Straken

by Toby Frost

  Tarricus looked as if he were going to run. Ferrens’s face was frozen in a look of utter surprise. Lavant licked his lips, his hands raised to grapple.

  In the centre of the room, Morrell stood huffing with rage. The insignia on his coat pumped up and down with each breath. His hands curled into fists, stretched out, flexed, and became fists again.

  Tanner stepped forward. ‘Well?’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Straken yelled. He hit the table. Wood splintered. The map tore. Straken raised his hand slowly, still in a fist. ‘I said that’s enough,’ he said, quieter now. ‘You want to fight in the street like a bunch of children? Go ahead. Maybe the orks’ll hold your jackets for you. But if you – any of you – dare try it anywhere near me, or while Warboss Killzkar is still alive, you’ll be answering to this.’ He opened his hand – the whine of the servos, usually almost silent, seemed as loud as a cloud of mosquitoes. ‘Right now, and until I say otherwise, you people will be doing one thing, and one only – fighting orks. Am I clear?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Morrell said loudly. ‘I entirely agree. But the discipline of this unit–’

  ‘I’ve got all the discipline I need right now,’ Straken replied. ‘Tanner. Are you going to muck around like a little kid, or are you going to act like a soldier of the Imperial Guard?’

  Tanner took a slow, deep breath. He looked around the room, at the walls instead of the occupants, and ran his hand over his face. When he took his hand away, his features were grim and set. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. Now, to business. Lavant, I want your team ready to march out in three hours. Whatever duties you’ve got here, I want them assigned elsewhere. Commissar, you’ll be coming with us. We may need a… ah… more official-looking representative of the Guard. Tanner, you’ll be helping train the civilians at the guild base. Understand?’

  Tanner nodded.

  Morrell saluted and stood up in a soft swish of leather. ‘I have reports to write. I’ll be about my work, colonel,’ he said. ‘Unless you have any further business for me.’

  ‘None, commissar,’ Straken said.

  They watched Morrell stride out of the room. As he disappeared, Tarricus exhaled.

  ‘Meeting’s over,’ Straken said.

  Ferrens tossed her lho-stick down and ground it under her boot. She got up, took her laslock rifle from the side table and slung it across her back. She looked eager and slightly crazy, the exact opposite of Tarricus. The two civilians departed.

  ‘We need to deal with that leash,’ Tanner said. ‘He murdered Zandro.’

  ‘You heard me,’ Straken said. ‘When we’re done here, you can take it up with General Greiss. Until then, we’re killing orks.’

  ‘You know that’s not going to happen. Remember when those glory boys shelled us by mistake, back on Signis Eight? By the time we see Greiss again, no one’ll remember who Zandro even was.’ Tanner scowled. ‘If we see him again.’

  ‘Get planning the route, Lavant,’ Straken said. ‘And Tanner, I want those civvies sharp and ready, all right? We need back-up personnel and scouts. I want them razor sharp. If you want to hit something, go down to the punchbags and show the locals how to box. Now, step to it, Guardsmen.’

  He strode out, boots loud on the plascrete floor. Lavant waited until Straken had gone, and turned back to his maps.

  Tanner strolled over and leaned against the wall. After a little while, Lavant realised that Tanner was not going to go away. ‘Need something?’ he asked.

  Tanner folded his arms. ‘You and I,’ he began, ‘have to talk.’

  ‘Next group, move up!’ shouted Sergeant Halda. His full beard and angry eyes made him look like a preacher, Straken thought, the sort of half-mad devotee the Ecclesiarchy would sent to some backward planet to keep the colonists in line. ‘Get on that firing line!’

  A dozen civilians of both sexes, ranging between ten and seventy, pulled up their salvaged laslocks and aimed at the outline drawn on the rocks behind them. Shots cracked out, and three hit the target.

  ‘Now run to the post and back!’ Halda shouted, pointing across the training range. ‘Move, son, or I’ll help you with my boot! Pick those feet up, granddad – do you need a stick to lean on?’

  Straken glanced at Halda. The civilian auxiliaries ran on, kit flapping, panting loudly. ‘How’re they doing, sergeant?’

  ‘They’ll never be front line quality,’ Halda replied. ‘But as support staff, maybe as scouts, they’ll be good.’

