by Dan Abnett
The third speeder turned in and made another pass, killing six more of the fleeing Gudrunites, who presented easy targets on the sand. Midas had
his weapon trained on it and fired as it passed over, missing. He fired again, striking its rear end as it burned away.
It kept going. Over the beach. Out to sea. I have no idea what he hit -the crew, the control systems - but it just kept going, on and on, until it disappeared from sight.
We pressed up the slope, in among the Gudrunites now. They were dirty and dishevelled to a man, none older than twenty-five. Seeing us and the damage we had wrought, they cheered, perhaps imagining we were part of some greater rescue force.
On the upper ridge, the last few troopers were crumpling. Fischig charged them, his stubber wailing, and a dozen Gudrunites went with him, eager to turn on their tormentors.
The ridge fight lasted another two minutes. Fischig lost two of the Gudrunites with him, but made certain none of the troopers survived. Law enforcement, I remember thinking, had robbed the military of a fine soldier in Chastener Fischig.
I sought out the Gudrunite officer as his men collapsed, weary with exhaustion and relief. Some were weeping. All of them looked scared. Smoke from the battle drifted down the ridge in the windless air.
The officer, a sergeant, was no older than his men. He had attempted to grow a beard, but his facial hair wasn't really up to it. He saluted me even before I had shown him my badge of office. Then he fell on his knees.
'Get up.'
He did.
'Inquisitor Eisenhorn. And you are...?'
'Sergeant Enil Jeruss, second battalion, 50th Gudrunite Rifles. Sir, is the fleet here? Have they found us?'
I held up my hand to quieten him down.
Appraise me, quickly and briefly'
*We wanted no part of it. We were mustered to the frigate Exalted, waiting to ship out. When we ran from Gudran high anchor, the captain told us all Gudran had fallen and we were relocating.'
'The captain?'
'Captain Estrum, sir.'
'And then?'
Thirty weeks in transit to get here. The moment we arrived, we knew something was wrong. We protested, demanded to know what was happening. They called it dereliction and sent dozens to the firing squads. We were given a chance to follow orders or die/
'Not much of a chance/
He shook his head. 'No, sir. That's why I tried to get the men out. We broke and ran, once we'd got in there, once they were busy. They came after us to hunt us down/
'In where?'
He gestured back over the ridge. The darkness/
Tell me what you saw/ I said.
NINETEEN
Jeruss makes his report.
At the plateau.
The true matter.
'I don't even know what world we're on,' Sergeant Jeruss said. They never told us. The ride in was rough, though.'
'It has no name, as far as I know. Go on/
They deployed us from the ships along this beach as an escort detail for the main party.'
'How many men?'
'Over a hundred naval security troopers, and three hundred or so of us guard.'
Vehicles?'
'Speeders like you saw, and a pair of heavier personnel carriers for some crates of cargo and the main party/
"What do you know of them?'
Jeruss shrugged. 'Of the cargo, nothing. In the main party was the captain, and Lord Glaw of Gudrun. He's a worthy nobleman from my homeworld/
'I know him. Who else?'
'Some others too: a merchant, an ecclesiarch, and a great and terrible warrior that they tried to keep away from us regular troops/
Mandragore, no doubt. And Dazzo and Locke. The core of Oberon Glaw's cabal.
Then what?'
Jeruss pointed up the slopes in the dark, forbidding uplands. 'We advanced into that. It seemed to me they knew where they were going. Things changed as we went further in. It got darker and warmer. And it was hard to negotiate the way, as if-'
As if what?'
'We couldn't judge distances. Sometimes it was like wading through hot wax, sometimes we could barely slow ourselves down. Some of the men panicked. We found polygons, like these on the beach/
It was his word for the hoop-like arches.
There were rows of them, aisles, marching away into the uplands. They were so irregular they disturbed the mind. They seemed to vary, to change/
What do you mean "irregular"?'
'I went to no officer school, sir, but I am educated. I understand simple geometry. The angles of the polygons did not add up, yet they were there/
Chilled, I recalled Maxilla's mention of the 'unwholesome' angles, and thought too of the marking on the tile I had taken from Damask.
