by Steve Lyons
The rest of the sergeant’s words were obscured, but Hanrik had heard enough.
He let the handset fall from his numbed fingers; one of his guards hastened to retrieve it. Of course, Hanrik had known even before this latest blow that Arex was lost to him. Not two kilometres away from here, the Death Korps of Krieg was beginning to lay siege to his capital city. They were setting up minefields around its edge, laying demolition charges to bring down some of the outer towers. They would probably cause as much devastation as the insect swarm had done – and, like the insects, they didn’t seem to care much how many lives were lost in the process.
It would have been easy for him to give up, then, to leave this war to Colonel 186, to slink away in the first rescue ship to arrive. It would have been easy, and it would have been safest, but Governor-General Talmar Hanrik prided himself on having the bloodline of heroes. As long as there was the smallest grain of hope, he would soldier on. He wouldn’t disgrace the memory of his father, his brother, or his sons.
So, he reached for the loudhailer that one of his guards had been carrying for him. He surveyed the sea of imploring faces that had gathered before their leader, and he raised the metallic cone to his lips, and he spoke:
‘My citizens,’ he said, ‘I know you have questions; I know you are afraid, and I will not lie to you, our world is under threat. That is why I… I need your help. I am asking all able-bodied males between the ages of fifteen and forty-five to make themselves known to a PDF officer by midday tomorrow. You have been chosen… We have all been chosen for the honour of serving the God-Emperor – and as long as our hearts remain pure, as long as we fight in His name against the forces that beset us, I believe He will not allow what we have built here to fall. Praise be to the Emperor!’
Chapter Eight
The sky was lightening in the east, and the shadows of the night were being washed away. The skyways of Hieronymous City seemed unusually tranquil, painted in pastel blues and greys, and Trooper Carwen could see hope at last.
His squad had reached the outskirts of the city – nine weary troopers and the indomitable Sergeant Flast, along with a handful of civilians they had picked up en route – but they were still almost a hundred floors up. In the darkness, Carwen had been sure they had no chance of reaching ground level before the city gates were closed. Now, in the cleansing pre-dawn light, anything seemed possible to him.
The long night was over, at last. If only the nightmares it had brought along with it could be so easily dispelled.
Carwen was nineteen years old. He had been a PDF trooper for three of those years. He had signed up out of a genuine desire to make his world safer. His mother was always grumbling that someone needed to keep those filthy mutants under control, keep them away from decent folk, so Carwen had thought, well, why not him? He enjoyed his job, and it had given him the means to move his mother and himself up nine whole floors, so she no longer grumbled as much.
And, after all, Hieronymous Theta was well protected. That was why so many of Carwen’s friends had joined the Imperial Guard: to keep the real threats from making it this far. That was why, until now, he had had to face nothing more alarming than a few angry, unarmed civilians during the food riots last year.
Until now…
Four hours ago, Carwen had turned over a bloodied, skinless corpse in a heap of rubble. He had looked into the dead, staring eyes of a trooper as young as he was, and neither passage of time nor the new light could dim that dreadful image. It was always there, waiting behind his eyelids, in all its stark and gory detail.
‘We should start to search these buildings,’ said Sergeant Flast, indicating the lines of hab-blocks to each side of them. ‘We need to find a way down.’ Carwen had never been more glad to receive an order.
He moved to the nearest door, and broke its lock with a blow from his lasgun butt. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom beyond, then he stepped into a long hallway, sending a grey rat skittering and screeching for cover.
There was a staircase here, but as Carwen had expected the downward flight had been blocked from this side. Nobody wanted a lower-floor dweller climbing up to their room in the night. The barricade, however, was a flimsy one, just a table and a couple of chairs piled up more in hope than with certainty.
Carwen tugged at a chair and it came free with ease, and brought the table crashing down behind it. He had created a gap, now, through which a man could climb. The way was clear, at least down as far as the next skyway. Feeling pleased with himself, he turned to report his discovery to his sergeant. He had almost reached the door when the sound of shouting and gunshots from without froze him in his tracks.
He couldn’t go forwards. Every time he thought about it, Carwen saw the eyes of that bloodless corpse, and he wanted to be sick. He wanted to turn and run, down the staircase, but his conscience wouldn’t let him abandon his comrades, and besides how would his mother feel if her firstborn son was executed for desertion?
