if nobody tries too hard to kill you i got your back
Warhammer 40k original characters: Fireteam Errant Valour, a unit of the Imperial Guard roughly equivalent to a squad of Army Rangers.
Warnings: character death
Flarelight fell in intermittent stripes through shattered holes in the great stone wall; fragments of stained glass still clung in places to what was left of windowframes, pouring patches of color onto the scene below. The building had once been a transit terminal; now it was a charnel-house.
"Damn good fuckin' thing we wore the respos," Sander said, the voxcaster built into his mask picking up his voice automatically. He took a careful step, trying to avoid both the rubble which would slip and scatter beneath his soles and the corpses which would just be disgusting. "Bet it fuckin' reeks in here."
The next man over was barely in his peripheral vision, making his own way through the mess. His response was inaudible outside, thanks to the muffling unit that accompanied the vox; Sander heard him only in his left ear, where the relay was plugged. "Can't smell worse than your mom does, so I bet you'd feel right at home."
"Choke on shit and die, dickhead." The pair exchanged rude gestures, ghostly white outlines of gloved hands in the dark. The rest of the five-man fireteam snorted into their voxes, tossing insults of their own toward either or both parties.
Or, well, most of them did. There was one voice conspicuous in its absence. "Duiker, did you get your ass lost again?" Sander scanned the room, searching for the fifth skeletal uniform amongst the shadows. The others followed suit, all in silence.
"Fuck," one man said finally. "Duiker, you tit-faced reject, where the hell are you?"
"Bet he found half a fat chick 'n' dragged her to the bathrooms."
"Dipshit. Wouldn't surprise me." Sander stopped and held his hand up, waving the others to a halt as well. "Haas, you're his marchin' buddy, when's the last time you saw him?"
"He was there when we cleared the street," said Haas. "We musta lost him when we had to climb that wall. I'll double back for him."
"We're on a fuckin' schedule here," complained the man nearest Sander - Jens, carrier of the handheld vox unit that was their contact with HQ. "We can't just wait around all fuckin' night for one dumbass who can't climb a wall. Brekt, you and Sander wanna keep going? I'll cover Haas 'n' help babysit."
Brekt and Sander agreed, then argued aloud and with sign language for a moment to determine who was going to cross the room to whose side. The other pair flipped them off and left, their complaints about Duiker's behavior (and parentage, and personal appearance and hygiene) fading as the two groups became separated past the limits of their short-range voxcasters.
"Y'know," said Sander, "this musta been one hell of a shitty place to be when the shit went down." The further into the building they got, the clearer the situation became. The damage to the structure was mostly on the front wall, from external shelling; the dead who littered the floor lay in patterns, waves that streamed forth toward the entrance from the transit tunnels on the far side. In places the waves were disturbed by - something; in others they were clearly discernable, and generally ended in decaying heaps piled against the exit doors. The fireteam had been unable to push the doors open against the stacked corpses, thus the need to climb the wall that had apparently eaten Duiker.
"I bet 90% of those poor bastards just straight-up got trampled to death," said Brekt. "You there when that happened with that factory fire back home?"
"Nah, I'm trash, remember? Heard about it, though - ah, Golden Scrote!" The surface Sander had taken for toppled rock had proven to be a very dusty corpse; his boot broke through the ribcage with a crunch and a squelch, and he shook his leg angrily until the remainder of the torso fell away from his ankle. "Fuck! I fuckin' got dead guy up under my fuckin' gaiter!"
Brekt was bent over, hands on his knees, shaking with laughter that the voxcaster refused to send after the first burst - it was programmed to ignore loud noises, to keep from transmitting screams. "You prissy son of a bitch," he said finally. "You gonna have to take a break to wash up before we keep goin'?"
"Shut the fuck up before I pick that guy up 'n' start stuffin' bits down your collar." Sander shook his leg a few more times.
Something, somewhere, rattled.
Instantly both men were on high alert, back to back, feet planted as firmly as the cluttered ground would allow, laspistols in their hands.
Silence reigned.
Eventually Sander spoke. "What the fuck was th- "
The walls surrounding the tunnel entrance exploded.
Brekt and Sander dove for cover, ending up knee-deep in corpses behind a ticket booth.
A thing broke out of the tunnels. A great, unspeakable thing, the size of a truck, covered with spines and splotches and unthinkable anatomy. It shook its huge blunt head, emitting a noise that cut through the Guardsmen's ears like a rusty sawblade, snuffling its snout as it sought its prey.
