by Dan Abnett
They were so denuded of anything except stares and grins that it was impossible to tell who the dead were. Local people, citizens of the coastal towns, engulfed by the fury of war, or Imperial Guardsmen who had got there some time ahead of AT 137 and found death waiting with a tinderbox?
The other possibility was that these smiles of chagrin and welcome were the smiles of the enemy. Were these his enemy, these blistered black-tar mannequins with their gleaming teeth? If they were, they were the first he’d met.
“Holy” A word, not even a question. He turned his head. Hamir came close, through the smoke, carrying his rifle across his stomach. Criid fell into step with him and they moved down the street, picking over the smoking rubble.
A quiet had fallen with the darkness. There was the immediate crackle of the flames, the scurry of falling masonry and the distant rumble and thump of something important happening somewhere else. Generally, though, there was a warm quiet, the sound of aftermath.
Criid knew it was no aftermath. He’d become reluctant to check his chron, because the maddeningly slow passage of time was sapping his will, but he knew they’d been down for about five hours. K’ethdrac was an immense target and it could not have fallen yet, even considering the fury of the assault. As with so many great cities and hives, the Imperial ground forces might be picking their way from street fight to street fight for weeks, for months.
For years. That wasn’t unheard of. Criid wondered, if he lived that long, whether he would survive mentally. If his body avoided being shot or blown apart or cut into pieces, would his mind withstand a length of time like that here? He doubted it, if the passage of time continued to be so heavy and prolonged. He would end up mad, with a rueful smile on his face.
Hamir gestured ahead of them with a nod. A trio of troopers, Fourbox amongst them, was edging forwards behind a low remnant of wall. On either side, they could make out other members of the company advancing through the rubble and the lazy smoke. In the last, creeping hour, their numbers had grown. Crossing a road bridge into the deeper parts of the city, they had encountered about thirty-five members of the AT 137 drop under the command of Corporal Traben. They’d come off a dropship that had overshot and ended up in some kind of manufactory compound. Wash and Lovely were among the troops. Like Kexie’s group, they’d seen nothing of Major Brundel.
A blurt of gunfire rang in from their right. Some of the troopers turned to peer into the smoke.
“Should I find Kexie?” Hamir asked Criid.
“Don’t bother,” said another voice from just behind them.
It was Merrt. He’d been with Traben’s party too.
“Shouldn’t we…?” Criid began.
“In this?” Merrt asked. “Surrounded by this? You report in every bit of gn… gn… gn… gunfire you hear, Kexie’ll be chasing his tail the whole day checking it. Best to keep moving, keep your formation. If it turns out that gunfire needs to involve you, it will.”
It was almost reassuring just to ignore it, to just get on and get through without looking for trouble. There was enough to go around anyway. It did the element more harm jumping at every last thing than it did keeping firm with the deployment.
To prove the point, they went on for another twenty minutes, and the gunfire got personal.
II
They had entered a part of the fortified city where the air was so black and the smoke so dense that it felt subterranean. Buildings on either hand—some ruined, some intact, and all empty—loomed like the smooth, grey walls of cyclopean caves. It was hot and dank, like the centre of the earth. Moisture dripped out of the noxious smoke. It was not rain or climate damp, but the condensing vapours of warfare: fuel oil, lubricants, accelerants and volatiles. It was sticky and brown like a lho-smoker’s phlegm, and the air coughed it out like spittle.
To the west of their position, about five kilometres away, a firestorm blazed through eight or nine city blocks like a communal fire at the centre of the cave. It made the faint light russet and gold. When they stopped to wait and listen, the members of AT 137 resembled gilded statues on a victory arch.
To the south of them, at a similar distance, an emphatic battle was raging, either between armoured forces or duelling batteries of artillery. It was evidently a formidable clash and raised a huge, slightly muffled, noise. They could see nothing of it, however, not even the merest hint of a flash or shell burst.
