Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘Let’s keep it that way,’ I said, and shot his opponent several times at point-blank range before it had time to register my presence. A pattern of holes about the width of my palm appeared in the back plate of its armour, roughly where a human heart would have been; no doubt the eldar’s was somewhere else, although I seemed to have hit something equally vital, as crimson rivulets began to trickle down the green ­plating, and it folded to the ground.

I looked round, vaguely surprised not to have been shredded by the shuriken of the others now I was standing in plain view instead of crouching behind a rock, only to find that the other eldar had more urgent matters to contend with. First and fifth squads had re-emerged from the tunnels they’d been despatched down, firing as they came, and catching the xenos in a neat enfilade. Several fell at once, the survivors immediately turning their attention to retreat, taking their wounded with them and covering their departure down the fissure they’d emerged from with neatly disciplined covering fire.

‘So they are down there,’ Kasteen said, her voice attenuated by the tiny vox-receiver in my ear. Which was hardly surprising under the circumstances; if it hadn’t been for the more powerful set being carried by the vox-op46 relaying the signal, I’d never have been able to get through to her at all with so much rock in the way. ‘Can you find out how many, and where they’re getting in?’

‘We’ll do our best,’ I assured her, being careful not to say anything which sounded like a guarantee. I turned to Grifen. ‘How are the casualties doing?’

It never hurt to let the troopers think I cared, especially when I was liable to be overheard; it meant they’d be watching my back when the las-bolts started flying.

She shook her head briefly. ‘Three dead, two critical. They’ve been stabilised, but they won’t last long if we don’t get them to a medicae. I’m sending them back with the rest of fourth squad.’

‘Good call,’ I said, to her evident relief and the quiet approval of all the troopers in earshot. ‘They’re at half-strength now anyway, and the casualties need them more than we do. Any injuries in second and fifth?’

‘Nothing serious,’ Magot reported, trotting over from the knot of troopers who’d just emerged from the tunnel mouth, making the place feel uncomfortably crowded again. ‘Couple of cuts and bruises, that’s all.’

‘Good,’ I said, with uncharacteristic sincerity. I was stuck with the job of eldar hunting in earnest now, and the more squaddies I had to hide behind the happier I’d feel. I glanced at the map again. ‘Looks like your original plan’s still the best,’ I told Grifen after a moment. She was astute enough to have worked that out for herself, and any excuse I could come up with to divert one of the other squads to clear the tunnel ahead of us would ring uncomfortably hollow, so, once again, I was trapped into living up to my dauntless reputation. ‘We’ll just have to take the middle tunnel alone.’

‘I was thinking the same thing myself,’ she agreed, neatly skewering my last hope of having some human shields in front of us, at least in the short term. She shrank the scale of the mapped area, surrounding it with a featureless expanse of terra incognita. ‘The vox-relays should let us know where the others are, at any rate, and if the outlying squads keep taking paths back towards the centre every time they reach a junction, we’ll probably meet up again further down.’

‘Sounds reasonable,’ I agreed. In my experience cavern systems did indeed link up with one another from time to time, and since the alternative was to believe that we were going to be pressing on bereft of even the possibility of help if we got into trouble, I preferred to cling to that hope. Even as I watched, one of the routes in the screen lengthened almost imperceptibly as first squad began their cautious advance beyond the limits of the map. I turned, looking as resolute as I could, while what was left of fourth squad shambled away in the direction we’d come from, taking their wounded with them.47 ‘Might as well get on with it, then,’ I said, with an uneasy glance at the tunnel mouth which had so recently disgorged a party of eldar. Long and bitter experience told me we were going to find trouble down there, but of what kind, and how serious it would turn out to be, I still had no idea.