"We followed some of these rows, passing through polygons on occasions. The ecclesiarch and the merchant seemed to be leading us. And there was another man, a tech-priest type/
'Slim build? Blue eyes?'
Yes/
'His name is Malahite. He played a part in choosing your path?'
Yes, they deferred to him on several occasions. Finally, we came to a plateau. A great raised, wide space, overlooked by jagged peaks of rock. The plateau was artificial. Tiled with smooth stones that-'
He tried to make a shape with his index fingers and thumbs but . shrugged and gave up.
'More impossible polygons?'
He laughed nervously. 'Yes. The plateau was vast. We waited there, the men grouped around the outside of the space, the main party and the vehicles in the centre/
'And then?'
*We waited what seemed like hours, but it was impossible to tell because our chronometers had all stopped. Then there was some kind of dispute. Lord Glaw was arguing with some of the others. I saw this as a chance. I got the men ready. Nearly ninety of us, ready and eager to trust to chance and flee. All eyes were on the shouting match. The big warrior - God-Emperor save me! - he was shouting by then. I think the sound of his voice was what decided us. We slipped away in twos and threes, from the back of the ranks, down the sides of the plateau, and ran back the way we'd come/
And they discovered your escape?'
'Eventually. And came hunting for us. The rest you know/
I waited a few moments for him to collect himself, and gathered the men around. There were about thirty riflemen left, all of them scared, and another three or four wounded. Aemos did what he could for them.
I rose and addressed them all. 'In defying your officers and leaders, you have served the Emperor. The men who brought you here are Imperial heretics, and their enterprise is criminal. My purpose here is to stop them. I intend to press on at once on that mission. I cannot vouch for the safety of any who follow me, but I count it as a mark of honour to the Emperor himself that you will. He needs our service here, now. If you take seriously the oaths you made to the Imperium when you became guardsmen, then you will not hesitate. There is no more vital battle in which you might give your lives/
Wild, frightened faces stared back at me. There was a murmur of agreement, but these were young inexperienced men, some no more than boys, who had been thrown into the deep waters of madness.
'Steel yourselves, and know that the Emperor is with you and for you in this. I don't exaggerate when I say the future rests in our hands.'
More voluble assent now. These men weren't cowards. They just needed a purpose and a sense that they were fighting for a worthy cause.
I whispered briefly to Fischig and he immediately stepped up and raised his voice to the Imperial creed, and the song of allegiance, hymns that every child in the Imperium knew. The Gudrunites joined in lustily. It centred and focused their determination.
Still, the booming came along the shore.
With Betancore's help, I stripped arms and equipment from the fallen. There were enough weapons to make sure every man had a lasrifle or a hell-gun. We also managed to assemble three intact naval trooper uniforms, mixing and matching from the dead.
<
br /> I stripped off my bulky vacuum suit and began to put on the polished black combat armour of a naval security trooper. Midas attempted to do the same, but his build was too slim for the heavy rig. The troopers were, to a man, large brutes.
We dressed Fischig in the armour instead, and then, so as not to waste the third set, chose a heavy-set Gudrunite from Jeruss's group, a corporal named Twane.
"What's the Gudrunite command channel?' I asked Jeruss as I adjusted the helmet vox set.
'Beta-phi-beta.'
'And of the men you left in there at the plateau, how many others might side with us?'
'All the Gudrunites, I would say. Sergeant Creddon's unit, certainly'
"Your job will be to rally them to us when we get inside. I'll give the word.'
He nodded.
We left the wounded on the shore, as comfortable as we could make them, and advanced into the dark uplands.
As Jeruss had told me, it quickly became darker and warmer. The sleek black body armour I was now wearing had an integral cooling system, but
it didn't seem to help. And the wrongness still afflicted us. It was difficult to walk without stumbling in places.
We came upon the first of the arches, and Jeruss led us through, though we would have been able to follow the course without difficulty. Footsteps and the tracks of heavy vehicles had left deep prints and ruts in the soft dusty soil.
