scuttling in the gloom around us, but what I could hear over the hammering of my heart was too faint and diffuse to pinpoint.
No point worrying then, I told myself, before a barely perceptible change in the quality of the darkness enfolding us started tickling at the edge of my awareness. 'Kill the luminator,' I instructed Jurgen. Responsive as ever to orders he complied immediately, and I realised at once that I was right. There was a faint glow behind us, growing in intensity moment by moment, and as I strained my ears I was able to make out the irregular drumming of a large number of fast-moving feet. A moment later it was joined by the timbre of guttural voices, quarrelsomely raised, which dispelled any possible doubt there might have been about who they belonged to. 'This way! And try to stay quiet.'
The last admonition may not have been strictly necessary, I suppose, as the oncoming orks would almost certainly have drowned out any noise we might be making with their interminable bickering, but it never hurt to be careful. Besides, I hadn't forgotten that the genestealers were somewhere around too, and were probably listening out for us with just as much energy and interest as I was for them. Fortunately I'd memorised the position of the cross corridor we'd been aiming for before our luminator went out, and a few strides were sufficient to take me there; my nose enabled me to fix Jurgen's location just as easily, and guide him in the right direction too, so that by the time the diffuse glow behind us separated into a score of distinct light sources, the pair of us were comfortably ensconced behind a large lump of rust a few metres into the passageway, which looked as though it had once been a pump of some kind. From there we had a good view of the corridor we'd just left, so I hunkered down, my laspistol at the ready, and peered round the defunct mechanism, hoping to see enough to get an estimate of the size of the group behind us.
In the event, I was to see a great deal more than that. As the orks approached the junction, and Jurgen and I steadied our weapons, preparing to drop any which split off from the main body to explore our refuge, the light around us grew brighter with every step closer the greenskins took. As yet, although they were more than audible, the pursuing orks had still to become visible; the pump behind which Jurgen and I were lurking was on the side of the passageway they were approaching from, so the view we had of the main corridor was up towards the genestealer nest we'd stumbled across what felt like a lifetime ago, but which my chronograph stubbornly insisted had been barely an hour and a half.
I centred the junction of the two passageways in my sights, and blinked, thinking for a moment that fatigue and stress had finally caught up with me. The shadows were shrinking and deepening as the luminator-bearing greenskins approached, but one had appeared to ripple, moving in the wrong direction, before settling again, somewhere in a tangle of pipework depending from the ceiling.
My breath froze. 'Stealer,' I whispered, almost inaudibly, not daring to raise my voice any louder in case the chitinous obscenity heard me. 'In the main passage.'
'I make it three,' Jurgen responded, equally sotto voce, an instant after I spotted the others, clinging to the wall beside a ventilator grille a little above eye level, and lurking in the utility channel beneath the mesh deck plate. Then more shadows rippled, and a whole swarm of them was suddenly there, blocking the passageway entirely, just as the vanguard of the orks came pounding into view from the other direction.
I suppose humans in that position might have hesitated, paralysed for a moment by surprise or indecision, but both xenos breeds were governed by an instinctive aggression which generally served them well in such encounters. With a bone-rattling yell of 'WAAAAAGGHHH!' the greenskins surged forwards, firing their crude bolters and swinging their axe blades, and the purestrains flowed to meet them, meeting firearm with mandible, edged steel with claw. Blood and ichor flowed, neither side willing or capable of giving quarter, each equally determined to annihilate the other.
'Come on,' I instructed, leaving them to it and hurrying down the passageway as quickly as I could without breaking an ankle on some unseen obstruction. After barking my shins on pieces of scrap littering the place a couple of times, I told Jurgen to rekindle the luminator; after all, the orks were using them too, and wouldn't be able to tell us from allies at a distance, and I was already convinced the 'stealers would be able to find us just as easily whether we were using one or not. The noise of the skirmish behind us was drowning out any warning my ears might have given of purestrains lurking in ambush, so, like it or not, we had no option other than relying on our vision in any case.
