Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

Gaunt and Rawne leaped up out of the scoop and ran towards the motorised sled. The ork left on foot was running their way, firing from the hip. Bolt rounds whizzed and sang around them, fizzling into the ice. Yelling as he charged the advancing ork, Rawne fired on full auto, his lasgun bucking as he carried it low against his side. Two laser shots spun the monstrous ork off his feet and dropped him on the ice, where he lay twitching.

Gaunt reached the sled, screwing up his nose at the smell of burning flesh. 'The gun and the gunner were still burning, but fire had not spread to the rest of the machine. He stepped forward, but darted back as another round went up. Then it was quiet.

He leaped up onto the tail-boards and put a point-blank round through the gunner's back, though he was sure the ork was dead. He had heard too many tales of the greenskin resilience to injury. Gaunt pitched the cadaver off the platform onto the ice, then grabbed hold of the smouldering, ruined weapon. There was a handle release to free the gun and its drums from the mount. He heaved on it, his hands slipping in thick grease. No human strength had tightened this latch. He put his weight behind it, cursing and grunting, expecting another round to explode in his face at any moment.

The latch gave. With a gasp, and an effort that tore ligaments in his back and arms, he hefted the entire gun and ammo carriage off the metal bars of the mount frame and tipped it over off the vehicle. As it landed, three more rounds went off, one scudding across the surface of the ice in slithering jags like a phosphorescent sprite.

Gaunt's gloves had caught fire from the red-hot metal and he jerked them off, throwing them aside. He clambered forward onto the driver's position and tried to pull the driver's body out of the cockpit. Nearly four hundred kilos of dead weight refused to budge.

He looked back at Rawne, in time to see him finishing the fallen footsoldier with his blade. Gaunt yelled him over, his voice lost in the keening wind.

Together they pried the driver's corpse free and flopped it into the ice. It had already begun to freeze and fell like a sack of rocks. Gaunt got into the cockpit, felt the space roomy and too big for a human operator. It stank of sweat and blood in the enclosed cabin. He tested the handlebar grips and found the foot pedals. His first tries at control revved the engine to a scream and then braked the sled in a jolt that threw the cursing Rawne onto his back in the troop bay behind him. Then he had the measure of it. It was a crude version of the landcars he had driven with his father back home, years ago. There was a foot throttle and also a foot brake, though that did little but dig a massive spike down from the underside into the ice to retard motion. The anchor would only work in conjunction with de-throttling. With the engine racing, the spike would shatter and pull the guts out from under the motor sled. The gears, three of them, were set by a twist on the left handlebar grip. There were gauges on the crude dash calibrated in greenskin script which he couldn't read or understand, but he began to measure the way the juddering needles spiked and dipped.

'Hold on, major!' he warned and raced them off towards the distant end of the valley. Rawne, in the back, clung on tight, the wind whipping his face and neck.

Gaunt focussed all his will into control. The massive machine bucked and jinked on every irregularity in the ice, but Gaunt quickly came to judge the way ahead, and knew what conditions would skid them round, or slide them, or make them spin treads. There was no power assist to the steering, and he fought it. It was beyond his strength to keep the steering true and he realised that he would never be able to drive the machine as fast as the stronger orks could. It fought too much and his strength was human, not inhuman.

They rocked and bumped and jolted. More than once, they spun out as he failed to keep the drive wheels true and the back end came around in a flurry of ice shards. After the last such lapse, the raging engine stalled and refused to restart. There was a starter switch under the steering column, but it flopped slackly.

Gaunt peered down and found the kick start stirrup to the left of the brake. He bent and flopped it down, trying it with his boot.

'Gaunt!'

He looked up. Rawne was standing on the flatbed, pointing back. A kilometre away, three dark shapes were kicking up ice-smoke as they raced after them. The orks, with their superior strength and experience of the snow machines, were making better speed in their pursuit.

Gaunt kicked viciously at the starter bar time and again until the engine yowled alive, and then hastily adjusted the protesting throttle.

They spun again, fishtailed, then chugged away. Gaunt pushed the machine as fast as he thought he could control it. Another misread flaw in the ice, another spin out, another stall, and they would be overrun. Or overturned, necks snapped under the rolling tonnage of the motor sled.

They came out of the night shadows of the valley onto the wide expanse of the ice floe. Sunlight seared them and Gaunt and Rawne were blind for a moment, even after they pulled their glare goggles down.

Ahead was the ice sea. White, scarlet, purple, green in patches, the ice was scalloped and curled like foam. Thousands of kilometres of open, frozen sea, spread out to a horizon where it met the blackness of space. The sunlight was a hostile white menace.

The sea and all its waves had frozen as if in mid-ebb, and now the sled bounced and flew, rose and fell, across the dimpled peaks of breakers that had frozen a millennium before. The motor sled over-rewed each time it left the ground and kicked ice chunks each time it landed. Gaunt could barely control the machine as the drive wheels and slithering skids kissed ice again. Rawne had thought about firing back at the ork machines closing on them, but the bumpy ride had thrown him to the greasy deck and it was all he could do to cling on and lie flat. Face to the metal deck-boarding, he saw the punctures for the first time. Shrapnel holes, from the exploding bolter drums. There was a stink of oil rising from them. He crawled, hand over hand, to the tail gate as the sled jumped and crashed, and saw a staining line of brown marking their wake.

He turned and yelled. 'We're bleeding fuel! The tank is punctured!'

Gaunt cursed. Now he understood what one of the gauges – the one with the rapidly dipping needle – really meant.

The ork pursuit was closing. Heavy bolter rounds and other explosive munitions rained down around them, blowing geysers of ice and steam up from the frozen sea.

Gaunt realised his naked, glove-less hands were beginning to freeze solid around the steering grips. The pain brought tears to his eyes, tears which froze behind his goggles and blurred his vision, biting his cheeks.

Two over-shot projectiles from the orks brought bigger explosions to the left of them. Sprays of glutinous, boiling liquid erupted far into the air from their impacts. Gaunt saw that the rushing landscape ahead of them was duller blue, more like frosted glass, cracked and crazed.

They made the next rise. Then the engine coughed, spluttered, died. They slid sideways in a long, wide deceleration, ice gouged up by Gaunt's desperate use of the anchor. He kicked the starter. The engine flared once, 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.