hairline fracture had appeared in the hull, stretching half the length of the passenger compartment.
“You see, Trooper Borscz,” said Mikhaelev nervously, “you didn’t have to worry about our
being trapped in here. The ice is going to crack this vehicle open like an eggshell and crush us all to
death instead.”
“You think the ice caused that crack?” Pozhar joked, half-heartedly. “That’s from where Borscz
banged his great head up there!”
“Can you bring the back end of the borer down a little?” Gavotski enquired of Barreski. “Use it
to protect the roof. I know it would slow down the drilling, but—”
“Can’t do it anyway, sergeant,” said Barreski. “I’m trying, but the ice is already packed in too
tightly under there. The borer is stuck at this angle.”
“It’s a race, then,” said Steele, his voice remarkably calm under the circumstances, “between us
and the ice. I’m relying on the two of you, Grayle, Barreski. Do whatever you have to do. Just keep
us moving, as fast as you can manage.”
“Aye, sir,” said Grayle. Then he turned to Barreski, raising his voice to be heard. “I can reroute
some power to the borer from the engine. The harder that drill works, the less the engine has to do
anyway.”
“Another flamer down,” reported Blonsky from behind them.
“I could do with one of those things up here,” Barreski shouted back. “Rip one out of an
emplacement if you have to.” He was operating the borer-mounted flamers — just three of them
now, as the fourth was returning jammed signals — almost constantly, but still the front shield was
being battered, not by mere shards of ice now but by great chunks of it, which hit like rocks.
The Termite’s roof was beginning to bulge inwards with the increasing pressure upon it, and the
Ice Warriors in the passenger compartment were up to their ankles in freezing slush. Barreski was so
engrossed in his task that he hardly heard Grayle’s voice, announcing that at their current speed they
would be through the glacier in one more minute. It seemed like the longest minute of his life, and
especially so when his flamers, only two of them working now, used up the last of their reserves and
sputtered to a halt.
29
He turned, and found Palinev at his shoulder with a hand flamer as requested. Barreski leapt
from his seat and snatched the weapon from the smaller man, even as the ice smashed through the
front shield at last, coming at them like an avalanche.
Grayle had no choice. He couldn’t leave his position or they were all done for. He met the
oncoming ice, head down, eyes closed, breath held, hands gripping the controls for dear life.
Barreski met it with a jet of flame, driving it back. Melted water gushed into the Termite’s controls,
angering the machine-spirits, which responded with a salvo of little explosions — but he couldn’t
worry about that now.
Borscz was standing on a seat, bearing the weight of the roof on his shoulders, but the walls of
the passenger compartment were starting to bulge. The one to the left burst at last, even as the
engine uttered its final gasp.
Then, the Termite’s front end emerged, with a cough and a splutter, into the open air, and fell
still.
Gavotski gave the order to abandon the vehicle, and its occupants almost fell over each other in
their haste to obey. Barreski would have expected the technophobic Borscz to be the first out — but
with the back half of the Termite still trapped in the ice, its roof threatening to collapse, the burly Ice
Warrior chose instead to continue in his role as human prop.
Barreski was just as surprised to see the colonel, the nearest man to Grayle, delaying his escape
in order to dig the driver out of the ice drift that had buried him. He went to help, and together they
freed his fellow tanker’s head. A half-conscious Grayle blew ice from his nose and mouth, and
murmured, “Did we make it?”
Then, something rammed the Termite from behind, and its rear end stove in, compacting the
back half of the passenger compartment — fortunately cleared by now — into a tangle of plasteel.
Hauling Grayle between them, Barreski and Steele scrambled out through the hatch, found a
two-metre drop beneath them, and dived into a blanket of grey snow. Steele landed on his feet, but
Grayle’s weight threw Barreski’s balance, and he fell and rolled onto his back, just in time to hear a
roar of “Incoming!” and to see Borscz’s enormous form blotting out the dull grey sky.
The impact was tough on the pair of them, but Barreski got the worst of it. He felt as if he had
been kicked in the stomach by an equatorial yak. For a moment, all he could see was a haze of red.