'Sounds like they're all at it,' Jurgen observed, sounding no more concerned than if he'd been informing me that rain was expected by evening, and I nodded in agreement. Sporadic shooting and orkish war cries could be heard echoing down the shafts from every direction now, and it became clear to me that perhaps we wouldn't find a way out after all. My gift for remaining orientated in environments like this still seemed as reliable as ever, but it appeared the way back to the hangar was now blocked by two hordes of inimical xenoforms hell-bent on knocking the proverbial nine shades out of one another. If there was anything at all positive about the situation, I supposed, it was that the greenskins were now well and truly aware of the genestealer presence, which meant neither would have much time or attention to spare for launching an attack on Serendipita any time soon. This may have been gravy for the Serendipitans, but wasn't much help to me.
'Let's try this way,' I said, spotting lights moving up ahead, and turning aside down a passageway which looked, if anything, even more decrepit and dangerous than the one we'd just left. A flicker of motion caught the corner of my eye, and I turned, bringing up my chainsword instinctively, powering the teeth up to combat speed. Yet again, my duellist's reflexes saved my life, as the blade sliced cleanly through the arm of a genestealer millimetres from closing its claws around my head, and I pivoted out of the way of its rush, decapitating it neatly on the backswing. As it fell I looked around for more, but this one seemed to have been alone, much to my relief.
Any respite could only be temporary, however; I had no doubt that the brood mind was aware of our location now, and would be sending more of the creatures after us. All we could do was keep moving, and hope the orks were keeping the rest of the 'stealers in the vicinity occupied. At which point I became aware of the lights in the distance again, following us down the side passage we'd taken. It seemed they'd noticed us at the same time we'd seen them.
'Keep moving,' I said urgently. 'As fast as possible.'
'Right you are, sir,' Jurgen said, suiting the action to the word and breaking into an ungainly trot. It seemed we'd passed into yet another section of the hulk, in greater disrepair than the old freighter and whatever vessel the orks had been cannibalising had been. The corridor was narrow, and the floor plates badly corroded. The ubiquitous dust being kicked up by my hurrying footsteps was stained brown with rust here, and flakes of the stuff came off the walls every time my shoulders brushed against them. Loops of cable hung like jungle vines from the ceiling, where the brackets holding them in place had worked loose, or fallen away entirely, and for a moment I found myself wondering if we could somehow emulate Mira's trick with the power lines back on the Revenant, but the generators which used to feed them had ceased to function centuries ago, if not millennia, and even if they hadn't I'd probably just have ended up electrocuting myself in any case.
'It's a dead end,' Jurgen called, flashing his luminator round a rubble-choked chamber, which, judging by the control lecterns and the glass-fronted dials set into the walls, had probably once been a monitoring chapel for the ship's power core. There was no other way out that I could see, and I expressed my disappointment in several short phrases I think it best not to record for posterity. 'Can we go back the way we came?'
'If we clear the orks out of the way first,' I said, indicating the brightening glow some way off down the passageway.
Jurgen took cover behind a chunk of fallen ceiling, his lasgun aimed at the narrow entrance. 'Not a problem,' he assured me.
'Glad to hear it,' I said, hoping he wasn't being overly optimistic. It sounded like a fair-sized mob to me, and, although they could only enter the chamber one at a time, I'd fought greenskins too often to be sanguine about our ability to drop them all as they came in. I'd seen orks shrugging off lasgun wounds which would have killed or incapacitated a man, and it would only take a few of them to rush us in so confined a space before we were overwhelmed. 'Got any grenades left?'
'Sorry, sir,' Jurgen shook his head dolefully. 'We've used the last one [145].'
'Oh well,' I said, trying to sound casual. 'Can't be helped. We'll just have to do the best we can.' I popped off a few speculative las-bolts down the passageway, hoping to delay our pursuers, or goad them into doing something rash, but all I received for my pains was an answering flurry of bolter rounds, which punched holes in the metal walls surrounding us with a ripple of overlapping detonations which made my ears ring. That sparked another idea,
