The night was hot but dry. Corporal Rants tasted the metallic tang of dust in his mouth as he crouched in the foxhole. He started downrange through the gun's holographic sights, seeing the same scene he'd been watching for the past five hours. Nothing. Not a damn thing, just like the first night he'd been assigned here and every night after that.
Hearing boots thump down behind him, he put his rifle on safety (training said never to leave a gun live when you weren't aiming it) and turned to look behind him. Gratz was there, breathing heavily as his bulky body settled from his trek. He tugged a canteen loose from his belt, yanked the cork off with his teeth, and drank. Rants caught the smell of something fruity and potent, clearly not water. He grimaced, debating whether the relief of alcohol would justify having to piss for the rest of his watch.
"Want some?" wheezed Gratz. "Good stuff, got it from Yarrick. Great guy, for a boot. Just needs a week or two ta get a few things straight." Rants shook his head in irritation; he knew Yarrick, and the kid didn't stand a chance. Just another example of the cannon fodder that they'd stuffed the Regiment with in the last few years. That helped him fit in with the rest of II Corps, though.
Second Corps, 4795th Regiment, Imperial Guard -- the "Gutbusters", thought Rants with a little bitter pride -- had been posted to this backwater for almost five months, waiting for some sign of the Chaos rebels Intel'd said were here. Yeah, right. About the most chaotic thing Rants'd seen so far was the stand-down each platoon had one week out of every seven.
The detector clucked as it picked up a signature; Gratz spat out his mouthful as he spluttered in surprise. He staggered toward the sensor station's small screen. His legs tangled in his lasgun, and both he and the weapon crashed to the ground with a clicking of plastic and metal. Various items of personal gear flew away from the impact point. Bloody moron, Rants thought. "You spook like that again and I'll burn you myself!" he muttered. "You know damn well how much crap there is runnin' around those woods! And tripping over your rifle's likely to get your ass burned off!"
"Sorry, Corp. Just tryin' ta stay alert, not like I've gotta job ta do er anythin' like," Grantz whined as he pulled himself upright. "Look, are ya gonna check the damn sensor, or not? At least try to act like you care!"
Bloody thoughts flipped through Rants' mind, most involving Gratz and knives, but he turned to check the sensor with a growl. Like it or not, the fat lout was right; even though the millions of signatures he'd checked since getting here were animal life, there was that one chance...
(The signature, outlined in thermal by the sensor's computer, had two arms and two legs, and walked upright.... It carried a gun, and as Rants watched, it straightened up and waved.... Two more signatures appeared -- then three others.)
(Oboy.)
"Get the radio now! Now, curse you! It's the rebels!" Gratz abandoned all discipline as adrenaline flooded his thoughts. He whipped out a grenade and armed it.
"NO!" Rants whispered, as he hunkered down behind his rifle's butt. If there were that many troops visible to the sensor, there were at least enough to fry himself and Gratz in their foxhole if they were found.
Above him, the sensor's aural output blipped and squawked. Rants cursed and swung his fist toward the system's power pack, cracking it off the back of the unit in one swift motion. After spitting a few sparks, the pack was silent. Yeah, it was a rare piece of equipment, but so were Rants' brains.
Their helmet radios broke squelch simultaneously; Gratz visibly twitched in surprise, while Rants simply listened. The sudden absence of the com system's normal white noise was a better attention signal than any tone would have been...
"All units, this is Central. Enemy movement detected in Stouffer's Woods, grid three-five-nine, two klicks from the left. Units which have sight engage to delay. Other units prepare for Fallback Plan D. Central out."
Rants' body felt suddenly chilly. There was no mention of pulling out the delaying units, and Fallback D meant basically "run like hell." Obviously, the Chaos forces had pulled it together for an attack, and it had just dropped in the pot over the entire sector.
The orders they'd just heard put the two men in that pot, and set the heat to boil. There wasn't anything he could do, though he thought he heard Gratz breathing heavily in fear. Rants was surprised; he wouldn't have thought the fat man had enough presence of mind to figure out what those orders meant.
