by Toby Frost
The explosion was so loud that it jerked Straken awake. The sound rang his skull like a bell, and for a moment he thought that the squiggoth had trampled him, crushing his head. Then Straken opened his eye and saw rock above him, moving. Guns rattled somewhere far away. He realised that he was lying on his back, and that people were carrying him.
‘Straken?’ A round face looked down, streaked with dirt. A slow, loud, rumbling sound crept in under the gunfire. It sounded like rock cracking. ‘Colonel?’
‘Tanner,’ he managed. A second man was helping. Straken recognised him as Marbo. ‘I’ve got to–’
‘You’re pretty messed up,’ Tanner said. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
‘The orks...’
‘Forget the orks. Look!’
They pulled him up. Tanner pointed. On the far side of the vault, the great sculpted pillar was falling apart. Rocks the size of houses fell down from Saint Helena’s face like tears, dropping into the aliens below. Her body was cracking open. With every second her outline lost more definition.
The roof fell in around the gates. Sunlight burst into the cavern like an orbital laser. A shelf of granite dropped onto the horde, crushing orks by the thousand. Even with his bionics smashed, his senses ruined, Straken felt the force of the impact, and its sound made his ears ring.
‘Truck,’ Marbo said.
Straken heard a motor close behind, sensed more people around him. A woman cried, ‘Put him on the back, quick!’
The hole in the roof widened, and an avalanche of rock fell onto the enemy below. Ork troopers, tanks, wagons and Dreadnoughts vanished under a steady, continuous flow of stone. Explosions flashed on the cavern floor, and in the middle of the carnage, the squiggoth ran in a blind panic, ploughing through the orks as it struggled towards the gates.
21.
Three days later, the relief troops rolled in. Commissar Morrell was there to greet them, alongside Captain Tanner. The Catachans ignored the commissar; Morrell knew that he would never be forgiven for executing Zandro. Toleration was the best he could hope for.
As the tanks rumbled past, followed by great tramping regiments in their crisp white armour, Morrell realised that he was filthy. His coat was ripped and spattered with blood, his trousers stitched where the medics had torn them to free his leg, his boots so ingrained with dirt that they would never scrub clean. The Purbech regiments seemed not just like men from another world, but a different sort of creature altogether.
Morrell was astonished not to be dead. He watched as the local medics handed Colonel Straken over to the medicae from the Radix Malorum, a tech-priest lurking behind them to deal with the colonel’s bionics. They’d get him going again, one way or another, Morrell thought. The Guard was good at keeping the men it wanted alive, even if the rest could go to hell. He paused, surprised by his own cynicism, and a voice called, ‘Commissar Morrell?’
He looked round, and saw another commissar. The man was thin, at least seventy, with beady eyes and a goatee beard smoothed to a point sharper than a woodpecker’s beak. The commissar took off his cap and stuffed it under his arm, the way the instructors taught them to do. ‘Eugene Semalken, Commissar Ordinary attached to the Third Purbech Rifles. Thought I’d come and see how you were faring.’
‘How kind,’ Morrell said, wondering whether he’d done something wrong.
‘Not at all.’ Behind Semalken, the medics slid Straken’s stretcher into the back of a converted scout car. It pulled away, rumbling towards the temporary headquarters. ‘You’ve done exceptionally well,’ Semalken said. ‘Even surviving here is an achievement. Victory, though – well, that’s something else.’ He leaned in slightly. ‘Frankly, I don’t know how you were able to take control of this rabble. It must’ve been hard just to stop them looting the place.’
‘Luckily, the orks got there first.’
‘Luckily? Oh, I see, the looting. Yes. Well,’ Semalken said, ‘you can rest easy. The place is under proper control now. Your lot’ll be lifted out in a day or two. You’ll come out of this mess looking good, you know. The Commissariat will be impressed that you held it together. I take it you’ll be submitting a report?’
‘I’ve made notes,’ Morrell replied. ‘I need to write a final draft.’
‘Of course.’
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ Morrell said, and he limped past Semalken. He kept walking, to get away from something that he couldn’t quite define.
