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.
For a fraction of a second the surviving greenskins stood in stupefied astonishment, watching another leader topple to the deck plates, then as one they reacted, charging forwards with a roar of 'WAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!' Despite this, I felt a faint surge of optimism. I'd seen many times on Perlia that once a group of orks falls below a critical proportion of their original number they tend to lose heart for the fray, breaking off to seek out another mob to join instead of pressing their attack. If I could just pick off another, that might be enough to shake the resolve of the rest.
But before I could squeeze the trigger again, the space beyond my sights was suddenly devoid of ork. The whole group of them had fallen, sprawling across the deck plates like drunkards in a drinking den, thrashing and bellowing with rage as they tried to rise, hampering each other as they flailed around like tantrum-throwing toddlers.
Mira looked at them with a faint air of disappointment. 'I was hoping they'd drop their weapons,' she said.
'That was your brilliant idea?' I asked, with a touch of asperity, getting ready to flee again. There was about as much chance of an ork dropping his weapons as deciding to take up flower arranging. 'A tripwire?' Which explained why she'd needed my hat, of course: the first principle of setting a booby trap is to direct the victim's attention elsewhere.
'Mostly,' she admitted.
'Then shouldn't we be running again?' I asked, with a hint of impatience. The only point of a tripwire would be to delay our pursuers, and standing around while they stood up and dusted themselves off would throw away that momentary advantage.
'Maybe,' Mira said, still looking back down the corridor with an air of vague expectation, and showing no signs of movement. Acidface had scrambled to his feet by now, bellowing imprecations at the others, and swatted at my dangling cap with the axe in his hand, no doubt relieving his feelings in the most direct fashion he could.
As the crude weapon smacked into my headgear, a blue-white arc of energy sparked across to the metal blade, and the ork spasmed, roaring and bellowing as he suddenly completed a circuit with the cable Mira had strung across the corridor. His comrades were caught in the discharge too, thrashing on the metal floor like fish on a griddle, their own ululations echoing loudly enough to pain the ears.
'That went about as well as could be expected,' Mira said, her expression now smug in the extreme.
I looked at her, then back to the twitching pile of smouldering orks.
'Why didn't you barbecue yourself while you were setting that up?' I asked, in some perplexity.
Mira shrugged. 'Rubber-soled boots,' she said. 'Saves time rigging the shock fence round a camp. It's an-'
'Old hunter's trick,' I finished for her. 'Next time you see that old hunter, thank him for me.'
Before she could reply, the abused power feed finally shorted out, and the standing greenskin collapsed on top of his comrades, with a faint clatter of falling weaponry. A fresh odour, pungent and familiar, forced its way past the stench of charring ork, and I turned to greet my aide.
'Jurgen,' I said. 'Prompt as always.' I indicated the feebly stirring mound of incapacitated greenskins behind me. 'If you wouldn't mind?' I could quite easily have put a las-bolt through each of their heads myself, but I'd promised to save him a few, and he'd only have sulked if I didn't.
'Of course, sir,' he said, and trotted off to administer the coup de grace to the fallen with every sign of enthusiasm. A few moments later he returned, bearing my cap, which he handed to me with a faint air of puzzlement. 'I'll have to see what I can do with this,' he said, 'but I'm afraid it's a little singed.'
THIRTEEN
AS I'D SURMISED , now they'd been deprived of the almost infinite number of reinforcements they'd surely been counting on to take the Revenant, the remaining greenskins were easy meat for the Reclaimers. Tracking them down took a little time, of course, given the size of the vessel, but a fully-grown ork isn't exactly hard to miss, and the Astartes were extremely adept at xenos hunting. By the time Gries called a meeting to discuss the situation, the shredded remains of the last one had been hauled away to the taxidermist[72], and the ship's enginseers were inhaling through their teeth[73] at the damage all those bolter shells had done to their nice clean bulkheads. Mira had, of