He brought his lasrifle up, setting the sights to thermal as he did so. If they could waste this group, they might be able to bug out and get back to Central, acting like they hadn't seen a blessed thing. If they could get out, facing an unknown force in near-total darkness.
The thermal imager in the lasgun's stock wasn't as powerful as the sensor array's, but it was good enough to give a sight picture. "Gratz. Target front enemy, then work back using Fire Plan Three. Check?"
"What! What?" Gratz wheezed, sharply returning to the reality of the hot night and advancing death. "Three? What?"
Rants nearly shot the bastard's brains out, but he figured that Gratz would be too stupid to realize what had happened to him. "Look. You shoot the guy in front, then you shoot everybody else, goddammit! We don't have time for your usual crap, and I'll burn you right now if you don't pull yourself together!"
"Yeah. Sure." The twin shocks of the death threat and sudden instruction had whipped Gratz through several different emotional responses, leaving him momentarily drained. Suddenly, hate contorted his features. "You always were a bastard, Rants, and I'll be glad when this night is over. You talk big, we'll see you deliver when we get back to Central."
"It's a date." Rants had no illusions about how that fight would proceed, but he didn't intend to be going back with Gratz in his company. He looked back through his sights. Gratz did the same. Thumbing the range trigger, Rants sent a nearly imperceptible beam of phased radio waves toward the nearest man, the one who walked bent nearly in two with the weight of his weapon. The readout popped up above Rants' left eye: 54 meters. Damn they're right on top of us! was his first thought. His second sent electrons tumbling down his nerve endings into the muscles that controlled his firing finger.
Inside the lasgun, helium atoms were suddenly bathed in light at a precisely calculated frequency. The atoms filled with enough energy to strip their electrons away, creating a sea of charged particles. A crystalline structure in the middle of the charging chamber drew the nuclei toward itself, their positive charges unable to resist the structure's siren call. Suddenly, the structure lost its charge, and the electrons and protons flowed back together, mixing violently as the electrons released almost twice the energy they'd gained.
All of this took place at subatomic levels of consideration in a microsecond. Rants only noticed that suddenly, a ghostly beam of light (refracted from dust particles, his mind said) connected him to his target. The effects of the man were devastating. At the range, Rants could pick his target fairly well, and he'd chosen a head shot as the most likely to drop his target. At this range, the beam from his rifle packed enough energy to instantly turn water into live steam, and this was precisely the effect it had upon the rebel's brains.
Other men screamed as they saw the first drop, half his head missing. Rants waited for the green light above his right eye to blink, showing that his rifle's capacitor had charged from its belt pack. Beside him, Gratz's rifle piped high tones as it too sent megajoules soaring through the air toward another member of the rebel squad. The forest was suddenly bathed with light.
"Gaaah!" screamed Gratz as the rebel starshell burst overhead, blinding both of the men in the foxhole. "My eyes! Can't see!"
"Shut up, damn you, they'll hear!" Rants said, hands pressed tight to his eyes. He ducked down, hopefully far enough to be below the lip of the foxhole. His eyes rapidly adjusted, an ability that had saved his life many times before. Gratz was still thrashing on the floor of the hole, moaning about the light. Rants poked his head up over the lip, preceded by his rifle.
A rebel spotted the motion and yelled before his chest was blown to tatters by Rants' beam. As Rants whipped out a grenade, the remainder of the squad returned fire with an assortment of weapons, from lasguns like Rant's own, to high-caliber autoguns, to the bolter the squad leader carried. The ground more than twenty feet from the foxhole exploded into a shower of dirt and bushes as the rebels, unsure of their target, obliterated a tree.
Rants threw the grenade with all his strength. Beside him, Gratz shook his head slowly as he rose to his feet. "What..." he said.
The grenade Rants threw bounced twice and landed about a meter from one of the squad members. A rebel had seen Rants throw, and was firing his gun in their direction. Grantz grunted as a slug slapped through his left arm. The grenade popped, scattering pieces of its metal casing through the members of the rebel squad.
