[Imperial Guard 05] - Ice Guard Read online

  “We should report back to our commanders,” said Palinev. “I should think they’ll want to talk.”

  They came together not long after that: the Valhallans in green, the Validians in red, their paths converging in the heart of the white forest.

  They had been expecting each other, of course, thanks to their respective scouts. A few of the troopers exchanged strained pleasantries, and Colonel Steele and the Validian commander, a fresh-faced young captain, sought each other out and moved to one side for a private conference.

  The rest of the Guardsmen took this as a cue to relax, to recharge themselves as best they could. Their surroundings, however, offered them scant comfort. It was almost impossible for a man to sit down without touching the deadly tree trunks or roots — and after trying for a time, holding themselves in unnatural positions until their muscles ached, many of them gave up and stood again.

  Few of the Validians could sit still anyway. They stamped their feet, rubbed their arms, did all they could to stave off the biting cold. Mikhaelev watched them, their bright colours spread through the forest as far as he could see, and he shook his head and sighed. Here they were, these brave men, doing the Emperor’s work, and their leaders couldn’t even equip them with the right clothing for the job.

  In a perfect Imperium, of course, the Validians wouldn’t have been assigned to this frozen world at all, unused as they were to such conditions. Somewhere, no doubt, a low-level clerk had looked at his slate, seen how many Guardsmen were dying from hypothermia on Cressida, weighed this against the cost of a few million armoured greatcoats and chosen to do nothing.

  Mikhaelev was standing with three of his comrades, Anakora, Borscz and Pozhar.

  “What do you think they are saying?” Borscz asked, inclining his head towards Steele and the captain.

  “They’ll be making plans to fight,” said Pozhar with more hope than certainty. “According to Trooper Palinev, the Chaos army is on the Validians’ heels. That puts them in our path. We’ll have to shoot our way through them.”

  Anakora shook her head. “This is meant to be a stealth mission. If we start a full-scale battle here, it will lead every heretic in the area to us. Even with the Validians’ help, we would be hopelessly outnumbered.”

  “I’m talking about a lightning strike,” said Pozhar. “Take the Chaos scum by surprise, and be long gone before the reinforcements arrive. The heretics think they’re safe here, cowering behind their walls of ice. We can teach them different.”

  Borscz grinned at that. “We can be like our ancestors, no? We can strike at our enemies’ very heart, as those mighty heroes did against the invading orks.”

  “We can teach them to fear us!” said Pozhar, his eyes gleaming at the prospect.

  “Yeah,” said Mikhaelev dryly, “a lesson that will stay with them for all of about a day and a half before they’re virus bombed out of existence.”

  “Trooper Mikhaelev is correct,” said Anakora. “There is no purpose in our fighting and perhaps dying when it would not advance our cause.”

  “Then what do you suggest?” asked Pozhar. “That we turn tail and run?”

  “Colonel Steele will find a way,” asserted Borscz loyally. “He has not brought us this far to give up on our mission just yet.”

  “No,” said Mikhaelev, with a tight smile, “I should think not.”

  Anakora was starting to see it too, he thought. She was looking at the knots of red and gold Guardsmen around them, at the hope in their faces that, having been lost for so long, they might have been found again.

  “They’ve been out of vox contact for weeks,” she said. “They cannot know about the withdrawal, about the… about what is to come next. They don’t know that it’s already too late for them, that without air transport they have no hope of reaching Alpha Hive in time to evacuate.”

  “So, they’re already dead,” said Pozhar with a shrug. “All the more reason why they should die like soldiers, with their guns blazing.”

  “Anyone want to bet the Validians do just that?” asked Mikhaelev quietly.

  The other three troopers turned to look at him.

  “Anakora was right,” he said. “These men are dead anyway. Frankly, even if that weren’t the case, the Imperium sees them, sees us all, as expendable. The only person on this world who really matters is Wollkenden, and we are the only people who can save Wollkenden. So, if it costs the Imperium four hundred lives to preserve our ten… well, it’s just numbers, right?”

  “And how, my friend, might the sacrifice of those four hundred lives help us?” asked Borscz.

  “Think about it,” said Mikhaelev. “We can’t go forward, can’t go back. There is one other option. We can’t fight our way through the Chaos forces, but perhaps we can go around them. If we are to do that, though, we will need a diversion… a big one.”

  Anakora looked pale, shaken. Her gaze was pulled again to the surrounding Validians, but she turned away quickly as one of them caught her eye. She seemed almost ashamed. Pozhar, in contrast, closed his eyes and let out a groan of dismay. Mikhaelev guessed that he would have swapped regiments in a second for a chance to get back into combat.

  “You want to know what our leaders are talking about over there, Borscz?” he said grimly. “I’ll lay you another bet if you like. I’ll bet you a day’s worth of dry rations that Steele is asking the Validians to die for us.”

  Mikhaelev was right, of course.

  Anakora prayed he wouldn’t be, that Colonel Steele and the Validian captain might have found another way between them. But the more she thought about it, the more she knew that Mikhaelev’s way was the only way that made sense.

  The officers parted company, and Steele called his squad to him for a short briefing. Anakora hardly listened to his quiet words. She knew what he was going to say, anyway. Her eyes wandered instead to the captain, who was chairing a similar meeting with his sergeants, fourteen or fifteen of them. She watched as they received the news: that their trials of the past few weeks had been for nothing, that they wouldn’t make it home after all, that the Emperor required only one final service from them. They bore it stoically, of course, but Anakora detected a few wistful expressions and a few slumped shoulders, as the sergeants moved out to spread the word to their troopers.

  Logically, she knew she had no reason to feel guilty. The Validians weren’t really sacrificing themselves for her sake, nor for that of her squad. They were doing it for Confessor Wollkenden, for the Ecclesiarchy, for the Emperor. Still, she couldn’t help but ask herself why, of all the good soldiers here, she should be among the few, the very few, to be spared — why this was starting to become a familiar pattern for her.

  If the Emperor had a plan for her — and it seemed that He must — if He was keeping her alive for some reason, then Anakora just wished she could imagine what that reason might be.

  With no more words left to say, the regiments went their separate ways.

  The depleted company of Validians turned back the way they had come, and marched to meet the pursuers from whom they had fought so hard to escape. The squad of Valhallans headed off to the north-east, planning to skirt around the inevitable battlefield as they had back at Alpha Hive. The difference was, they were on foot this time, but at least this battlefield would be smaller.

  Steele led the way. He had an unerring sense of direction, another gift of his augmetics, but still he paused frequently to check his bearings with Palinev. Gavotski knew that the colonel would be watching the chrono, calculating the cost of yet another diversion from their planned course. Steele had been tight-lipped since his talk with the captain — but then, this was hardly unusual for him.

  It couldn’t have been easy for him, to have been the bearer of such bad news, to have had to ask a fellow commander to order his men to their deaths. It had still been just a few days, after all, since the same had been asked of him.

  Gavotski’s thoughts drifted back to Alpha Hive, to the many good comrades he had lef
t behind there, the scores of men alongside whom he had been proud to fight at one time or another. He wondered how many of them were still fighting, how many might yet make it onto the last of the exodus ships. He doubted he would see any of them again.

  Barreski, at least, seemed happy. Somehow, he had talked one of the Validians into giving him another hand flamer — and with Grayle’s help, he was stripping it down on the move, lovingly cleaning and lubricating its components.

  Presently, the squad bore north and then around to the north-west again, until they had completed a quarter-circle and were on a path parallel to the one they had been on before. They had seen and heard nothing of the Validians in an hour, but now the quiet of the ice forest was interrupted by a series of distant sounds: the usual sounds, the ones that could have been the soundtrack to Gavotski’s life, to all of their lives.

  Gunfire, explosions, screaming. The sounds of war. The sounds of four hundred good men, dying.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Time to Destruction of Cressida: 38.24.44

  It seemed like a long time before the forest fell silent again.

  For Steele, of course, with his enhanced hearing, it felt like even longer. This was a good thing, he told himself. It meant the Validian company had bought him more time than he could have expected from them. It meant they had died as they had lived, as heroes, and no Guardsman could want any more from his life than that.

  It meant that he had done the right thing by sacrificing them.

  Not that he had doubted this, not any longer. Steele had reviewed his decision six times, and was satisfied that he had overlooked nothing. Anyway, he had Sergeant Gavotski’s support, which was always a reliable indicator.

  The Ice Warriors had completed their half-circuit of the battlefield. They were behind the Chaos forces, whatever remained of them, back on course for the confessor’s crash site. Steele just prayed that their enemies would take some time to lick their wounds, before turning to head homeward. Just time enough for his squad to gain a safe distance from them.

  He heard the approaching mutants a full six seconds before he saw them.

  They were making no attempt to be quiet, crashing through the ice forest at speed, whimpering and howling. They must have fled from the heat of the battle, thought Steele. They couldn’t have known that the Ice Warriors were here — and yet, by some perverse chance, they were about to run right into them.

  He hissed a warning to the others, telling them to take cover. Although they couldn’t have seen anything themselves yet, they didn’t stop to ask questions. They obeyed their colonel’s order with varying degrees of success. Only a blind man could have failed to see Borscz, who was twice as broad as the ice tree behind which he attempted to hide. Still, thought Steele, if the mutants were in the throes of panic, and obviously feeble-minded, then they might not see the trap before it was sprung.

  And suddenly, there were over a score of them, appearing in the gaps between the trees, their manifest and varied deformities an assault to Steele’s eyes. He waited until they got closer, even closer… and then one of the mutants came scrambling to a halt, and its huge, pink eyes widened, staring at Borscz’s protruding stomach. It opened its mouth to squeal a warning…

  …and that was when Steele stepped out of hiding with his laspistol levelled, and before the mutant could let out a sound, he calmly blew a hole through its head.

  The rest of his squad were quick to follow his lead. Pozhar, not surprisingly, was the first, his face lit up by a broad grin as he pumped las-beam after las-beam into his confused and terrified targets. Barreski took his time, waiting for the opportune moment to wreak maximum damage with one shot from his new flamer. Three mutants were engulfed in fire, filling the air with the stink of their burning flesh and the sounds of their screams.

  “Don’t let any of them get away!” Steele yelled.

  He counted four mutants on the periphery of the group, making to turn back, deciding that the lesser of two perils was the one that lay behind them after all. He brought down a hunchbacked, tentacled horror with a shot to the back.

  The other three mutants fled, and were out of sight before Steele could stop them — but an instant later a tremendous bang rent the air and a cloud of shrapnel billowed out from the trees where they had vanished. Barreski had tossed a frag grenade after the mutants — and, although Steele winced at the sound that had almost overloaded the acoustic enhancers in his right ear, he couldn’t deny that it had been an effective tactic.

  Was there any hope, he wondered, that no one in the main body of the Chaos force had heard the explosion, that the ice trees might have deadened its sound before it could reach them? Perhaps, at least, it might be dismissed as the work of a lone Validian kamikaze, or even a dispute between undisciplined mutant stragglers.

  So long, that was, as none of the mutants lived to tell a different tale.

  In focusing on the would-be deserters, Steele had let down his guard against the more immediate threats to his wellbeing. He heard the cocking of a pistol, and turned to find its barrel aimed at his head by a creature that looked as if its face had melted, its eyes and its nose running towards its chin.

