The Greater Good

SEVENTEEN

My boots landed in deep sand, which almost immediately began to work its way inside my socks, the sharp-edged granules making my feet itch abominably. Within a few hours they’d be rubbed raw, and I’d be slogging through the dunes on a mass of blisters. No point worrying about that now though, and the way things were going, sore feet would probably turn out to be the least of my worries. So I put the matter out of my mind as best I could, and slithered through the drift towards the downward-tilted nose of the battered utility craft, following the furrow left by Jurgen.

Emperor knows I’m no enginseer, but even I could see it wouldn’t be flying again without some serious benediction from the tech-priests. The wings were flexed in a fashion the designers would never have envisioned, its landing gear was badly buckled, and several inspection panels had been jarred loose by the impact, revealing partial glimpses of the mechanica inside. The nose was deeply buried in the sand, which reached halfway up the armourglass surrounding the pilot’s seat. Though the panes had been cracked and crazed with the force of our landing, none had shattered completely, effectively hiding the cockpit from view. My pessimistic assessment of our pilot’s chances of survival dropped even further, if that were possible.

Then the distinctive crack of a lasgun echoed flatly around the dunes, and I broke into a floundering run, drawing my weapons and barking my shin painfully on the sheared-off stub of the chin-mounted autocannon. As I caught my first glimpse of Jurgen’s target, a reflex of revulsion stilled the breath in my chest which, given the quality of the air, was probably no bad thing.

A trio of scavenging hormagaunts had ripped the cockpit asunder, and begun feeding on the body of the pilot. There was no telling by this point precisely how or when he had died, but I found myself hoping it had been during the crash. One of the gaunts lay twitching on the sand, part of its head ripped away by Jurgen’s las-bolt, but the other two were already moving, bounding towards my aide with murderous intent.

‘Take the left!’ I called, cracking off a shot with my laspistol at the one on the right as I spoke. Jurgen complied, chewing up its thorax with a quick burst of automatic fire, and the hideous thing stumbled and fell, leaving him well beyond the reach of its scything claws. I wasn’t so lucky, the hasty pistol shot at the target I’d selected missing its head entirely. Before I could adjust my aim it was on me, with a vicious swipe calculated to rip me in two.

I’d anticipated the move, though, knowing such creatures only had a limited repertoire of responses, and swung up my chainsword to block it. The whirling teeth bit deep, severing the tip of a razor-sharp talon as long as my arm, and I pivoted, bringing the screaming blade round to deflect the follow-up strike from the other claw I knew had to be coming. Gaunts always struck in the same scissoring pattern, hoping to catch their prey between the two keen edges of their primary weapons. Unfortunately for this one, it was now off-balance, and I was able to evade it neatly, slicing off the secondary arm which was reaching out towards me with its smaller, hook-like talon in the process. Undaunted, it came on, mouth agape, and stuffed with far too many fangs for my peace of mind, but I’d anticipated this too, and squeezed the trigger again, putting a las-bolt through the back of its throat and into what passed for its brain.

Too stupid to realise it was dead, the foul thing rallied, then leapt into the attack again, only to fall heavily to the sand as it finally got the message and expired.

‘Sorry, sir,’ Jurgen said, with an apologetic shrug, ‘they took me by surprise.’ He poked the one he’d downed cautiously with the barrel of his lasgun, and it twitched feebly for a second before vomiting up a rancid mess of bile and masticated pilot. Ignoring the mess on his boots, my aide put another round through its skull to make sure it wouldn’t be getting up again, although, if I was any judge, it only sped things up by a second or two.

‘Me too,’ I said, conscious of the irony. All the time I’d been scanning the horizon, the vile creatures had been right under our noses. ‘What worries me is how many more of them there are.’ There must have been dozens of spore pods ejected by the drone we’d followed down, and the others left in orbit, and they’d all have been directed towards the same area[119]. That meant there were hundreds of the ghastly things roaming the desert, if not thousands[120], which was hardly going to make it any easier tramping across a lethal wilderness in an attempt to find help.

I glanced round apprehensively, conscious of how badly hemmed in we were by the whispering sands. The faint hissing of the grains as they were blown over one another by the wind would mask the sounds of any more approaching, and we couldn’t see beyond the next dune. All we could do was keep a sharp lookout every time we crested one, hope the conditions here made us equally hard to detect, and pray to the Emperor that none of the swarm were burrowers.

‘Better get moving,’ I said at last, conscious that if we delayed much more I’d lose my nerve entirely. Staying where we were wasn’t an option, as the hive mind would be aware of the loss of its meat puppets, and would surely send more to investigate[121]. Picking up the survival gear we’d dropped in the melee meant putting my weapons away, which gave me a moment’s disquiet, but there was no help for it. Our chances were slender enough as they were, without leaving our food, water and shelter behind. Reluctantly I scabbarded my chainsword, holstered the laspistol, and shouldered the habitent. It was just as unwieldy as I’d expected, but, with the melta slung across his back, Jurgen would have found it even more awkward.

Slogging through the dune field was every bit as gruelling as I’d anticipated. We soon discovered that scrambling up them was more effort than it was worth, every step sliding back almost to its starting point in the loose grains and raising clouds of the stuff which made breathing even more difficult. So, despite my apprehension about being ambushed, we remained at the bottom of the gullies between the sand drifts, trying as best we could to keep moving in the direction of the hive, although the haphazard arrangements of the dunes meant that we seemed to spend as much time moving parallel to it as towards our destination. My initial estimate of how long it would take us to get there revised itself depressingly upwards with practically every step, until it was so far in excess of the maximum time we could possibly survive out here that I gave up thinking about it in sheer self-defence.

We’d entirely lost sight of the downed Aquila within moments of leaving it, which I couldn’t help thinking was something of a mixed blessing; although we were now hidden from any further tyranid organisms drawn to feed on the carrion we’d left scattered about it, it would have been a useful marker point in this wilderness of sand. My sense of direction, so reliable in enclosed spaces, was far less helpful in this accursed wilderness, and I was soon completely disorientated. Even the sun was no help, obscured as it was by the huge pall of debris flung up by the crash of the bioship. All about us was the same dust-hazed twilight, casting no shadows, merely deepening inexorably as the day wore on.

After what my chronograph assured me had been no more than a couple of hours of fruitless plodding, but which felt like a day and a night, I called a rest stop, and luxuriated in a mouthful of water. The parched tissue of my mouth seemed to absorb it directly, like a sponge, but enough of it trickled down my throat to clear the worst of the dust still settled there, and I followed it with a second swallow before passing the bottle to Jurgen. He drank as abstemiously as I, and resealed it, the lessons learned in our arduous journey across the desert region of Perlia needing no reminder or reinforcement.

‘We need to know where we are,’ I said, eyeing the side of the nearest dune with scant enthusiasm. But we couldn’t keep plodding on blindly forever, and the short break and some fresh water had perked me up as much as possible under the circumstances. Taking the amplivisor again, I began to make my way up the sand pile. I’m not embarrassed to admit I used my hands as much as my feet, another lesson learned the hard way on Perlia, and probably a wise precaution anyway, since I had no wish to announce my presence by skylining myself.

From the top, the landscape looked just as bleak as ever, and I swept the amplivisor across it, finding little to raise the spirits. The far distant line of the hive, like a thundercloud on the horizon, seemed no nearer than before; hardly a surprise given the tiny fraction of the intervening distance we would have walked, but it lay more on my right hand than I’d expected, and I resolved to adjust our course accordingly. The dust plume I’d spotted before was far closer now, enough for the amplivisor to pick out individual dots among it, but the intervening haze prevented me from discerning any further detail. Another good reason to go wide, though; the organisms looked unusually large, and there were at least a dozen that I could see.

I continued scanning the panorama before me, picking out several groups of gaunts wandering in the middle distance, and, far away, what looked like the leprous bulk of the pod which had brought them, but there was no sign of the genestealer brood or the lictor I’d spotted before, which suited me fine. Then, much closer at hand, I saw a gleam of reflected light, so bright it could only have come from a metal surface.

My spirits soared. Out here, amid so much desolation, the only possible explanation for that would be a human presence. Probably a vehicle of some kind, or, at the very least, an Adeptus Mechanicus altar, set there to monitor something, and through which we could attract attention and rescue.

‘Jurgen!’ I slithered down the dune in a flurry of sliding grains, which all but buried me as I came to a precipitous halt at the bottom. ‘There’s something metallic out there!’ I floundered to my feet, creating a miniature sandstorm as I did so. ‘I can’t tell what it is from here, but it means humans. We can get a ride back, or call for help.’

‘If the ’nids haven’t eaten ’em already,’ my aide added, and, recalled to the grim realities of our predicament, I nodded.

‘We’ll move in cautiously.’ I’d taken careful note of the position of the object, whatever it was, and was sure I could find it without too much difficulty, in spite of the open nature of our surroundings. From here we’d just have to skirt two further dunes, and our objective ought to be in sight.

Before moving off, I drew my laspistol. Jurgen’s point had been a good one, and any humans out here would surely become bait for the tyranids before long, including ourselves.

My aide readied his lasgun too, and we began to advance cautiously along the gully between the dunes, watching for any sign of movement. Despite an almost overwhelming impulse to break into a run, I kept my eagerness in check, all too aware of the consequences of letting our guard down, even for a moment. Tyranids excelled at attacking from ambush, and this environment seemed purpose-made to conceal a lethal surprise.

Sure enough, a surprise was waiting for us round the final corner, although under the circumstances I would almost have preferred more ’nids. ‘Frak,’ I said feelingly, followed by a few more choice expletives.

‘That’s the shuttle,’ Jugen said, in his customary matter of fact tone. ‘How did it get here?’

‘It never moved,’ I said, kicking the half-buried cadaver of the hormagaunt he’d first shot. Like the others, and the rather more widely-distributed remains of our luckless pilot, it had already acquired a tenuous shroud of wind-driven sand; another few hours and it would have been completely buried. Come to that, the entire Aquila would probably disappear in another day or two. ‘We got turned around in the dune field somewhere.’

I might have said a great deal more, but before I got the chance something inhumanly fast and at least twice my height burst from the sand no more than a handful of metres away, and charged at me, its talons and reverse-jointed forelimbs straining in my direction, the feeding tendrils around its jaw writhing like a nest of snakes. The lictor had found us.