Rawne reached for his medi-pouch and pulled it open. He took the flesh clamps out and worked with them as the medic, Dorden, had instructed them all during Foundation Training. But the wire clamps were frozen and his numb fingers managed little more than to ping them off across the floor instead of opening them.
It took him an age to extract a needle from the sterile papei packets. He dropped four or five before he grasped one, and then set it between his teeth as he tried to find the loose end of the surgical thread.
Finally, it was pinched between unfeeling fingers. He took the needle and tried to thread it. He'd have had more chance making a bull's-eye on a target ten kilometres away with a wrong-sighted lasgun. After twenty attempts, he put the needle back between his teeth and tried to twist together the now frayed ends of the thread.
Something hit him hard from behind, smashing him head first into the snow floor.
He lay on his face, fazed, slowly becoming aware of the snorting and sniffling behind him. His tongue hurt and his mouth was full of blood which drooled out and frosted down into the ice. A big shape was moving behind him.
He turned his head slowly and dared to take a look. Circumspect, sidelong, as one might do into a mirror whilst shaving.
The ork was nearly three metres tall and almost as wide. Impossibly large muscles corded its shoulders and arms and stinking furs swaddled its bulk. Its head was huge, twice the size of a human's, thrust forward and seated on the vast lower jaw. Blackened teeth stuck like chisel blades out of the rotten gums. He couldn't see the eyes. He could smell the reeking breath, the corrosive saliva that spattered and dripped from the half-open mouth.
Playing dead, he watched as it toyed with his medi-pouch, rooting through the contents with hands big enough to break a human throat like a twig. It took out a roll of gauze and bit it munching and then spitting out.
It's hungry, thought Rawne, and his guts iced and tightened at the idea.
Suddenly, it moved to him, pulling him up by the hair and jerking him back like a puppet, rummaging in his clothing with the other hand for food pouches, rations, munitions.
Blood spilled out of Rawne's jerked-open mouth, spattering down his chest. He tried to remain limp, but his left hand crept down towards the knife sheathed at his waist. The huge ork jerked and twisted him like a sack of bones, sniffing and gurgling behind his ear, hot breath on Rawne's neck, rancid smell in his nose.
Rawne found his knife and slid it out. He must have tensed doing so because the ork froze and then muttered something in its arcane tongue. Rawne moved to swing his knife, but the ork's huge paw was suddenly around his blade-hand, crushing it and slamming it into the icy wall beside them. Two slams and Rawne's hand gave up. The Tanith dagger whipped away.
The ork roared, a guttural bellow that deafened Rawne and shook his diaphragm. Holding him from behind, it bear-hugged, pulling its arms apart, determined to rip his torso in two. Rawne screamed, fighting futilely at the greater strength, tearing his arms free. He was dead, he knew that. Death was a moment away.
Pain made him reach into his mouth, to pull at whatever throbbed in his tongue. He found the end of the surgical needle, protruding from the flesh of his tongue. He yanked it out. A shockingly long spurt of blood followed it. Then he stabbed back behind his head with the little sliver of metal.
The ork screamed and dropped him. Rawne landed, spitting and coughing blood from his pulsing tongue. The ork was flailing around the cave wildly, holding one eye that dribbled with clear fluid and stained ichor. The noise of its rage was deafening in the ice-hole.
Rawne scrambled for a weapon, but the ork turned and sent him flying across the cave with a flat backhand. Rawne hit the ice wall hard with his shoulders, upside down and horizontal. His shoulder blade cracked and he dropped to the floor.
The ork charged him, one eye half-closed and oozing around the stub-eye of the surgical needle impaling it. Rawne rolled.
His lasgun was on the far side of the cave, but his knife was in reach.
His knife. How many fights had he won with that? How many throats had he cut, how many hearts had he burst, how many stomachs had he opened?
He reached it, grasped it, turned in a low crouch to meet the attacker, a gleeful look on his face.
The ork faced him, its back to the cave mouth, a huge, crude bolt-pistol in its ichor-spattered fist.
The ork spoke, slow, rumbling, alien. Rawne didn't know what it said, but he knew what it meant.
There was a blinding flash and the roar of a weapon loosed in the confines of the cave.
Rawne had always wondered what it would feel like to take the killing hit. To be shot mortally. To die. But there was no feeling. No sense.
In the blink of an eye, he saw the ork explode, its mid-section disintegrating in a burst of light.
It fell, almost in two parts. Its body fluids froze as it flopped to the ground.
There was a tall figure in the care entrance, blocking the light. 'Major Rawne?'
Ibram Gaunt entered the cave and holstered his bolt-pistol.
It seemed that the commissar had fared no better than him. The ork warband had decided to take advantage of the chaos of the crusade's push to seize Typhon as part of its attempt to build a raiding foothold into the Sabbat Worlds. Charged with destroying the menace, the Ghosts had deployed into the long gorges and ice-floes of the moon and come undone. As Rawne's platoon had been cut down along the eastern edge of the screaming valley, so Gaunt's had to the west. In retreat, the greenskins had proved the more determined adversaries.
The commissar and the major crouched down in the ice cave together. Rawne had made no sign of gratitude. In many ways he knew he would rather be dead than remain beholden to the off-worlder.
'How's your tongue?' Gaunt asked, getting a fire lit with chemical blocks. 'Why?'
'You're not saying much.'
