Guard fic 4.7
The devilfish slammed into the ground at an impressive speed, aided on its way by a coincidental successful blast from the las cannon. King wasn’t sure whether, when he got back, to congratulate them on shooting down their commander or complain at them for nearly blowing him up. On the whole, congratulate was winning.
Everyone was knocked from their feet and scrambled to abandon the dying vehicle before it exploded. Kicking aside a Tau corpse Rossaria thumped the hatch release with the heel of her hand, blasting the door open and so they scrambled out into the snow of Sargas. It was a shock to the system to be outside in the cold again after so long in the warmth of the Tau habitat, as though their bodies had forgotten what true cold was really like. Scar had no such qualms however, having had the luxury of free movement and the sense to spend some time outdoors during the ceasefire, and leaving no time for King and his men to waste recovering from the shock.
Even though they outnumbering the enemy five to three they were armed only with the fragile Tau blades and pulse rifles they couldn’t use up close, making the odds more even than he would like. Running wasn’t an option, not in the deep snow, but since Scar had chosen the practicality of the devilfish rather than the combat ability of his crisis suit for this battle then the fight would likely go to whoever managed to escape the downed vehicle fastest. King gritted his teeth and gave an order he hoped his men respected him enough to follow.
“Charge!”
Without hesitation they scrambled around and across the stricken skimmer and into the three Tau. As King and Rossaria led the assault Scar swung his pistol up and fired off several pulses of energy at the incoming guardsmen. Most of the shots went wide but King grunted in pain as he felt a blast clip his shoulder. Fortunately his refractor field had been returned to him for the battle and he offered a silent prayer of thanks to the Emperor as it absorbed enough of the incoming energy that the rest dissipated harmlessly, if painfully, against his skin. Good job he’d annoyed Scar so much really, since Rossaria’s refractor field had never been seen again.
“Nice try, frogman. I’ll give you another scar to match now.” He smiled viciously as he advanced, knife in hand to face Scar’s significantly longer sword, hoping to intimidate Scar into forgetting how weak the Tau knives seemed to be, how weak King’s sword arm now was, and how hard it was to even hold the damn thing properly with that stupid little Tau handle.
“You talked about peace and alliance, then you betray us.” Povree Sakea shouted, no doubt echoing Scar’s thoughts “Humans have no honour!”
King saw red. Slashing out furiously with his stolen knife, he rushed forward with a tirade born of all the frustration, stress and fear of Sargas.
“No honour? You want me to abandon the true faith, to betray everything I stand for and murder everyone I have worked with, and that’s your idea of honour? Honour is in victory, you Xeno filth! For the Emperor!”
Povree Sakea hid behind Scar in fear as King charged home. Scar was indeed a soldier, he’d give it that, and while he fought with the inferior weapons and weaker body of a Tau, it had the skill and training to match many of the Emperor’s finest. Given his own injured arm and missing his familiar power sword, King only barely had the upper hand. He feinted at Scar’s eyes, trying to scare the Tau into flinching, but the experienced warrior saw that for what it was and King had to draw the blade down sharply to protect his own side from Scar’s counter attack. Instantly King leapt back on the offensive, whirling blade slashing high and low, testing Scar’s defences from every angle. Suddenly he saw it, that gap which opened up between its armour plates when it stretched up, leaving only the webbing of its under armour to get through. He swung the knife high over his head, coming down in a sweep that would have cleaved through the top of his opponent’s skull if it hadn’t got its own sword up in time to block. Which it did, of course, and which King had been depending upon, because as it stretched up in defence he slid his blade down his opponent’s, using the force of his attack to carry him through, then reversed direction lightning fast and stabbed upwards between the plates of Scar’s armour to the weaker flesh below.
A good tactic, a classic but a good one, and it would have been the beginning of the end for Scar if it hadn’t been for the delicate nature of the Tau knife. As Scar slammed his arms down, shouting in pain, the closing armour plates trapped King’s knife, leaving him trapped. Scar said something, presumably gloating in its filthy language, as it saw the duel swing very much in its favour.
Fortunately the Astra Militarum believe in practicality as well as victory, and so as Scar swung his blade towards King, aiming for the same stripe across the face that King had given it, instead Rossaria’s blade sliced in underneath the swing and blood poured from a deep gash in its armpit. King ducked, trying to force his knife free, and felt Scar’s blade connect practically harmlessly with the skin above his ear, no force left to the blow to speak of. His own knife broke off in the armour joint, leaving him with barely a few inches of ragged-edged weapon, but a blade is a blade and when he punched it into Scar’s throat it made a very satisfying ripping sound before grating hard against its spine. Rossaria struck again, her height allowing her to punch her knife full-force in its eye, burying it almost to the hilt and sending Scar staggering backwards before collapsing to the snow. It tried to speak, but all that came out was a gout of blue blood, then stillness.
“Satisfying?” King asked, panting slightly but with a larger smile than he remembered having since coming to this forgotten little planet.
“Doing the Emperor’s work is always satisfying, Commander.” Rossaria commented, walking over and wrenching at her knife to pull it free. “But yes.”
Noting the title and if anything smiling even wider, King looked around at the scene. The pilot and Povree Sakea also lay dead, taken down with ease by the other troopers. Bill had disappeared, though instinct told King where to look and sure enough moments later he emerged from the cockpit shouldering his Vox. King wiped the smile off his face as he returned to business, retrieving Scar’s sword and pistol to replace his own broken knife. Looking at the pistol, it seemed to be a cut down version of a pulse rifle, presumably in the same way as a las pistol was closely related to a las gun. He tossed it aside. The pulse rifle was better, as Xeno tech went, and he didn’t want to sully his soul with anything more than he absolutely had to. The sword didn’t even look Tau in origin, and was certainly a thicker blade than the knife had been. Possibly some trophy that Scar had taken from a different enemy? Now he thought about it swords weren’t really a Tau thing anyway. Still, it didn’t have any chaos marks on it so it was just another Xenos blade and he didn’t really care which heretic race it came from. It was only a short-term measure anyway. For the first time in what felt like a very long time, he was hoping that he might get to hold his power sword again soon.
Looking around and taking stock of the wider situation, their victory started to feel more minor in the grand scheme of what they could do now. They were out in the open of a huge battlefield that, while it was turning into a massacre on their side’s favour, was certainly leading to a lot of flying debris and shots, and at least one side would be remarkably vengeful against them. This was not likely to appear in the training manual for successful battlefield situations any time soon. Rossaria’s commissarial garb didn’t make for camouflage either, and bursting through the front lines to rejoin their troops was a plan that had ‘Friendly Fire’ written all over it. Perhaps with Bill’s vox now recovered they would be able to convince Trevanus and the rest that they weren’t a group of the traitor colonists, but given that Bill, Hunter and Bellis were meant to be dead, he’d been reported as a traitor and Rossaria hadn’t looked likely to make it through their captivity, that wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded. Still, no one joined the Astra Militarum looking for an easy life (or voluntarily, but that wasn’t likely to make it onto a motivational holovid any time soon), so it was time to do what he did best: keep going, pretend it was fine and hope no one noticed.
“Right.” King said, hoping that gathering his men together would help him gather his thoughts. “Not entirely to plan, but good enough, I’d say, good enough. The Xenos are on the back foot, they’ve committed all their forces to this attack relying on an edge they never had, and we just took down their battle commander. That’s a good start. Now we have to follow through on it. First thing is get out of the open, we need to get a feel for how the battle is going before we can know how best to get involved. Charging forward blindly may look good on the holovids but it’ll do more harm than good if we don’t know where we’re going.”
Gesturing his men back into the cover of the broken devilfish he looked around, trying to get his bearings on what was happening where. The human traitors’ morale had broken when the promised easy victory had not come to pass, and they were running blindly back behind the Tau lines to get lost in the snow and die frozen by their own cowardice. A fitting end for most of them, though there was a frustration at the back of his mind remembering those few amongst them who in other circumstances could have had lives and deaths with some meaning behind them. The fire warrior troops had held in the main, taking up positions as far back as possible to allow themselves to use their superior range to snipe at the Guard without repercussions. So far. The Guard were currently focussing their stronger, longer ranged weapons on the Tau’s vehicles, but several of them had wrecked themselves crashing against the void shields that they hadn’t expected to be there, and the base itself had considerably more firepower than they were able to amass on the field, so the tanks and chimeras were beginning to rumble forward to take the fight to the enemy and the massed platoons of the Astra Millitarum - which Trevanus had scrambled very efficiently given the suddenness of the breach of peace, he must remember to congratulate the lad - were surging over the barricades, using the cover provided by the vehicles to get closer and closer to firing range. It wouldn’t be safe to be a fire warrior for much longer.
