Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

‘There are too many of them,’ Amberley said, matter-of-factly – and, in my opinion, far from helpfully. The others were still up and fighting, although not for much longer, probably. Pelton was blowing one after another to offal with his bolt pistol, as calmly as if they were nothing more lethal than targets in a shooting gallery, but each one he despatched was incrementally closer than the last, and the Emperor alone knew how many more shots he had left; the moment he ran dry, one of the hideous things would be on him before he had a chance to reload. Zemelda had one clinging to the arm she’d raised to protect her face, flailing wildly as she tried to keep it at a distance, bludgeoning at it with the butt of her laspistol – from which I inferred she’d already burned through the power pack143 – while Mott ran to help her, the razor-edged glint of a combat knife in his hand. Me, I’d have dropped the luminator and gone for the laspistol still holstered below his shoulder, but I suppose he was worried about the possibility of hitting his fellow acolyte by mistake (the odds of which he’d no doubt calculated to the trillionth decimal place).

‘Hang on, sir,’ Jurgen said, his voice as conversational as if we were out for an evening constitutional, casually batting one of the predators aside with the barrel of his melta as he spoke. It smacked into the tunnel wall and clung there for a moment, before Amberley reduced it to offal with a pistol bolt. ‘I’ve got this.’

Forewarned, I closed my eyes just in time, seeing the flash of the melta’s activation punch through my eyelids, and blinked my vision clear of the dancing after-images. ‘That’ll slow ‘em down.’

And indeed it seemed to have done, tearing a ragged, smoking hole through the heart of the roost, from which patches of greasy, foul-smelling smoke rose in several places.

‘Indeed it has,’ I said, potting a somewhat singed specimen as it attempted to spring at me in a rather lopsided fashion. The rush towards us had subsided, the few surviving face-eaters now clinging to crevices in the walls and roof, rather than bounding in our direction. The odour of charred offal was almost stifling, thin curls of greasy smoke rising from unpleasant-looking patches of seared flesh littering the tunnel floor, and I fought down the gag reflex with a moment’s effort.

‘How’s Zemelda?’ I asked. Not that I was particularly bothered, of course, but it was the sort of thing I was supposed to say in the interests of morale.

‘I’ve felt better,’ the young woman said through gritted teeth, her face pale from delayed shock. Mott was supporting the arm he’d cut the face-eater away from – now a mangled mess of blood and flesh, with rather too much of the bone beneath visible for my liking.144 ‘Just need to get this patched up, and we can move on.’

‘Not this way,’ I said, peering into the darkness ahead of us. The face-eaters had been driven back by our weapons, particularly the ravening power of the melta, but if my ears were to be trusted there were plenty more lurking further down the tunnel, the stirring and rustling growing in intensity as the whole damned roost became aware that there was prey in the vicinity. ‘There’s plenty more where that lot came from.’

‘We can take them,’ Zemelda said, wincing a little as Jurgen started working on her arm with the contents of the medicae kit he’d produced from somewhere among his collection of pouches.

But to my relief, Amberley was shaking her head. ‘We got lucky,’ she said. She turned away, back in the direction we’d come. ‘We’ll need to go round them. Take the other tunnel, and leave the face-eaters as a surprise for the eldar.’

‘The tunnel leading to the main line of their advance?’ I asked, trying to sound casual, and tapping the vox-bead in my ear as I spoke. ‘Where the defence force got into a firefight with them?’ There was still some vox traffic on the defence force frequencies, but as before it was too faint and distorted for me to gain any useful information by listening to it.

Amberley nodded. ‘That’s the one,’ she said cheerfully, and began leading the way back towards a different mortal danger to the one we’d just escaped.

Eighteen

If you’ve read much of these ramblings of mine, you’ll no doubt appreciate that I found the idea of heading straight for the main concentration of the enemy far from appealing, but I knew from long experience that there was no arguing with Amberley once her mind was made up. So I made the best of it, hanging back a little with a show of concern for Zemelda, who by now was looking a little more chipper thanks to Jurgen’s ministrations, and understandably reluctant to remain too close to her benefactor. Now it seemed we weren’t stalking or being stalked by a daemon after all I was a little more sanguine myself about being further away from my aide, and was quite happy to let him lead the party alongside Amberley, his melta, as always, at the ready.