"Okay, yeah, that's some bullshit," said Sander. "That is so the kinda thing you ain't supposed to look at 'cause it makes you crazy."
"You got a mirror on you, nancy?"
"Nope. Fuck you."
"We are so fuckin' dead," said Brekt. The men's eyes met - two pairs of shadowed holes in white-pale faces, the darkness of the night completing the illusion created by their skull-painted masks. "I'd say it's been nice knowin' you, but I don't want the last words out of my mouth to be a lie."
"The last words out of your mouth are gonna be cryin' for your mommy," Sander said scornfully. "You go ahead 'n' die if you wanna. I was plannin' on killin' that thing and goin' home for a fuckin' bath, myself. I ain't gonna die with dead-guy juice all over me."
The thing's blind face - eyeless but bizarrely humanoid - turned toward them, and it fell silent for a split second before roaring and veering its mass in their direction.
"Shit shit shit split up!" Brekt was already on it, clattering through the rubble in the opposite direction, making the pair into separate targets to divide the thing's attention.
From the amount of noise Brekt was making, Sander figured his teammate wasn't getting much traction; he himself had a clear lane ahead of him, one of the swathes carved out of the mass of bodies, and he took it at a run, the sword at his side thumping against his leg, his soft-soled boots barely thudding against the inlaid stone floor. He spun on his heel and used his momentum to plant his feet firmly.
The thing wasn't hard to track even in the low light; it swept its way across the room toward Brekt, tossing corpses and wreckage aside to leave another cleared path in its wake. "Get your six," Sander said into the vox, and took careful aim with his pistol.
The shot was clear and easy and true, and the beam struck the thing in the joint of one rearmost leg. It paused and screeched, but kept going.
"Oh for fuck's sake." Sander fired again. "Two guys with fuckin' flashlights against this piece of shit."
"Was supposed to be five," Brekt noted breathlessly.
"Fuckin' Duiker."
The gun wasn't accomplishing much and the thing was still gaining on Brekt. Sander tried one more shot, then took a deep breath and pulled his mask down. "HEY, FUCKFACE, I'M SHOOTIN' YER ASS!" He shoved the respirator back on and yanked the tightening strap immediately, though not before enough of the outside air got in to confirm that it did, indeed, fucking reek in there.
Being noisy seemed to have worked. The beast halted and lumbered around in a circle, head-first, sinuous as a snake despite its bulk and legs. Sander had a moment to deeply regret his life choices before it lunged toward him.
He fired wildly into its approaching face, trying to back up at the same time. The distance had felt sufficient until the thing started moving to lessen it. Closer up the tusks and horns which stabbed outward from its face looked longer and sharper, and the face itself both more and less human, and Sander realized with a jerk that he'd stopped firing. Brekt was swearing into his ear, and he swore himself as he tore himself away from the sight of the beast, firing one last time without aiming before turning to try to run.
Before he could gain any ground the thing was within reach of him, swinging its awful head and letting forth the rusty bellow. Sander threw himself down and felt the air move just above his head as a tusk swept over him by inches at best. He rolled into a crouch, his pistol steadied in both hands - a point-blank shot was his best hope at this point - and the creature swung its head back, face low to the ground, the dull side of one of the massive horns catching him in the flank with unexpected force.
He was flung skidding across the floor, his gun knocked free of his grip and skittering away; he finally smashed hard into what was left of a mid-class check-in kiosk. A piece of someone's luggage fell over and hit him in the chest as punctuation. For a moment he was stunned, struggling to breathe and literally seeing stars; then the stars resolved themselves into bursts of lasgun fire - Brekt's pistol, drawing the thing's attention back to himself.
"Get the fuck over here, dickhead," Brekt was shouting aloud. He pulled his respirator back on and hissed into the vox: "Sander, you asshole, you better not be dead yet, I ain't distracting shit for a dead guy - "
"You should be so lucky," Sander told him between gasps, pushing himself to his feet. "Lost my fuckin' gun, though. Gonna have to go in close. Try 'n' don't shoot me, okay? Just keep aimin' for the big thing."
"You're as bad as Duiker, you gun-losing fuck-up," Brekt said sharply. "I see you clear, get on it."
It was a game of cat-and-two-mice, the creature tracking Brekt, then turning to roar toward Sander after the bite of his sabre, then called off again by Brekt shouting to buy his teammate time to maneuver. Its hide was tough and smooth; the well-sharpened blade merely glanced off it until Sander switched tactics to point-first stabbing, and even then it seemed to treat him as merely an annoyance on par with a mosquito. They kited it between them, back and forth across the ruined lobby, without seeming to wear it out at all.
The same could not be said for them.
"We need," said Brekt, while it was his turn to run, "to fuckin' kill this thing. I'm gonna have a heart attack."
"Thanks for the insight, kloteklapper, I thought we were keepin' it as a pet."
"I got an idea, keep leadin' it - I'm gonna overcharge my gun - let it get up close at me when I say, got it?"
"'n' while you're playin' sittin' duck I do what? How much lead do I got right now?" Sander didn't dare turn to look; he was making wide zigzags across the floor, unable to turn too tightly lest the thing cut a tangent across his path. At least the repeated turnings had led it to clear most of the floor; it flung the corpses out of its way as it chased the two men, which gave it more room to turn but also left them with less restricted paths to take on their evasive runs.
"You're fine," Brekt assured him. "I'll yell for it in a second. Stay off it 'til I say go, then run up on it 'n' try and shove your sword through the middle of it. Just stay the fuck out of line with its head, okay?"
"Roger that - kinda been my plan this whole time, have you SEEN its fuckin' head?"
"Shut up." Brekt dropped his mask again and shouted. Once more the beast swung around toward the noise and roared across the floor.
Sander turned on his heel and ran after it, staying clear to one side as in V formation. He could see Brekt on the far side of the room, down on one knee, both hands steadying his pistol. The charge indicator was flashing out a warning, and the man's eyes were so wide Sander could see the whites against his black facepaint even at this distance. Brekt's lips were moving, silent without the voxcaster in his still-unfastened respo, and although his earpiece would still be in, Sander kept silence as well. No distractions.
The thing was getting closer to him, and Sander was right behind it, and it was almost in range of Brekt, and when was he going to shoot it, for the Emperor's sake -
- and then he heard Brekt shouting, "GO!", clear and loud at close range without the vox, and he leapt forward, kicked off the thing's back leg, put all of his weight behind his sword -
- and then the world exploded, bright blue-white, the burning hellbolt of a lasgun pushed just this side of becoming a flash grenade pulsing out of Brekt's pistol and through the center of the thing's skull, and it jerked mightily with all its great bulky strength, flinging Sander off behind it.
Once more he skidded across the floor, and sat dazed in the sudden silence, sword still in hand.
"Holy shit, Brekt, we killed it." Sander pushed himself upright, sitting amongst the corpses. "Brekt?"
It took him a moment to get to his feet. He stumbled through the quiet, past the steaming body of the behemoth toward his teammate. The creature had a round, charred black hole through the center of what had once been its face, but the sword-like horns remained, and its last throes had raked the sharp ends across the man's body. The silvery stripes on the chest of Brekt's uniform were soaked near-black with his own blood.
"Yeah, you're pretty fuckin' killed too, ain't you." Sander carefully nudged the least-bloody bit of the body with one toe. "You poor, dead bastard."
He reached down and pulled Brekt's laspistol from his hand. The charge pack was ruined, of course, but he cleared it and slid the gun into his own holster anyway - the lenses would still be fine, and replacing the charge pack would be easier than finding the one he'd lost in all that mess. Then he kneeled, hefted the other man's body over his shoulder, braced his legs and rose to head out.
He was nearly to the wall they'd come over to get in before he started picking up vox chatter - Haas and Jens repeating his and Brekt's names, asking for updates. "Did you find Duiker?" he asked.
"Hey, shit, they're back! Yeah, we found him," said Haas. "Dumbshit fell off the wall 'n' got himself a concussion. He'll be okay, though."
"What the fuck were you guys doing in there?" Jens demanded. "All we could do was hold the perimeter 'n' try to raise you on vox."
"Oh, y'know, war stuff," Sander replied drily. "Look out, dead guy incoming." He heaved Brekt's body up over the wall and laboriously climbed after it. "We neutralized the threat, though, so you're welcome." His legs dangled over the edge of the wall for a moment; when he let go and dropped down his knee gave out under him, sending him sprawling, and he swore sharply enough to be cut off by the vox.
"Didn't clear the tunnels," Jens pointed out. "No way you were gone long enough." Haas left the little pile of Brekt and crossed to Sander's side, checking him for wounds.
Sander waved him away. "The fuckin' tunnels cleared themselves, Sparky. If there was any more of them things they woulda come up for the ruckus. Let 'em send the regulars in with meltas if they're that fuckin' worried about it."
"Who got the kill?" asked Jens.
