze. His bionic right eye glinted in the light of a flaring explosion in the sky, but there were no other outward signs of his internal augmetics.

  It was said by some that Steele’s emotions had been neutered by his cybernetic grafts, that he had become cold, unfeeling. Gavotski could see how that myth had been born. He counted himself privileged, however, to be one of the few who knew the truth.

  The Chimera had come to a halt, and another two Ice Warriors emerged, exchanging amiable banter. They introduced themselves as Troopers Barreski and Grayle. That made six — eight, including the sergeant and the colonel. It was enough to make do, but two short of the full squad for which Gavotski had hoped. He g
lanced at Steele for instructions, but could see that, as always, he was happy to trust his sergeant’s judgement.

  He decided to wait another ten minutes. With luck, Palinev might still make it, and bring the count up to nine. Beyond that…

  Gavotski had had high hopes for one more Ice Warrior. He had added Pozhar’s name to his list, despite his chequered service record, despite Steele’s concerns, because he had worked with the lad before and judged him to have potential. Pozhar was one of the three MIAs — which meant that Gavotski was now praying for a miracle.

  Or, to put it another way, he was about to find out if his faith had been justified.

  Pozhar had lost all track of time.

  He was so close to his goal, so close to getting back to his comrades, the returning hero. It seemed like days since he had been separated from them, days since he had lain on the battlefield, almost gagging on the stench of the fallen Chaos worshippers whose bodies had protected him. Now, he was just a few metres away.

  A few metres — but it may as well have been a few thousand.

  It was not in the young trooper’s nature to lie still for long. Anyway, the grumbling of approaching engines had alerted him to a new danger. The Chaos army had pressed forward, most of its foot soldiers passing him by without seeing him, but behind them had come the heavy artillery, the tanks and the battle cannons, and he had had to act fast to avoid being crushed beneath their wheels.

  Pozhar had scrambled to his feet, feeling the sting of cold air on his face, expecting to be shot down as soon as he was seen. Instead, surrounded by the enemy, he went unnoticed. He had realised that his uniform was dishevelled and torn, coated in grime and blood, and thus there was no real visible difference between him and any number of Traitor Guardsmen on the battlefield. Thinking quickly, he had ripped off his unit badge to further this illusion, and had considered taking a coat from one of the fallen traitors, one daubed in Chaos sigils, but the thought of wearing such a thing had made his stomach turn and his skin crawl.

  He couldn’t just stand there, he had realised. He had to do something, make it look like he belonged here, give himself time to think, to find an escape route.

  Casting around, he had seen a pair of cultists bickering over an upset cart. A purloined plasma cannon, too heavy to carry, had spilled from the rickety contraption, and Pozhar had rushed to help lift it back into place. In so doing, he had brushed against a cultist’s arm and felt something shifting beneath his cloak. He had caught a glimpse of a slimy black tentacle, and had almost vomited on the spot.

  Pozhar had ached — truly, physically ached — with the driving need to pull out his lasgun, to blast these freaks to whatever afterlife they believed in, and he would have done it too had it not been for the vox-message… had it not been for the fact that Colonel Stanislev Steele needed him.

  He wished he knew how long it had been.

  He had slipped away from the cultists at the first opportunity, leaving his last frag grenade in their cannon’s barrel. When the weapon was fired, the grenade would burst and, Pozhar hoped, trigger a devastating plasma explosion. He had made his way to the edge of the battlefield, trying to remain innocuous, finding cover where he could in deserted, half-demolished buildings.

  He had not counted on running into civilians. Four women and six children were huddled in a dark corner of one of those buildings, somehow overlooked by the heretics that had burnt out their homes and slaughtered their men.

  At first they had been an unwelcome burden, because Pozhar would certainly have become a target as soon as he had stepped out into the open with them. But, emboldened by the appearance of an Imperial Guardsmen, their saviour, the women had told him of a way out: a hatchway into the underhive.

  And so, Pozhar had ended up here, in a tunnel mouth, up to his ankles in the filth of a billion departed slum-dwellers, as the women waited some way behind him and tried to keep their children quiet. And the ladder that would take them all back up to the surface, back to Pozhar’s comrades, was just a few metres away… a few metres away, but guarded.

  It had been a shock to find cultists in the underhive. Fortunately, the women had known their way around, and, so far, they had been able to keep out of sight, though a number of diversions due to blocked tunnels had left Pozhar fretting with impatience. His greatest fear was that Colonel Steele might have given up on him by now — worse still, might have written him off as a coward or a traitor.

  Four cultists. He could take them, he thought, especially as their guns were trained on the manhole above them. They were expecting trouble from above, not from below. They weren’t expecting him. He could take them.

