[7]

Denma Province

132.738.M41

More days. More patrols without any sign of an enemy—not even tracks, not even from the squig-beasts that the Orks half-tame. We got back one evening from a daytime patrol, feeling good. I gave Tara a bright blue butterfly wing. No accompanying bug, it had just been lying on a rock. She beamed and chattered excitedly about Lysandra bellargus.

It was idyllic, but not a vacation, nor a meaningless posting. The third week after we arrived, one of the Guard patrols voxed in a sighting of a trail chopped and trampled into the woods. A few minutes later, the four of us were at the observation post—the others just outside, me leaning over the vox, shoulder to shoulder with Sergeant Gustav.

"Estimate between five and ten enemy," came the crackling voice over the vox unit. "Orks on foot. Just boot prints, but Orks. Moving north."

Gustav traced his finger over a contour map, from the patrol's location northwards. It passed the observation post just a few kilometers away. He stopped when it was near a flattened section between peaks, tapped it, and then traced on towards a marked lumber camp.

"Looting raid, I bet," he said. "Through the pass, looking for machine parts or something. Concur?"

"That seems right."

"I'll call it in. Get your girls ready. We might be rolling out to hit them."

"Yes."

We were already prepared, but there is always more. We spent the time studying the map. I felt a brief, irrational certainty that if I just looked around, I would see a skull, a bone, an engraving, something to bear witness, something to share the weight of the present moment. But of course there were none.

Command gave the order and we went. Maybe we were the only available unit in range. Maybe it was just more efficient than sending a Valkyrie to bomb them out of existence. It didn't matter much to any of us.

Tara was much better, but I wasn't ready to let her join a five kilometer march both ways with a fight to the death in the middle, loaded down with munitions. The terrain was too rough and forested for anything that didn't fly, so we would be on foot.

We left—six guardsmen, Verity, Gwen, and me.

The patrol that had found the footprints would keep following the tracks. They would keep us updated by vox and make sure that we set up in the right place along their route.

Gustav turned to me once the chaos of the departure was settled. "Have you faced the Orks before?"

"Not as a warrior," I said. Whatever he was about to say next, he didn't say it.

We walked. We didn't look at each other much. We were in the back of the loose formation, but more eyes on the trees were always better.

After a while, he said: "Civilian?"

"Yes. A village near Vogel, far to the south, where the invasion started. And then again when they took Vogel."

"Sixteen years ago?"

"Yes."

Another long pause.

"That's where your parents died?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry."

"Men die. Man endures."

I hated how callous I sounded. I'd hate anyone saying that to me.

For a minute there was just birdsong and the sound of our feet and the forest.

"I'm sure you can quote the Tactica about the Orks. But I've fought them, and my theory is simpler. The way you fight the Orks is that whatever you do, you don't fight the Orks. You murder them, or you run from them until you can start murdering them. Never let them see you. A human will break if he thinks he can't win. But an Ork will only break if he thinks he can't fight."

"Attacking their morale?"

"Exactly. They love a fight. They love a chase. They hate not having a target, and they either jump up and charge or they break and rout."

"Plan?"

"The patrol following them should catch sight of them at some point and give us an exact path to hit. I was thinking L-shaped ambush. But instead of hitting hard and close for maximum shock, we do it from as far as we can get."

I said, "I like the L-shape but I would rather hit hard. There are too many trees. We will only get a few good seconds and then they'll be out of sight, moving towards one of the elements."

"That's what you would do if ambushed. Return fire and push into the trees, then go break contact and maneuver for your own ambush."

"Yes."

"I bet you anything they won't do that. Even if they're the sneaky kind of Ork, which I doubt. Once the fight is on, they'll want to fight."

"You're sure?" I asked.

"Sure enough," he said.

An hour later, tired from the fast march, we picked our ground. There was a good place along an animal trail that the Orks seemed to be following. We set up a little closer than Gustav had wanted—the trees were too thick for long range—but still farther than I would have liked. Verity, Gwen, and I were the short leg of the L, square in the expected path. The guardsmen were the long leg, flanking them, so that anywhere they tried to find cover would be enfiladed by their las-rifles and volleygun light machineguns. The guardsmen had also mined the path with some improvised grenade traps. We heaped leaves and branches over ourselves to make our position invisible, pressed ourselves into the earth so that almost nothing was exposed to return fire, and waited.

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And waited.

