'What the hell was that?' Mira asked, her face preternaturally pale after depositing her supper on the deck plates.
Checking the impulse to respond 'Looks like it used to be florn cakes,' I shrugged. 'We're back in the warp. Drumon got us out in the nick of time.'
'Well he could have been a bit more careful,' Mira shot back. 'I feel awful.'
'You'd have felt a lot worse with another wave of greenskins rampaging through the ship,' I pointed out, perhaps not as tactfully as I might have done, but I still wasn't feeling too good myself, don't forget. Hardly had the words left my mouth than a bellow of triumphant rage behind us reminded me that there were still more than enough orks aboard to be going on with. 'Run!'
'Run? I can hardly walk!' Mira snapped back, clearly well on the road to recovery. She turned her head, and apparently decided she could run quite well after all, as she caught sight of the mob of orks rounding the last turn we'd taken in the corridor. There were five of them, the two in front filling the passageway from side to side, all brandishing shootas[69] like the one I'd dissuaded Mira from picking up in one hand, and equally crude axes in the other.
The one in front had a metal jaw, which I'm bound to say hardly improved his appearance, and more scar tissue than Gries. Clearly the most dangerous, and therefore the new leader. The rest were little better, particularly the one who seemed to have taken a bath in acid some time in the past, who glared at the world through a single, red-rimmed augmetic eye, and whose stance at Metaljaw's shoulder was enough to tell me that the two of them had fought together long enough to watch each other's backs as effectively as a greenskin could.
Before I could get a decent look at the rest, bolts and solid slugs began making a mess of the wall near where we stood, but fortunately they appeared to be no better shots than most of their kind. It could only be a matter of time before they got lucky, though, so I ducked down the nearest cross passage, Mira at my heels.
'Why didn't you shoot back?' she demanded, with a single glance over her shoulder to see if the greenskins had reached the junction yet. I didn't bother, secure in the knowledge that a renewed fusillade would announce their presence as soon as they could see us again, and turned into the first cross corridor which would take us back towards our original route. The last thing I needed now was Jurgen missing us because of the impromptu diversion.
'Because I'd have to be damn lucky to bring one down, and the rest would be on us by the time I did,' I explained, reminding myself that she'd never seen the creatures before, so she wouldn't have anything like the hard-won appreciation I did for their resilience and ferocity.
No doubt recalling the exaggerated stories she'd heard about my exploits on Perlia, Mira nodded briskly. 'Can we outrun them, then?' she asked.
'I doubt it,' I said. We might stay ahead of them for a while, but their superior strength and endurance would tell against us in the end.
'Then we need an edge.' She slowed, and looked speculatively at the nearest of the ubiquitous access panels, to which a prayer slip had been affixed by a wax seal, the freshness of both mute testament to the diligence of the Revenant's enginseers. 'Can you get one of these open?'
By way of an answer, I swung my chainsword, chewing through the thin metal in seconds and a shower of sparks. No doubt the tech-priests would be horrified by so casual a desecration of even this minor a shrine to the Omnissiah, but it was nothing compared to the damage the orks would do to the ship if left unchecked. Or to us, come to that, which I must admit was of rather more pressing concern to me. 'What have you got in mind?'
Mira smiled, for the first time since I'd run into her. 'An old hunter's trick,' she said, starting to pull wires from the gap between the walls.
I have to admit I'd had my doubts about the wisdom of going along with this, every second we delayed eroding our hard-won lead, but I stayed to cover the corner around which I expected the orks to come at any moment while Mira busied herself with the cables she'd extracted. It seemed that despite my earlier scepticism in the bunker below the palace in Fidelis, her hunting trips had indeed endowed her with some knowledge and skills which might be of use to us in the present emergency. Her marksmanship, quite exceptional for a civilian, I already had good reason to be grateful for, so it seemed worth the risk to tarry a moment or two to see what else she had up her sleeve. Besides, I was confident that I could run faster than her if push came to shove, and our pursuers got too close.
'Finished,' she said, after a tense few moments, and not before time, as the clatter of iron-shod feet against deck plates was beginning to reverberate through my spine. 'Can I borrow this?'
Before I could even ask what ''this'' was, she snatched my cap from my head, and reached up to hook it on a length of wire she'd thrown over a pipe running along the centre of the ceiling. My purloined headgear swung in the middle of the corridor, a little above my head and about face height for an ork. I didn't have the faintest idea what she intended to achieve by it, other than drawing their fire perhaps, but my neck seemed a great deal more important than my hat, so I simply started running again.
'Not too far,' Mira said, laying a hand on my arm. 'You'll be round the next corner before they can see us.' Well, that sounded fine to me. She seemed to have some idea of what she was doing though, so I slowed my pace a little and took refuge behind the next junction, levelling my laspistol back the way we'd come. Letting them see us was one thing, but I wasn't stupid enough to stand out in the open where they'd have a clear shot. Even an ork can hit the target occasionally.
They burst into view in a clump, jostling for position as they always did, which no doubt had slowed them down considerably and bought us enough time for Mira to do whatever it was she'd been doing. I flexed my finger on the trigger, tightening it to the point where the slightest movement would be sufficient to fire. My hours of practice against the hovering cyberskulls in the training chapel had paid off handsomely, my grip on the weapon as assured and instinctive with my new augmetic fingers as it had ever been with my original ones; even more so, if anything, as I'd found it easier to remain precisely on aim without the faint tremors no amount of training and discipline can quite eliminate[70]. I held back, though, wanting to be sure of a target. I still hadn't the faintest idea what Mira had been up to, and the last thing I wanted to do was throw away whatever advantage she'd brought us by precipitate action.
The first thing the greenskins saw was my hat, of course, all of them staring at it with expressions of vague confusion, which is the closest their kind can come to any form of cerebral activity. Their headlong rush slowed, and they began to move down the corridor towards us, grunting and barking in their barbarous tongue, which I was familiar enough with to gather that the one I'd killed had indeed been their leader, and that his successor was still attempting to impose his authority on the others[71].
'If you wouldn't mind shooting them?' Mira asked irritably, so I took careful aim at Metaljaw, since he was the one shouting the most, which is usually a reliable indicator of status among greenskins, and squeezed the trigger. I'd only intended getting their attention, which was presumably what Mira had in mind, but I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations: I fired just as my target opened his mouth to bellow at a recalcitrant subordinate, and by great fortune my las-bolt hit him in the back of the throat, exiting through his skull and taking most of his brain with it.
69
An orkish word for firearms in general. They have nothing more specific in their vocabulary, and, like many nouns referring to pieces of wargear, it appears to be a corrupted Gothic loan word.
70
Given that the main cause of perturbation in a hand holding a pistol on aim is the heartbeat, which affects the entire body, Cain's apparently unshakable conviction that his augmetic fingers increased his accuracy with such weapons may have been psychological rather than physiological in origin.
71
Which probably accounted for at least some of the gunfire Cain noted earlier, orks having a fairly basic way of resolving most arguments.