Wanna-be-a-pilot, though, and Lickspittle, they had gone the way of Webfoot and the others. Hanged from the trees in the dead of night, disembowelled and their hands bound in the pious sign of the aquila. Lickspittle had been cut for steaks too, where Wanna-be-a-pilot had been left alone. There was no meat on her skinny body anyway, Cully thought, and he had to rest his forehead against a tree until the nausea receded.
It’s a drukhari, he told himself. The sergeant said so. It’s a filthy bloody drukhari.
It wasn’t a drukhari, and he knew it and Rachain knew it and he was starting to suspect that Steeleye did as well. He wondered whether Gesht did, too.
No, no, no. Oh Holy God-Emperor of Terra, don’t do this to her.
Please.
Please don’t.
On the twelfth day of their recon patrol they found an ork encampment. Steeleye had the point, and she voxed her position back on the command channel. She was the only non-command trooper to warrant a personal vox-bead, but she was a near-legendary sniper so Rachain hadn’t had any trouble getting it for her. Even the chair-polishers at the Munitorum had heard of Steeleye, and to be honest no one wanted to piss her off. If she wanted a vox-bead, she got one.
‘Understood,’ Rachain said, and voxed through to Cully. ‘One Section, move up to support.’
Cully tapped his vox-bead in acknowledgement and waved his squad forward.
They crept through the perpetual gloom of the green, lasguns at their shoulders as they closed on Steeleye’s position through the constant pissing rain. Rachain himself was bringing Two and Three Sections up on the far flank, Cully knew, the sergeant not entirely trusting Gesht or Dannecker to hold the command all by themselves.
I’m top canid, Cully told himself as he swiped a fang-leach off his shoulder before it could get a hold through his sweat-soaked combat uniform. He trusts me.
Did he, though? Did he really? According to Rachain they were still hunting a renegade drukhari, but Cully knew that was just so much groxshit. He knew exactly what it was. Every night in his tent, twisting in his own rancid sweat in fever dreams of horror, Cully saw the face of their murderous foe.
That was the nights, though, when the humidity was trying to drown him alive in his tent. This was now. A Guardsman has to live in the now, or he’ll sure as hell die in it. There was no time for distractions.
The ork settlement was rough and crude, as everything the orks built was.
Cully and One Section bellied down in the swampy filth between the trees, their lasguns held tight to their shoulders and the rain beating down on them, and waited for the signal. He had absolutely no idea where Steeleye was. She was like a ghost, in the green. Silent, invisible. Like all the veterans were.
Shut up, Cully, he told himself. Don’t think about that. Just don’t.
He sighted along his rifle, picking targets, for all that they had been ordered was to wait until the master sniper gave her word that it was time. There were orks out there – cleaning weapons, mending the crude thatch of their huts, cooking meat over open fires that sizzled and smoked in the rain.
Cooking meat.
Could I be wrong? Cully wondered.
So much simpler, this way. Forget about drukhari, and perish the other thought; maybe it was orks. Very, very quiet orks. Orks who knew what the sign of the Aquila was, and what it meant.
Don’t be bloody stupid, he told himself.
Obviously, he wanted it to be orks. He understood orks. He hated them, of course he did. They were filthy xenos, the enemies of the blessed holy God-Emperor, but after two years deployed on Vardan IV he understood them all the same.
No.
No, that just wasn’t going to work, was it?
It wasn’t orks, however much he wanted it to be.
Cully snugged his lasgun to his shoulder and sighted on a big greenskin who was threading an ammunition belt into a heavy stubber with its left hand and vigorously picking its nose with the forefinger of its right.
Still Steeleye waited.
It’s not an ork.
Cully really, really needed to kill something, anything, to take his mind off the alternative, even if only for a little while.
The jungle did strange things to a man’s sense of right and wrong, he thought again. The jungle did strange things to a man’s mind in general. What could it do to a man like that?
Shut up, Cully. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
One of the hut doors was flung open, and a huge ork came stomping down the crude wooden steps in front of it, a big rusty cleaver in its hand. It wore a spiked leather vest and a pair of heavy, ugly boots, and nothing else. It was enormous, even by ork standards, and quite clearly the boss of the whole encampment.
Steeleye put a hotshot through its left eyeball at three hundred yards, blowing its brains out of the vaporised remains of the back of its skull.
The vox crackled into life in Cully’s ear.
‘Go,’ she said.
Cully put a three-round burst into the nose-picker without hesitation, blowing the hideous xenos off its arse and onto its back beside the camp fire. Its legs flailed up into the air, and Cully put another deliberately targeted shot into its crotch simply because he could.
Kill!
The horrible thing flailed and howled on its back, and then Strongarm landed a krak grenade right next to it and that was the end of that.
Strongarm was Cully’s top boy in his section, a born thrower who carried most of the squad’s grenades strung from a heavy bandolier that crossed his shoulder and made him walk with a perpetual lean to the left. A sniper like Steeleye was all well and good, Cully reasoned, each shot a personally addressed missive of death, but grenades were addressed to everyone in the vicinity at the time. When you were fighting orks, there was a lot to be said for that.
