echoed in my comm-bead, as if in reproach to that fleeting thought. ‘Are you there?’
‘We’re cut off from the bunker,’ I told him, truthfully enough, as it would have been suicide to try fighting our way back to it though the rapidly deploying tau. ‘The xenos have it completely surrounded.’ Which may have been a slight exaggeration, but if it wasn’t true by then it soon would be. Their preferred tactic when faced with a static defensive position was always to surround it, relying on the superior range and firepower of their weapons to wear down the defenders. The bloody business of actually taking an objective they preferred to palm off on their kroot vassals[11], which I could hardly blame them for, especially as the kroot seem to enjoy that kind of thing. ‘I’m going to head for the southern enclave, and try to pull some effectives together before it’s too late.’
Most of the units we had left were concentrated in the southern quarter of the city, which made it the best place to be so far as I was concerned; the more bodies I could put between me and the tau the better. With a bit of luck we’d be able to hold out long enough for Zyvan’s task force to turn up and evacuate the survivors, which I was determined would include me, and if the worst came to the worst it would be easy enough to go to ground on my own more or less indefinitely. I hadn’t forgotten any of the lessons I’d learned dodging orks on Perlia, and the tau would be far less inclined to waste time and resources hunting down stragglers who didn’t do anything stupid to attract their attention, like shooting at them or blowing things up, than the greenskins had been.
‘Good idea,’ Braddick said, clearly believing that the situation meant I’d be bringing a relieving force back with me.
‘Just hold out as long as you can,’ I voxed back, not having the heart to disabuse him, and sure he’d do that anyway whatever I said. ‘The Emperor protects.’ Although, so far as I could see, He was going to have His work cut out keeping Braddick in one piece for much longer.
Come to that, He didn’t seem to be doing that good a job for me either. Shadows were moving at the end of the street, too quick and fluid to identify, but some of them seemed uncomfortably big. All of a sudden the abandoned smeltery looked a good deal more attractive than it had done, but it was far too late to worry about that; whatever was lurking up the boulevard would have registered our approach by now, and be locking its weapons on our auspex trace as like as not.
‘Hit the lights,’ I told Jurgen, wrestling with the damaged pintle mount again, once more to no avail. Nothing was going to free the mechanism short of the benedictions of a tech-priest, and there’s never one around when you actually need one.
‘Right you are, sir,’ my aide responded, and I squinted reflexively as the powerful spotlight kindled, the beam knifing erratically through the darkness in response to every jolt of our abused suspension. Then the breath seemed to solidify in my lungs, as the dancing ray of light picked out a cluster of vaguely humaniform figures, more than twice the height of a man. Dreadnoughts, or the tau equivalent at any rate: just as heavily armed as their Imperial counterparts, and a lot more manoeuvrable.
‘Second wave’s incoming,’ I voxed to Braddick. If I was about to die, I supposed I might as well be remembered for some heroic last words. ‘I’ll delay them as long as I can.’
Which wasn’t likely to be more than a second or two, especially as I hadn’t actually said anything about trying to engage the towering battlesuits in combat. Attracting their attention just long enough for them to be sure I was heading for the horizon and not worth wasting the ammo on would be good enough for me.
‘Can you give us an estimate of their numbers and disposition?’ Braddick asked, determined to get his currency’s worth out of my noble sacrifice, and I gritted my teeth. Clearly ‘Lots, and surly,’ wasn’t going to be an acceptable answer. Throne alone knew who might be monitoring the vox-traffic, and if by some miracle I did get out of this with a whole skin, the last thing I needed was an auditory record of me appearing to