They had been some time without taking fire, so when the first shots came upon them, they seemed mystifying and unfamiliar. The trooper known as Gyro suddenly fell and rolled violently backwards across the ground as if he had been unrolled briskly out of a carpet. The sergeant yelled everyone to cover, but as they scrambled, Splits, a Kolstec with an unpopular, nasal voice, was also hit.
Unlike Gyro, his wound wasn’t fatal. He started to scream, tortured by the pain. His cries became strangulated and high-pitched. Criid had never heard such sounds come out of a person before.
Sergeant Kexie was pinned near the rear of the group, so Commissar Sobile ordered the first men forward. He fired his pistol into the dark and cracked his whip so they could hear it.
“Take out that shooter!” he yelled.
Everyone wondered who he was talking to.
Criid had found cover behind the thick exterior wall of a hab. Ganiel and Fourbox squashed in behind him.
“Can you see it?” Ganiel asked.
Criid couldn’t see much of anything. It was all he could do to think of anything apart from the awful screams coming from Splits. Occasionally, a shot whined past the corner of the wall.
“I’ll take a look,” Fourbox announced, and peeked around the corner. Almost immediately, he jerked back, banging his head against the bricks in his haste to withdraw.
“Fourbox?”
Fourbox was doing a little stamping dance, his hands to his head.
“Fourbox?”
“How bad is it?” Fourbox asked, turning his head so that they could see his right ear. A hard round had punched it clean off, nicking the rim of his helmet as it deflected. He had a scorch mark burn across the top of his cheek, and a bloody rosebud of tissue and cartilage where his ear had been. Blood streamed down his neck.
“How bad is it?” he asked again. He was in a little discomfort, but didn’t seem genuinely distressed.
“Get a dressing on it,” Ganiel said. Fourbox sat down and fumbled with a belt-pack.
Splits was still screaming. Gunfire was coming from several places in the Imperial spread. It sounded like they had half a dozen shooters firing at them.
“Somebody move forwards!” Sobile yelled. “In the name of the Golden Throne, advance and engage, or by Terra I will flog you all for cowardice!”
Criid started to run. He was running before he’d even realised he’d decided to. He vaguely heard Ganiel, left behind, cry out, “Criid, no!”
He was out in the open. Several shots hit the ground near his feet like firecrackers, and a las round shrieked over his head. He reached the far side of the street, rolled down behind a flight of stone steps, and started firing. Other figures followed him. He heard running footsteps, hard boots thumping over grit, the sound of voices cursing.
All the while, Splits was in the background, wailing like a child.
Lasfire was coming from directly above him. Looking up at the gloomy face of the building he was cowering against, he saw the sparks and fizzles of muzzle flash from an upper window.
Moving without thought or hesitation, he rose and ran up the steps into the building’s entrance. It was hard to tell what the place had originally been. Wall tiles had been chipped away and littered the floor. Rot discoloured the ceilings of the unlit hallways. He moved from doorway to doorway, swinging his aim around, lugging the heavy barrel of the lasrifle from one imagined target to the next. He climbed a flight of creaking, decaying steps, his back sliding against the wall, and then turned a landing onto a second flight.
On the next landing, he finally met the enemy face-to-
face.
* * * * *
III
He had just come out of a room, as if breaking from some activity and casually heading off in search of a smoke or a latrine. Afterwards, Criid was able to remember in astounding detail the specifics of the man’s clothing and equipment. He was wearing dark green combat armour of an exotic style not worn by any Guard unit Criid had ever seen. The armour was well-finished and well-made, and had once been polished to a good shine, but dust had caked its surfaces badly. It looked light and wearable. It had insignia marked in red and green on the breastplate, and some kind of ornate shoulder braid. The marks were vulgar and alien, and made no sense.
The man’s webbing, his boots and most of all his lasrifle, were Imperial issue. His kit closely resembled the equipment Criid was carrying. Criid could even see the little yellow Munitorum stencil, half worn off, on the rifle butt that had denoted the theatre of issue. He had been told, time and again in briefings, and anecdotally by his extended family in the Ghosts, that the enemy frequently used the weapons, uniforms and vehicles they appropriated from the Imperial Guard.
