He caught sight of something on the side of the track.
‘Pull her up here, Parker,’ he ordered the driver and stood up out of the Salamander.
‘Commissar!’
Reeve, who was watching the beards supervising the men, turned and regarded the colonel. Arbulaster carried on.
‘We are presenting some of the commendations tonight, commissar. There is one where your attendance would be much appreciated.’
Reeve said nothing, as he always did when he did not consider that a response was required. Arbulaster was undeterred.
‘It is an ogryn, very dedicated. You know how they especially venerate those of your position. If you were there, I do believe it would be ten times as inspirational as if I presented it alone. Will you attend?’
Reeve considered it for a moment.
‘This is Ogryn Frn’k attached to Major Stanhope’s company?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘I accept, colonel. I have some other business with that company. I will attend.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ Arbulaster couldn’t care less as to Reeve’s reason; getting the commissar there was all that was important. ‘Tonight then, commissar. At the new transit camp.’ He tapped the driver’s helmet and sat back down as they powered off to the head of the column.
Carson’s patrol advanced quietly through the jungle. The going was relatively easy. Unlike the jungle areas close to the coastal settlements, which had once been cleared by the colonists but which now had grown back as an impenetrable mesh of thorn thickets and underbrush, this jungle was old. The battle for supremacy had been won long ago by the great trees whose canopy blotted the light from the ground and thereby suppressed the growth of any competition. There was no grass, no flowers; all that covered the ground was a thick carpet of dead leaves. The only other plant-life that prospered were the parasites: the creepers, vines and mosses that drew their life from others. In the half-lit gloom and deep shadow, the trunks of the giants stood like pillars in a dark and limitless cathedral. In such a place, the men needed no reminding to stay silent and so their progress was accompanied only by the crackle of the dead leaves underfoot.
Van Am held her hunting rifle ready in both hands. They were pushing further forwards today than they ever had done before. Their target was the great ring of grassland that stretched five or six kilometres from the crater. When the rok had impacted, super-heated fragments of it fell on the jungle, starting wildfires in every direction. On her first expedition, she had discovered the crater surrounded by a blackened plain of charred vegetation. The Valkyrie pilots had reported that that plain was now green. Arbulaster had considered this a significant boon, allowing his tanks to cross the final stretch in a day. Carson, though, wanted to ensure that it was just grass and fireweed and nothing more pernicious that would delay the column even further.
The jungle was quiet. Quieter than Van Am had ever known it. Her grandmother had sent her to Tswaing fifteen years before, to ‘prepare her’ as she had cryptically pronounced. But the young Van Am found the isolated Tswaing settlement little better than a prison. It was surrounded by the jungle and tree branches encroached over the settlement’s walls. The jungle appeared to her a gloomy and dangerous place, very different to the wide plains of the farms near Voorheid where she had spent her earliest years. It held that same sense of oppression that her grandmother claimed the first colonists had been trying to escape. The young Van Am endured her exile with little grace, paying scant attention to what her keepers tried to teach her of survival there. Her uncooperative attitude only shifted after one of her guardians finally lost his temper and let slip that her grandmother would be granting her all her land in Tswaing, thousands of acres, the settlement included, when she turned fourteen.
It shocked her. The sudden sense of ownership, of responsibility, struck her hard. On Frisia, scarcely any usable land existed outside of that possessed by the Imperial government. The rights and deeds over what little there was were a source of immense pride to a family and were vigorously defended. Even on Voor, only some of the colonists, those who had worked off their indentured service to the Imperium, were allowed to own the land they worked. The rank of landholder was treated with dignity and respect. To have a chance at it so young… Van Am was determined to prove herself worthy of it. When she travelled out into the jungle again, the trees and animals no longer felt like her gaolers, rather she saw them as her wards. They were savage, yes, even deadly, but she knew that if they should kill her it would only be because she had not learnt them well enough.
But now she could sense the sickness of her land. The alien chill caused by the clouds overhead was slowly killing the plants. As the plants died, so did the creatures. Even on her first expedition to the rok the jungle was still full of the sounds of life. Now it was quiet. There were only the orks and the Guardsmen, trespassers both.
She saw a slight commotion at the head of the platoon and they halted. One of the Voorjer scouts approached to report to the command section, and she and Carson went to the front of the platoon to see for themselves. Another party had stopped there at some point before. Orks were not subtle creatures and the evidence of their residence was easy to see: the carpet of leaves had been kicked aside where they had walked, they had clumsily felled a tree for wood to start their fires, and they had left the bones of the creature they had cooked and eaten in the embers.
Carson ordered the platoon to deploy from its file to encircle the area. The men split and advanced cautiously on either side, Forjaz taking his section to the left, Corporal Marble taking his to the right. Only once they were in place did Carson lead the command section forwards to investigate.
The lieutenant had made an impression on Van Am. The other Brimlock officers she had encountered were exactly as her grandmother had predicted: hide-bound, crude and old. They were all old, even the troopers. They were veterans, to be sure, but as far as Van Am could tell that just meant that they had learned one way of warfare and stuck to it. Even when they did patrol, they stayed close to the path, their link back to Dova, back to warfare they understood. They felt secure there and, in thinking so, they automatically considered everything outside to be hostile, everything including the jungle itself. They spooked themselves believing that the orks were phantoms, able to move through the terrain with ease, without making a sound.