He rubbed his hands together to warm them and walked on, past the smiling rows of Purbech troops, keen to be out of their sight.
Straken awoke in a cold, quiet room. The ceiling was vaulted. He sat up slowly and realised that he had been lying on a bed as if laid out in a chapel, waiting to be buried.
There were sensors on his chest. He disconnected them and stood upright, checked his metal arm and then his flesh one, and leaned against the side of the bed, remembering.
A tall man got up from a seat by the wall. He had been so still that Straken had hardly noticed him. As he approached, General Greiss smiled. ‘Welcome back.’
‘Sir.’ Straken saluted. ‘It’s good to see you, general. Where am I?’
‘The Radix Malorum. You took a bad hit.’ The old general glanced around and slipped a flask out of his pocket. ‘You need a drink? I brought some amasec.’
The battle came back to Straken in a jumble of images. He remembered leaping down into the squiggoth’s howdah, seeing Killzkar’s hideous face. ‘The orks. Did we win?’
Greiss chuckled. ‘You won all right. Killzkar’s army is finished. Most of them are under about a million tonnes of rock. And yes, Killzkar’s dead. It was a shambles by the time we made planetfall. The locals will have mopped up what was left. A textbook operation, you might say.’
Straken rubbed his good eye. Greiss was hiding something. He felt that bad news was about to break. The Imperial Guard only did textbook operations in its training manuals. ‘What about my men?’
‘I won’t lie, Straken. You took hard casualties. You’ve lost a third. Almost as many are still getting stitched up. To be honest, you were lucky to take that few. Under another commander, that fight would have been a last stand.’
Straken felt tired – not sleepy, but exhausted, as if each of his muscles had been stretched beyond repair. He walked across the room and looked at one of the readout screens, not really taking it in. A third of his regiment was dead. ‘We were lucky,’ he said. ‘When the roof caved in–’
‘Luck’s nothing to do with it,’ Greiss said. His face soured. ‘You did a damn good job down there. Not that anyone would know it.’
Straken frowned. ‘How do you mean, sir?’
Greiss said bitterly, ‘I had to take reinforcements at Purbech. Their High Praetor’s claiming the victory as his own.’
‘What?’
‘I know. Half the army I came with was Purbech. They’re still on Dulma’lin. Osh’Preen’s put himself in as governor – to prevent unrest, apparently. Now we’re on the way out, and they’re covering themselves in victory honours. That fish-faced, conniving…’ Greiss shook his head. ‘I’ve seen some bad stuff, Straken, on the field and off. But it’s things like this that make me sick.’
Straken folded his arms. He took a deep breath. ‘And my people? All the things they did?’
‘Written out of history.’ Greiss noticed a spot of dirt on his uniform, and began to fuss with it. Straken knew that the general didn’t want to look at him. ‘Osh’Preen says that the Catachans spent the year hiding in the caves.’
‘Son of a bitch.’ He shook his head. ‘Our own allies. You’d expect that from the xenos, but–’
‘What you did there was fine work. The Imperial Guard is lucky to have you.’
‘Screw the Guard. It’s my men I want to know about. People died down there, and now what? Now you’re saying they’ll go down on record as what? Cowards? Or did they never exist at all?’
Another man might have shrunk back from Straken. Greiss si
mply licked his thin lips.
At the back of the room, Nork Deddog looked up and growled.
‘It’s all right, Nork,’ Greiss replied. He turned back to Straken. ‘I’ve forwarded a formal complaint to the warmaster’s general staff.’
‘Yes, and I know how much good that’ll do.’
‘That’s not all. You weren’t entirely forgotten. Commissar Morrell’s put his final report through to the Commissariat three days ago. He deigned to send me a copy. Look.’
The general opened his jacket and took out a small data-slate. His twiglike fingers worked the controls. Straken took the slate. ‘There,’ said Greiss.
