It was a battered and bloodied group which filled out of the Mechanicus pump station. Katia led the surviving six. Walking erect and straight as befitted the position of a regimental Commissar despite the dull pain that stabbed along her left side with each step. Two of the survivors were too badly wounded to walk, one having taken a fragment of a bolt round in the chest, the other having lost a hand to an ork chopper before the brute had finally been brought down. Field stretchers had been rigged out of lengths of piping and fertilizer stacks. Not one of them was free of wounds. Actually crossing the causeway posed some problems, the ork’s breaching tactic having blown six feet of the gravel rise away and allowing the pond water to rush in. It took only a minute to throw several beams across and make a precarious bridge.

 

“Zeb!” Katia called, realizing after she said it that it bordered on improper to call a trooper by his first name in public. The new minted sergeant was waving a greeting even as he spoke into the vox. Positioning his vehicles in a loose line to screen the direction from which the orks had come.

 

“Commissar,” he responded, clearly relieved to see her alive, though the expression lingered on his face only a hearbeat.

“Are their more survivors inside?” he asked, peering back towards the smoking entrance of the pump station. Katia made the sign of the Aquilla and then twisted her hands to make the cogwheel of the Mechanicus as she shook her head.

“But there was a whole platoon…” Zeb began cutting himself off. Katia turned to order the survivors medical attention but they were already being loaded onto the vehicles, a field medicae already hanging a bag of IV fluid above one of the worst hit.

 

“Most of them went in the crash, the rest the ork’s did for,” she admitted, pulling herself up and into the passenger seat beside the corporal. Her whole body hurt from bruises and contusions she had taken during the fight and she felt like she might never be able to stand again.

“How did you come to get here so quickly?” she asked, knowing there was no way this fast attack group had arrived so soon after they had gotten through to command.

 

“Oh you know…” he began but cut off as one of the auspex operators shouted something.

“Frak!” Zeb cursed, looking down at his own unit.

“Incoming…” with shocking suddenness an aircraft burst over the ridge line trailing a vast plume of smoke. It nozed down and dived towards them. Katia had a momentary vision of something red with gold stripes as it streaked towards them. Shells flickered from its wings and ripped up a twin track of impacts in the ground, racing down over the pond where it lifted similar spouts of water. There was a sudden chunking sound and something heavy and black fell into the pond before an explosion ripped through the water lifting a hundred meter plume of water into the sky. The ork aircraft made a half roll and dived down out of line of site as imperial las fire, more hopeful than effective, followed it. No one had been hurt by the inaccurate attack. A haze of prometeum fumes and fisolene hung in the air like summer heat haze.

 

“Explains what got the dropship,” Katia said, “whomever prepared our tactical briefing somehow failed to mention ork air superiority.”