Commissar

by Andy Hoare

  ‘Clear out?’ Aleksis blurted before Flint could respond, causing the governor to swing back around to face him. ‘The commissar here has located the rebels’ lair, my lord. We were hoping you would acquiesce to an immediate assault upon it, so that we…’

  ‘No!’ Lord Kherhart screeched in response. ‘I will not acquiesce! You will leave here, this instant, do you…’

  The remainder of Lord Kherhart’s words were drowned out by a sharp explosion nearby. The blast wave ripped at the canvas awning and fragments of shrapnel pattered from the hull of the graf’s command track. The officers ducked for whatever cover they could find while Claviger-Primaris Gruss appeared out of nowhere accompanied by several other wardens and formed a protective circle about the governor. A moment later the chief warden was bundling his master back towards his transport and was lost to Flint’s sight.

  ‘Bukin?’ Flint bellowed, striding out from under the awning to be greeted with the sight of a huge, orange fireball blossoming upwards just a few hundred metres away. ‘What the hell was that?’

  The chief provost was nearby, Vahn at his side as staff officers ran to and fro. ‘Looks like one of our tracks went up, sir,’ he shouted over the raging of flames, the wind and the rain. ‘Must be rebels in the wire!’

  ‘Vahn,’ Flint shouted over the rising pandemonium gripping the command post. ‘Muster your men and get them here. Go!’

  Vahn nodded and was gone, leaving Flint with Provost Bukin. ‘Can’t say I’m surprised,’ he muttered.

  ‘Sir?’ said Bukin, shielding his eyes from the rain as he squinted towards the roiling flames and the column of black smoke rapidly rising into the air.

  ‘He’s counter-attacking,’ Flint shouted.

  ‘Who is, sir?’ Bukin bawled in response.

  ‘Strannik,’ Flint shouted. ‘That’s what I’d do!’

  Another explosion blossomed nearby and a Chimera less than fifty metres distant lifted into the air, flipped onto its side and came to rest on its back with flames consuming both fuel tanks. Muzzle flares lashed out of the darkness overhead as figures appeared on gantries that the headquarters security platoon had declared secure. Flint saw Vostroyans cut down where they stood, unaware of the danger from above and he shouted a warning to get behind cover. Las-fire erupted all around, competing with the deep, resounding boom of combat shotguns and handmade junkers. A great roar filled the air, a sound Flint had grown all but accustomed to during the battle in the sluice chamber. It was the sound of a horde of rebels attacking in numbers greater even than they had back then.

  Vahn reappeared with the remainder of the penal troop at his back. The soldiers were struggling to pull on armour and backpacks only recently set down and most appeared not to have slept a wink.

  ‘What the…’ Vahn started as he came to a halt beside Flint and Bukin. ‘Oh frag…’

  FIFTEEN

  Revelation

  With an explosive release of stinging luminescent liquid, Kohlz awoke, rolling onto his side and vomiting the chemical gruel across the rockcrete floor. Every muscle in his body screamed with pain and his bones felt like they’d been pulped. Still, he wasn’t quite convinced he was actually alive until the painful dry heaving finally ended and his eyes stopped streaming long enough to see clearly.

  Hauling himself up onto his elbows, Kohlz realised that the ridiculously heavy Number Four vox-set was still strapped firmly to his back. Punching the release catch at the centre of his chest he shrugged the hated thing off and let it drop hard to the ground as he struggled painfully to his feet.

  ‘Where the hell…’ he started as he looked all about. He was at the base of some manner of shaft, a small circle of light visible twenty metres or so above. He’d come to rest on a slim ledge at the side of a sluice channel, the filthy waters having deposited him there safely against all the odds.

  Safely, except that to escape he would have to climb yet another set of corroded rungs. For a brief moment Kohlz seriously considered just sitting back down and waiting this one out but the idea was a fleeting one that soon left his mind. Besides, he thought, aside from the vox-set he had no one to talk to.

  ‘Oh fu…’ he began, realising that he’d dropped the vox-set so heavily it might no longer be functional. His heart suddenly pounding at the thought of being left alone at the bottom of the drainage shaft, he bent over the Number Four and folded back its canvas protective covering. ‘Come on…’ he implored the device.