Carson was the only one of them who had shown he thought differently. While the others clutched their lasguns tight, keeping them ready to fire in an instant, Carson kept his pistols holstered. He walked through the jungle with none of the others’ instinctive fear. He knew that the truth, as the patrol now saw before them, was very different. It was the orks who were on the alien world. The jungle was even more unfamiliar to them than it was for the Guardsmen. Carson appreciated what Van Am had tried to tell the rest: the jungle was not against them, the jungle was neutral.
As Carson went to look at the remains of the creature, Van Am examined the tracks. ‘A few dozen, their path is curving back towards the crater. Not orks though.’
‘No,’ Carson replied. ‘But it’s something they brought with them. Look at this.’
She went over.
‘Do you know what this is?’ He pointed at the remains of the carcass. She looked at it and scowled in disgust. The body was squat, bulbous, without arms; but the face, the face was almost human.
‘No. What is it?’
Carson picked up one of the bones, broken in two to drain the marrow. ‘A walking larder. They follow the orks, eating anything that moves, and then the orks eat them.’
He looked down the trail for a moment. Van Am watched his face while he thought, the slight deepening of the lines on his brow, the intensity of his gaze, the sudden focus when he made his decision.
‘We follow them, but we stay off their path,’ he said and began dictating the new marching order. His men obeyed his commands q
uickly. Van Am saw that they did not obey him out of fear or obligation to his rank, rather because they did not want to disappoint him. She could understand why; the lieutenant cast an aura of confidence about him. He knew as little as she did as to what lay ahead, yet as he gave his orders, she could believe that he had planned it all from the beginning.
‘Holder?’
Van Am blinked. ‘Yes?’
‘Are you all right?’
She swung her rifle barrel up to grip it with her other hand. ‘Perfectly fine.’
They moved out cautiously at first, but quickened their pace as they progressed and did not encounter the enemy. After a few minutes they saw a mound of leavings on the trail; they were pungent, warm and very fresh. Spurred on, Carson and Van Am closed the distance up to the head of the column. Suddenly, one of the men in the lead made a frantic signal and dropped. In the split second it took Van Am to realise what he was doing, the other Guardsmen had all flattened themselves to the ground and she felt Carson tug at the side of her trousers to bring her down as well. They lay there, utterly still, for a long minute, waiting to see some sign of whatever had excited the scout. Nothing. Carson rose to his haunches and ghosted forwards. He reached the front of the patrol; it was the trooper they called Blanks. Carson made a gesture with his hand and Blanks replied in kind. She watched the silent conversation until finally Carson nodded and motioned her to join them.
Ahead of them was their quarry. There were not a few dozen but sixty at least of the orkish herd animals. Their features, which had appeared merely freakish on the corpse, were grotesque upon the live examples. They were bunched together, butting and biting at each other in bad temper. A dozen gretchin armed with poles and spears prodded them to keep them marshalled together, and at their rear was the largest ork Van Am had ever seen. It pulled the remains of an unfortunate jungle creature from the jaws of the herd and flicked its whip. The loud crack urged the gretchin to shove the herd forwards down the trail and it moved with a great cacophony of screeches, growls and snaps. The ork did not care about being quiet. It felt secure, confident, as though it were the master of this place.
Van Am was ready to put a shot through its head to demonstrate how wrong it was, but Carson gave no move towards an attack. Instead, he was looking ahead, at the line of grey light now visible through the trees and the curve of the slope of the crater beyond. They were nearly at the edge.
They shadowed the ork and his herd the rest of the distance until finally it emerged from the trees. There, back on familiar ground, the herd beasts picked up speed and waddled away on their two legs. The ork cracked the whip again and the gretchin went careering after them to stop them dispersing. The patrol reached the edge of the treeline and looked out.
The green expanses the Valkyrie pilots had seen were not grasslands but kilometres and kilometres of lichen and mould carpeting the ground. The few trees that still remained were covered with the black and yellow fungi eating away at them. Hardened mushrooms with wide umbrellas were still low to the ground, but were growing quickly to take the drying trees’ place. Their thick stalks were covered with their smaller cousins, sticking out like flints. Others grew in clusters, like sickly-coloured flowers, while still more littered the ground, their appearance varying from crystal-latticed eggs to piles of leavings. The perverted landscape flowed all the way to the rise of the crater in the distance, and from that crater the leering orkish glyph carved from stone looked over its lands with pride.
For Van Am, it was a monstrous vision, a living bruise on her jungle. She finally began to understand that she could not merely kill these xenos, she would have to burn her planet to be rid of them.
Chapter Nine
Carson’s company had slotted into the lines of men marching back from the head of the path to the new site of the transit camp. Although Drum’s tanks and Ledbetter’s cavalry were able to return to the greater safety of Dova each night, the infantry needed to be housed closer to the front. So, as well as carving a path through the jungle, the overworked beards had also constructed the transit camps, clearing nearly twenty acres of jungle around the path for the fort and the dead ground surrounding it. Every few days, all work at the front halted as the beards moved the fort a half-day’s march up the trail to the next area they had cleared. The whole process took an immense amount of effort across such terrain and it slowed down the overall advance, but it was steady and it was secure.
