by C. L. Werner
The first disposer didn’t answer, instead grabbing hold of a metal handgrip and climbing onto the back step of the slow-moving transport. As soon as he was aboard, he began prodding and poking the heap of bodies, shifting them around as best he could with a length of pipe. As the black boot of a janissary emerged from beneath the pile, he gave a grunt of pleasure. Immediately he fell upon the boot, savagely pulling at it, trying to wrench it free.
‘Body’s gone stiff!’ the ghoul complained.
‘Then break the bones,’ the overseer snarled back, again glancing nervously at the tunnel behind them. ‘Don’t be squeamish.’
The ghoul muttered a curse beneath his breath, then began to viciously pound the corpse’s foot with his pipe. Yuxiang wasn’t sure if it was imagination, but he seemed to hear a dull crunch accompany each blow.
‘This would be easier if you’d let us stop,’ the ghoul snapped, continuing to hammer the foot.
‘You explain why we’re stopped if somebody from processing comes along,’ the overseer growled at him. ‘Now just focus on what you’re doing!’
A cry of triumph came from the scavenger as the boot finally slipped free from the shattered foot. Tucking his trophy under one arm, he began shoving bodies aside to reach the corpse’s other leg. Jubilation turned to rage as he found himself staring at a charred stump that ended well above the knee.
‘Deacon!’ the ghoul cried out. ‘Did you notice any loose legs when we were loading up?’
The overseer spun around, distracted from another of his paranoid inspections of the tunnel. ‘No,’ came the curt answer. ‘Only big bits. No pieces. You should know, you lugged them onto the tractor.’
‘I thought maybe somebody might have chipped in and tossed the small stuff on while I was busy,’ the scavenger cursed.
Deacon’s shrill voice became thin and sharp. ‘Nobody helps disposal. You know that.’
Angrily, the ghoul took the lone boot from beneath his arm and hurled it into the darkness.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Deacon scolded him. ‘Processing Omega could have used that.’
‘To the warp with Processing Omega!’ the scavenger growled back. He raised the heavy pipe, bringing it crashing down into the skull of a body only a few centimetres from Yuxiang. This time there was no imagination when the hidden slave heard bones shatter. ‘I’d like to do that to every one of those sump-vermin!’
Deacon’s expression became frightened behind his mask. Nervously, he spun around, watching the tunnel. ‘Talk like that and they’ll take you to Processing Omega,’ he hissed. ‘The rest of us too, just for being associated with you.’
The ghoul chuckled, the sound made even more inhuman by his mask. ‘Maybe we could all share the same paste-tube,’ he joked.
The blood seemed to drain out of Yuxiang’s body as he heard the two disposers talk, his mind refusing to accept the obscenity the ghouls were discussing. It couldn’t be possible! It was too vile to believe, even of the most monstrous tyrants!
Paste. Processing. No, it couldn’t happen, couldn’t be real! Even the Iron Warriors wouldn’t do such a thing!
Yet with every word that passed between the bickering scavengers, Yuxiang felt his resistance crumble. The monstrosity was true, the Iron Warriors were that inhuman. The fiendish reality was that the lords of Castellax viewed their human slaves as nothing but cattle and, like cattle, they thought nothing of harvesting their flesh. A staple of the rations being issued to the defenders of Vorago, the tubes of protein-paste were created from the bodies of their own dead!
With acceptance of that abominable fact, an even more terrifying realisation seized Yuxiang. The tractor, the cargo he had allowed himself to become a part of, it was on its way to Processing Omega. These weren’t bodies piled around him but slabs of meat destined to be rendered down into core nutrients and proteins, dissolved into shapeless mush to be injected into foil tubes and issued to millions of starving wretches!
Horror overwhelmed fatigue, injury, caution – every handicap that might have restrained Yuxiang in that moment. Like a maddened berserker, the slave thrust himself from the pile of corpses, exploding upon the disposers in a burst of violence that might have impressed an ork. The scavenger on the cargo bed was just turning around when Yuxiang’s knife licked out, raking across his face with an almost psychotic strength. The ghoul shrieked, clutching at his slashed mask and the gory debris bubbling up from behind it. Yuxiang eviscerated him with a back-handed slash and kicked the body from the bed.