  ‘Don’t work them to death just yet. Listen, Tanner’ll be helping you for a couple of days. Let me know if anything unusual comes up, will you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. Keep an eye out, Halda. I want to know about anything untoward, whether it’s from this lot or our people. If anything comes up, bring it straight back to me – nobody else.’

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘Just being careful, that’s all. Now get back to your shouting.’

  Halda smiled. ‘I learned it from an expert, sir,’ he said. ‘Get down to the range again and ready your guns!’

  An engine growled behind them. Straken turned and saw an open-topped mining truck come rolling out of the dark. The cab had been reinforced with sheet plasteel, and an ancient-looking heavy stubber had been mounted on the back. Lavant leaned out of the passenger side of the cab. ‘Coming along, sir? We can fit one more.’

  Straken swung himself up. As the truck rumbled towards the cave entrance, it occurred to him that this was the first time that he’d been in a vehicle since they had arrived in Dulma’lin. Straken glanced into the back of the cab. Morrell sat on the far side, next to an ammo box. He gave Straken a brief nod.

  The driver was silent. Lavant talked almost continuously, but his eyes never left the road.

  ‘We’ve got guards posted down the main tunnel,’ he explained. ‘We cleared out the wreckage and set up fire points. You remember those ork bikers that came racing down here, when we first made contact with the civilians? We’ve not seen them since.’

  ‘Keep looking. If they come back, kill them.’

  ‘Will do, sir. Now, just past the tunnel we go left, along the edge of the mushroom forest.’

  The truck turned slowly. Straken saw grey tarpaulins stretched between the trees, covering stashes of bombs made from mining explosives. This was Catachan territory, no doubt about it. Were the orks to enter in any number, it would become an excellent killing-ground. The only problem, he reflected, was that the orks had no use for this place.

  Lavant kept talking, explaining the preparations he had made and the traps his men had set. He sounded keen to impress. Straken wondered if the captain realised that Straken found him odd.

  ‘You’ve been busy,’ Straken said, ‘but it’s time we took the fight to the orks.’

  ‘Of course, sir. That’s why I’ve been moving our gear into the forward positions in the hab-zones. See there?’ He pointed to a long, low building on the right. ‘That’s one of ours. Well hidden, good communications, excellent defensive capabilities–’

  ‘Have you ever been to Cadia?’

  Lavant frowned. ‘Cadia? No, colonel. Why?’

  ‘You sure sound like a Cadian sometimes.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Straken saw the driver suppress a smile.

  ‘I’m Catachan born and bred,’ Lavant snapped back. ‘Obviously.’

  There was a moment’s silence. ‘Course you are,’ Straken said.

  They pulled up forty-five metres from the vox tower. In a fourth-floor window of a nearby hab-block, light glinted on magnoculars. A soldier gave them the all-clear hand signal. Up in the vox tower itself, men watched the surrounding blocks.

  Lavant ordered their supplies to be unloaded from the back of the truck. Straken pitched in, his bionics making light work of the lifting. Lavant helped too, careful as ever. Even Morrell assisted, a case of grenades wedged under his left arm, the right hand free. Straken wondered if he expected to have to draw his bolt pis
tol.

  Unloading was easy compared to the task of hauling the boxes up seven flights of stairs. Most of the gear was food – local stuff, since their rations were long gone – together with ammunition for snipers and rockets for the missile launcher the Guardsmen had mounted in the vox tower.

  Strange, Straken thought as they struggled upwards. Lavant clearly was Catachan: the heavy build and natural strength marked him out as having grown up on a high-gravity world. But the old joke about Cadians being prissy had cut him deeply. You heard it almost every day among the men – whether it was Vostroyans, Mordian Iron Guard or some other smartly dressed unit, there was always some regiment that the Catachans joked about as being toy soldiers in pressed uniforms. Everyone knew that the jokes were just that – for one thing, a fair few Cadians were as hard as nails – but something about it had genuinely offended Lavant.

  As he stepped onto the top floor landing, the door opened before Straken and a man said, ‘Yalsky, get your lazy– Oh, sorry, sir.’ The soldier stood to attention and saluted, and Straken shoved the box of supplies at him.

