'I wonder if Franx has killed Linskrug yet?' I speculate idly, as Gappo busies himself with handing out mess tins.
'Why did you put them together then?' asks Kyle, sitting up from where he was lying in a bedsack at the far end of the tent.
'Don't you know?' I say, suddenly feeling bitter about being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, an ugly and painful death lurking not far away. 'It's the same reason we're all here - torment is good for the soul/
Two days we've waited for the orks on this Emperor-forsaken mountainside. Two days sitting on our hands, so to speak, in the freezing snow and bone-chilling wind. We're set up just beneath the cloud line, sometimes it drifts down on us and you can't see your hand in front of your face. The air is so thin up here too, causing sickness and dizziness, the lower pressure making your body expel its gases pretty continuously. That caused some laughs the first few times until it became plain uncomfortable. Some of the men have already died from exposure to the elements, killed by sheer altitude.
The only way to cross onto the plains is over a ridge at the top end of the valley, or that's what the guides reckon. A few
brave souls have tried to navigate the routes to the north and west, but none ever returned. We've got some explosives rigged up to bring down a good sized chunk of snow and rock on the greenskins, but I expect that'll just get their attention more than anything. I hope these Kragmeer guys know what they're doing because I don't want to get caught up in that mess when it comes tumbling down.
Now that we're here you might be fooled into thinking that the hard slog was over, but you'd be wrong. We've been kept really busy digging trenches in the ice. If you ever thought snow was soft, you're sorely mistaken. The stuff round here has been packed solid for centuries and I swear is harder than the rock. We've only been able to get the trenches maybe a metre and a half deep. Also, the bulky mitts you have to wear make it hard to grip the haft of a pickaxe or a shovel handle, and Poliwicz almost took his foot off earlier this morning. The watery light of the sun is just about above the clouds now, and for once the snow seems to have slackened off. Well, relatively speaking -it's just coming down continuously in big chunks now, instead of almost horizontally in a blizzard.
The wind's shifted to the south/ one of the guides, Ekul, explains when I ask him about the calming weather. 'But that's actually bad news/
'Why so?' I ask, wanting to know the worst before I get caught out by it. He looks to the south for a moment, showing the pointed, sharp profile of his nose and chin from out of the grey and white furs he's wearing. Like the rest of the Kragmeerites, his face is battered and weathered, and his dark eyes seem to gaze into the distance as if remembering something. He looks back at me, those eyes regarding me slowly, set above high cheekbones that seem to have been chiselled rather than grown.
There's a kind of funnel effect in the valleys and that stirs up the storm a lot/ he replies eventually, bending down to draw a spiral with his finger in the snow. 'It builds up and builds up and then whoosh, it breaks up and over the mountaintops and comes rushing up here. We call it the Emperor's Wrath. A bit poetic, but you understand the idea/
'Bad news to be caught out in it/ I finish for him.
'Seen men blown easily thirty metres clear off the ground, and that's no lying,' he tells me with a sorry shake of his head.
We stand there looking down the pass at the zigzag of trenches being built. We've taken up position on the western side of the valley, the shallower face. The other penal regiment has been split into two contingents, forming a first line and a second line. The plan is for the orks to crash against the first line and when they're thrown back the surviving defenders will pull back and reinforce the second line. I thought it would have been better on the eastern slopes, where the going is steeper and would slow down die ork assault. But of course the Colonel has looked at everything and pointed out a good kilometre of defilade further along the valley, where units on the eastern slope wouldn't be able to target the valley floor. All the orks would have to do would be rush the gauntlet of fire for the first kilometre and then they'd be in the defilade and in cover. Once they were clear of that they'd be out of range. That said, I've fought orks before, and I can't see them refusing the challenge of six thousand guardsmen shooting at them without trying an assault. It's the way their minds work - they're brutal beasts, without much thought, just an unquenchable hunger for war and bloodshed. Emperor knows, nature has certainly built them for battle. As I said before, you can shoot them, stab them, chop them, and they don't go down.
I see someone striding up through the snow and it's not difficult to recognise the Colonel. I watch him as he pushes up through the drifts, hauling himself along the rocks towards us at some points where the going is really treacherous. He pulls himself over the lip of the ledge we're standing on and stands there for a moment, catching his breath, glancing back down towards the entrenchments.
'How much warning can you give me?' he asks Ekul, looking around, towards the guide.
'Depends on how fast the orks are moving, sir/ he replies with a shrug. 'A ploughfoot can cover the ground from the pickets in a couple of hours, and assuming the cloud stays up, you should be able to spot a force that size a good ten kilometres away/
About five or six hours, then?' the Colonel confirms and the guide nods. 'Why are you here, Kage?' he adds suddenly.
'I was surveying the layout of the trenches, sir/1 reply quickly. It's the truth. I made the back-breaking climb up here with Ekul to get a feel for the lay of the land.
You would not try to get away, would you lieutenant?' he says darkly.
'And go where?' I can't stop myself answering back. 'Go live wim the orks?'
'And what are your conclusions, lieutenant?' the Colonel asks, mankfully ignoring my insubordination this time.
*We need to extend the front trenches on the left flank/ I tell him, indicating the area wim a sweep of my arm. They should overlap the secondary position by a few hundred metres/
'And how did you become such a student of military theory?' he asks quietly, looking straight at me.
'Because that's what we ran into when you led us on the forlorn hope assault into Casde Shornigar on Harrifax, sir/ I point out, keeping the bitterness from my voice.
'I remember/ he says back to me. There was quite a deadly crossfire, if I recall/