The mutilated man slammed into the trailing Deacon, smashing the overseer to the ground. Yuxiang leapt down after his first victim, intent upon claiming his second when the tractor suddenly lurched to a halt.
Spinning around, the slave saw the driver come charging back from the cab, a cudgel-like maintenance tool clenched in his fist. Yuxiang didn’t give the man time to close with him, but instead rushed forwards to meet him. Long accustomed to the brutality of Prefect Wyre and his slavemasters, Yuxiang barely reacted to the blow that crashed against his shoulder as the driver struck at him. It was the only blow the man would strike and he had wasted it.
Again, the knife flashed in Yuxiang’s hand, ripping through the disposer’s duster and stabbing deep between his ribs. The driver screamed into his mask, flailing on the point of the blade. Throwing an arm about the struggling man, Yuxiang drew him closer, burying the blade still deeper in the man’s body.
As soon as he felt the man’s struggles falter, Yuxiang tore his blade free and let the driver collapse. Immediately, he turned and sprinted towards the back of the tractor, intent on finishing the third disposer.
The last of the corpse collectors had finally freed himself from the dying weight of his comrade. The eyes above Deacon’s gas mask became wide with fright as he saw Yuxiang’s blood-coated form looming above him. Desperately, he lifted his hands to ward off the murderous apparition.
‘No! Don’t do it!’ the disposer wailed.
Yuxiang glared down at him, the slave’s face pulling back in merciless contempt. ‘You help them feed us our own dead!’ he shrieked, raising the knife and pouncing on the man.
Displaying unanticipated agility, Deacon rolled away from the maddened slave, darting beneath the bed of the tractor. Cringing against the treads, he shouted at Yuxiang. ‘I was only following orders. I was just doing what I was told to do!’
Yuxiang reached beneath the tractor, slashing at the disposer with his knife. ‘Now I’m telling you to die!’ he yelled.
Deacon recoiled from his attacker, manoeuvring to keep the treads between himself and Yuxiang. ‘I’m sorry!’ he shrieked. ‘We didn’t know you were alive.’ He squirmed away from a savage lunge, retreating towards the underside of the cab. ‘Don’t kill me, I can help you! Stop! Listen to me!’
Yuxiang hesitated, staring hard into the disposer’s eyes. There was no guile there, only raw terror. Nor was that fear directed solely at the man trying to knife him. Even now, Deacon kept glancing anxiously at the tunnel around them. Yuxiang remembered what the man had said about the Steel Blood. Almost against his will, he felt sympathy for the disposer. Even if the man appreciated the horror of what he was doing, there was nothing he could do about it. If he tried, the Iron Warriors would just kill him and put someone else in his place.
Noticing his attacker falter, Deacon continued to plead with him. ‘I can help you,’ he insisted. ‘If you kill me and run off, they’ll look for you. I can keep that from happening.’
‘How?’ Yuxiang asked, suspicion in his tone.
Deacon gestured towards the back of the tractor where one of the dead disposers lay. ‘Put on Zhang’s gear. They’ll think you are him down at Processing Omega.’ Even through the blood coating his features, Deacon could see Yuxiang’s doubtful scowl. ‘It’s the only way,’ he declared. ‘They won’t notice and I won’t tell them. If they found out, I’d be shot for lying to them.’
‘You wouldn’t have a chance to get shot,’ Yuxiang
promised, fingering his knife.
Deacon nodded in understanding. ‘However you want it,’ he said. ‘But we have to hurry. The Steel Blood might be around any time. Get into Zhang’s gear.’
‘What about the other man?’ Yuxiang said, gesturing with his knife at the driver.
‘I’ll hide his gear and we can dump the body into the tractor along with Zhang,’ Deacon sighed as he saw the horror that flashed through Yuxiang’s eyes. ‘If they find bodies in the tunnel, they’ll know something happened. Nobody will question a few more kilograms delivered to Processing.’
Feeling sick to his stomach, Yuxiang had to bend to Deacon’s logic. Keeping his eyes on the disposer, he made his way back to the first man he had killed and started to strip the corpse. ‘How will you explain the driver?’