In the end, it was his conscience that won out. He forced himself to take one small step forwards, then another, then another – and he reached the doorway at long last, and he summoned up the courage to look outside.
Carwen had been warned about the metal-faced ghouls. He had spent the past four hours searching the shadows for them, imagining what they might look like. The reality, however, was more horrific than anything he could have dreamed.
They had his squad surrounded; they had appeared at each end of the row of buildings, ten of them in all, and now they were closing their trap. In the centre of the skyway, Sergeant Flast and a couple of troopers were trying to protect the civilians, but their las-beams hardly seemed to trouble the encircling monsters.
The rest of Carwen’s comrades had already emerged from the buildings, and they added to the barrage of las-fire until at last a ghoul was felled by a lucky shot, but by then it was too late. The hunters fell upon their prey, and their already blood-caked flensing blades set about their grisly work.
Carwen snapped up his lasgun, but he was trembling too hard to aim it properly. They’re already dead, he told himself. Sergeant Flast, Tondal, Garroway, you can’t hurt them now, and with that thought he switched his gun to Full Auto and let its staccato bark drown out the sounds of his comrades’ screams.
It didn’t work for long. The lasgun bled dry, and suddenly Carwen’s sights were filled by the heart-freezing sight of a leering metallic skull. The ghouls had finished with their victims on the skyway; now, they had separated and were turning their attentions to the snipers. With a yelp, Carwen leapt back into the hab-block, feverishly yanking at his spent power pack, slinging it away and fumbling to insert a fresh one into the housing. He stumbled over the words of the Litany of Loading, and the pack fell from his jittery hand.
The ghoul was in the doorway. A graveyard stench hit Carwen full in the face and made him retch. He gripped his lasgun stock with both hands, determined to meet his killer with his bayonet when it pounced, knowing it would do him no good.
Then the ghoul exploded.
There had been no warning, just a burst of flame in which the creature’s skin coat had been vaporised, the metal skeleton beneath it melted. A haze of acrid smoke added to the already overpowering stink, and Carwen fell to his hands and knees, scrabbling for his dropped power pack and was violently sick on the floorboards.
He looked up through teary eyes, saw a figure standing where the ghoul had once stood. He could almost have cried at the sight of its face – rather, its metal skull. Then, he noticed the plate attached to the front of the figure’s helmet, the image of the Imperial Eagle embossed upon it, and he breathed again.
This skull was a mask, Carwen realised, beneath which…
…beneath which he could see a second, fabric, mask attached to a rebreather unit on the man’s back. Despite his disturbing appearance, however, the man’s shoulder flashes identified him as an Imperial Guardsman, and he was carrying a melta gun, with which he had apparently jus
t saved Carwen’s life.
The Guardsman looked down at Carwen with what might have been disdain, before turning and marching away, his weapon flaring once more. Ashamed of his weakness, Carwen reloaded and scurried after him, holding his breath and trying not to look at the simmering silver pool in the doorway as he stepped over it.
Outside, the tide had well and truly turned. A platoon of skull-masked Guardsmen had arrived from the east, outnumbering the ghouls more than three to one. Only a handful had meltas, but the remainder were armed with what looked to Carwen like hellguns, more powerful lasgun variants – he had handled one in training, but never since – and these too were having some effect. The ghouls were kept at bay, unable to employ their claws. Another two were vaporised, two more felled by crimson bolts.
For a moment, Carwen was overwhelmed with relief for his close escape, and gratitude towards his saviours – but those feelings were quickly dissipated.
He heard a whooshing sound, a concentrated blast of air, and suddenly the number of ghouls on the skyway had more than quadrupled. One second, they had been down to five, now there were over twenty of them, and Carwen had no idea where the reinforcements had come from. They had just… appeared.
The ghouls were still pinned down, but now, through sheer weight of numbers, they were starting to gain ground. Some of them had hoisted up the corpses of their previous victims and were using them as shields against the skull-masked Guardsmen’s fire. Carwen had one of the creatures in his sights, but this new tactic gave him pause. Not so the Guardsmen, who kept up their bombardment regardless.
