[Imperial Guard 05] - Ice Guard Read online

  She got out of its way just in time. The second beast, unable to reverse the momentum of its lunge, landed on the first with its claws outstretched, and virtually gutted it. That left her free, for a moment, to defend herself against the third. As it thundered towards her, she got her first good look at it. She saw its feline features and its whiskers and she realised what the beasts were, or rather what they once must have been.

  They were snow leopards, much like those that roamed Valhalla’s tundra.

  She blasted at the oncoming beast, scoring three palpable hits — but it was tough, tougher than the Chaos hounds had been, and it would not fall. It leapt for her throat, and Anakora turned her lasgun sideways, using its barrel to protect herself. As soon as the snow leopard’s claws hit the weapon, she hefted it over her head as if it were the bar on a set of dumbbells, simultaneously dropping to her knees. Her attacker’s huge body was carried over her head, but it reacted fast, faster than she had hoped, and by the time Anakora had regained her footing and shouldered her lasgun again, the snow leopard had reined in its momentum, turned, and was coming at her again.

  Her only hope was a kill shot, right through its eye, into its brain.

  It was impossible.

  In a fraction of a second that stretched into an eternity, Anakora realised that she didn’t have the time to level her gun, to turn it to protect herself, to do anything else before she was eviscerated. She faced her death with a heavy sense of resignation. She turned her head away, felt the impact of the beast with her chest, felt herself falling, felt the spray of hot, sticky blood on her face…

  … and realised, to her surprise, that the blood wasn’t hers.

  The leopard was standing over her, black fluid gushing from its head, streaming into its eyes, one of its legs burnt off below the knee, fused into a bloody stump. It was unable to see, unable to run, thrashing in pain and confusion, and it seemed to have forgotten its erstwhile prey.

  Then it was struck by three las-beams at once. More blood and offal erupted from between its ribs, and the beast toppled onto its side, quite dead.

  Anakora’s comrades had come to her rescue.

  Steele was questioning his judgement once more.

  He should have anticipated that there might be trouble outside the Termite. He had anticipated it. Should he, then, have left it to his troopers to help Grayle? Should he have taken point, been the first out there, ready to lead? There was no point in thinking like that. Gavotski and the others had things under control, for now.

  Only one mutated leopard remained upright, and it was howling and twisting in the crossfire of five las-beams. It occurred to Steele to wonder if the beasts were native to this world, perhaps confined to its polar regions before the cold had spread. Or could they actually have evolved, even in the short time since a permanent winter had fallen over Cressida, to suit their altered climate?

  He used his momentary respite to survey his new surroundings.

  Two metres above him, the front end of his battered vehicle protruded from the glacier’s sheer face. As he watched, the Termite’s great horn crumpled and its wreck was dragged, screeching, back into the ice. A moment later, it had been swallowed up, and a fresh layer of ice had formed across the mouth of the tunnel it had made. No sign remained that the Termite, or indeed its passengers, had ever been up there.

  Borscz, Barreski and Grayle were on the ground beside Steele, struggling to disentangle themselves from each other. Borscz was the first to break free from the scrum, and he rushed to join in the near-ended battle with gusto.

  In front of Steele, there was a forest. Its near edge was almost parallel with that of the glacier, leaving only a narrow strip of land between them, eighty metres wide or less. Like the glacier, the forest stretched out far to each side of him, a great deal further than even his bionic eye could see.

  It was a forest not of wood but of ice — of obscene, twisted sculptures, mockeries of the natural shapes they had presumably replaced, growing thick around the trunks but branching out into grasping, clawing talons as they reached upwards. The ice trees grew high and thick enough to blot out the already-scant daylight and the shadows between them were dark and foreboding. Their surfaces were encrusted with the ever-present purple fungus, and Steele’s sensitive nose wrinkled at its overripe stench.

  He could detect something else too: a movement. There was something out there.