Deacon was already out from under the tractor, frantically unlacing the driver’s boots. ‘I can drive the tractor,’ he said. ‘We’ll report that Wang had a breakdown and fled into the tunnels.’ He paused, shaking his head. ‘It happens a lot to disposers. Takes a certain mentality to do this sort of work. They’ll send a patrol to look for him, but of course they won’t find anything.’ He hesitated again as another thought occurred to him. ‘What will you do after we reach Processing Omega?’
Yuxiang smiled grimly. ‘I’ll stick with you,’ he promised. ‘Just to make sure you stay honest.’
‘You’ll have to see some horrible things,’ Deacon warned. ‘Nobody knows how bad the Iron Warriors are until they’ve seen Processing Omega.’
The comment sent a chill down Yuxiang’s spine, a chill that seemed to spread to his heart. Instead of making him shudder, however, it seemed to pour strength into his veins. ‘Maybe the orks will destroy those monsters,’ he said, then looked up and stared into Deacon’s eyes. ‘Or maybe that job is up to us.’
Deacon froze, a haunted look creeping into his eyes. He wondered if Yuxiang was slipping from lucidity back into madness.
Yuxiang was oblivious to the disposer’s scrutiny. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how well do you know these tunnels?’
The sun’s polluted rays glared down upon the scrap yard wasteland of the ork encampment, seemingly eager to illuminate the carnage unfolding amidst the wreckage. Over-Captain Vallax’s chainaxe screamed as he brought it cleaving through the metre-long blades reaching out for him. In a shower of sparks and smoke, the savaged metal was cleft asunder, falling into the toxic desert sand. The arm behind the industrial shears recoiled as though in pain.
Vallax rounded upon his adversary, a hulking cylinder of steel mounted on a pair of piston-driven hydraulic legs. From either side of the cylinder, a mechanised arm protruded, the left mounting a massive cannon, the right equipped with the torn remains of a set of power shears. The crude semblance of a snarling face had been painted across the cylindrical hull, a long visor-like gash serving as its eyes. Behind the gash, real eyes, beady yellow orbs, stared.
There had been four of the ‘killa kans’ when the Iron Warriors were first ambushed. The machines had been lurking behind a pile of scrap within the ork encampment, seemingly just another jumble of junk. At least until they had lurched upwards in obscene life and started firing on the Space Marines.
That had been their first mistake. With their cannons, the killa kans could have kept the Raptors at a distance, denying them the close-quarters combat at which they excelled. By waiting until their enemies were right on top of them, the xenos had woefully overestimated their own strength.
Malfas had claimed the first of the machines, blowing off one of its legs with a krak grenade and then ripping open its hull with his power fist. The alien operator, a wizened little gretchin that had been hard-wired into the killa kan, shrieked as it was forcibly removed from the cockpit. Its shrieks grew louder when Malfas dashed its brains out against the cylindrical hull.
Uzraal took the second killa kan, his meltagun scorching a hole clean through the hull and causing its promethium-fuelled engine to explode. The wreckage had staggered for a few moments, even managing to fire a few wild shots into the air before it finally slumped over and was still.
The third and fourth machines had become the objectives of Vallax and Rhodaan, the two commanders taking it as a matter of pride to outdo each other. Both of them had warned away the other Iron Warriors, determined to tackle the enemy alone. While Vallax duelled with his foe, picking it apart piecemeal with his chainaxe, Rhodaan scored the hull of his adversary with quick shots from his plasma pistol, trying to angle around to the killa kan’s engine.
Since their withdrawal from the battlefortress, the Iron Warriors had been subjected to almost constant attack. The anticipated confusion and disorder from the death of their warlord had yet to manifest among the orks. Vallax laid it down to a simple cause – the presence of Space Marines in the alien camp. With an enemy in their midst, the orks had a common cause to provide them with cohesion and unity of purpose. Once that cause was eliminated, then the brutes would fall to fighting among themselves to determine the new warboss.
It was a theory that supported the facts, though Rhodaan wasn’t going to let himself and his men be slaughtered just to prove Vallax right. The only course of action was a speedy extraction from the ork camp, but with air supremacy questionable, extraction was something the Raptors would have to attend to on their own. Short, controlled jumps across the ork camp had drained their packs of fuel, forcing them to make the last leg of their retreat on foot, repelling enraged aliens every step of the way.