‘…while such methods may appear suggestive of dangerous individuality, not to mention deviation from sanctified dogma, I respectfully submit that the first duty of any Guardsman is to face and destroy the enemies of the Emperor. The kill-figures I have listed speak for themselves. Those seeming to require shows of elaborate propriety from regiments on extended duty would do well to recall that the Emperor’s light is not spread by the neatness of dress uniforms, but through the annihilation of heretics and aliens…’
As Straken read, Greiss took a sip from his flask. After a while, Straken handed him the data-slate.
‘I can see why they recalled him,’ Straken said. ‘Why the hell did he say that?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he just felt it was the truth.’
‘He’ll never be a lord commissar,’ Straken said. It was the closest thing to a compliment he’d ever said about one of the Commissariat. ‘So, Ryza, then?’
Greiss glanced away. ‘No. The Radix Malorum has been diverted away from the main warzone. We’ve entered the Ulani system. You’ll be fully briefed when our shuttles rendezvous with a Naval delegation. You’re to have your men ready in six hours.’
Straken was neither pleased nor surprised. He nodded. He looked at Greiss, and realised that the general didn’t know what was happening either. We’re the same, you and I, he thought. Two cogs in the same machine.
He turned to go. Greiss said, ‘Straken? I’m sorry about how it all worked out.’
‘I’ll get the men ready,’ Straken said, and he left the room.
‘How very interesting,’ said the new governor of Dulma’lin, and he moved on to the next man in the line.
About thirty of the great and good of Excelsis City stood in a row before him. Their uniforms were patched and dirty, as much in need of repair as the buildings around them, If this was the best the planet could offer, Osh’Preen thought, Emperor help the rest of it. Above the little group stretched the ruins of the cathedral, like the decaying ribcage of a colossal beast. It had been declared safe, but Osh’Preen had no wish to linger.
The governor had spent as little time as possible in his new fiefdom. This was his first formal trip out of his own landing craft since his army had made planetfall two months ago. Apart from the obligatory speeches to his men, and the vid-cap of him standing beside the mangled corpse of Warboss Killzkar, he had stayed in his palatial quarters, hunting sharks imported from Purbech in a deck of his ship specially flooded for the purpose.
Hubrik Art’Aren gestured to the next man in the line. This fellow was balding and short. A long cut ran along his scalp, only recently healed.
‘This is Larn Tarricus, Master Burgher of the Dulma’lin Mining Guild,’ said Art’Aren, managing not to sound bored.
‘Tarricus,’ Osh’Preen said. ‘I see. And what do you do here?’
‘I run the guild, what’s left of it,’ the little man replied. ‘I was in the battle against the orks.’
‘The surviving guild members were forced into the rear caves,’ Art’Aren explained. ‘They carried out some scouting missions with the Catachan unit that got left behind.’
One of the soldiers in the security detail checked his comm-link. Purbech dress helmets interfered with reception in the caverns; irritably, the comms-trooper pulled his helmet off and muttered into the comm-link. Osh’Preen glanced around. There were still a few little groups of orks stalking the city, and they were proving annoyingly difficult to wipe out. Even using some of the locals as guides, the Purbech troops were still losing a few men a day. Worse, there were rumours that some of the orks had escaped the planet, somehow. Nonsense, of course, but subversive nonsense.
‘We hid out in the tunnels, sir,’ Tarricus said. ‘The Catachans taught us how to fight the greenskins guerrilla-style.’
Art’Aren frowned. ‘My lord,’ he corrected.
‘Sorry,’ Tarricus replied. ‘My lord.’
‘Hmm,’ Osh’Preen said. ‘So, are you assisting with the repair work?’
‘Yes, my lord. And the monument.’
Osh’Preen glanced at Art’Aren. The factotum said, ‘A stone sculpture, to commemorate the fall of the orks. I understand that it’s almost complete.’
The High Praetor rubbed his hands together. ‘Well, that sounds interesting. I’m a great patron of the arts, Tarricus. Take us to it. It’ll be nice to see something that’s being put up, rather than something falling down,’ he added, and his entourage chuckled politely.
Tarricus shrugged and led them to a hall at the rear of the cathedral. Two men worked with chisels at a huge lump of granite, six times their height and half hidden under scaffolding. To Osh’Preen’s surprise, there were no servitors on the work; the sculptors used picks and lascutters like ancient masons.
