Strange Bedfellows

by BRBrony9

Keep The Home Fires Burning

Shells were bursting left and right along the south side of town, and men and ponies were dying. Another Imperial tank had erupted in flame after taking several hits and, although the enemy attack had been blunted with heavy losses, they were still pressing, moving on both flanks, trying to envelop the town in a pincer movement. The deafening racket made Muzzle Flash’s head pound. He was at a loss for words to describe what was happening.

Private Tornado was dead, had been dead long before the Royal Guard medic had arrived. The battle had been raging for less than thirty minutes, and already he was caked in dust and somepony else’s blood, half-deaf from the thunder of guns, and about to be encircled by an enemy possessed of technology vastly superior to his own. The only consolation was that his new allies possessed similar levels of technology.

This was warfare unlike anything he had ever known, and it frightened him. The speed, the noise, the ferocity. He had fought before, against gangs, outlaws and robbers, but never had he been in open warfare. Even if he had, against the Griffons or Dragons, he doubted it would have been anything quite like this.

His squad were still crouched behind the sandbag barricade. All except for Tornado, who had been taken away by the medics. Ahead of them, the humans in their trenches and tanks blazed away, explosions rippling across the meadow. Two dozen smoking wrecks marked the destruction of enemy vehicles. More were still sweeping across the field, heading for the town. Several more were firing from the cover of the trees lining the road. Still others were zooming across the plains to the east and west of the town to encircle it. Things did not seem to be going particularly well.

‘Fire!’ Lieutenant Marcell roared. The tank’s cannon clattered as it sent another round toward the enemy.

‘On the way!’ shouted the gunner, Andrix. Their Leman Russ tank lay just right of centre in the town’s southern defensive line. On either side of them, the two other tanks in their platoon fired back at the enemy. Their tanks and personnel carriers were still coming, pounding across the open meadow and snapping off the occasional shot. Young for a tank commander, at just twenty-two standard years, Marcell nevertheless commanded the respect of his older crew for his stoic professionalism.

‘Load armour piercing!’ Marcell ordered. The loader, Coltyn, slammed a shell into the breech and worked the action shut.

‘Up!’ he shouted. Marcell glanced through his viewing periscope.

‘Target one o’clock, enemy tank, traverse right,’ the Lieutenant called.

‘Tracking!’ Andrix replied, the turret rotating with a mechanical whirr. ‘On target!’

‘Fire!’

The cannon roared again. Through his spotting scope, Marcell saw the round impact against the frontal glacis plate of the enemy tank with a bright flash. As if on cue smoke immediately started to pour from the turret ring and the roof hatch, and the tank ground to a half.

‘Load armour piercing!’ he shouted again. ‘Target two o’clock, enemy personnel carrier, traverse right!’ Coltyn reloaded the cannon, Andrix swung the turret round, and Marcell gave the command.

The gun belched smoke again, and the enemy APC erupted in a glaring fireball.

Inside the tank the noise was deafening. Although they were not moving, the tank’s turbine engine had to be kept running to provide power to the onboard systems. The sound of the cannon firing was barely muffled by the protective headsets the crew wore to allow them to communicate. The heat was oppressive, too. Lieutenant Marcell wiped sweat from his brow as he peered through the viewing periscope, his only lifeline to the outside world. Though the battlefield was now wreathed in smoke and dust, with the press of a button he could switch his scope to thermal mode, allowing him to see warm objects, such as troops and vehicles, glowing white against the now-red backdrop.

‘Load armour piercing. Target ten o’clock, enemy tank in treeline, traverse left!’ he ordered, spotting a white blob trying to force its way through the trees at the side of the road. The turret swung round.

‘On target!’

‘Fire!’ The view through his periscope was momentarily blotted out by the muzzle flash from the tank’s battle cannon, turning the world white as if he were looking through a snowstorm as the superheated gases expanded and filled the periscope’s viewfinder. As it cleared, he could see the white blob in the trees now had a column of white pouring from the top, and he knew another enemy tank was burning.

‘Direct hit, target destroyed,’ he called. Abruptly another bright white flash filled the viewfinder, and Marcell heard a powerful detonation, audible even over the noise of the tank’s interior. Something started pattering off the turret roof.

‘Tiger three is down!’ someone called over the vox. Tiger three, the tank to their immediate right, had been knocked out. Through the viewfinder, Marcell could see waves of enemy infantry, now on foot, moving in bounds across the open field. some of the surviving tanks in the vanguard of the attack were deploying smoke to cover their advance, but it was of no obstacle to his thermal sight. It obviously lacked the anti infra-red particulates that the smoke launchers of the Imperial vehicles produced.

‘Load HE!’ he commanded. Coltyn swung round, pulling a round from the ammunition locker and ramming it home.

‘Up!’

‘Target two o’clock, enemy dismounts in the open, traverse right,’ he ordered, seeing a squad of soldiers moving at a sprint through the enveloping smoke. The turret motors whined as the gun adjusted onto the target.

‘On target!’

‘Fire!’ Again his vision was obscured. As it cleared, he saw that most of the man-sized white blobs that had been charging forward were now lying still on the ground. Another tank was moving up just to their right.

‘Direct hit!’ He called. ‘Load armo…’ his order was interrupted by a sudden, almighty clang. Stars danced across his eyes and he stumbled, falling against the side of the turret. Struggling back to his feet, he knew they had been hit.

‘Damage report!’ he called. The crew sounded off, unhurt- driver, gunner, loader and the two sponson gunners.

‘Doesn’t look like it penetrated,’ Andrix shouted. ‘Wait…ah, damn it! Turret traverse is jammed.’

‘Get it fixed!’ Marcell ordered, peering back through the viewfinder. The picture was blurry; something must have been damaged or knocked loose by the impact. It was still displaying its thermal picture, however, and he could still see blobs moving about. Some were getting worryingly close now, despite the weight of firepower the Imperial line had been throwing out.

The turret juddered and then began to rotate slowly.

‘We’re good to go, sir!’ Andrix called. Just in time, too, thought Marcell. An enemy tank was heading straight for them, its barrel rotating slowly. Marcell rattled off his orders with terse precision.

‘Load armour piercing! Gunner! Target enemy tank, twelve o’clock.’ He heard the shell being loaded.

‘Up!’

‘Fire!’ he shouted instantly. The tank bucked, rocking back on its bogies as the shell left the barrel.

‘On the way!’

The shell hit the enemy tank just before its own gun traversed far enough to fire. It kept rolling forward, but the turret continued to rotate, the mechanism damaged or the gunner killed. The driver must have been hit, too, because the tank continued on until it nosed down into a ditch and did not come up the other side.

Marcell noticed, with a pang of fright, that while most of the Imperial tanks had been focusing on their Chaos counterparts, the enemy infantry had been able to close the distance rapidly under cover of the smoke which had screened them from observation by the Guardsmen in the trenches, who lacked thermal scopes.

As if from nowhere, he counted twenty white blobs suddenly spring up from concealment behind the earthen mound at the edge of the meadow, less than a hundred yards from the Imperial lines, and start charging madly towards them. They were directly in front of his tank, heading straight for it. Most of them carried rifles. Others had satchel charges held aloft, ready to destroy his tank, and probably take themselves with it. He had to act fast.

‘Load canister!’ he called into the intercom. ‘Target twelve o’clock, enemy infantry.’ Coltyn rammed the shell into the breech.

‘Up!’

‘On target!’

‘Fire!’

Muzzle Flash felt useless. So far the enemy had not come close enough for his squad to engage, with either magic or their rifles. Or, perhaps they have and I just can’t see them. There was so much smoke drifting across the battlefield now that he could see very little of anything beyond the edge of the meadow. The humans in the trenches were still blazing away, but perhaps they could see more than he could. The tanks certainly seemed to be having no problems finding things to shoot at.

Without any warning a group of humans appeared through the smoke just to their right, charging, yelling and firing. They were running straight at one of the tanks, and, finally, they were within effective range.

‘There! Open fire!’ Muzzle Flash shouted to his ponies, gripping his rifle firmly and taking aim. Around him his squad did the same, resting their guns on the sandbags to steady them. Muzzle Flash lined up on one of the screaming maniacs. He was waving some kind of bag over his head.

His vision focused down until all he could see was the man, his dark-red clothing not dissimilar to that of their new allies, except for the colour. His face was contorted in a snarl of rage. Muzzle Flash took a deep breath, tensed his hoof over the trigger, lined up the sights with the man’s chest…which abruptly vanished, along with the rest of him, as the tank fired.

The canister round, a steel casing containing thousands of tungsten balls, erupted from the cannon like an enormous shotgun shell. With a sound like tearing canvas, the bursting charge fired and the balls dispersed just feet from the barrel, turning the open ground in front of the tank into a hailstorm of death. Muzzle Flash watched in equal parts fascination and revulsion as most of the charging humans simply ceased to exist as anything recognisable, ripped to bloody shreds by the anti-personnel round. A fine cloud of blood filled the air.

Some of the humans were merely wounded by the onslaught. A few tried to crawl away, others lay writhing in agony, clutching aimlessly for missing limbs and gasping for breath. The Imperial troops in the nearby trenches put them out of their misery.

‘Oh, sweet Celestia…’ Private Sharpshooter breathed. He dry heaved twice before explosively vomiting all over the sandbags again.

‘Rather them than us,’ the veteran platoon sergeant, Thunderchief, growled, though even he looked a little unsettled by the sheer violence of their deaths.

A shell distracted the squad from their reverie, bursting in the roof beams of a nearby house and showering their position with broken fragments of tile and plaster.

‘Keep down! Stay low,’ Muzzle Flash urged. After the death of Private Tornado, they did not need telling twice. Bursts of automatic fire, both bullets and what seemed to be red magical blasts, were now playing up and down the street, shattering cobbles and raising tiny puffs of dust. Above and behind them, the EAS Celestia poured its own fire down into the melee, shells from its bombardment cannon whistling overhead and plunging into the smoke. The Stalliongrad was performing the same task on the west side of the town.

Another thunderous clang filled Muzzle Flash’s ears. He whipped his head round in time to see a large puff of dirt rising from the berm in front of the nearest tank, the one that had massacred the charging enemy. Whatever had hit it must have punched its way clean through, because the machine was jolted backwards a foot or two by the impact. He noticed dust rising from the roof, and from the side. No, not dust…smoke.

Marcell’s eyes flickered open. It took him a couple of seconds to remember where he was, and when he did he started violently. He could hear a dry crackling that could only be a fire somewhere in the fighting compartment. His eyes were blurry; well, his left eye was. He couldn’t see anything out of his right. Smoke filled the compartment and he coughed. His throat felt dry and raw. The acrid fumes from burning propellant and metal filled his nostrils. He had to get out, and he had to get out fast.

He was lying on his back in the corner of the compartment. The shell must have come right through the compartment and into the engine block, he reasoned. He forced himself to sit up. He ached all over; he felt like he was drunk, a situation he had only experienced a few times since he became old enough to buy booze himself. He had no idea how long he had been out, but he reasoned it must only have been a few seconds or he would have been burned alive already.

To underline his thinking, flames licked around the front of the compartment. The driver’s corpse, or at least its lower half, was being slowly consumed by the flames that engulfed the front of the compartment. The round from the tank must have passed right through him. Marcell looked around and couldn’t see anything of his other crewmen, except a few bloody smears and a dark shape to the right of the gun mount that could have been a corpse or a stack of shells; his mind was too confused and he couldn’t remember if any rounds had been there. Then again he couldn’t remember much at all. Deep down he knew he was being slowly poisoned by the fumes and lack of oxygen as the fires burned furiously all around him.

He thought of his mother. Part of him wanted to just lie down and let everything fade away, but with a supreme effort he hauled himself up, grabbing on to the shattered remains of the gun breach as a support. He became slowly aware of a throbbing pain in his left thigh. He felt unsteady on his feet. I really must be drunk, he thought. He couldn’t feel his left leg at all, in fact, at least not below where the pain was. He looked down.

No wonder I can’t feel anything. There was nothing left of his leg below the knee anyway. A part of him was surprised at how detached from everything he felt. He didn’t care that he was missing a limb. He didn’t care he was stuck in a burning tank. He couldn’t get his mind to focus on anything, and yet his body was carrying out automatically the emergency bailout drill. Fire lapped at the edge of his vision. The smoke was thick, cloying. He could have cut it with his combat knife but his body was wracked with coughs and he couldn’t find it…ah, he’d had it strapped to his left calf. Which he was leaving behind. His mind whirled. How much did I drink? He slapped the hatch release and it dropped free onto the ground outside. The smoke billowed out, obscuring his vision even more. Where am I?

He pulled himself up to the edge of the turret escape hatch. Fire and smoke reached out for him as he crawled out and dropped to the earth six feet below. It jarred his shoulder and hurt his back, but he didn’t care. His brain seemed to have no control over his actions. He automatically began to drag himself away from the burning wreck. He had no idea where he was going. Marcell pulled himself round a low brick wall as the flames reached the ammunition. In a series of deafening blasts his tank ripped itself apart from the inside, hurling flaming shrapnel and bits of armour across the Imperial line. Marcell felt the heat wave wash over him, felt his skin blistering, but he was protected from the blast by the wall. When the explosions had died down he just lay there, head down and resting on his arm.

That was how Muzzle Flash found him. Seeing the man crawling away from the ruined tank, into the house that lay behind it, his body had acted before his mind had even had time to process it.

Shouting to Thunderchief to keep the squad where they were, he dropped his rifle, leapt over the sandbags and galloping for the rear door of the building. The tank exploded, filling his eyes with a searing orange light and bathing him with heat, but he kept going. His mind screamed at him to turn around, but his heart knew he was doing the right thing. Leave no pony- or man- behind. He had already lost a pony under his command, and he didn’t want to add any other friendly casualties to the list, pony or otherwise.

He dipped his head, using his magic to open the door as he galloped inside. The house was a mess, having been hit by several high-explosive rounds. The entire front wall had fallen away, which was how the human had managed to crawl inside. Smoke from the burning tank drifted in through the gaping hole.

The human lay face down. Muzzle Flash felt sure it was a wasted trip and he was already dead, but as he approached the man groaned and stirred. Muzzle Flash could see that he was grievously wounded. His left leg was missing below the knee. His face and arms, all his exposed flesh, had been deeply burnt, a horrifying sight that made the pony’s bile rise. One of his eyes was missing and the other was a mass of singed tissue. Muzzle Flash rolled him, as gently as he could, onto his back, put his hooves under the man’s forelimbs, and tugged.

Almost immediately he felt his hooves slipping as something simply fell apart under his touch- he couldn’t tell if it was the man’s uniform or his flesh. He let go, instead using his magic to levitate the man and carry him, like a sack of potatoes, in the air in front of him.

He made his way back outside. His squad were still crouched behind the sandbags. Several of them stared open-mouthed at him.

‘Don’t just stand there!’ he roared. ‘Get a medic!’ One of his ponies, Firestorm, began to dash for the rear.

‘No! A human medic!’ he shouted, gesturing with a hoof towards a nearby shop where he knew the humans had set up an aid post. The guardspony turned mid-step and headed for the building. He moved as quickly as he dared, the human’s head lolling about like a ragdoll. He crossed the street during a lull in the incoming fire, and met Firestorm coming out of the alley from the rear of the shop, a human in tow.

The medic raised an eyebrow at seeing the magical field enveloping the tanker, took one look at him, and said;

‘Forget it, he’s gone.’ Muzzle Flash shook his head.

‘No, he’s still alive! He was moving.’ The medic raised his eyebrow again.

‘Well even if he is, there’s nothing I can do for him here. I just don’t have the tools. He’d need a burn ward, and we don’t have one. This is just a triage post.’ Muzzle Flash hesitated.

‘I don’t have the time or the manpower to treat every casualty!’ the man said. ‘We have to focus on the ones who have a chance. Put him down here, we’ll move him inside and give him a shot of morphine, but that’s all we can do.’ Muzzle Flash wanted to argue, but he knew that the medic was right. Despite his reckless charge to save the wounded man, there was nothing that could be done for him on the battlefield.

‘Maybe if we got him to our hospital…’ he said, plaintively. The medic shook his head.

‘Wouldn’t do any good. You don’t know the first thing about our physiology. You’d probably kill him faster than his wounds will.’ He knew he was right. He gently put the man on the ground in the alleyway. The medic turned to run back inside to fetch a stretcher party, but stopped and looked back at Muzzle Flash.

‘Thank you, pony. For trying to save one of our own.’ Muzzle Flash nodded at him.

‘I hope your people will do the same for us.’

Comments

[Bronzer]

Yay WH40K combat. Gory and awesome.