My helmet vox crackled with Gustav's voice.

"The Orks broke off from the trail a kilometer south. We're in the wrong place. They're already past us."

"Which way?"

"Going northeast."

I thought of the map. "There's a stream that way. Maybe they stopped for water."

After a few seconds he replied. "I have the map, I see it. Then if they keep going north along the stream… there. We can cut them off at the little pond if they haven't already passed it. There's a steep section that we can fight from. Everybody up!"

We got up and ran, abandoning the grenade traps—it bothered me more than I can explain, the thought that some animal might trigger them.

The steep section on the map next to the little pond was a cliff with a tiny waterfall that plunged ten meters to a small, deep pool. We dashed into position and prayed that we weren't blundering straight into an equivalent strength group of the green-skinned alien giants.

There they were, four hundred meters downstream, just visible through a gap in the trees. Their green-brown skin was great camouflage, but the metal of their huge guns and crude chopping blades gave them away.

"I count eight," I said quietly. We wouldn't have an L-shape to pour fire on them from two directions, but we were in their path and they would come out completely into the open.

"Nine," said Verity.

"Nine," confirmed one of the guardsmen.

"Get down and wait for them to get close," said Gustav. "Nobody fires until I give the order. Nobody. From the first shot we have ten seconds to kill them all or we start to die. Do you get me?"

"Yes, Sergeant!"

We would have to test Gustav's theory about fighting the Orks another day.

I don't know if you've ever seen an Ork up close. They're huge in a way that you can't get from a picture. It's not height. Fully upright, they're only a little over two meters. But in that two meters they fit the bulk and strength of seven men. When I was a girl I lived because of a doorframe. A regular exterior doorframe. The Ork knocked the door down, but he couldn't fit through the frame. Not even sideways, sucking in his gut, craning his huge neck, reaching for me with a hand the size of my whole body, the building shaking with the impact, the wall cracking and bending inwards with the force as he wedged himself in after me. Fingers thick as firewood on the end of his huge arm, grazing my yellow dress.

It was hard not to fire too soon.

Raucous voices. Clanking weapons. Jostling and shoving. They pointed our way and I thought we were seen, but they kept coming, their posture unchanged.

One with some sort of autocannon slung over his shoulder snarled something in their language. Another roared and growled back.

Ninety meters.

Seventy meters. They weren't hurrying, but their strides ate up the ground. I prayed. I wasn't a helpless little girl this time. I wasn't among civilians, and this wasn't a Waagh, a giant wave of green flesh and smoke-belching metal pouring out from invasion ships into a shocked and unprepared village.

I set my sights over the pelvis of a muttering, growling Ork on the left. The Tactica notes that Orks can fight through multiple wounds that should be fatal. But strength, redundancy, and immunity to pain are not bones. Nothing can stand with a shattered pelvis.

These Orks were probably all younger than I was. Second generation, not remnants of the war. I didn't care. I hated them.

One Ork barked something and pointed towards us.

"Open fire," said Gustav.

There was a ragged, deafening roar: two volleyguns, four lasguns, three bolters, all at a distance of forty meters from a tightly clustered target. Birds burst from every treetop. Metal broke and bent, flesh blew apart.

Orks are tough. Huge, incredibly strong with all the thickness of armor and devastating firepower that goes with strength. Multiply redundant. Biological killing machines made for fighting long before the God-Emperor trained humanity's hands for war. It kept them alive and in the fight for long enough to return fire, even with whole pieces of their bodies blasted away. But not accurately, and not for long. It was over in a few seconds.

There is probably a moral lesson in it. Something about the superiority of Man. But I took a practical lesson away.

I think everyone else was feeling the shaky, rattled joy that comes when you're alive and the ones who wanted to kill you are dead. I could hear it in Verity's voice, see it on the faces of the men. I felt something like moral horror instead. Moral horror and the spine-tingling sense of unexpected mercy.

Being clustered together in the open is death, even when you think you're safe. Especially when you think you're safe.

I'll never feel anything like sympathy for an Ork or their soulless mimicry of human friendship. But it could just as easily have been me, Verity, and Gwen, clumped together like idiots, trying to catch a stupid butterfly for Tara while we were out on patrol.

(We did recover those grenades, and we did burn the Ork bodies. Ork sporelings aren't a major threat in an ecosystem adapted to eating them, but the Tactica Imperialis recommends universal immolation.)