Smoke obscured the target zone. Rants thought he heard a roaring, but he couldn't be sure over the comnet's sudden bleating and Grantz's cries of pain as he tried to slap a bandage over the wound in his bicep.
Trying to pay attention to too many things at once, Rants only caught a fraction of each. He heard "...tanks in area..." over the net at the same time a large shape moved through the dusty region which he'd just shredded with his grenade. The starshell was lower, hiding Gratz in the shadows of the foxhole. His cries had turned to angry growls, now that the self-applying anesthetics in the medipatches went to work.
A Leman Russ shrugged its way between two trees. A demonic symbol was painted on its front glacis, along with the name "Virgin Violator".
Rants grabbed Gratz and yelled, "Get moving, you fat bastard! We're about to get our asses wasted! They've got a damn tank!" A thump from the tank's main gun and a crash about ten meters to their left punctuated his words.
The two men half-ran, half-staggered through the woods. They ran in random directions, Rants sometimes pulling Gratz along through sheer force of will. Suddenly, a shadow on the ground opened up into a crack, and the two men fell in.
They fell about four feet, into a shallow ravine with stinking water running through it. Rotting sticks floated, on which moss grew. All of it vibrated with the engine of the oncoming tank.
"We can't -- can't stop -- stop the tank," panted Gratz. "it's too -- big."
"Yeah we can. We just have to get close enough. It's not a problem." Rants pulled out a krak grenade, its armor-piercing warhead highlighted in red and grey.
The tank rumbled closer, its crew wondering where the two men had disappeared to. Given time, it would discover the ravine, but Rants knew that if he could get close enough, he'd be able to waste the tank. He thought.
It wasn't like he had any other choice; by stumbling into this ravine, they'd ensured that if they tried to run now they'd be crisped on their third stride.
Rants waited, waited while the roar of the tank's frustrated guns and the vibration of its engine penetrated his very bones, waited the wait of soldiers everywhere who knew they didn't have a chance in hell of living through the next thirty seconds, waited until the primal rhythms of his subconscious told him it was time to go out and die anyway.
And then he saw Gratz jump out of the ravine, firing his lasgun at the metal monster, only four meters away.
"Bastard! Go get it! Now! Damn you! Ha, eat this, bastards!"
Rants couldn't believe what was happening. His body, however, acting under its own direction, hurled him up and out of the ravine before he understood what was happening. He held the grenade out before him, seeing the blunt muzzle of the heavy bolter swing towards him. He ducked half a second before it had him, Gratz's lasrifle pulses firing over his head and vaporizing paint off the tank's turret.
The heavy bolter's shells, propelled by violent gas-producing reactions, whipped out toward Gratz. At least three hit him, neatly separating his head and left arm from his body with their multiple explosions. The remainder spun off in an arc, the heavy bolter's gunner following it with his stream of death. Rants reached the side of the vehicle and slapped the krak grenade to it, its adhesive sticking it to the vehicle's armor like a lethal leech, as the blood Gratz splattered over the area in his dying convulsions sprayed him.
The grenade didn't go off.
Screaming inside with his very soul, Rants twisted the grenade to the right. A light on the back flashed, and Rants threw himself to one side, careful to stay out of the heavy bolter's arc. No need to add another kill to the bastard's list tonight, he thought grimly.
The grenade went off with a flat WHACK, buckling armor plates and damaging the track's internal systems. Rants thought he heard a scream from inside the tank, but it might have been just tortured machinery.
The tank kept moving. Its turret whined around toward Rants.
"No..." Rants croaked. The exertion of the past few minutes, sustained by adrenaline, had burned him out totally. He felt like he could sleep for a week.
He knew he'd soon be able to get all the sleep he wanted. He rolled to the side slightly, just enough so that the battlecannon's blast only broke ribs, crushed his left leg, and hurled him ten meters to the right. He twisted around, ignoring the pain, to see the cannon's fifty-centimeter bore steady in line with his torso. Rants pointed his lasgun at the tank and pulled the trigger, just as an orange flash spat from the gun's bore towards him to rip his life from his body.