  Throwing the main power rune he was greeted by the sound of churning static. ‘Thank the Grey Lady!’ he blurted out deliriously. ‘Thank Her I wasn’t dumb enough to get a Number Twelve…’ There was no way he could get a signal where he was, but at least the vox-set was functioning. He was as certain as he could be that he’d be able to transmit from the top of the shaft.

  Then Kohlz heard something out of place, a sound from high overhead that brought his head up slowly towards the circle of light that formed the mouth of the shaft. ‘What the hell…’ he muttered, straining to hear more over the rush of water and the hiss of static. Cocking his head, he concentrated on the noise. It sounded disturbingly like an odd combination of animalistic grunting and the creak of old leather.

  Something Trooper Solomon had said many times over the last few days came to Kohlz’s mind as he bent over, deactivated the vox-set and shrugged it back over his shoulders. ‘Why me…’ he mumbled as he cautiously took hold of the lowest of the ladder rungs. Given that the last one he relied upon gave up on him and cast him into a raging flood and almost drowned him in the process, he tested it first, making sure it was firmly set in the rockcrete.

  Reasonably satisfied, Kohlz climbed slowly up the dark shaft, concentrating all the way on the sounds emanating from above. The higher he climbed the louder the noises became until he was dreading actually seeing what might be causing them. His body had yet to even start to recover from the harm done to it by the flood and he was sure he’d be covered in livid bruises by the time all this was over and by the time he neared the top his muscles were screaming for respite. At the last, he halted just below the lip, his ears filled with the hideous sounds.

  Swallowing hard, he raised his head and peered out.

  The sight that greeted him made him wish he’d taken his chances with the sluice and been washed further on into the bowels of the geotherm sinks. He was at the northern end of Carceri Resurecti, that much he could tell by the sight of the cliff-like wall and the many openings through which the force had climbed previously to infiltrate the stronghold up above. From out of those openings came a steady stream of hideously deformed figures, some massively large and machine-augmented, others small and twisted. Hundreds, probably thousands of the creatures were staggering and trudging south across the open ground and the sound Kohlz had heard earlier was their mute mumbling and the flexing of their vile musculature.

  ‘Mutants…’ Kohlz breathed. Hundreds upon hundreds of mutants, dredged up from the darkest bowels of the geotherm sinks.

  ‘These must be the ones we saw in the stronghold!’ Flint yelled into his vox-pickup as he ducked into the cover of a burned out Salamander, its shattered armour still radiating heat. ‘They’re properly armed with weapons taken from the clavigers,’ he continued. ‘They aren’t the cannon fodder we faced at the sluice chamber!’

  ‘Understood, commissar,’ Graf Aleksis’ voice came back through Flint’s earpiece, barely audible through the interference and the constant barrage of gunfire all around. Yes, Flint was sure of it. The rebel convicts attacking the regiment were well armed and they were organised into squads and platoons, just like the formations Flint had seen during the infiltration of the stronghold.

  That being the case however, Flint was wondering where the rebel colonel, Strannik, might be.

  Leaning out from behind his cover Flint sought to decipher the enemy’s deployment, to fathom the centre of the formation’s mass and where its commander might be directing it from. The scene before him was hazy with the wei
ght of rain pounding the ground and the light levels were at an all time low, yet he could make out dark shapes running from the cover of one machine edifice or pile of debris to the next. One group was engaging 1st Company almost a kilometre to the west. Another, larger mass, was probing towards the east where its leading edge was contacting 3rd and 4th Companies along with elements of the support echelons. If I were the overall commander, Flint thought, and I had nothing in the way of vox, I’d be… over there, advancing in the lee of that twenty-metre tall piston housing.

  ‘Vahn?’ Flint shouted back towards the penal troopers huddled behind a line of tracked supply wagons belonging to the assault pioneer platoon. ‘Get ready to move out!’

  ‘Come on, come on, come on…’ Kohlz muttered as he worked the dials and switches of his Number Four. Hanging from the ladder just below the lip of the shaft with hundreds of vile mutants swarming past scant metres away, it really wasn’t easy.

  ‘Come on!’ He repeated through gritted teeth. A line of red lights turned green, telling him the set had achieved machine communion with a transmitting station. ‘Yes!’ he hissed as he raised the horn to speak.

