'Are they dead?' Jurgen asked, and I shook my head, too shocked to speak for a moment.
'No,' I whispered at last, backing away fearfully, expecting the whole nest to rouse and tear us apart at any moment. I'd had merely the briefest of glimpses, but there must have been at least a thousand of the abominable creatures in there, probably more if I could be bothered with a proper headcount. 'Just dormant.' I tried desperately to remember the files Gries had shown me. 'The ones who attacked us before must have been revived to protect the others[137].'
Which meant we were in a very uncomfortable position indeed. I glanced round again, alert for any sign of movement, and withdrew to the far side of the corridor. We had to go on, there was no question of that, but the thought of those monstrosities at our backs was a terrifying one.
'Do we turn round?' Jurgen asked, and I shook my head slowly.
'No,' I said. The chances of running into an active 'stealer or two would be just as great whichever direction we took, and at least the hangar was a definite objective, as opposed to wandering around in the dark waiting to be torn to pieces.
'Very good, sir,' my aide replied, his matter-of-fact demeanour as obscurely heartening as it usually was in a crisis, and I felt a measure of confidence beginning to return. After all, the purestrains behind us were all dormant, so unless we did something catastrophically stupid to rouse them...
The distinctive hisssss... crack! of a bolter round impacting a few feet to my left, blowing a fist-sized hole in the metal wall beside me, galvanised me into action, and I brought my laspistol up in the direction it had come from, returning fire instinctively as I dived for cover. Jurgen responded too, the beam of his luminator picking out the distinctive lumpen profile of an ork as he brought his lasgun on aim. The greenskin ducked back behind a stanchion, as las-bolts peppered the metalwork around him, and I began to pick out other shapes moving in the shadows beyond.
'Pull back,' I ordered, trying to get an estimate of their numbers. This was hardly the best place to start a firefight, as I strongly suspected the genestealers would be rather cranky on first waking, and we were making a considerable amount of noise between us already.
'Right you are, sir,' Jurgen agreed, with a trace of reluctance, eager as any Valhallan to be killing orks, but this was hardly the time or place to indulge him. There seemed to be a dozen or so greenskins lurking in the darkness ahead of us, and a couple more of them began to shoot as well, though fortunately with no more luck than the first one was already having. 'They're trying to keep our heads down.'
'And they're succeeding,' I said testily, as a couple of heavy slugs ricocheted from the edge of the shrine to the Omnissiah atop the tool locker behind which I'd found refuge.
'Getting ready to charge, most likely,' Jurgen reminded me, a tactic we'd become more than familiar with on our Perlian odyssey, and I nodded grimly.
'Wait until they move,' I told him, unnecessarily, given how conversant he was with the best tactics to use against the creatures, and he nodded too, flicking the fire selector of his lasgun to full auto.
Without any further warning, a staccato rhythm of metal-soled boots began ringing off the deck plates, and a small knot of greenskins charged, brandishing the crude axes so many of them tend to favour in close combat. As they bore down on our position, a sense of foreboding washed over me; something was definitely not right about this. (Apart from the obvious point of an enraged mob of orks wanting to hack us to shreds, of course.) Then the hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle, as realisation dawned: the greenskins were running towards us in complete silence, none of them having made a sound since the skirmish began. On every other occasion I'd encountered them, they'd bellowed warcries, threats and exhortations to one another even before combat was joined, not to mention yelling their lungs out for as long as it continued, and they remained in any condition to do so.
'Don't let them get near you!' I yelled, as if Jurgen had been planning to offer them tanna and a florn cake, and he opened up at the same instant I did, spitting a fusillade of las-bolts down the corridor. There was no point in worrying about the genestealers in the hold now; the brood mind already knew precisely where we were, a deduction confirmed an instant later by a barely perceptible shifting in the shadows behind the orks with guns. Expecting to see something of the kind, I recognised it at once for what it was: a purestrain 'stealer, observing the actions of its implanted puppets with dispassionate interest.
'Grenade!' Jurgen yelled, lobbing another of the frag charges down the corridor, where it landed just ahead of the charging greenskins neat as you please. Both of us turned to run as it detonated, the concussion echoing in the confined space like an Earthshaker firing, and the pressure wave slammed into our backs as we took to our heels. The onrushing orks faltered, the leading ones shredded by the hail of shrapnel, and those behind either sufficiently incommoded by it or impeded by the resulting mess to allow us to open up a lead I hoped would prove sufficient.
'There was a genestealer with them,' I panted, praying that it would be prevented from pursuing us immediately by the tangle of perforated orks blocking the passage. We stood a reasonable chance of staying ahead of the lumbering greenskins for a while, until their greater endurance started to tell, but I was under no illusions about being able to outrun a purestrain.
Jurgen nodded. 'Saw it too,' he confirmed, before another bolt detonated uncomfortably close behind us; the phenomenal resilience of the orks was already allowing at least some of them to recover from the explosion.
We both turned, directing another hail of unaimed las-bolts back in their general direction, with the vague hope of putting them even more off their aim than usual, and for a second the air in my lungs seemed to freeze solid. Most of the las-bolts were impacting on the thorax of another genestealer, which had just entered the corridor from the cargo hold. It was moving sluggishly, rather than with the blinding speed and agility I usually associated with the creatures, and went down without even an attempt at seeking cover, but I knew we wouldn't be so lucky again. Even over the sounds of combat, and the ringing of our bootheels on the deck plates, I was beginning to hear a rustling, faint at first, like the wind in a forest, gradually rising to a muted roar, which reminded me uncomfortably of the tidal bore which had almost swept me to my death on Rikenbach. (And taken the feet out from under the heretic Dreadnought I'd been running away from at the time, luckily for me; I'd eventually washed up half-drowned on a sandspit, while our Hydra battery chewed it to pieces before it managed to get up again[138].)
'The whole nest's reviving[139]!' I shouted, finding I could run a little faster after all. The distinctive click-scratch of talons on metal echoed all around us, and I risked a quick glance back, regretting it at once. The pursuing 'stealers weren't just racing along the floor of the passageway, they were moving just as fast along the ceiling and the walls, their claws ripping purchase even from apparently smooth surfaces. The resulting fast-moving constriction in the dimensions of the corridor, beyond which more purestrains and a few implanted orks could be intermittently glimpsed, made it looked uncannily as though Jurgen and I were being swallowed - an impression I found about as comforting as you might expect. The creatures were still moving a little more sluggishly than usual, true, but they were gaining nevertheless, and I found myself trying to estimate just how long it was going to be before I felt claws in the back of my neck. The only result I could come up with was not nearly long enough, which was hardly helpful. The side passages we passed were choked with debris, and attempting to find refuge in any of them would be futile, simply slowing us down enough for the horrors in pursuit to catch up even more quickly.
137
Or from a different nest; similar hibernacula would have been distributed throughout the hulk, allowing the brood mind to survive the loss of a group or two.
138
Though Hydras are intended primarily for air defence, most Imperial Guard commanders are well aware of the damage their quad-mounted autocannon can do to a heavily armoured target or dispersed infantry formation, and aren't slow to take advantage of the fact when the opportunity presents itself.
139
A substantial proportion of it, at any rate; the number of genestealers Cain describes could hardly have fitted into so narrow a maze of corridors all at once.