‘It’s for the Triumphal Gardens,’ Tarricus said.
The High Praetor squinted and rubbed his chin. The sculpture was stylised, so much that its main figure looked rather like an ork. It depicted an enormous man, broad as well as tall, heavily muscled. The right arm, which was raised as if to punch the sky, had an angular quality, as though it were mechanical.
‘And you call this what?’ Osh’Preen demanded.
Tarricus drew himself to his full height. ‘The Saviour of Dulma’lin,’ he announced.
Osh’Preen nodded. He felt relieved that he would not be coming back here for a very long time. ‘That will be all, Tarricus.’
As they walked back to the main hall, Osh’Preen shook his head. ‘Saints,’ he muttered, ‘what an ugly thing.’
Art’Aren sighed. ‘I’ve seen similar figures, my lord, made to celebrate the victory over the orks. I suppose the central figure has some local significance. That said, the style is somewhat naive.’
‘Hideous is more the word,’ the High Praetor replied. ‘Strange, really. It doesn’t look like me at all.’
Straken entered his cabin and unlocked the door. He took out the vox-phonograph and put on Guttman’s Elegy for Prandium.
He thought of the Catachan Second, now almost halved in fighting strength. Men lost to orks, to Father Sarr’s madness, even the drop-ship lost to Dulma’lin itself. He hoped the bodies left behind had been given the burial that they deserved, and knew that if Larn Tarricus still had any say in the place, they would be. He wondered what High Praetor Osh’Preen was like, and figured that he would be much the same as most high-ranking officers of the Guard.
Business as usual.
Then he thought about Morrell, and wondered why the commissar had felt the need to give the Catachans such a glowing report. Why jeopardise his own standing like that? Straken remembered Lavant, tormented by his own mistakes, on a self-imposed quest to redeem himself even if that meant death. They had been men who he couldn’t begin to comprehend. For all his reputation as a leader, Straken found people hard to understand.
He turned the phonograph off and pushed it out of sight. Then he stood up and walked out.
He passed Lavant’s tiny room. The captain had left a roll of tools on the shelf, neatly packed away next to a wooden box. Straken opened the box. Compact and deadly, a plasma pistol nestled against folded cloth. Lavant’s initials had been engraved into the side, with immense care: P.L.
There was a grox-skin holster next to it. Straken clipped the holster onto his belt and slid the pistol in. He wondered whether Lavant had b
een repairing it. Whatever the answer, Straken was sure that it would work perfectly.
He felt restless. It was time to make his presence known.
Straken walked down a narrow flight of steps and into the hold of the ship. He passed the great frieze of Lord Solar Macharius, and his men stopped and looked round. Slowly, they gathered to see him, word of his presence preceding him like the bow wave of a ship.
As he walked, he saw people he knew – old fighters like Halda and Pharranis. He recognised men from half a dozen campaigns, a few of them almost as riddled with bionics as he was. He noticed newer troopers who had come to his attention through their skill. Two snipers, Halski and Serradus, put their cards down and stood up to salute him, before he gestured for them to stay at ease. Serradus smiled as much as his mask would allow. And sitting on a bunk, rubbing grease into his gloves to keep the leather soft, was Marbo. He glanced up, nodded at Straken, and looked away.
Straken heard chatter, music from an ancient phonograph and the high whine of the tattoo needle as someone etched their last victory onto their skin. There was a blast of laughter, and a huge man with a round, friendly face left the conversation he’d been having and stepped out to greet him. Tanner held a battered cup in one hand, no doubt full of illicit liquor, and grinned. ‘Welcome back!’
‘Yeah,’ Straken replied. ‘I just couldn’t keep away.’
Like the rest of his regiment, and perhaps the whole Imperial Guard, Straken had no real home, and would probably never know lasting peace. But, surrounded by his troops, he was at least back where he belonged.
‘Catachans,’ he called. ‘Listen up!’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A trained legal professional, in his spare time Toby Frost enjoys writing science fiction for Black Library and other publishers. Straken is his first novel set in the grim dark future of the 41st millennium.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK