Shield of the Emperor (Warhammer 40,000) by Mitchel Scanlon & Steve Lyons & Steve Parker

Author:Mitchel Scanlon & Steve Lyons & Steve Parker [Scanlon, Mitchel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Games Workshop
Published: 2019-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The fighting seemed to have gone on forever.

Lorenzo remembered the first tint of sunlight touching the sky, remembered how amazed he’d been that only one night had passed because it seemed so long since he’d thought of anything but blood and smoke and fire. Yet when he looked back on that time, much of it was no more than a blur of sneering ork faces and knife thrusts and death. Lots of death. He thought that, at one point, he’d stood back to back with Sergeant Greiss, but he couldn’t be sure. Once they’d moved into hand-to-hand combat, he’d had no choice but to surrender himself to his instincts. Otherwise he’d have thought about the tiredness in his muscles and the aches from his bruises and the still-overwhelming odds against him, and he would have lain down and died. Or, worse still, he’d have thought about dying.

He could have died, and he’d probably have known nothing about it. Just wound down like a spring, from a wound he hadn’t yet felt, and that wouldn’t have been so bad, would it?

Lorenzo was fighting in his sleep, muscle memory twitching his arms in response to an imaginary parade of blood-crazed enemies. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought he must have wondered if he would ever wake up, or if he would fight this nightmare struggle forever.

Yes, it had been a glorious battle.

And it was made all the more so by the fact that, in the end, Lorenzo felt sunlight touching his face, and he opened his eyes and knew that he had lived.

It took him a moment to work out where he was. The light was bright, but his surroundings seemed dim. He realised that the light was streaming through a small window, to be swallowed by the dust and the dirt in here.

An ork hut. Lorenzo was lying on a makeshift bunk, really no more than a pile of junk draped with rags, and he was swaddled in stinking furs. He was hot, burning up. It crossed his mind only briefly that the orks themselves might have brought him here, as a hostage. That wasn’t their style. The fact that he was here meant his small squad had achieved the impossible. They had won. But at what price?

Lorenzo felt a stiffness in his side, and sent a tentative hand under his bulky coverings to investigate. His questing fingers found a hard knot of synth-skin, between the ribs in his right side, and he winced at the sudden white hot memory of an axe blade scything through his flesh. His memories were disordered, still vague, but that pain, he felt sure, was among the most recent of them. He sighed regretfully. He would have liked to be found standing, at the end.

‘Hey, Lorenzo? You moving under all that lot?’

The familiar voice drew Lorenzo’s gaze to his left, to the next bunk, where lay Woods. He must have been injured too, though Lorenzo wouldn’t have known it from the cocky grin on his face.

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