We were advancing up a cluster of hills, dark and uninviting with a glowering sky above. There were many-rows of arches, some overlapping. We became disoriented. It seemed on occasions that as we passed through one arch, we came out through another in a different row. The tracks never wavered or broke, but we seemed to blink between one aisle of hoops and another. And the angles of the joints in the arches were - as Jeruss had said - geometrically incorrect.
'I think,' Aemos said quietly to me as we walked onwards, 'the lack of symmetry is in every particular and every dimension.'
'Meaning?'
The three we can see and the fourth - time. Dimensions have been stretched and warped. Perhaps accidentally. Perhaps to torment us. Perhaps for some other purpose. But I think that is why things are so twisted and wrong.'
We came at last upon the place Jeruss had called the plateau. It was a flat-topped mound nearly a kilometre across, smoothly tiled with octagonal tesserae that mocked logic. The sides sloped down to the dusty soil and all around, the site was ringed by ragged brown peaks and crags. Above, the sky was dark and flecked with stars.
On our side of the plateau, a semi-circle of several hundred men sat huddled around the rim, waiting. I could feel their tension. More than half of them were Gudrunites; the others were troopers. Smaller groups of soldiers stood in ordered ranks further towards the centre of the plateau, escorting two navy troop carriers in which figures sat, and a pair of empty landspeeders. A pile of crates had been removed from the carriers and piled on the tiled ground.
On the far side of the plateau, a row of arches led away into the surrounding rocks.
We lay in cover and waited, watching.
After an interminable period, there was movement on the far side and figures emerged from the arches. Even at a distance, I could tell they were Dazzo and Malahite, with four naval troopers in escort. They came out briskly, signalling to the main group at the vehicles. All the troops around the rim got to their feet.
Other shapes now appeared through the arches. They were impossible to define at first; grey, reflective shapes that had no human form or intelligible movement.
I took out my scope, and trained it on them, carefully resolving the magnification.
And I saw the saruthi for the first time.
There were nine of them, as far as I could tell. They made me think of arachnids, or crustaceans, but neither comparison was entirely accurate. From their flat, grey bodies extended five supporting limbs, jointed in such a way so that the main mid-limb joint was raised higher than the horizontal torso. There was no symmetry to the arrangement of limbs, or to the way in which they moved. Their scuttling pace was irregular and without repetition of order. It was disturbing merely to watch them walk. Each limb ended in a calliper of polished silver, a metal stilt clasped in the digits of each limb, lifting them a further metre or so off the ground. The metal spikes of the stilts made a clacking, tapping sound on the hard tiles that I could hear despite the distance. Their heads were oblate shapes rising on thick, boneless columns from the tops of their bodies. They had long skulls and lacked obvious mouths or eyes, though several flaring, nostril-like openings showed on their snouts. There was no symmetry to the arrangement of these openings either, nor to the shape of the skulls, and their necks sprouted off-centre from their backs.
They were loathsome, filthy things. Each creature was twice the mass of a man, with gleaming grey flesh.
Shouts and noises of alarm came from some of the waiting men. Several turned and fled from the plateau, scrabbling, wailing.
The nine saruthi clicked their way out into the open from the hoop, fanning out until they formed a semi-circular line facing Dazzo and Malahite. I saw Oberon Glaw, Gorgone Locke, Estrum and the monstrous form of Mandragore descend from the vehicles to join their comrades.
I confess that I was, by then, as afraid as those with me. I have seen horror, and horror itself does not terrify me. Nor indeed was there anything horrific about these beings. Alien, yes, and as a puritan that was alarming. But objectively, they were impressive, striking creatures; assured, almost majestic.
My fear stemmed from a deeper, gut instinct. As with this world we had entered, there was a wrongness to them, to their shape, their movement, their design. Each scuttling limb, each swaying head, betrayed an unholy nature. I could not have believed how reassuring symmetry could be, and how distressing might be its lack. They were warped things, warped from any civilised sense of grace, any human understanding of aesthetics. Their bodies and limbs were so irregular, they didn't even seem to make sense as if, like the tiles and the arches, their angles didn't add up correctly.
Fear, then, swayed me. I looked around at my companions, and saw fear on their gazing faces too; fear, revulsion, disbelief.
