then died forever in a cough of stinking oil smoke. Dry rotors and cylinders burst and ground.
The ork machines were a hundred metres behind them. They could hear them whooping in victory. For the first time, Rawne realised that the wind was no longer screaming now they were out of the valley.
Gaunt clambered out of the cockpit. 'Tube-charges, Rawne!' he bawled.
'What?'
Gaunt pointed to where other wide shots from their pursuers dug steaming vents from the glassy ice.
'The ice is thin here. We're riding over a thin skin. The living ocean is right below us.'
Another shot whinnied down and exploded the steering section of the sled where Gaunt had just been sitting. 'Now!'
Rawne understood the commissar's idea just as suddenly as he recognised the insanity of it. But the orks were only fifty paces away. Rawne realised the desperation too.
He had twelve stick mines in his satchel and he pulled them all out, handing half to Gaunt. He kicked the glass off one of the vehicle's lamps and used the white-hot filament to light the fuses. The two humans took three in each hand and hurled them as far and as hard as they could, scattering them wide.
Twelve huge explosions, each big enough to kill a tank. They split the world apart. But more particularly, they burst and shattered the ice. The steaming hydrocarbon sea, so close beneath, rushed up to plume and boil and froth in the air.
One ork machine cartwheeled, an explosion taking it over It tore itself and its occupants into fragments as it landed on ice that was beginning to separate and fracture in huge bob bing sections. Another dodged the rain of blasts and flew straight off the edge of an ice chunk into the sea, where it vaporised and burned. The last stopped short, the riders bellowing, just missing a gap in the ice. Then the ice chunk it sat on collapsed and they all dropped shrieking into the frothing, flaming liquid.
The ice was coming apart, fracturing into chunks that burned and steamed as the rising ocean, locked in for so many thousands of years, welled up and conquered the surface. On the back of their dead machine, Gaunt and Rawne leapt and yelled in triumph until they realised the ice collapse was spreading their way fast.
The ocean fizzed and thrashed up around their sled runners and the motor-sled dipped suddenly. Gaunt jumped clear onto a nearby iceberg, newly formed and sizzling in the hideous liquid.
He held out his hand. Rawne jumped after him, grabbing Gaunt's hand, allowing himself to be pulled clear as their ruined machine slid backwards into the liquid and exploded.
'We can't stay here,' Gaunt began. It was true. Their iceberg was rocking and dissolving like an ice cube in hot water. They leapt off it to the next, and then the next, hoping that the fractured sections of ice would remain intact long enough for them to reach some kind of shore. Vapours gasped and billowed around them.
On the fourth, Rawne slipped and Gaunt caught him just centimetres from the frothing water.
They made the next floe and Rawne moved ahead. He heard a cry behind him and turned to see the ice plate upending and Gaunt sliding backwards on his belly, clawing the surface as he slipped down towards the seething ocean of hydrocarbons.
He could let him die. Rawne knew that. No one would know. No one would ever find the body. And even if they did… Besides, he couldn't reach him.
Rawne pulled out his knife and hurled it. It stuck fast, blade down, in the tilting ice just above Gaunt's hand and gave the commissar a grip. Gaunt pulled himself up on the dagger and then got his foot braced on it until he could reach up and take Rawne's hand. The major hauled him up high enough for the pair to make a safe jump to the next berg. This was larger, more solid. They clung to it, side by side, panting and out of strength.
The ice chunk behind them fell back into the ocean, taking Rawne's silver dagger with it.
They sat together on top of the iceberg for six hours. Around them, the ocean refroze and its seething hiss died away. But they could go nowhere. The reforming ice skin was but a few centimetres thick – thick enough to enclose the lethal liquid but not so hard as to bear weight. The distress beacon from Gaunt's pack blinked and sighed behind them on the top of the ice chunk.
'I owe you,' Gaunt said at last.
Rawne shook his head. 'I don't want that.'
'You pulled me up there. Saved me. I owe you for that. And frankly, I'm surprised. I know you'd like to see me dead and this was an opportunity that spared your hands from blood.'
Rawne turned to look at Gaunt, his face half-lit by the dwindling starlight. His cheeks and chin seemed to catch the light more like a dagger now than ever before. And his eyes were hooded like a snake's.
'One day, I will kill you, Gaunt,' he said simply. 'I owe it to Tanith. To myself. But I'm no murderer and I respect honour. You saved me from that greenskin in the cave and so I owed you.'
'I would do as much for any man in my command.'
'Precisely. You may think I'm a malcontent, but I stay loyal to the Emperor and the Guard always. I owed you and, though I hate myself for it, I repaid. Now we're even.'
'Even,' Gaunt murmured, measuring the word softly in his mouth. 'Or level, perhaps.'
Rawne smiled. The day will come, Ibram Gaunt. But it will be on equal terms. Level terms, as you put it. I will kill you, and I will rejoice in it. But now is not the time.'
'Thank you for being so forthright, Rawne.'Gaunt pulled out his Tanith knife, the knife given to him by Corbec when they first mustered for war.
Rawne tensed, jerking back. But Gaunt held it out to him, hilt first.
'You lost yours. I know any Tanith would be incomplete without a long blade at his hip.'
Rawne took the knife. Me held it in his hands for a second, spun it with deft fingers, and then slid it into his empty belt sheath.