‘Advance!’ he shouted, rising up from cover and spraying a burst of full auto into the camp as he went.
There was nothing moving there anymore, and it would suit Cully just fine if it stayed that way.
Of course, it didn’t work out like that.
Orks came boiling up out of the huts, out of the trees, out of holes in the ground. They always did.
Heavy calibre rounds flew around Cully as he charged them with his squad behind him, his lasgun barking in his hand. Orks were terrible shots but they all had heavy stubbers; big, ugly home-made things daubed with red paint that showered sparks when they were fired but spat out huge explosive rounds at a terrifying rate. Cully ducked behind the massive trunk of an ancient tree and took aim. He chopped one ork in half at the waistline with a scything blast of las-fire. Another’s head exploded as Steeleye dialled in on it and unleashed the killing power of her long-las from wherever the hell she was concealed.
‘One Section, kill!’ Cully bellowed, and his squad ran forward again to do their jobs.
Killing and dying, that’s what the Imperial Guard are for.
The air sizzled with las-fire.
‘Kill, kill, kill!’ Cully roared.
This was what he was for.
Death and death and death.
The unofficial mantra of the Astra Militarum.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
Afterwards, Cully found he had no real memory of the battle. Steeleye had been up a tree, he discovered later, and she had taken out fifteen orks in that battle alone. The battle that had lasted perhaps ten minutes at the most.
It had felt like an eternity of flying red-hot lead and las-shots and shouting and adrenaline and terror, and yet it had been over in a handful of minutes. Cully slumped against a tree trunk and watched as Steeleye clambered down from her perch in the canopy, her long-las over her shoulder.
She looked at him for a long moment, her single augmetic eye clicking as the bezel adjusted from targeting mode to more rare human interaction.
‘You
know it’s not an ork, right?’ she said quietly.
Cully sighed and nodded.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘It’s not drukhari either, is it? They’re no friends of the orks, so why the bleedin’ hell would it be?’
‘No,’ Cully admitted. ‘It’s not a drukhari. The sergeant… he said that, but he knows it’s not really.’
Steeleye looked at him for a long moment, green snot welling up in the open hole in the middle of her face.
‘Didn’t think so,’ she said at last.
Cully swallowed, then spat on the ground between them.
‘I don’t want to…’ he said.
Steeleye shrugged. ‘No one does,’ she said. ‘No one wants to bloody well admit it, do they? I don’t care, Cully. Why the sodding hell should I? So what, a commissar comes after me? So what? I’ll say it like it is, if no one else will.’
‘Emperor’s sake, Steeleye, he’s one of us.’
‘Was one of us,’ she corrected him. ‘He’s officially MIA anyway, no one will know. He made the list, remember?’
Sergeant Drachan wiped the grease off his fingers and kicked dirt over his camp fire. The last one had been delicious.
Emperor but they were hopeless soldiers, in the main, good for nothing but corpses and meat.
Rachain knew the work, and Cully too when he had his mind on the job and not on the card table. Steeleye was an avatar of Imperial Justice, her long-las like lightning from the heavens. He might let her live. This new lieutenant was a child, though. The bloom of Imperial youth, perhaps, but in no way hardened enough for the realities of Vardan IV. He supposed he would have to kill him too.
That would be a shame, Drachan had to allow, but the thing had to be done. The platoon had to be strengthened if they were ever going to defeat the enemy. Tempered in the fire like a fine blade. In his fire.
And then there was Gesht.
Gesht had slept with her sergeant, there was no getting away from that. Gesht had loved him. That was disgraceful.
That was weakness, right there in itself.
Gesht was part of the problem with Alpha Platoon.
‘You honestly believe that?’ Cully asked.
Steeleye nodded.
‘I really do,’ she said. ‘It’s Drachan. You know it. Rachain knows it, and so does Gesht. I’m sorry, I wish she didn’t every bit as much as you do and I know damn well she won’t admit it, but she does, and there we are.’
‘What… what do you think she’s going to do?’
Steeleye shrugged and looked at Cully.
‘What would you do?’
What do Guardsmen do?
Kill, and kill, and kill.
‘How do we do it?’
Steeleye wiped the hole in her face again.
‘I wish I knew,’ she said.
The fools had a triple guard set that night, more of them awake than asleep. Boots, most of them, barely trained and scared out of their minds, utterly and totally useless in the face of the true reality of war. Drachan had been two years on Vardan IV. He knew the jungle. He lived it, every foetid breath of rotting humidity giving him life.
He loved it, loved it in a way that he had never been able to love the artificial environments of barracks and troop-ships and firebases.
Stinking and rotting as it was, the jungle was real.
This is my home, now, he thought as he hung upside down from the tree, his knees locked over the branch that held him. Invisible, his face and the ragged remains of his flak armour smeared black with the charcoal and burned human fat from his camp fires. The noose of tightly woven vines hung from his left fist. The knife, clamped tightly in his right.
Death, and judgement, and natural selection.
The Emperor’s Will.
I’m top sergeant, he thought. Not Rachain, me! You think he could survive what I’ve been through? Two months an ork prisoner, before I fought my way out with my teeth and fingernails?
No.