Aemos saved my life and sanity. He and he alone stared in wonder at the saruthi, a perplexed smile of intellectual delight on his ancient face.
'Most perturbatory/ I heard him murmur.
That simple detail made me laugh. My confidence returned, and with it, my resolve. I waved Fischig and the soldier, Twane, over to me, and then made certain that Bequin, Midas and Jeruss were sufficiently in control of
their faculties to be left in charge. Jeruss and Twane needed some fierce cajoling. Bequin was already prepared, her weapons drawn. The sight of Mandragore had fired her will.
'Wait for my signal/ I told Midas. To Fischig I said, 'Keep an eye on our friend here/ meaning Twane.
The three of us crept down from cover and approached the edge of the plateau. The men were all on their feet, murmuring, alarmed, looking at the meeting taking place at the centre of the platform. Naval security officers scolded the Gudrunites and kept them in line, but I could tell they were uneasy too.
We came up the slope and melted into the watching crowd. Gudrunites got out of our way - three more naval oppressors with blank visors and low-strapped hell-guns.
We came almost to the front of the crowd. A trooper near me growled, 'I didn't sign up for this!' as he stared at the saruthi two hundred metres away.
'Pull yourself together!' I snapped to him and he looked at me sharply.
'It isn't right!' he murmured.
'We'll see, won't we?' I said, patting my hell-gun. 'If Estrum and these others have led us into a nightmare, they'll see how Scarus Fleet's troopers account for themselves!'
He nodded and readied his own weapon.
Twane, Fischig and I moved forward again. No one paid us any heed. Indeed, many troopers were moving forward to flank the vehicles now.
I looked again at the meeting. Obe
ron Glaw, his long robes spilling down from upraised arms, was greeting the saruthi with words I couldn't hear. It went on a while.
Finally, he half turned and gestured towards the waiting crates. His voice reached me.
'And in good faith we have brought the properties as agreed.'
Locke moved back from the group. 'Attend me!' he ordered to the naval troopers around him. I moved forward at once, and so did Fischig. In a second, we were part of a team of more than a dozen troopers carrying the first of the crates forward. I was right next to Locke, my black-gloved hands clutching the carrying handle next to his brawny fists.
We set the crates down in front of the saruthi and withdrew a few paces. Locke remained and opened a crate lid as one of the saruthi clattered forward.
I saw them now, close to. It was no better. Their grey skin was covered with whorled pores, and the nostrils on their snouts flared and clenched. I could see that each of their limbs ended in what looked abominably like a human hand, grey skinned, gripping the cross-bar of each silver stilt.
The saruthi that had moved forward set two of his stilts down on the tiles and reached into the open crate with flickering fingers. It searched by touch for a moment, and then withdrew its hands empty. Its eyeless skull swayed slightly on its neck. Then it raised those free hands high, clasped together, as a man might raise his hands over his head in victory.
The long, rubber-jointed fingers of each hand - and I cannot say for sure how many digits each hand had or even if they each had the same number - twisted and clenched around each other and formed a shape. A visage. A human face. Eyes, a nose, a wide mouth. Perfect, impossible, chilling.
The raised effigy of a face seemed to study us. Then the mouth moved.
'Your bond you have with truth made, being man/
There was a hush of alarm in the crowd at my back. The voice was dull and tuneless, without inflection, but the finger-mouth puppeted the speech with awful precision.
Then we may trade?' Glaw stammered.
The hands parted and the face vanished. The creature took up its stilts again and scuttled backwards. Its kin also moved back, away from the arch.
More creatures emerged, more saruthi identical to those who had already appeared, flanking other things. There seemed to be four of them, with body structures similar to the aliens, but they were bloated and misshapen. Their rugose flesh was white and sickly and blotched with marks that seemed like disease. Instead of stilts, their limbs were fitted with heavy, metal hooves, linked all around by wires that acted like shackles. These pallid, wretched things - slaves of the saruthi I had no doubt -moaned as they moved, filling the air with a sickly whining. The waiting saruthi jabbed at them with the points of their stilts as they clattered past onto the plateau.