  And they would raise the alarm, and then more cultists would come running. Would he be able to ferry the women and the children up the ladder and hold their attackers off long enough to follow them?

  A more cautious man might have waited a while longer, might have looked for a better chance, or even another ladder. Not Pozhar. He had lost enough time already.

  Even though he knew that the fight ahead of him would be difficult, even though he knew that his chances of survival were slim, he drew his lasgun and he ran to meet it firing. And he did so not just because he felt he had no other choice, but with a grin on his face and a mad laugh erupting from his stomach.

  A step gave way beneath Trooper Palinev’s foot, and he leapt for the safety rail and pulled himself up. He had started a cascade effect, which demolished the rest of the staircase beneath him, but he had attained the balcony level of the refinery as planned.

  He grinned at the memory of those comrades who had thought him mad for eschewing the standard Valhallan greatcoat. His basic flak jacket might not have provided the same level of protection against the cold, but it was much lighter, more flexible, and Palinev’s unencumbered agility had just saved his life.

  He reached the tall, narrow window — the one towards which his sergeant had directed him from outside, below. He settled behind it and used the butt of his long-las, his sniper variant lasgun, to knock out the glass. An icy gust of wind blew away the refinery’s stuffy gloom, and further reddened Palinev’s already ruddy cheeks.

  He rested the long, thin barrel of his weapon against the sill, and waited.

  The battle had only just spread to this part of the hive, and many of the buildings were still standing. Palinev’s platoon was attempting to draw the enemy into a narrow street, a bottleneck in which the defenders would have the advantage, and the strategy was working. The first wave of Chaos forces came crashing against the Ice Warriors’ front lines, and were held. That made them sitting ducks for Palinev, and the nine other snipers stationed behind the surrounding windows. He squeezed off round after round, claiming kill after kill.

  And then, in a second, the tide turned.

  Palinev didn’t know what had happened at first, only that there had been a shift in the battle, that his comrades were reacting to something he hadn’t seen. Something behind them. Then he saw las-beams ripping into them, from an area that ought to have been secure, taking them by surprise. It was a massacre.

  His heart in his throat, Palinev abandoned his post and raced along the circular balcony, his footsteps ringing off metal mesh. Three windows along, he found a better view, and he saw to his horror that cultists and traitors were rising from the manholes, from the underhive, outflanking their foes. The Ice Warriors on the ground were rallying, but they didn’t stand a chance. Still, Palinev did what he could to help them, sniping down all the heretics he could in the time he had.

  The refinery doors crashed open, somewhere beneath him, and all of a sudden the battle seemed a great deal louder, a great deal closer to him.

  The intruders knew where he was. A frag grenade arced over the balcony rail and rolled up to Palinev’s feet. He was already running, just ahead of the explosion, which blew out a section of the building’s wall. The balcony was mangled, left partially unsupported, trembling and creaking — and, as Palinev reached the one remaining s
et of steps, he found four Chaos cultists ascending towards him, recognisable by their cloaks and by their obscene tattoos.

  He brought up his gun, but the cultists were too fast for him, and he had to throw himself onto his stomach to avoid their las-fire. He wasn’t accustomed to close combat, wasn’t built for it. Palinev had spent his years in service honing his sneaking and sniping skills. This, then, was his worst nightmare: an enemy that could see him!

  A section of mesh beneath him rattled and slid. Feverishly, he pried it loose and clambered down through a web of scaffolding. He dropped the six metres to the ground floor level, rolling to absorb the impact of his landing. The cultists were up on the teetering balcony, looking for him, and he decided to give them a taste of their own medicine. They saw the incoming grenade, and one of them tried to run, while the other three saw the futility of that course and jumped for it.

  Palinev managed to get off a shot while they were in mid air, wounding one of the cultists, who landed awkwardly with a snap of bone. Then the grenade went off and the balcony gave way, bringing two walls down with it. All Palinev had time to do was to drop to his knees and cover his head with his hands as he was engulfed by a tidal wave of screeching, rending sound.

  When it was all over, as the echoes died down, Palinev raised his head, and saw that one of the cultists had survived, and was training a lasgun on him. He closed his eyes, heard the familiar cracking retort, and expected it to be the last thing he would ever hear.

  Then, he opened his eyes again to find the cultist dead on the floor.

  An Ice Warrior stood over the corpse, one whose name Palinev did not know. “You the scout, Palinev?” the man grunted, and he nodded blankly.

  “Must be something up with your comms,” said the Ice Warrior. “They’ve been trying to contact you for the past half hour. Steele wants you.”

  They had lined up beside the Termite, Steele and his handpicked squad: the nine troopers to whom he would be trusting his life, and more importantly, the success of his assignment.