No, Rachain couldn’t have done that. I’m top canid in Alpha Platoon.
He was top canid, and they would all come to see that.
In time, they would. The survivors, anyway. The few who he would allow to live.
The worthy ones.
Navylover from Three Section died that night, the boy who had been oh-so fond of the female Valkyrie pilots stationed at Advance Firebase Theta 82.
Triple guard, and still no one had heard anything.
‘It’s like a ghost,’ Rachain said, when they found the young trooper hanging from a tree with his entrails dangling in great, reeking purple ropes. ‘Nothing’s that quiet.’
‘Someone is,’ Cully said, and he exchanged a long look with Steeleye as he said it. ‘Someone we know.’
Rachain turned on Cully with his fist raised in preparation for a punch that would have floored him, but Cully met his old friend’s eye and faced him down.
‘Come on, Rachain,’ Steeleye said, and spat snot onto the ground out of the hole in the middle of her ruined face. ‘Who was your top scout? Who did you send out into the green when you needed ork advance parties murdered nice and quiet in the dark? It was Drachan, every time.’
‘Be quiet!’ Rachain growled. ‘It’s not…’
‘Isn’t it?’ Cully snapped. ‘Isn’t it, Rachain? Who else? It’s no ork, and we all know there aren’t any drukhari on this planet. Who the hell else could it be? Who else is this good?’
‘No one,’ Rachain admitted with a sigh. ‘You’re right. Oh Emperor’s love, you’re right. It’s him, I know it is. I’ve known for days. I just… I didn’t want to be right, you know what I mean?’
Cully turned and looked at his friend, recoiled from the expression in his eyes.
Betrayal, and murder, and despair.
‘Yeah,’ he said at last.
Rachain’s jaw set in a hard line.
‘Then we end this,’ he said. ‘We end this now.’
They were busy for the rest of the day. There were pits to be dug, deadfall traps to be rigged and wooden stakes to be cut and sharpened and set. The jungle steamed around them, making combat uniforms and flak armour stick to them disgustingly even as hideous insects crawled through their hair.
Vardan IV was hell.
The Emperor created Vardan IV to train the faithful, Cully thought to himself; the old joke, bitter with irony. No, no He did not.
Vardan IV was created by monsters. Vardan IV was, in Cully’s experience, the very worst place in a galaxy pretty much made of bad places. And now they faced one of the very worst monsters it had to offer.
One of their own.
The jungle did strange things to a man’s mind.
Drachan had lost his mind altogether. Cully had no idea where he’d been in the three months since he made the list, and Emperor’s truth be told, he didn’t want to find out. The thought of being an ork POW… no.
No, that didn’t bear thinking about. How he had escaped was anyone’s guess, but even if he’d got his body out he had quite clearly left his sanity behind.
Cully wiped the back of his hand across his sweat-slicked forehead and remembered an ork camp they had liberated a year ago, him and Rachain and Drachan and Steeleye and the other old guard of Alpha Platoon. The prisoners had been kept in tiny bamboo cages, with the new shoots growing up around them like spears. Their bodies contorted into hideous shapes, unable to move, twisted to avoid the plants that would have impaled them as they grew, inches per day.
The others, the unlucky ones, had been shut in metal boxes.
In the jungle heat of Vardan IV.
It was a point of discussion, among the veterans, over sacra and dice, whether or not the heat exhaustion and dehydration killed a man before the meat cooked on his bones. Whether, starved to the point of madness, he was tempted to e
at his own limbs before the heat overcame him. Whatever the questions, they had found no one left alive in the metal boxes to tell them the answers. Some of them, yes, had shown the signs of having tried to eat themselves.
Cully shuddered and looked down into the pit. It was twelve feet deep now, with sharpened stakes lining the bottom. Nothing that fell in there was getting out alive. They had dug eighteen of them around the camp.
He could only pray it would be enough.
It wasn’t enough.
Drachan walked through their traps like they weren’t there.
He laughed as he killed, laughed his special silent laugh into the jungle night. The laugh the orks had taught him.
Somewhere deep down in himself, he knew he had changed. Knew he was no longer the man he had been. He had evolved. The orks had done that, taught him new things. New ways of being. New priorities.
Amongst the orks, the biggest and strongest was always in charge.
And why not?
It made perfect sense, when you thought about it. Might made right, everyone knew that. The whole Imperium pretty much ran on that principle, so how was this any different? The jungle made things clearer in a man’s mind.
Everything was very clear, now, to Drachan. What he was.
What he had to do.
He laughed as he hauled Sharpknife up a tree, his noose tight around her throat as he hung upside down over her from his knees and drove the point of his combat knife into her sternum, dragged it down hard to spill her guts out over her boots.
He hadn’t had a firearm since before he was captured, but he found he didn’t miss them anymore. The Guard-issue knife, to kill with. The stolen ork cleaver, to cut his meat with. So simple. So clean.
Might and steel.
That was all he needed.
Drachan walked the jungle like a spirit unavenged, looking for the lieutenant. Blood and blood and death, drummed into him over and over again in basic. Reinforced in the fires of war on twenty planets. The unofficial mantra of the Imperial Guard.
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