  In the cramped control room, three Guardsmen watched the different windows. Music blared from the room’s speakers: a rough-sounding band were shouting and hacking their way through a song about a deep-mining woman. Seeing their guest, they stood up and the music died.

  ‘I thought this was a five-man post,’ Straken said. Behind him, the rest of Lavant’s team huffed and cursed as they unloaded their supplies on the landing.

  ‘It is, sir,’ said the man who had shouted. ‘One of us just stepped out to use the, y’know, facilities. The other’s on watch up on the roof. He keeps to himself.’

  Straken stepped to the window. The roofs of hab-blocks stretched away. Even here, deep underground, the apartments had been made to Administratum standard. Thirty metres above them, the cavern roof was wreathed in thin cloud. So, Straken thought, this was the edge of his domain, the point where Catachan control faded into a no-man’s-land. Beyond this point, the area was not of any value to the orks, but not under Straken’s control.

  He looked out the way he had done two months ago, remembering the convoy of captured vehicles rolling past. For a moment Straken recalled the soldier roped to the front of the Chimera, struggling vainly to get free. Long dead.

  And somewhere out there, he thought, looking at the hab-buildings, is an enemy who has made twenty-eight soldiers disappear.

  The fourth man came in. He had one eye. Straken recognised him as Orlow, who had been on the first expedition to this area. Lavant completed the group.

  Straken set out the situation.

  ‘I’ve heard music a couple of times,’ Orlow replied, ‘but no more than that. It comes from over there,’ he added, pointing. ‘It sounds like marching-hymns.’ He stared out of the window. ‘One of the fellows with me last month said that he heard a voice with it, calling to him. But then, he was the kind of man who believes that sort of stuff, if you see what I mean.’

  Straken nodded. He could imagine the soldiers, sitting up here at night, watching the city and wondering what lurked among the empty homes.

  ‘It sounds like superstitious nonsense,’ Morrell said.

  ‘What was this man’s name?’ Straken asked.

  ‘Hass,’ Orlow said. ‘Rogen Hass. But you won’t be able to talk to him. He was with the patrol that disappeared.’

  A trooper with a neat strip of white hair shaved down the centre of his head said, ‘I’ve heard the music, once or twice. It doesn’t come often. Me and Loke heard it about a week ago. It was loud as hell, but it just played a couple of verses and cut out. We thought it was something going wrong – a trap, or some machine’s spirit breaking.’ He shrugged. ‘I didn’t think it was for us, somehow.’

  The third soldier, evidently Loke, nodded.

  Lavant said, ‘Hey.’ The soldiers had pinned a street plan to the wall, patched together out of pages from a guidebook. The captain pointed. ‘You say the music you’ve heard is hymns. There’re three churches north-west of here. They’d have the comms and power supply to broadcast sound loud enough to hear from a block away – and the music collection.’

  ‘One of ’em’s a burnt-out shell,’ said Loke. ‘Saint Lucador’s. We take bearings off the steeple on patrol.’

  ‘Which leaves us the Chapel of St Lua Immolata, and the Temple of Our Protector of the Healing Word,’ Lavant said.

  Straken looked out the window, into no-man’s-land. ‘Can we see them from up here?’ he asked, scanning the hab-blocks.

  ‘Not from up here,’ said the white-haired man, the one they had called Yalsky. ‘Maybe from the roof. There’s a man up there on watch – but watch out, he’s not the sociable type.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Straken said to Lavant. ‘Lead the way.’

  They opened a trapdoor and climbed onto the roof. Without bird-life or any real weather, it seemed oddly calm. It reminded Straken of moments on Miral, standing in the hot still air, waiting for a storm to break. Far above, near the cavern roof, something large and dark flapped through the mist. It looked like a mixture of bat and ray.

  Lavant pointed. ‘The locals say they bring you luck.’

  ‘Not if one does its business on you,’ Yalsky said.

  A man sat on an upturned crate at the far side of the roof. A monocular lay beside him. He was big even for a Catachan. He leaned forward, hands close together as if praying. As Straken came closer, he saw that the man was pouring liquid over the cutting edge of a broad-bladed knife. The little bottle looked tiny in the soldier’s wide, scarred hands.

  ‘Guardsman,’ Lavant said. ‘Is it possible to see either the Temple of the Healing Word or the Chapel of Lua Immolata from here?’