  But before he’d said a word his headset phones spat into life and a voice cut through the static-laced feedback.

  ‘… aren’t willing to do as I say, cousin,’ the voice said. Kohlz froze and lifted his thumb from the transmit rune. ‘He refuses to honour his familial duty, thanks to that damned commissar…’

  That got Kohlz’s attention and he worked the dials to get a clearer channel.

  ‘Very well,’ a second voice replied. ‘I anticipated such a turn of events. I have mustered the… inmates, of the under-sinks. They are inbound now.’

  ‘Are you…’ the first voice stammered. ‘…are you sure that’s, er, wise…?’

  ‘Cousin!’ the second voice hissed, the tone coldly intimidating to Kohlz even though he wasn’t its target. ‘You will listen to me and you will heed my words, do you understand?’ When there was no reply the voice continued. ‘I do not care if every one of my followers is slain, I do not care if this entire complex burns down around me, but I have told you, I shall not submit to them. I cannot, and not just for my sake, you know that, Kherhart, it’s for the sake of the entire damned line, understood?’

  Kherhart? Kohlz was stunned. The first voice was the governor of Furia Penitens. Not just the lord of Alpha Penitentia, but the Imperial Commander of the entire world.

  So who then was he speaking to?

  ‘Understood, cousin Strannik,’ Kherhart replied, his voice petulant and defeated. ‘Then I see I have no choice but to leave if you are set on your course of action.’

  Strannik? Kohlz almost lost his footing on the ladder and was forced to grab hold of another rung. He almost dropped the vox-horn in the process, his breath short and his blood pounding in his ears.

  ‘Do what you must, kinsman,’ Strannik replied. ‘Be gone. I am unleashing the under-sink host now. Our traitorous kinsman and his regiment won’t know what hit them, cousin. Within the hour, they’ll be dead. Every last one of them.’

  ‘Khave,’ Vahn hissed from the shadows at Flint’s side. ‘He’s mine.’

  ‘The Catachan?’ Flint replied as he leaned out from his hiding place behind a huge storage tank that had been torn open by multiple heavy bolter rounds. ‘Then make it quick, we don’t have time for personal vendettas.’

  ‘Understood,’ Vahn replied and a moment later he had the detachment up and running. Flint could see the unfettered hatred etched on the face of each penal trooper as they dashed by his position. It was clear that the penal troopers were kept going far beyond the point of exhaustion by a motivating force Flint hadn’t yet considered. It wasn’t duty or honour that was keeping the ragtag group going – it was hatred. Hatred of every rival convict that had been part of the uprising they themselves had chosen not to participate in. Out of a population that had numbered in the tens or hundreds of thousands before the uprising, that small group represented the last few souls who had, for whatever reason chosen not to surrender to the bloodshed and anarchy that the rebel Colonel Strannik had unleashed upon Alpha Penitentia. He’d thought they were following him. Instead, as they charged past with their carbines raised and mouths roaring unspeakable oaths of vengeance, Flint decided he would follow them.

  Flint broke cover and joined the mad charge towards the enemy lines. Bukin bellowed something from behind but he ignored the chief provost. Then Bukin was beside him, he too surrendering himself to the mad rush.

  As Flint steeled himself the first shots rang out. Vahn and his fellow penal troopers fired their carbines from the hip as they advanced at full pelt through the rain and many had attached bayonets in preparation for the charge hitting home. Flint’s world was reduced to a tunnel of las-fire and rushing bodies and the blinding white lances of the carbines were soon competing with a heavy weight of return fire. The detachment had the advantage of surprise but as it closed on its target, the Catachan and the rebels he was leading started to recover and fire back.

  The first of the penal troopers went down. A scream of frustration and pain split the air so loud it competed with the whip-crack of carbines and the thunderous report of the rebels’ crude firearms. The man fell at Flint’s feet and he had no choice but to vault over him. Landing heavily, his power sword instinctively raised to the guard position, he found himself face to face with the Catachan.

  The enemy roared, filling the air with a blasphemous curse and swung his shotgun like a heavy club. Flint ducked back from the clumsy attack but before he could advance another came in. The Catachan was far quicker than a man of his bulk had any right being.

