'Pull back,' I told Jurgen, sotto voce, although the cacophony from below was still enough to drown out a marching band. If anything it was growing louder, as another ork nob[131], larger and more generally repulsive than either of the other two, and surrounded by bodyguards who at least matched them in physique, ploughed through the baying crowd, bellowing orders and threats. I would have surmised him to be the warboss of the entire Waaaaghh! from this alone, even without the distinct resemblance to the late and unlamented Korbul[132]. 'Time we were leaving.'
'Right you are, sir,' Jurgen agreed, no doubt considering that the multitude below were rather too many to take on, ancestral vendetta or no. He indicated the warboss, who was restoring order with all the tact and subtlety of a Khornate berserker with a hangover, and patted his lasgun. 'Shame I can't get a clean shot from here, though.'
'It'd make a good trophy,' I agreed, retracing our steps as quickly as I could consistent with caution, in case he was tempted to take a crack at it anyway. That would be all I needed, an army of hacked-off orks chasing after me, as well as playing dodge the genestealer. 'But I'm not sure there's room for it on the wall of your quarters.'
'Probably not,' Jurgen conceded, after a moment's reflection. Then he brightened. 'But at least we know who shot the CAT thing now.'
'I suppose we do,' I said, as we regained the welcoming gloom of the unlit tunnels at last. The indiscriminate hail of bolter fire which had blasted a hole in the deck as well as the target was certainly consistent with orkish ideas of marksmanship. But orks were looters by nature, almost as innately as they were fighters, and none of the greenskins I'd previously encountered would have abandoned a prize like that after disabling it, especially with a contingent of mekboyz around to barter for the remains once they'd dragged it home. The palms of my hands itched again, but whatever disquieting pattern my subconscious was recognising failed to elbow its way into my forebrain. Knowing better than to try forcing it, I turned my attention to a strategy for getting us back to the hangar bay; unfortunately, the best I could come up with was ''Keep moving and avoid the xenos'', which, although it seemed to have worked so far, seemed a little light on the essential details.
Jurgen nodded sagely. 'Better keep an eye out for perimeter patrols,' he cautioned, rekindling the luminator. 'Must have been one of those that got it. And the 'stealer back there.'
'More than likely,' I agreed. If my innate sense of direction was working as well as it usually did, the docking bay would be somewhere on the far side of the orks' encampment, and it was only too likely that they'd posted outer pickets there, one of whom had used the peripatetic automaton for a spot of target practice. Which meant getting to safety would mean eluding a greater concentration of greenskins from now on, as well as the roving fragments of the brood mind.
Then some of the sense of unease I'd been feeling crystallised suddenly into a hard knot of apprehension. 'If they've got sentries out,' I said slowly, 'why didn't we see any on the way in?'
Jurgen shrugged. 'Maybe the genestealers got them,' he said. 'They were quick enough to get through the hole the orks shot in the floor.'
'They were,' I agreed, the dark shadow still failing to lift from whatever my subconscious was fretting about. 'But we didn't see any of those close to the greenskin camp either.'
'Apart from the dead one,' Jurgen reminded me, pausing to put his shoulder to a corroded hatch cover blocking our progress any further. I kept the widening gap covered with my laspistol until we were reasonably certain nothing was going to leap out and attack us, then motioned him through, glancing back down the corridor for any signs of a hostile presence. Despite my obvious apprehension, I heard nothing like the scrabbling of talons or the ringing of iron-shod boots on the deck plates, although my imagination supplied movement enough in the shadows behind us.
'Shot with a bolter,' I mused aloud, and Jurgen nodded, no doubt taking the attempt to order my thoughts as a desire for confirmation.
'Looked like it to me,' he agreed. 'And at least a week ago. Could have been more. No way to tell how fast things rot in a place like this.'