As the company marched into the camp that the colonel had designated Fort Eliza, after his wife, the beards in their construction Sentinels were hurrying to place the last sections of the wall behind the glacis and trench dug around the camp. The skies were growing black. The ever-present clouds blocked the light of the setting sun and so day rapidly turned to night. Only at the line of the horizon could hints of orange and red be seen through the cracks in the darkening grey.
Red led the men to the tent cluster where they were billeted. Forjaz and Booth came around with the evening rations and the men groaned at the sight of them. Officially the company had been ‘rested’ during the day and so their lot had been drawn to be the first on sentry duty. They had half an hour to cook their rations as best they could before they took their posts to stand watch, as the other companies took their time to eat in the central mess. The men grumbled as usual but without much rancour. At least, once they were done, they could have an uninterrupted night’s sleep. And the men of second platoon were additionally fortunate because Mouse, having been excused the patrol, had had a full day to get up to his usual business and knew the wisdom in being generous. He had acquired cheese, pudding, fruit and pastries and, having eaten his fill already, handed the rest around.
‘Crumpet?’ he said, offering it to the circle.
‘Yes, muffin?’ Ducky said from the other side of him.
Mouse turned around. ‘What’s that?’
‘Oh sorry,’ Ducky continued, taking it. ‘I thought we were trying out new pet names for each other.’
Mouse shook his head at the medic’s antics and moved on to Marble. ‘Anything for you?’
Marble, nicknamed such because of eldar gun-gems he’d picked up ‘for research purposes’ on Azzabar and managed to sneak past Commissariat inspectors by hiding them internally, was busy re-rigging his lasgun yet again.
‘Do you have a micro-energy regulator?’ he said without looking up. ‘It’s still overloading when you ride the pull too long.’
‘How about a scone?’
Marble looked at him, exasperated, then glanced back at the scone, took it, and went back to his task. Mouse carried on round to Gardner.
‘What about you, corporal? Got a few day-old loaves here that might be good for Trouble.’
Gardner looked them over. ‘Where’d they come from?’
Mouse sighed. ‘Why’d you ask that, corp? They ain’t got a name on ’em.’
Gardner frowned for a moment, but then took the sack and headed off over to the corner where Frn’k was sitting. The ogryn ate separately to the rest of the company so he wasn’t tempted to take their food and they weren’t nauseated by his smell. Mouse finished distributing his haul to the rest of the platoon. Blanks sat a small distance from the rest of them, feeling neither welcomed nor excluded. It was time to change that, he decided. He approached Mouse.
‘So, where’d they come from?’ he asked.
‘You as well, Blanks?’ Mouse narrowed his eyes. ‘Funny, I know you don’t remember anything, but I didn’t take you as the sort to stick by the law.’
Blanks regarded Mouse carefully, then picked out a piece of cheese and took a bite from it. ‘I think you’re right,’ he said, and smiled. Mouse chuckled at that and, with that small gesture, there was an opening.
‘I tell you,’ Mouse began. ‘Sticking by the law doesn’t say anything about you. Down in the rookeries, there ain’t laws. None that matter. That’s where you learn what you’
re willing to do and what you ain’t.’
‘Is that where you started?’
‘It’s where I’d still be if I hadn’t volunteered.’
‘You’re not a conscript?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Mouse exclaimed. ‘None of us are. We’re all volunteers.’
‘That’s right,’ Ducky added. ‘Brimlock is very strict on that. They’ll only conscript you if you’re not smart enough to volunteer.’
‘We all had the choice,’ Mouse continued. ‘The choice to starve, the choice to get locked up, to have your back whipped on the factory lines or catch your death working the outside of the dirigibles.’
Ducky perked up. ‘A man offered to sell me a dirigible once, but it turned out to be a lot of hot air.’
Blanks ignored him. ‘Maybe you’ll see it differently when you go back.’
‘Go back?’ Mouse exclaimed. ‘None of us are going back. One-way ticket when you join the Guard. They’ll fork out to lug you halfway across the galaxy, but they won’t for a return trip.’
‘Apart from their favourites,’ Ducky amended.
‘Apart from them. Room for a few to go back with the colours. The clinkers, you know, the ones with the medals, to found the next Eleventh.’
‘The officers?’ Blanks said.
‘A few of ’em,’ Mouse said. ‘The colonel, of course, and anywhere he goes he’ll take Brooce with him. The Rooster’s already been promised a place; he won it after Mespots. Drum’s too barmy. Rosa wouldn’t fit. The new one, Ledbetter, he’s a good bet, they like to take a tin belly with ’em. Some of the sergeants as well, ’cos you need a few who actually know the end of a lasgun. Red’d be top of the list, I’d wager.’
‘Won’t be Forjaz,’ Ducky said. ‘He’s got so many kids in tow it’d be quicker to bring Brimlock to us.’
Imperial Glory Page 11