He was tangled in Grayle’s arms, pinned down by Borscz’s bulk, and he could hear the grinding and
rending of plasteel above him. He feared that the mangled remains of the Termite were about to
come crashing down on him too. And there was another sound, too. A sound that, if anything, made
Barreski even more concerned for his immediate future.
The sound of las-fire.
The creatures had been waiting for them.
Anakora didn’t know how it was possible, how they could have been warned of the Ice
Warriors’ approach — but as soon as she dropped from the Termite, as soon she planted her feet in
the snow, they converged on her, three of them.
They were much like the Chaos hounds she had fought in the underhive, all teeth and claws and
spines. The most apparent difference was that their fur was white, with patches of light green and
brown: snow camouflage. It would have done them more good if they had been able to contain their
eager growls at the prospect of a kill. Even so, it was hard to see where the shape of each of the
beasts ended and its surroundings began, almost impossible to get a bead on any of them.
Anakora loosed off three shots from her lasgun anyway, one in the direction of each of the
beasts. Then she ran — not out of cowardice, but in the hope of drawing the creatures away from the
wreckage of the Termite, and from the nine other Ice Warriors who were about to emerge from it,
dazed and confused. She would not lose another squad today. Not if she had any say in the matter.
The first of the beasts pounced on her from behind, sinking its claws into her shoulders. Carried
by the momentum of her run, Anakora fell face first towards the snow — but she had been prepared
30
for this, and she angled her descent so that she landed side-on, rolled onto her back, and pinned the
Chaos beast with her weight.
It squealed, and scrabbled at the backs of her legs with its back claws. Anakora could feel its hot
breath on her neck, and although she frantically recited the Litany of Protection under her breath,
she knew that she had only an instant before the beast sunk its teeth into the unprotected flesh
between her helmet and her greatcoat’s collar.
She shifted her grip on her lasgun and thrust it, butt-first, over her shoulder, aiming blindly,
gratified to feel a crunch as she struck the beast in its grotesquely enlarged fangs. It howled, and its
grip on her shoulders loosened. Anakora tore herself free of it, even as the second beast caught up
with the first and leapt at her.
She got out of its way just in time. The second beast, unable to reverse the momentum of its
lunge, landed on the first with its claws outstretched, and virtually gutted it. That left her free, for a
moment, to defend herself against the third. As it thundered towards her, she got her first good look
at it. She saw its feline features and its whiskers and she realised what the beasts were, or rather
what they once must have been.
They were snow leopards, much like those that roamed Valhalla’s tundra.
She blasted at the oncoming beast, scoring three palpable hits — but it was tough, tougher than
the Chaos hounds had been, and it would not fall. It leapt for her throat, and Anakora turned her
lasgun sideways, using its barrel to protect herself. As soon as the snow leopard’s claws hit the
weapon, she hefted it over her head as if it were the bar on a set of dumbbells, simultaneously
dropping to her knees. Her attacker’s huge body was carried over her head, but it reacted fast, faster
than she had hoped, and by the time Anakora had regained her footing and shouldered her lasgun
again, the snow leopard had reined in its momentum, turned, and was coming at her again.
Her only hope was a kill shot, right through its eye, into its brain.
It was impossible.
In a fraction of a second that stretched into an eternity, Anakora realised that she didn’t have the
time to level her gun, to turn it to protect herself, to do anything else before she was eviscerated. She
faced her death with a heavy sense of resignation. She turned her head away, felt the impact of the
beast with her chest, felt herself falling, felt the spray of hot, sticky blood on her face…
… and realised, to her surprise, that the blood wasn’t hers.
The leopard was standing over her, black fluid gushing from its head, streaming into its eyes,
one of its legs burnt off below the knee, fused into a bloody stump. It was unable to see, unable to
run, thrashing in pain and confusion, and it seemed to have forgotten its erstwhile prey.
Then it was struck by three las-beams at once. More blood and offal erupted from between its
ribs, and the beast toppled onto its side, quite dead.
Anakora’s comrades had come to her rescue.
Steele was questioning his judgement once more.