Rhodaan dived as his enemy finally opened fire with its cannon. The gretchin inside the killa kan was panicking now that half its comrades were destroyed. In that panic, it could only focus on a limited range of action. By finally goading it into using the cannon, Rhodaan could ignore the menace of the power shears, at least for a few seconds.
A few seconds were all he needed. Throwing himself in a long slide that carried him between the killa kan’s stomping legs, Rhodaan fired a blast from his plasma pistol into the underside of the machine’s engine. The point-blank shot quickly bore results, thick black smoke billowing from the engine and little flames flickering from rents in the hull. The killa kan swung around, its shears snapping at Rhodaan as the Iron Warrior withdrew. Blasting a vicious bellow across its loudspeakers, the machine started to pursue him. After a few steps however, the bellows turned to squeals. Flames were now spewing from all over the hull, fires raging inside the killa kan. Pursuit degenerated into frantic flight as the gretchin cooked within its own machine. Its blind panic drove it into a stack of ruined battlewagons which toppled on top of the killa kan, burying it completely.
Rhodaan turned away from his victory to see Vallax bringing down his own enemy, sawing through a hatch on its hull, then driving the blade of the axe deep inside to pulp the gretchin within. Greasy blood and gobs of flesh churned from the exposed hatchway, spattering Vallax’s armour.
The Over-Captain stared across the wreckage, observing the smoke rising from where Rhodaan’s own foe was buried. With an angry shift of his shoulder, he pulled the chainaxe away, glaring sullenly at the whirring blade. ‘Brother Nazdrav,’ he growled across the vox. ‘This weapon is no longer functioning at peak efficiency. You will provide me with yours.’
Rhodaan could see Nazdrav’s hand clench into a fist as his commander issued the order, but the Raptor knew better than to question Vallax. Dutifully, he marched to the Over-Captain’s side and exchanged his sword for the gore-crusted axe.
‘Our ingress to Vorago is two kilometres east,’ Vallax announced across the inter-squad channel, gesturing past the piled wreckage with his new sword. ‘There is an old drainage pipe. We will cut our way in and employ it to re-enter the city.’ The Over-Captain paused, turning to stare at Rhodaan.
‘Captain,’ Vallax resumed. ‘Without the benefit of a jump pack, it seems Brother Merihem has fallen behind. You will provide a rearguard to lead him to the extraction point.’
Rhodaan glared at the Over-Captain, visualising the
smirk on Vallax’s scarred face. ‘Warsmith Andraaz will require every Iron Warrior he can get when he goes on the offensive,’ he pointed out.
Vallax nodded. ‘Precisely why I want you to recover Brother Merihem. If you do not feel up to the task, however, I am certain we can explain your failure to the Warsmith.’
‘There will be no need, Over-Captain,’ Rhodaan announced. ‘I will stay here and await Merihem.’
‘Excellent, captain,’ Vallax declared. He waved his arm, motioning the Raptors of Squad Kyrith and Squad Vidarna forwards. ‘When you rendezvous with Merihem, lead him back to the drainage pipe. Unless there is danger of the orks exploiting the breach, we will leave the way open for you.’
Rhodaan watched as the Iron Warriors withdrew beyond the scrap yard, listening to the sounds of gunfire as they fended off isolated pockets of aliens. Vallax’s last words echoed in his mind, taunting him with their barely disguised malice.
Whatever else happened, he was certain of one thing. He was going to need to find his own way back inside Vorago.
Chapter XIV
I-Day Plus Ninety-Four
Taofang scrambled for shelter as the clunky ork fighter swept along the wall, strafing anything that moved. The deranged xenos pilot flew its craft so low that he could see its fanged face leering from behind the glass cowling, its mouth gaping in raucous laughter. Heavy bolters, secured to the fighter’s wings with loops of chain, chattered incessantly, their vibrations making the plane wobble ridiculously as it streaked overhead. By all the rules of logic, there was no way such a crude patchwork of scrap should be able to fly, yet fly it did, well enough to slaughter the men posted along the firebreak.
‘Taofang! Here!’
The janissary spun as he heard Mingzhou call him. He could just see the wild cascade of her crimson hair peaking above the lip of a firing pit. He gave one last desultory glance at the embrasure he had been sprinting towards, then dashed towards the pit. There was a lot a Scorpion could learn from a Jackal, it seemed. Not least of which was that in a crisis it paid to think beyond one’s training.