  He activated his eye’s zoom function. It took the augmetics a long second to react to his thought but then the colonel’s gaze probed, searching, penetrating the ice forest’s dark depths, and there…

  There it was… for a moment at least: a humanoid creature, covered in light grey fur, or maybe it was just wearing a fur coat. Steele couldn’t tell — because before he could adjust his focus to see the creature more clearly, it was off again, a blur of motion despite its odd, shambling gait. It disappeared behind an especially fat tree, and he had lost it.

  Unless, he thought, he acted now.

  There was no time to second-guess his instincts, this time. The figure might have been a Chaos scout, in which case Steele couldn’t let it go, couldn’t allow it to take news of the Ice Warriors’ presence in this area to its masters. So, he drew his lasgun and set off in pursuit of it yelling to Troopers Blonsky, Palinev and Pozhar to follow him. The rest could catch up once the final snow leopard was dead.

  As Steele crossed the tree line, he was plunged into an eerie gloom, and the aperture of his bionic eye widened to compensate. The recent snowfall had, for the most part, not touched the ground here. The soil was black and infertile, but the roots of many of the ice trees protruded from it like tripwires, and patches of the slippery fungus were everywhere. Steele had to slow his pace, watch his step. Even so, he almost lost his footing — and as he caught himself, he felt a sharp, slicing pain to his left shoulder.

  He had brushed against a tree trunk, and it was razor sharp. Its edge had cut right through his greatcoat, through its layers of plasfibre and thermoplas, to score his skin. He turned to deliver a warning to his troopers, but saw that they had discovered the danger for themselves.

  They proceeded as best they could after that. Steele used his power sword to cut away some of the more treacherous branches in his path — even without its energy field active, the well-honed blade sliced easily through the ice. Still, it was several minutes before he reached the spot in which the grey-furred figure had lurked — and, by then, he was not at all surprised to find no sign that it had ever been there.

  Blonsky and Pozhar had fallen behind, but the smaller, slighter Palinev had been able to keep pace with his colonel, slipping through the forest as if its traps and snares were little impediment to him.

  “There was something here, sir,” he reported. “You can see where its breath has started to melt this tree. I could search for its tracks, but they’ll be hard to follow on this ground.”

  “No,” said Steele. “Thank you, Trooper Palinev, but we don’t have time for that.”

  “It does look bleak, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so. We’ve lost the Termite. Our escape route through the ice has closed behind us, so that even if we do find Confessor Wollkenden, we’ve no way of getting back to Alpha Hive with him. We must be at least twenty kilometres from his crash site, and it seems our enemies know we’re here.”

  Steele couldn’t have summed up the situation more succinctly himself.

  “We should get back to the others,” he said. “We have a great deal of work to do.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Time to Destruction of Cressida: 40.42.39

  Pozhar was beginning to wonder what he was doing here.

  He was a front-line fighter, not a scout. Stealth was no more a virtue of his than was patience. Bad enough, he thought, that Steele had had the Termite flee from a single artillery unit; bad enough they had let the enemy have that victory. At least, he had thought, when they got to where they were going, when he was able to climb out into the open again at la
st, he would have the chance to flex his muscles.

  The mutated snow leopards had been a welcome diversion — and Pozhar felt confident, although it was impossible to know for sure, that his las-beams had finished off two of them. But then Steele had directed his squad into the ice forest and warned them of the overriding need for caution.

  And Pozhar had come to realise that the ice forest was almost as constricting, almost as claustrophobic, as the inside of the Termite had been.

  The further they had ventured between its vile, warped trees, the more densely those trees had become packed. Already Pozhar had been scratched three times by their sharp edges, and he was starting to ache with the effort of walking with his elbows damped to his sides, his head bowed, checking the ground for the treacherous purple fungus before he dared to take each step.

  Still, as bad as this was for him, he thought, it was far worse for Borscz, who was visibly straining to rein in his massive form, and who let out an aggrieved yelp every few minutes. Borscz’s greatcoat was so crazed with cuts by now that Pozhar was expecting great squares of its fabric to start falling away.