  Flint parried without thinking and his power sword’s white hot, monomolecular edge scythed the improvised club clean in two. The Catachan’s already ugly face twisted into a hideous mask of hate and he flung the two halves of his ruined weapon to the ground with a savage curse.

  The charge was hitting home all around Flint, Vahn’s penal troopers surrendering themselves to the hatred and fury that had built up within them since the first, slaughter-filled days of the uprising. Facing off against the Catachan, Flint glanced quickly left and right and saw the troopers engaged in bitter, one-on-one fights to the death.

  He saw Becka strike an ape-faced rebel hard in the side of the head with the butt of her carbine then reverse the weapon in her hands to stab the bayonet savagely up into her enemy’s guts. The Savlar screamed something in the man’s face as he fell at her heavy-booted feet, comparing his features to those of a simian and casting aspirations on his parental legitimacy.

  Trooper Skane, the big Elysian, was wrestling with a huge enemy with metal studs crudely mounted in his bald skull and other scraps of metal protruding from his heavily muscled body. The two men were soon locked in a death-grip only one of them could possibly win. Skane’s foe pulled back his head, the whipcord muscles of his grox-like neck tensing like steel cables. An instant later he drove his studded head straight towards Skane’s but the Elysian was ready and rolled sideways at the last possible moment. The rebel’s head slammed into the wet rockcrete ground and sent up a spray of rainwater mingled with blood.

  Trooper Vendell, the one-eared Voyn’s Reacher, had cast his carbine aside and was sat astride a screaming, desperately squirming rebel. His knees clamped around the man’s head as he drove his thumbs down into, and through, the eye sockets.

  Trooper Stank, the Asgardian, had been cut across both cheeks by a crude, serrated knife wielded by an impossibly skeletal but preternaturally fast rebel convict. But the Asgardian was faster and fuelled by a thirst for vengeance his opponent could never match. Stank twisted sideways and in a flash his enemy’s blade was in his hand. Another flash, of steel and blood, and the knife was in his enemy’s throat right up to the hilt.

  Even Solomon, the lanky Jopalli indenti, was there in the thick of it along with over two-dozen more penal troopers whose names Flint had yet to learn. Solomon had his beloved snipe
r rifle slung over his back and had drawn a laspistol with which he was gunning rebels down at shockingly close range.

  Flint looked around for Vahn but the Catachan lunging forwards snapped his attention back to the fore. He drew his power sword back and tensed his body in preparation to strike when he was pushed hard from the side.

  ‘He’s mine!’ Vahn shouted, drawing a curse from Flint’s lips as the commissar was knocked almost off of his feet.

  ‘What the hell…’ Flint snarled, turning to see that Vahn was already engaging the Catachan. His dreadlocks streaming behind him like a ragged mane, Vahn screamed and drove forward with his bayonet-tipped carbine. The Catachan ducked left and by his own move, Vahn had expected him to duck the other way. A meaty fist came out of nowhere and slammed into the side of Vahn’s head and he only just managed to roll with the blow sufficiently to avoid it breaking his neck.

  Seeing that Vahn was outclassed, Flint began circling around toward the Catachan’s blind spot. Vahn growled a stream of incoherent curses but he had the sense to circle around the Catachan in the opposite direction to Flint.

  But the Catachan wasn’t stupid, despite all appearances to the contrary. He did exactly what Flint would have done in the same circumstances, and dove forwards onto Vahn before Flint could get behind him. The last blow must have dazed the penal trooper for he reacted too slowly to dodge the Catachan’s two-handed grasp for his neck. He went down screaming, his mouth twisted into a savage, animalistic snarl as he dropped his carbine and attempted to lever his enemy’s girder-thick wrists away.

  No chance, Flint thought, knowing the Catachan would snap Vahn’s neck within seconds.

  ‘Vahn!’ Flint bellowed over the chaos of battle and the pounding rain. ‘Twist!’

  Not waiting to see if Vahn had understood, or even heard, his order, Flint reversed his grip on his power sword’s basket hilt and lunged forwards, the Catachan’s rippling back firmly in his sights. He caught a glimpse of Vahn’s face, his eyes bulging from pain or panic, he couldn’t tell which.