Sander shrugged. "I wasn't payin' attention." He thought for a moment, then shrugged again. "Give it to Brekt. I'll get the next one."
Warnings: character death
Flarelight fell in intermittent stripes through shattered holes in the great stone wall; fragments of stained glass still clung in places to what was left of windowframes, pouring patches of color onto the scene below. The building had once been a transit terminal; now it was a charnel-house.
"Damn good fuckin' thing we wore the respos," Sander said, the voxcaster built into his mask picking up his voice automatically. He took a careful step, trying to avoid both the rubble which would slip and scatter beneath his soles and the corpses which would just be disgusting. "Bet it fuckin' reeks in here."
The next man over was barely in his peripheral vision, making his own way through the mess. His response was inaudible outside, thanks to the muffling unit that accompanied the vox; Sander heard him only in his left ear, where the relay was plugged. "Can't smell worse than your mom does, so I bet you'd feel right at home."
"Choke on shit and die, dickhead." The pair exchanged rude gestures, ghostly white outlines of gloved hands in the dark. The rest of the five-man fireteam snorted into their voxes, tossing insults of their own toward either or both parties.
Or, well, most of them did. There was one voice conspicuous in its absence. "Duiker, did you get your ass lost again?" Sander scanned the room, searching for the fifth skeletal uniform amongst the shadows. The others followed suit, all in silence.
"Fuck," one man said finally. "Duiker, you tit-faced reject, where the hell are you?"
"Bet he found half a fat chick 'n' dragged her to the bathrooms."
"Dipshit. Wouldn't surprise me." Sander stopped and held his hand up, waving the others to a halt as well. "Haas, you're his marchin' buddy, when's the last time you saw him?"
"He was there when we cleared the street," said Haas. "We musta lost him when we had to climb that wall. I'll double back for him."
"We're on a fuckin' schedule here," complained the man nearest Sander - Jens, carrier of the handheld vox unit that was their contact with HQ. "We can't just wait around all fuckin' night for one dumbass who can't climb a wall. Brekt, you and Sander wanna keep going? I'll cover Haas 'n' help babysit."
Brekt and Sander agreed, then argued aloud and with sign language for a moment to determine who was going to cross the room to whose side. The other pair flipped them off and left, their complaints about Duiker's behavior (and parentage, and personal appearance and hygiene) fading as the two groups became separated past the limits of their short-range voxcasters.
"Y'know," said Sander, "this musta been one hell of a shitty place to be when the shit went down." The further into the building they got, the clearer the situation became. The damage to the structure was mostly on the front wall, from external shelling; the dead who littered the floor lay in patterns, waves that streamed forth toward the entrance from the transit tunnels on the far side. In places the waves were disturbed by - something; in others they were clearly discernable, and generally ended in decaying heaps piled against the exit doors. The fireteam had been unable to push the doors open against the stacked corpses, thus the need to climb the wall that had apparently eaten Duiker.
"I bet 90% of those poor bastards just straight-up got trampled to death," said Brekt. "You there when that happened with that factory fire back home?"
"Nah, I'm trash, remember? Heard about it, though - ah, Golden Scrote!" The surface Sander had taken for toppled rock had proven to be a very dusty corpse; his boot broke through the ribcage with a crunch and a squelch, and he shook his leg angrily until the remainder of the torso fell away from his ankle. "Fuck! I fuckin' got dead guy up under my fuckin' gaiter!"
Brekt was bent over, hands on his knees, shaking with laughter that the voxcaster refused to send after the first burst - it was programmed to ignore loud noises, to keep from transmitting screams. "You prissy son of a bitch," he said finally. "You gonna have to take a break to wash up before we keep goin'?"
"Shut the fuck up before I pick that guy up 'n' start stuffin' bits down your collar." Sander shook his leg a few more times.
Something, somewhere, rattled.
Instantly both men were on high alert, back to back, feet planted as firmly as the cluttered ground would allow, laspistols in their hands.
Silence reigned.
Eventually Sander spoke. "What the fuck was th- "
The walls surrounding the tunnel entrance exploded.
Brekt and Sander dove for cover, ending up knee-deep in corpses behind a ticket booth.
A thing broke out of the tunnels. A great, unspeakable thing, the size of a truck, covered with spines and splotches and unthinkable anatomy. It shook its huge blunt head, emitting a noise that cut through the Guardsmen's ears like a rusty sawblade, snuffling its snout as it sought its prey.
"Okay, yeah, that's some bullshit," said Sander. "That is so the kinda thing you ain't supposed to look at 'cause it makes you crazy."
"You got a mirror on you, nancy?"
"Nope. Fuck you."
"We are so fuckin' dead," said Brekt. The men's eyes met - two pairs of shadowed holes in white-pale faces, the darkness of the night completing the illusion created by their skull-painted masks. "I'd say it's been nice knowin' you, but I don't want the last words out of my mouth to be a lie."
"The last words out of your mouth are gonna be cryin' for your mommy," Sander said scornfully. "You go ahead 'n' die if you wanna. I was plannin' on killin' that thing and goin' home for a fuckin' bath, myself. I ain't gonna die with dead-guy juice all over me."
The thing's blind face - eyeless but bizarrely humanoid - turned toward them, and it fell silent for a split second before roaring and veering its mass in their direction.
"Shit shit shit split up!" Brekt was already on it, clattering through the rubble in the opposite direction, making the pair into separate targets to divide the thing's attention.
From the amount of noise Brekt was making, Sander figured his teammate wasn't getting much traction; he himself had a clear lane ahead of him, one of the swathes carved out of the mass of bodies, and he took it at a run, the sword at his side thumping against his leg, his soft-soled boots barely thudding against the inlaid stone floor. He spun on his heel and used his momentum to plant his feet firmly.
The thing wasn't hard to track even in the low light; it swept its way across the room toward Brekt, tossing corpses and wreckage aside to leave another cleared path in its wake. "Get your six," Sander said into the vox, and took careful aim with his pistol.
The shot was clear and easy and true, and the beam struck the thing in the joint of one rearmost leg. It paused and screeched, but kept going.
"Oh for fuck's sake." Sander fired again. "Two guys with fuckin' flashlights against this piece of shit."
"Was supposed to be five," Brekt noted breathlessly.
"Fuckin' Duiker."
The gun wasn't accomplishing much and the thing was still gaining on Brekt. Sander tried one more shot, then took a deep breath and pulled his mask down. "HEY, FUCKFACE, I'M SHOOTIN' YER ASS!" He shoved the respirator back on and yanked the tightening strap immediately, though not before enough of the outside air got in to confirm that it did, indeed, fucking reek in there.
Being noisy seemed to have worked. The beast halted and lumbered around in a circle, head-first, sinuous as a snake despite its bulk and legs. Sander had a moment to deeply regret his life choices before it lunged toward him.
He fired wildly into its approaching face, trying to back up at the same time. The distance had felt sufficient until the thing started moving to lessen it. Closer up the tusks and horns which stabbed outward from its face looked longer and sharper, and the face itself both more and less human, and Sander realized with a jerk that he'd stopped firing. Brekt was swearing into his ear, and he swore himself as he tore himself away from the sight of the beast, firing one last time without aiming before turning to try to run.
Before he could gain any ground the thing was within reach of him, swinging its awful head and letting forth the rusty bellow. Sander threw himself down and felt the air move just above his head as a tusk swept over him by inches at best. He rolled into a crouch, his pistol steadied in both hands - a point-blank shot was his best hope at this point - and the creature swung its head back, face low to the ground, the dull side of one of the massive horns catching him in the flank with unexpected force.
He was flung skidding across the floor, his gun knocked free of his grip and skittering away; he finally smashed hard into what was left of a mid-class check-in kiosk. A piece of someone's luggage fell over and hit him in the chest as punctuation. For a moment he was stunned, struggling to breathe and literally seeing stars; then the stars resolved themselves into bursts of lasgun fire - Brekt's pistol, drawing the thing's attention back to himself.
"Get the fuck over here, dickhead," Brekt was shouting aloud. He pulled his respirator back on and hissed into the vox: "Sander, you asshole, you better not be dead yet, I ain't distracting shit for a dead guy - "
"You should be so lucky," Sander told him between gasps, pushing himself to his feet. "Lost my fuckin' gun, though. Gonna have to go in close. Try 'n' don't shoot me, okay? Just keep aimin' for the big thing."
"You're as bad as Duiker, you gun-losing fuck-up," Brekt said sharply. "I see you clear, get on it."
It was a game of cat-and-two-mice, the creature tracking Brekt, then turning to roar toward Sander after the bite of his sabre, then called off again by Brekt shouting to buy his teammate time to maneuver. Its hide was tough and smooth; the well-sharpened blade merely glanced off it until Sander switched tactics to point-first stabbing, and even then it seemed to treat him as merely an annoyance on par with a mosquito. They kited it between them, back and forth across the ruined lobby, without seeming to wear it out at all.