Mortars and rockets filled the air, flashes briefly dying the snow in shades of yellows, orange and reds before landing in fire amongst the enemy. The Valkyries were airborne, darting between enemy and allied fire equally and blasting strafing runs along the Tau lines. The main thing they could do, by the looks of things, was to get the frakk out of the blast zone and lay low until it was all finished. Not overly heroic, but did have the major advantage of not getting them shot by either side. There was something nagging at him about the situation, but maybe it was just that he wasn’t used to not having three different fronts to fight at once.
“What would have been entirely to plan?” Rossaria asked suddenly. Bill took the hint and joined Bellis and Hunter on guard around the cabin’s hatch to give the officers privacy to yell at each other in the cockpit without them having to be involved.
“I’d hoped we would be staying back at their base, that was the option I put forward.” King explained. “Then we could have done some real damage before we left.”
“It would appear your plan has done some real damage regardless.” She commented dryly, looking through the shattered remains of the windshield at the shattering remains of the Tau army. “So I can only presume your real motivation was to not be there to witness should your plan fail.”
“As I said, I trust Haine.” King replied stoutly, ignoring the insult seeming to be a better idea than responding to it at this point. After all, she was armed.
“And at what point did you begin lying to me?”
“Are we looking at it like that then?” he asked, a slight sarcastic edge to his voice. He may have gone unorthodox and mucked up a lot of things, but the view from this devilfish gave the lie to any accusations of treachery and he wasn’t about to be cowed. “From the point I pretended to agree with the Xenos and their lies. I don’t do diplomacy, I’ve never learned how to deal with peace. So I just moved things to an arena I do understand, and that seems to have worked pretty well all things considered.”
“Thank you.” She replied, somewhat cryptically. He had just resolved not to ask her for an explanation when she offered one anyway. “I know there’s no way Haine would have agreed to this insane plan, so thank you for not insulting the Commissariat by trying to make me believe that he did.”
“Unusual though it may be in your line of work, I don’t actually relish lying to you. Nor, despite what I tell the troops, do I have all the answers and see everything coming. I hope I’ve found a way to complete our mission, fix every problem and get us all back home safely, but if... what’s that?”
Rossaria snapped to alert status, pulse rifle raised. It was hard to hear much over the noise of the battle, and she couldn’t immediately make out what King was thinking of. King raised his voice, judging the level required to be heard by the guards outside versus not being heard by the Tau they were sheltering from.
“Guardsmen, what’s going on out there?”
There was what sounded like the usual response that accompanied giving bad news to a commanding officer: the silence of everyone hoping someone else would take that bullet for them. King randomly picked a victim.
“Hunter, report!”
“Trouble sir!” she responded, the tone of her voice suggesting a guard who was holding largely because whatever was at her front, at her back was a Commander and a Commissar. King charged for the door, keen to back them up before Rossaria noticed. Trouble, it emerged, was shorthand for ‘over a dozen frakking crisis suits coming to see what happened to their leader and looking for vengeance’. So that was what had been bugging him, he hadn’t seen the crisis suits when he was doing his recce. Now at least he knew why, turns out they had all been jump-packing their way across the field - and Tau jump packs were frustratingly effective, he knew from long experience - to meet up with their commander. King hefted his pulse rifle, trying to work out the best strategy when hopelessly outnumbered by better equipped troops.
“Well, this isn’t going to go down well.” He remarked, keeping it casual. “Reminds me of my Captain when I crashed a chimera on patrol once.”
“Looks like a bit more trouble this time Sir.” Bill replied, keeping the banter going in a desperate attempt at morale.
King replied to that by letting rip with pulse rounds, filling the air with shot though he scarcely had the range yet to hit. Sparks lit up on one of the front clump of suits as a lucky shot dissipated harmlessly against its armour, but the impact at least buoyed the unit’s spirits slightly.
“That, Bill, is because you never met my Captain.” He fired again, targeting the same enemy and getting and answering barrage in exchange. Luckily the exchange of fire was at the limit of even the Tau’s range - a lasgun would never have made the shot - and both sides achieved nothing more than pretty lights in the sky. The Guard backed off back inside the downed devilfish, taking advantage of the cover they had, and continued to fire. King glared at the approaching suits, trying to get an eye for what weapons they were wielding. With the jump packs the creatures were crossing the distance at an alarming rate and it was clear that they weren’t going to get a chance to pick off more than one or two at the most on the way in. The devilfish was giving them a degree of cover which was very gratefully received, but sooner than they hoped they would be facing something that their experience was something like a cross between a space marine and a terminator, at odds of two to one against.