  He longed to set eyes on another snow leopard or two, something against which he could cut loose — but the ice forest seemed sterile, devoid even of birds, an entire area scoured of life, given over to the creeping rot that was destroying this world.

  Pozhar shivered at the thought, and decided that on reflection this was far worse than being cooped up in any vehicle. Out here, he could feel the Chaos corruption in the air, pressing in on him like a physical force, battering him. He wanted to yell defiance at it, to fight back. He wanted to hack, slash and burn this accursed place down.

  “Just give me a couple of flamers,” seethed Barreski, who had obviously had the same thought, “and I guarantee you there’ll be nothing left standing here in ten minutes. We’d be wading through water the rest of the way to the crash site.”

  “And the Chaos forces would hear us coming ten kilometres away,” said Borscz.

  “Just making a point, that’s all,” said Barreski. “I’d put my faith in Imperial firepower over anything Chaos can muster any day, no contest.”

  “Forgetting what happened to the Termite, are we?” asked Mikhaelev wryly.

  Anyway, there were no flamers — only the one that Barreski had been carrying, and it was out of fuel. There had been no time for the Ice Warriors to salvage anything more than their standard kit, worn or carried in their rucksacks, from the stricken Termite. Mikhaelev in particular was mourning the loss of his missile launcher, being now a heavy weapons expert with no heavy weapons.

  Pozhar heard a noise ahead of him, glimpsed a moving shape and reacted with lightning speed. By the time he recognised Trooper Palinev, he was already staring at his comrade’s slender form through his lasgun sights. An instant later, and Pozhar would have pulled the trigger. He chafed at having to hold himself back.

  Palinev had adapted to his surroundings with enviable ease. He moved between the ice trees like a ghost, seeming to know instinctively where to step, and when he had to twist or hop to avoid a grasping branch or a protruding root. “I’ve scouted two kilometres ahead, sir,” he reported to Steele, “but there’s nothing, nothing at all. The ice forest stretches as far as I’ve seen.”

  Gavotski’s lips tightened with disappointment. “Maybe we should have tried to go around it after all. If it gets any thicker—”

  Steele interrupted him. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, sergeant. In the meantime, assuming that the forest does reach all the way to our destination, if we maintain our current bearing and speed and encounter no further hostile life… assuming all that, we should be able to reach the crash site in…”

  He hesitated for a second, and his eyes — both the real one and the augmetic — glazed over. Pozhar stared at his commander in fascination — but then Steele’s eyes cleared and he concluded, “Approximately four hours and forty-seven minutes’ time.” And Pozhar wanted to scream.

  Palinev was alone again.

  He didn’t mind that. He had become used to solitude, welcomed it even. It was a long time since he had been in an environment as quiet as the ice forest was, far from the sounds of battle or even from the thrum of an engine. He knew he had to be careful not to let the quiet fool him. Likewise, he was sure to examine every ice tree that came into his view, even though the aberrant shapes had long since lost the power to fascinate or even to repel him, had begun to take on a monotonous quality.

  Palinev couldn’t take anything for granted, couldn’t drop his guard for a second. The others were depending on him. The information he could gather, alone and unseen, could prove vital to them. But it came with a risk attached. If he were to walk into an ambush, if he were to be captured, then the enemy would know that his comrades were behind him, and they would be prepared.

  One mistake, and Palinev knew he could take his entire squad down with him.

  He had left them almost an hour ago. It was time to drop back, he thought, and report in to Steele again, just to reassure the colonel that he hadn’t run into trouble, that the way ahead was still safe. Cradling his Guard-issue compass in his palm, Palinev reoriented himself. He was confident that he could retrace his steps by memory, but there was no harm in a double-check. If he strayed off course by even one half of a degree, he was likely to miss his comrades altogether.

  He was about to set off when a sound made him freeze.

  It had been almost nothing — the tiniest of scrapes, perhaps a rustle of fabric — and yet, it had not been a natural sound. Palinev knew this because he had taken the time to attune himself to the natural sounds of the forest, such as they were: the faintest warbling of the wind between the trees, the occasional pops and cracks as a newly frozen shape settled, or perhaps even grew?

  As quickly and as quietly as he could, taking only one careful step, Palinev tucked himself in behind the nearest ice tree, and dropped to his haunches. He drew his combat knife from his boot, recited the Litany of Stealth, made sure that his breathing was as soft as the breeze, and waited.

  As he had expected, a figure came into view. It was a man, as slight of stature as Palinev was. He was wearing an armoured helmet and a tight-fitting flak jacket, also like Palinev’s, except that where his was a bottle green in colour, the stranger’s was a bold red with gold highlights. It was hardly good camouflage material.

  Palinev thought that he recognised the colours, though he couldn’t name the regiment to which they belonged. Evidently, though, this man was an Imperial soldier — or at least, he had been once. He was holding a lasgun, keeping it ready as he crept from one tree to another: a scout. The question was, for whom was he scouting? There were no visible signs of Chaos mutation on the stranger, but that didn’t prove anything.

  Palinev waited until the man had drawn almost level with him, waited for his questing eyes to turn away from him. Then he slipped out from behind his tree, and into the shade of another. He repeated this manoeuvre twice more, each time drawing closer to his unsuspecting prey, and moving further around behind him.

  When at last he was close, almost close enough to reach out and touch the nape of the other scout’s neck, then Palinev pounced. His prey heard him coming, too late, didn’t even have time to spin around. Palinev was on the man’s back, his left arm locked around his shoulders, his right hand holding his knife to the man’s throat.

  “A friendly warning,” he hissed. “If you try to shout to your people, if you speak at all other than to answer my questions, I will slit your vocal cords.” He would have done it by now if only he had been sure, if he had seen any proof that this man was a traitor. “Who are you?” he asked. “Answer me!”

  “Trooper Garroway,” the other scout spat defiantly, “of the 14th Royal Validian regiment of the Imperial Guard. Kill me if you like. Kill us all, but it won’t save you. They will send a hundred thousand more like me — a million more — and they won’t rest until this world is scoured clean of your
filth, reclaimed for the Golden Throne!”

  “You’re Imperial Guard?” queried Palinev. “What are you doing out here? This is Chaos-held territory.”

  His prisoner relaxed a little in his grip, and this told Palinev more than words could have said. Garroway was relieved, not afraid, to have found himself in the hands of a fellow Guardsman. He was telling the truth.

  “There are just under four hundred of our company left,” said Garroway. “We were helping civilians out of Iota Hive to the north-west of here. When it fell, we were ordered back to Alpha, but the glaciers closed in front of us, blocking our path. We don’t have a vox-caster any more, so we couldn’t call for assistance. We have no maps. We’ve just been trying to find a way through, but the Chaos army is behind us. We were forced to take cover in this… this forest, whatever it is.”

  Palinev let go of him. “Palinev,” he introduced himself, “Valhallan 319th.”

  Garroway turned to face him, and his eyes narrowed. “You’re an Ice Warrior?”

  “Don’t let the lack of a greatcoat fool you. I move a lot better without it.”

  “Yeah? I can’t say I’d turn down the chance of a little protection. When my regiment first came to Cressida, sure it was cold, but not like this. Maybe it’s different for you, coming from an ice world, but we’re losing men by the hour. But… but you’ve found us now, they sent someone for us at last!”

  “Ah,” said Palinev, “no, I’m afraid they didn’t. We’re on a mission of our own.” He frowned. “And if the enemy is behind you, that’s going to mean trouble for us.”

  “You can guide us out of here, at least,” said Garroway. “You found your way past the glaciers, you can tell us how to get out… can’t you?”