The same could not be said for them.
"We need," said Brekt, while it was his turn to run, "to fuckin' kill this thing. I'm gonna have a heart attack."
"Thanks for the insight, kloteklapper, I thought we were keepin' it as a pet."
"I got an idea, keep leadin' it - I'm gonna overcharge my gun - let it get up close at me when I say, got it?"
"'n' while you're playin' sittin' duck I do what? How much lead do I got right now?" Sander didn't dare turn to look; he was making wide zigzags across the floor, unable to turn too tightly lest the thing cut a tangent across his path. At least the repeated turnings had led it to clear most of the floor; it flung the corpses out of its way as it chased the two men, which gave it more room to turn but also left them with less restricted paths to take on their evasive runs.
"You're fine," Brekt assured him. "I'll yell for it in a second. Stay off it 'til I say go, then run up on it 'n' try and shove your sword through the middle of it. Just stay the fuck out of line with its head, okay?"
"Roger that - kinda been my plan this whole time, have you SEEN its fuckin' head?"
"Shut up." Brekt dropped his mask again and shouted. Once more the beast swung around toward the noise and roared across the floor.
Sander turned on his heel and ran after it, staying clear to one side as in V formation. He could see Brekt on the far side of the room, down on one knee, both hands steadying his pistol. The charge indicator was flashing out a warning, and the man's eyes were so wide Sander could see the whites against his black facepaint even at this distance. Brekt's lips were moving, silent without the voxcaster in his still-unfastened respo, and although his earpiece would still be in, Sander kept silence as well. No distractions.
The thing was getting closer to him, and Sander was right behind it, and it was almost in range of Brekt, and when was he going to shoot it, for the Emperor's sake -
- and then he heard Brekt shouting, "GO!", clear and loud at close range without the vox, and he leapt forward, kicked off the thing's back leg, put all of his weight behind his sword -
- and then the world exploded, bright blue-white, the burning hellbolt of a lasgun pushed just this side of becoming a flash grenade pulsing out of Brekt's pistol and through the center of the thing's skull, and it jerked mightily with all its great bulky strength, flinging Sander off behind it.
Once more he skidded across the floor, and sat dazed in the sudden silence, sword still in hand.
"Holy shit, Brekt, we killed it." Sander pushed himself upright, sitting amongst the corpses. "Brekt?"
It took him a moment to get to his feet. He stumbled through the quiet, past the steaming body of the behemoth toward his teammate. The creature had a round, charred black hole through the center of what had once been its face, but the sword-like horns remained, and its last throes had raked the sharp ends across the man's body. The silvery stripes on the chest of Brekt's uniform were soaked near-black with his own blood.
"Yeah, you're pretty fuckin' killed too, ain't you." Sander carefully nudged the least-bloody bit of the body with one toe. "You poor, dead bastard."
He reached down and pulled Brekt's laspistol from his hand. The charge pack was ruined, of course, but he cleared it and slid the gun into his own holster anyway - the lenses would still be fine, and replacing the charge pack would be easier than finding the one he'd lost in all that mess. Then he kneeled, hefted the other man's body over his shoulder, braced his legs and rose to head out.
He was nearly to the wall they'd come over to get in before he started picking up vox chatter - Haas and Jens repeating his and Brekt's names, asking for updates. "Did you find Duiker?" he asked.
"Hey, shit, they're back! Yeah, we found him," said Haas. "Dumbshit fell off the wall 'n' got himself a concussion. He'll be okay, though."
"What the fuck were you guys doing in there?" Jens demanded. "All we could do was hold the perimeter 'n' try to raise you on vox."
"Oh, y'know, war stuff," Sander replied drily. "Look out, dead guy incoming." He heaved Brekt's body up over the wall and laboriously climbed after it. "We neutralized the threat, though, so you're welcome." His legs dangled over the edge of the wall for a moment; when he let go and dropped down his knee gave out under him, sending him sprawling, and he swore sharply enough to be cut off by the vox.
"Didn't clear the tunnels," Jens pointed out. "No way you were gone long enough." Haas left the little pile of Brekt and crossed to Sander's side, checking him for wounds.
Sander waved him away. "The fuckin' tunnels cleared themselves, Sparky. If there was any more of them things they woulda come up for the ruckus. Let 'em send the regulars in with meltas if they're that fuckin' worried about it."
"Who got the kill?" asked Jens.
Sander shrugged. "I wasn't payin' attention." He thought for a moment, then shrugged again. "Give it to Brekt. I'll get the next one."