  The soldier did not look up. He continued his careful work, pouring venom along his knife-blade as if anointing it. ‘You’ve got eyes,’ he said. ‘Use ’em.’

  Yalsky said, ‘Hey, Marbo. You’re talking to an officer.’

  The soldier looked up. His face was sulky and sad in equal measure. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You’ve got eyes, sir.’

  ‘Watch it, boy,’ Morrell said, stepping forward. The commissar flexed his gloved fingers; leather creaked.

  Straken looked at the pair of them, and wondered what would happen if it came to blows. ‘I want to know where the nearest churches are, or anywhere else that has a vox-caster system. And if you address an officer like that again, I won’t leave any of you intact for Commissar Morrell to put on a charge. Understood?’

  Five minutes later, they returned to the vox-room. ‘We’re heading out,’ Straken said. ‘Recce job. Commissar, you’re staying here. I need someone to take control of this area if we fail to return.’ Morrell nodded. Straken gestured to the Guard team. ‘You people monitor the comms. If you don’t hear back from us in two days, two of you are to go back with Commissar Morrell and tell Captain Tanner that he’s in command. And don’t send a search party after us. No point in wasting more people.’

  They gathered at the base of the tower: Straken, Lavant and his team, Marbo and Yalsky, the white-haired trooper from the vox tower.

  ‘Listen up,’ Straken said. ‘We’ll leave the truck here and head out towards the two churches on the map. We’re going to sweep through and search for any clue of what happened to the men who’ve disappeared out here. I heard church music playing over a vox-caster somewhere to the north-west a while ago. I understand that the sentries hear it every so often too. I’ve no idea what the source of it is – Ecclesiarchy holed up somewhere, orks using the hymns to lure our people into the open, maybe – but we’re going to find out.’ Straken pointed down the road. ‘I don’t need to tell you that anywhere north of here is enemy territory. Stay sharp and report anything suspicious. We may meet with serious resistance.’

  ‘Good thing I brought this thing,’ one of Lavant’s team said, patting the chipped plasma gun slung across his body on its shoulder strap.

  ‘Should we split into groups?’ Lavant asked.
<
br />   Straken shook his head. ‘We’ll go as one. It’ll be quicker, and we may need the firepower. Any questions, people? Marbo and Yalsky, you’re leading the way. Gear up, men. Let’s go.’

  They travelled quickly and quietly, keeping to the sides of streets, in the shadow of the hab-blocks. Several times they moved through the buildings, taking some short cut best known to the two scouts. At one point they walked through a warehouse that had housed luxury goods and frozen meat.

  ‘We cleaned out the freezers and took the food back to the guild base,’ Yalsky explained. ‘Lucky we did, because the power went down soon after. Since then, we’ve been using them for other stuff.’

  He opened a door as heavy as a bank vault’s, pushing it open with his shoulder. Inside the cold room, almost a dozen ork corpses lay on the floor. They looked bad enough in life: the cold had given them a damp, rubbery look.

  ‘Tidy work,’ Lavant said.

  ‘Thanks,’ Yalsky replied. ‘A couple of months ago they’d come down here in little groups, looking for stuff to loot. Not just food, though, machines as well. They must make something out of it, I suppose.’ Straken thought of the ork mech and its minions, ransacking that servitor workshop. ‘They’ve given up now,’ Yalsky said, shutting the massive door. ‘They must have realised that there’s death here.’

  Straken thought, I wonder how many men we’d have to lose before we came to the same conclusion? He remembered his order to the watchers in the vox tower: if this party goes missing, send no more. He then wondered what would happen to the whole mission if he fell.

  ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Lavant, let’s keep moving. Yalsky, lock that door up.’ He strode forward to take the lead. ‘Pick it up, people – we’ve not got all day!’

  Yalsky sealed the freezer door and hurried along.

  They slipped through the warehouse and onto the streets. Straken looked into the hab-blocks as they passed, into the empty rooms. Most of the windows were intact. There had been nothing for the orks to take; from the looks of it, they had hardly bothered to search. Without weapons to steal or prisoners to torment, there was little in the hab-blocks that the orks might want except canned food. Straken imagined the hab-zones being given to some low-ranking ork chieftain as a booby prize.