'The orks have been here a lot longer than that,' I said, understanding beginning to sink in at last. 'So why hasn't the brood mind moved against them?' The genestealers had attacked us less than an hour after our arrival aboard the Spawn of Damnation. Yet the orks, who'd presumably been here for weeks on end, still seemed unaware of their presence.
'Just too many of them?' Jurgen suggested. Well, that was possible, of course, but according to Gries's datafiles a hulk as large as this one would normally have thousands of genestealers aboard it, and a battle on that scale would certainly have left far more evidence of itself than a single cadaver.
'I don't think so,' I said, with a shake of my head. The genestealers had been quick enough to react to the presence of the Reclaimers and the tech-priests, and if the orks were being left alone it had to be for a reason. Once again, I found myself forced to consider that the brood mind was a more subtle and dangerous enemy than the waves of animalistic genestealers it controlled made it appear. 'The 'stealers are up to something.'
Jurgen shrugged again. 'Of course they are, sir. They're xenos,' he pointed out reasonably. 'But if they're concentrating on the orks instead of us, good luck to 'em.'
Well, those were sentiments I could hardly argue with, so I nodded instead, but kept my weapons handy nevertheless. Both xenos breeds were utterly inimical to humankind, and they were welcome to take lumps out of each other until there were none of either left standing so far as I was concerned; but my finely tuned sense of paranoia was convincing me that whichever side won, we'd lose.
WORKING OUR WAY round the greenskins' beachhead took just as long as I'd feared, and more than once I had cause to be grateful for the tanna flask and ration bars Jurgen had secreted about his person before leaving the safe haven of the Revenant.
Though necessary, each of these pauses for rest and refreshment were anxious ones, punctuated by glances at my chronograph, until even my most optimistic estimates of how long the Thunderhawk would remain waiting for survivors to straggle back to it had been long exceeded. But there was nowhere else to go that I could think of, so the hangar bay remained our objective. Even if the entire expedition had been massacred by the pure-strains stalking it, I was pretty sure the Reclaimers and their allies in the Adeptus Mechanicus would be unwilling to leave the treasure trove of archeotech aboard the Spawn of Damnation alone for long, and it would only be a matter of time before they launched another attempt to loot the hulk. Which meant rescue would simply be a matter of waiting, and hoping we didn't succumb to starvation, the blades of the orks or the jaws of the genestealers, before they stopped dithering and got on with it. True, there was no guarantee that they'd make for the same docking bay again, but that was a possibility I didn't allow myself to dwell on for too long.
By the simple expedient of keeping the faint glow of the functioning luminators to our right, as it continued to seep through the labyrinth of passageways, ducts and conduits like the herald of dawn on some habitable world, we contrived to remain far enough from the main body of the greenskins to avoid ready detection, without deviating too far into the depths of the hulk again. On several occasions we were forced to seek refuge in some shadowy side turning, or behind some tumbled debris, by the approach of footsteps and the guttural barking of the greenskins' barbarous tongue, but orks and gretchin aren't exactly stealthy at the best of times, and Jurgen and I were able to conceal ourselves long before the risk of detection became a real possibility. Though all these parties were armed, the carrying of weapons being as natural as breathing to an ork, so far as I could see, without sticking my head out far enough to be noticed, they were being hefted in a distinctly casual manner, and I remarked as much to Jurgen, as the shrill squabbling voices of a gretchin scavenging party under the sullen supervision of an apprentice mek and a couple of bored-looking boyz[133] faded into the distance.
131
The orkish warboss Cain bested in single combat on Perlia, effectively breaking the back of the invasion in the process.
132
Orkish warriors or footsoldiers; also used as a generic suffix to indicate a group with more specialised abilities, like mekboyz (ibid.), weirdboyz (the nearest greenskin equivalent to sanctioned psykers), painboyz (roughly analogous to medicae or chirurgeons, although their ministrations are only sought by most orks under the direst of circumstances), and so on. Largely synonymous with gitz, which is often applied to any group of boyz which doesn't include the speaker.