He should have anticipated that there might be trouble outside the Termite. He had anticipated
it. Should he, then, have left it to his troopers to help Grayle? Should he have taken point, been the
first out there, ready to lead? There was no point in thinking like that. Gavotski and the others had
things under control, for now.
Only one mutated leopard remained upright, and it was howling and twisting in the crossfire of
five las-beams. It occurred to Steele to wonder if the beasts were native to this world, perhaps
confined to its polar regions before the cold had spread. Or could they actually have evolved, even
in the short time since a permanent winter had fallen over Cressida, to suit their altered climate?
He used his momentary respite to survey his new surroundings.
Two metres above him, the front end of his battered vehicle protruded from the glacier’s sheer
face. As he watched, the Termite’s great horn crumpled and its wreck was dragged, screeching, back
31
into the ice. A moment later, it had been swallowed up, and a fresh layer of ice had formed across
the mouth of the tunnel it had made. No sign remained that the Termite, or indeed its passengers,
had ever been up there.
Borscz, Barreski and Grayle were on the ground beside Steele, struggling to disentangle
themselves from each other. Borscz was the first to break free from the scrum, and he rushed to join
in the near-ended battle with gusto.
In front of Steele, there was a forest. Its near edge was almost parallel with that of the glacier,
leaving only a narrow strip of land between them, eighty metres wide or less. Like the glacier, the
forest stretched out far to each side of him, a great deal further than even his bionic eye could see.
It was a forest not of wood but of ice — of obscene, twisted sculptures, mockeries of the natural
shapes they had presumably replaced, growing thick around the trunks but branching out into
grasping, clawing talons as they reached upwards. The ice trees grew high and thick enough to blot
out the already-scant daylight and the shadows between them were dark and foreboding. Their
surfaces were encrusted with the ever-present purple fungus, and Steele’s sensitive nose wrinkled at
its overripe stench.
He could detect something else too: a movement. There was something out there.
He activated his eye’s zoom function. It took the augmetics a long second to react to his thought
but then the colonel’s gaze probed, searching, penetrating the ice forest’s dark depths, and there…
There it was… for a moment at least: a humanoid creature, covered in light grey fur, or maybe it
was just wearing a fur coat. Steele couldn’t tell — because before he could adjust his focus to see
the creature more clearly, it was off again, a blur of motion despite its odd, shambling gait. It
disappeared behind an especially fat tree, and he had lost it.
Unless, he thought, he acted now.
There was no time to second-guess his instincts, this time. The figure might have been a Chaos
scout, in which case Steele couldn’t let it go, couldn’t allow it to take news of the Ice Warriors’
presence in this area to its masters. So, he drew his lasgun and set off in pursuit of it yelling to
Troopers Blonsky, Palinev and Pozhar to follow him. The rest could catch up once the final snow
leopard was dead.
As Steele crossed the tree line, he was plunged into an eerie gloom, and the aperture of his
bionic eye widened to compensate. The recent snowfall had, for the most part, not touched the
ground here. The soil was black and infertile, but the roots of many of the ice trees protruded from it
like tripwires, and patches of the slippery fungus were everywhere. Steele had to slow his pace,
watch his step. Even so, he almost lost his footing — and as he caught himself, he felt a sharp,
slicing pain to his left shoulder.
He had brushed against a tree trunk, and it was razor sharp. Its edge had cut right through his
greatcoat, through its layers of plasfibre and thermoplas, to score his skin. He turned to deliver a
warning to his troopers, but saw that they had discovered the danger for themselves.
They proceeded as best they could after that. Steele used his power sword to cut away some of
the more treacherous branches in his path — even without its energy field active, the well-honed
blade sliced easily through the ice. Still, it was several minutes before he reached the spot in which
the grey-furred figure had lurked — and, by then, he was not at all surprised to find no sign that it
had ever been there.
Blonsky and Pozhar had fallen behind, but the smaller, slighter Palinev had been able to keep
pace with his colonel, slipping through the forest as if its traps and snares were little impediment to
him.
“There was something here, sir,” he reported. “You can see where its breath has started to melt
this tree. I could search for its tracks, but they’ll be hard to follow on this ground.”
“No,” said Steele. “Thank you, Trooper Palinev, but we don’t have time for that.”