Of course, sometimes they even used the men themselves, if the men could be turned.
They were face to face on that dingy stairhead for less than a second, although the frozen moment embedded itself in Criid’s memory forever. Two things broke the hesitation. First, the man began to raise his rifle. Second, the man wasn’t a man at all.
He wore no helmet or head covering, except for a padded canvas hood that tied beneath the chin, the sort worn by a tank driver under his wide-bowl helm. With the exception of the insignia, from the neck down, the man might be mistaken in every respect for an Imperial Guardsman. His face, however, was a rancid, distorted mass, so bloated that its original structure was gone. It was as if the hood had been tied in place simply to hold the face together. There was no nose, just a raw socket, and the eyes under the deformed brow were the staring, circular eyes of a large bird. The wet mouth hung open to reveal teeth like quills.
The horror of the face was the last thing about the figure that Criid noticed, as if he was blocking it out and absorbing all the non-disturbing details until he couldn’t put it off any longer.
Criid exclaimed in disgust and shot the enemy soldier three times with his lasrifle. The shots lifted the creature off the floor and bounced it off the corridor wall.
Two more equally depraved creatures stormed out of the same room. One had a drooling snout, full of yellow peg teeth, that wouldn’t close. The second, draped in a long Guardsman’s greatcoat, looked perfectly human except that his left eye socket was shared by two eyes.
The snout had a laspistol and was firing it in a wild, panicky manner. Splinters blew out from the wall behind Criid and from the banister posts in front of him. Yelling, Criid ran up the last few stairs, squeezing the trigger of his lasrifle. The snout with the laspistol was hit so hard that it flew back through the doorway with a sharp jerk, as if someone had yanked it back inside. The other thing, which seemed to have no weapon, turned and ran down the landing, arms wide, greatcoat tails flapping, desperately yelling something in a language that made Criid’s brain sizzle. Criid dropped to one knee, the rifle up to his cheek, and fired two aimed shots to bring the fleeing thing down. It fell flat on its face, halfway down the mouldering hall, with an impact that puffed dust up from between the floorboards.
Criid got up slowly. There was a lot of noise down below where others from AT 137 were following him into the building. Around him, on the second floor, sound seemed suspended. Dust, disturbed by the brief but frenzied exchange, wafted in the air. Criid took a few steps forwards gingerly, his heart punching at his ribs, his hands shaking. Everything seemed to be alive around him. Out of the corner of his eyes, shapes seemed to scurry and shuffle behind the grey-wallpaper, or fidget and gnaw behind the skirting. Patches of mould and decay seemed to spread while his back was turned. There was a buzzing, like flies. A comb-on-teeth clicking of dusk bugs.
Another step, another. Was that all of them? Where had the thing in the greatcoat been running to? What had it been shouting? Was there anything else in the rooms at the far end of the hallway?
Criid tightened his grip on his rifle and took another few steps along the landing. He was a metre or two short of the place where the corpse in the greatcoat lay, just drawing level with the half open door that all three of the enemy had emerged from.
His attention was fixed on the end of the hallway. Where had the thing in the greatcoat, the thing with the nightmare eye, been running to? The hall ahead—bare dusty boards, stained walls, rot-infested ceiling—led to a foggy, soot-stained exterior window at the far end. Adjacent to that, two doors on opposite sides of the hall were both closed.
Something was in there. In one of the rooms. Criid knew it. His nerves sensed it more acutely with every step he took. Something. Left or right? Left or right? Another step, another. What was that? A movement? Did something just move in the shadows under the right-hand door? Was—
“Get down,” Caff said.
Criid obeyed without even thinking about it. He hit the boards prone as the right-hand door flew open and a squealing pig-thing came out.
It was huge, as tall as Criid, but four or five times the body-mass. It wore old, unlaced Guard boots and ragged battledress trousers belted under the girth of its distended belly. It was bare from the waist up, a sagging barrel of hairless pink flesh smeared with dirt and sweat. Its shoulders and arms were massive, massive like old Corbec’s used to be. It was carrying a heavy autocannon, greasy and black, like a normal-sized man would carry a combat shotgun. Its head was tiny, a puckered, bald, pink ball with dot eyes and brown tusks. It made a shrill, bleating squeal as it opened fire.