  Before the mutant could fire, Borscz barrelled into its side and threw off its aim. It responded by swinging its gun butt at the burly Ice Warrior’s jaw. It hit with a resounding crack, but Borscz barely seemed to feel the blow. He gripped his hapless opponent by its shoulders, thrust it back against a razor-edged ice tree. The mutant screamed and thrashed as blood gushed out of its back, but with a deep-throated chuckle and a flash of his brilliant white teeth, Borscz pushed its chin up and back with the heel of his hand. The tree cut through the mutant’s misshapen head, bisecting it down the middle.

  Three more of its kin made a break for it, but two ran into a crossfire of las-beams set up by Gavotski and Anakora. Palinev went racing after the third, with his knife drawn. Barreski pressed his flamer into service again, and Borscz, who had been about to pounce on another mutant when it combusted in his face, gave a yelp of protest and threw his hands up to his singed beard.

  Surprise and discipline were the Ice Warriors’ greatest assets, and many of their foes were cut down before they could do much more than gibber. Mikhaelev in particular proved to be an expert shot, choosing his angles well so that a single one of his las-beams often sliced through two bodies.

  The closest the mutants came to exhibiting teamwork was when four of them tried to swarm Blonsky. Steele’s pistol finished off one before it could reach its target, but the others fell upon the trooper. Most of the Ice Warriors held their fire for fear of hitting a comrade, although Steele noted that Pozhar was the exception.

  He drew his power sword and activated a control in its hilt, causing the blade to flare with a crackling blue energy. He stepped up behind one of the mutants and struck with all the strength in his augmented muscles, severing its head from its spinal column.

  Borscz wrenched a third mutant from its victim, while Grayle attempted a similar manoeuvre with the fourth, but found that it was stronger than he was. Nevertheless, he kept it occupied long enough for Blonsky to stand and to thrust his bayonet into the struggling creature’s guts.

  And then the fight was over, there were no more mutants standing, and Palinev returned, wiping his blade with a cloth, to report that the one he had chased was also dead. The Ice Warriors were left in a self-made clearing, but the ice trees that Barreski’s flamer had melted were already beginning to grow again. Pozhar leapt as a new shoot sprouted with impossible speed beneath him, almost impaling his foot.

  Before they moved on, Steele counted the bodies to confirm that all the mutants he had seen were accounted for. Then he took another second to rerun that calculation, four more times, to be sure.

  It had become second nature for him to do this, and he did it for a good reason. He did it because he could not trust his own mind.

  Some things, he remembered too well.

  He remembered every detail
of his time in the hospital, everything they had done to him there. The medics had rebuilt one side of Steele’s head, inserted plates into his skull, and grafted foreign objects onto his brain. They had replaced the shattered bones in his right shoulder and upper arm with plasteel, the muscles with hydraulic systems.

  He remembered their assurances that the pain would be worthwhile, that they were doing the best they could for him. He hadn’t believed them. He had thought it more likely that the medics were just pushing, testing, seeing how far they could go.

  Steele could remember all that, but he couldn’t remember what had landed him in that Emperor-forsaken place to begin with. He had no memory of Karnak, the world to which his service records told him he had been posted for more than two years. He did not know who his comrades had been on that world, in that campaign, which of the Imperium’s many enemies they had been fighting, or what his orders had been on that fateful day.

  He had no idea what had caused the explosion that had gone off in his face.

  He couldn’t remember his father’s eyes, nor the touch of the girlfriend he had left behind on Valhalla when his draft papers had arrived.

  Sometimes, in the weeks that had followed his discharge, Steele had wished that the medics had just left him to die.

  He was aware that people saw him as a quiet man, a deep thinker. As a cold man. Some were jealous of his augmetics, of the feats they enabled him to achieve. Those people didn’t know the real Colonel Stanislev Steele. They didn’t know the abiding frustration that burnt at the core of his being.

  He could hear the flapping of a moth’s wings from forty paces now, detect its body heat from a hundred. He could perform complex calculations at lightning speed — or rather, a small part of his brain to which he felt little connection could perform them and offer up the results to him. He had near-perfect recall, and could store tactical maps and troop movements in that same small alien corner of his head.