'What's going on?' she demanded, the minute I came within earshot.
'The Space Marines are taking out the artillery for us,' I told her, trying not to sound too pleased about it. 'That headache a few minutes ago was a bunch of Terminators teleporting in.' Which seemed a bit like overkill, given that a combat squad of ordinary Astartes could have taken out the rebels without breaking sweat, but only the Terminators had the training and experience to deploy by teleporter. A thought struck me, and I nodded in sudden understanding. 'No wonder Gries wanted the vox link kept open. They must have used it as a homing beacon.'
'Then we need to get the men up here,' she said, turning towards the manhole we'd first emerged from. 'The Astartes might need some backup.'
'I doubt it,' I said, keeping the relief from my voice with an effort. It could just have been the bulk of the intervening building, but it sounded to me like the firing was already reducing in both intensity and volume. 'But you're right about getting back under cover as fast as we can.' If I'd read the situation right, the few remaining rebels would give up trying to make a fight of it and start fleeing for their lives at any moment now, and that would be a bad time to get caught in the open. I fully expected Mira to argue about that, as she seemed to do more or less by reflex every time I tried to get her to be sensible, but if she was about to she never got the chance. Instead, she crouched behind the wrecked Chimera and raised her lasgun.
'Too late,' she said.
FIVE
A QUICK GLANCE round the Chimera's hull was all it took to confirm that Mira was right: there was no way we could get back to the tunnels now without being spotted. A full squad of rebel infantry, still wearing the remains of their old PDF uniforms, embellished by some paintstick scrawl in place of the unit patches which had been ripped away from the sleeves, was deploying further up the road in skirmish order. As I watched them come, the palms of my hands started to itch. Though I couldn't quite put my finger on it yet, something wasn't right.
'There are more up there,' Mira said, swinging her lasgun in the direction of the upper floor I'd been observing the enemy from, and where I'd left the two dead sentries a few moments before. She was rewarded by a flicker of movement, as whoever it was ducked back out of sight with almost indecent haste.
'Frak!' I said, heedless of the fact that there was a lady present. We'd be dead meat if anyone started shooting at us from up there, and even though Mira had picked off one man from this distance, I didn't imagine for a moment that she'd be able to repeat the trick with las-bolts bursting around her. 'There must have been a third man up there all the time.'
I didn't see how there could have been, though, or he would have surely intervened in the firefight. But the only other explanation I could think of didn't make sense either. Neither of the sentries we'd taken out had any vox gear, so how could they have called for help?
'I'm more worried about the ones down here,' Mira said, cracking off a couple of shots before I could stop her, which took one of the troopers advancing on us down and sent the rest scurrying for cover. She grinned exultantly at me, before returning her eye to the sights. 'I got one!'
'Instead of holding your fire long enough to be sure of several, when they got a bit closer,' I said, trying not to sound too hacked off about it. I readied my own weapons, hunkering down just as a las-bolt hit the discoloured metal above us, sending a brief rain of rust particles pattering off my hat. As I'd feared, the man on the building was targeting us too, although, thank the Emperor, he seemed to be an indifferent marksman.
'I think I'm doing pretty well, actually,' Mira snapped, turning to send a couple of retaliatory las-bolts back in the direction of the upper floor. She didn't seem to hit anything this time, but successfully discouraged whoever it was from trying again for a moment or two. 'At least I'm shooting at them, instead of just criticising all the time.'
Nothing in all my years as a commissar had prepared me for a response like that, but then I'd never encountered anyone quite like Mira before either; at least, not in a parody of a military uniform, and apparently trying to live up to it. My dealings with the daughters of the aristocracy had, up until that point, been confined to the kind of soirees my fraudulent reputation had attracted invitations to, generally as part of a delegation from an Imperial Guard contingent who'd either just arrived in-system to deal with some pressing threat, or were about to depart after having done so. I knew they were reasonably good dancers, moderately dull conversationalists and tolerably pleasant company for the night, but that was about all. There was little point in frittering our last few moments away on a pointless argument, though, so I bit back my instinctive response and peered round the Chimera's dozer blade again.
'Something's definitely wrong, here,' I said. These were no panic-stricken routers, fleeing the Astartes: they were advancing swiftly and purposefully from one piece of cover to the next, half of them moving while the rest kept their comrades covered. I pulled my head back behind the thick steel plate just ahead of a blizzard of las-bolts.
'You think?' Mira levelled her lasgun to retaliate, heedless of the state of her powerpack, and I cracked off a few shots of my own in the general direction of the upper floor, certain I'd seen movement up there again. The situation was getting more desperate by the second: it could only be a matter of time before the lurkers above us managed to line up a shot, or the advancing troopers moved round our flanks.
Looking back, we'd probably have been dead, or a great deal worse, in another handful of minutes, had it not been for the surviving rebels in the artillery park. By the grace of the Emperor, they chose that moment to break and run, pelting down the avenue in an inchoate, howling mob, any pretence of military discipline completely forgotten in the desperate rush to save themselves.
'Come on!' I said, grabbing Mira by the arm and making a dash for the open manhole before she had a chance to start arguing again. 'Now's our chance!'
To her credit, she seemed to get the idea, putting on a fair turn of speed for a woman whose usual idea of exercise was probably walking down the corridor to the dining room. Timing was cruciaclass="underline" it would have been ironic to say the least to have been shielded from the las-bolts of our enemies by the bodies of their comrades, only to be trampled to death by the hysterical mob.
As it was, we managed to make it to the hole in the road with no more difficulty than one might expect, despite the risk of twisting an ankle on the rubble-strewn carriageway, cracking off a couple of shots at our most visible enemies as we ran; not with any hope of hitting them, of course, but in the vague hope of preventing them from gunning us down as we emerged. Seeing no point in delaying any more than I had to, I raised my laspistol and chainsword above my head, to keep them from fouling on the manhole's rim, and jumped feet first into the darkness beneath. I was no stranger to this sort of thing, having grown up in the underhive, and was already flexing my knees to absorb the impact as I hit the rockcrete about three metres below. I don't mind admitting it jarred a lot more than I remembered it doing as a juvie, but I remained on my feet, and took a couple of cautious steps to check that my ankles were still where they belonged, instead of having been driven up through my shins like they felt.
'Are you mad?' Mira asked, scrambling down the ladder, the luminator still attached to her lasgun strobing round the narrow chamber, and I shrugged.
'How would I know?' I asked, not really caring to hear her answer. I'd already met enough head cases in the course of my career to have filled an asylum, and every single one of them had thought they were perfectly sane. To my relief, however, Mira disdained to reply, having found something else to get sniffy about.