Fed by a long, swinging belt of ammunition, the cannon thundered, its muzzle crackling with fierce flash jags. Each rapid sound was a blend of numbing boom and metallic ping. The hallway behind Criid tore apart under the onslaught.
From the floor, beneath this concussive rain, Criid fired back. He hit the huge, shuddering torso three times, and then his fourth made a definite kill-shot as it struck the thing’s squealing face. The pig-thing toppled backwards, the cannon tilting with it, the last of its belt of shots firing blindly into the hall ceiling. The impacts ripped out the centre of the ceiling in a violent flurry of plaster, dust and splintered lathes.
Collapsing, the thing struck the hall-end window and shattered it, but did not fall all the way out. It crashed to the floor, its right arm hooked up on the broken glass of the window. The cannon barrel, sobbing smoke, hit the floorboards like a piece of lead piping. A long gurgling sigh issued from the dead bulk.
Criid slowly regained his feet, still aiming at the pig-thing. The air was dirty with cannon-smoke. Pieces of ceiling kept fluttering down like autumn leaves. He moved towards the pig-thing to make sure that it was dead.
Something slammed into him from behind and drove him against the far wall of the hallway. Criid struck his chin and his cheek against the wall as he fell, and pain flared, but he was more undone by confusion and shock. Something was screaming in his ear. Everything was blurred. Something was on top of him, pinning him to the floor.
He managed to half-roll over. Another enemy trooper, his howling face a diseased wreck, was astride him, raining fists down on him. This wretch must have sprung from a side room that Criid hadn’t checked. Criid tried to block the repeated blows. He’d lost his grip on his rifle, and he couldn’t raise his own arms to defend himself properly. The enemy was intent on beating him to a pulp.
A las shot cracked out and the enemy trooper folded up with a judder. The body slumped sideways, and Criid was able to heave himself out from underneath. Three or four metres back down the hall in the direction of the stairs was Merrt. The Tanith lowered his lasrifle.
“All right?” he asked.
Criid’s head was swimming. His face throbbed and he could taste blood and feel it running down his lips. He nodded to Merrt, and made an attem
pt to stand.
He was almost on his feet when there was a commotion. Yet another enemy trooper had rushed out of the side room to grapple with Merrt. They were struggling face to face, Merrt pressed against the hallway wall, his rifle pinned impotently between his chest and his aggressor’s. With snapping needle fangs, the trooper was trying to get at Mertt’s throat while its hands tried to wrestle Merrt’s weapon off him.
Dizzy, Criid tried to move. He looked around for his own weapon, or something else that he could club Merrt’s attacker off with.
At his feet was the sprawled figure of the enemy that had been beating him. Merrt’s shot had punched clean through its torso, and it was leaking a wide puddle of stinking black blood across the dusty floor.
It wasn’t dead.
Unable to stand, barely able to move, it was hacking out its last few breaths and, with trembling fingers, pulling the pin from a stick grenade.
IV
Criid threw himself at the dying soldier, clawing at its hands to win ownership of the grenade. Lying on its side, the enemy trooper cried out, and blood gushed from its mouth. It struggled with Criid for a moment more, and then suddenly expired.
It had pulled the pin out.
There was no way to put it back. Criid simply snatched the stick grenade out of the dead thing’s hands and threw it through the open doorway opposite. There was some vague hope in his head that the wall of the room would take the brunt of the blast.
In the two or three seconds it had taken for Criid to wrestle the bomb away, Merrt had fought with the other soldier. Locked together, grappling face to face, they had struggled frantically until Merrt butted the enemy in the face with his augmetic jaw. The soldier reeled away, finally, by accident, tearing Merrt’s rifle out of his hands, and staggered backwards through the doorway a fraction of a second after Criid had hurled the grenade in that direction.