Sergeant Flast’s body was set alight by a melta’s near-miss; a ghoul hurled it at the Guardsmen’s lines, a flaming missile, forcing them to scatter. Carwen’s lower lip trembled with frustration and rage – Flast had been a good man, a good leader, he deserved to rest in peace – and he squeezed his trigger, but few of his las-beams found their mark and those that did only glanced off the ghouls’ metallic bones.
He had expected the Guardsmen to fall back. Instead, their front ranks drew sword bayonets and charged, choosing an opponent each. Carwen admired, and was astonished by, their courage, more so when he saw that the Guardsmen were outclassed by the ghouls in close combat. They fought hard, enduring far longer than Flast and the others had done, but the ghouls were faster, stronger, and each of them wielded eight blades to the Guardsmen’s one.
The first Guardsman fell, his heart impaled by metal claws, but before he hit the ground both he and his opponent were engulfed by melta fire, and Carwen realised that this had been the plan all along. Those ten Guardsmen had offered their lives, without a moment’s hesitation, to buy time for the others to regroup.
Another ghoul was vaporised, while a third was cut down in a crossfire of las-beams. Another, to Carwen’s amazement, was run through by a bayonet, collapsing into the liquid remains of one of its kin. The victorious swordsman turned in search of his next kill, and so had his back to his last as, impossibly, it twitched and jerked and hauled itself back to its feet, its talon-knives poised to strike afresh.
Carwen managed a cry of ‘Look out!’, but if the Guardsman heard him he had no time to react. He was flensed to death in two terrible seconds, revenged in the next by a salvo of hellgun bolts. It was happening elsewhere on the battlefield too, supposedly dead ghouls rising to fight again, and it seemed to Carwen now that there was no hope, that this nightmare was never-ending.
He could see muzzle flashes in the doorways across the skyway: two of his fellow squad members, two of the few survivors, doing the best they could, doubtless aware by now that this didn’t amount to a great deal. Only the meltas were killing the ghouls, killing them for good – and indeed, now Carwen could see that the ghouls were aware of this too and they were targeting the holders of those very weapons. The rest of the Guardsmen had dropped their hellguns, fighting with their bayonets to defend their better-equipped comrades – but, as Carwen watched helplessly, a ghoul sidestepped two opponents to close with one of the melta gun-wielders. Its claws lashed out, and the melta’s containment chamber was sheared in two, immolating both ghoul and Guardsman in a brief but furious eruption.
Another Guardsman had backed up to the skyway’s edge, only metres away from Carwen’s doorway, a ghoul bearing down on him hard. The Guardsman fired his melta gun twice but missed, and Carwen tried to get a bead on the creature himself but found its victim in his way. A second later, that problem at least was solved, as the Guardsman collapsed in a spray of arterial blood – but before his killer could retrieve its prize, a PDF trooper’s lasgun struck true at last, and it too was slain.
Carwen knew what the Emperor required of him now, little as he may have liked it. Just a few strides along the skyway, apparently forgotten in the tumult, lay the dead Guardsman’s weapon, unattended. A chance for him to make a difference, save a few lives, and all he had to do was pick up that gun and make himself a target.
He had no choice, he told himself. He couldn’t think about the ghouls and their bladed claws, couldn’t think about skinned bodies in the rubble or his sergeant’s burning corpse. He had to take inspiration from the skull-masked Guardsmen, had to prove himself as brave as they were, had to take those strides.
Carwen ran to the melta gun, dropped to one knee and picked it up. His heart was thumping against his ribcage, his palms so slick with sweat that the weapon almost slipped from his grasp. He found the firing mechanism by touch; his gaze was held by the corpse of the ghoul just a metre away from him. It hadn’t moved since it had fallen – perhaps it was actually, finally dead – but Carwen was taking no chances.
He thought the melta gun had misfired for an instant, because it didn’t have the kick he had expected and the only sound it made was a burning hiss, but then the corpse of the ghoul ignited with a satisfying crump. Carwen enjoyed a moment of pure exultation, and then remembered the other creatures whose attention he had doubtless just drawn. He hefted the gun to his shoulder and prayed that he might at least take one of them down before he died, two if the Emperor was with him.
Finding a target amid the melee was harder than he had expected. He didn’t trust himself not to strike a Guardsman by accident. His fellow gunmen were not so reticent. Friendly fire had just vaporised another two of their comrades, albeit taking a ghoul with them. No doubt they had reasoned that, if they didn’t take those shots, then those men were dead anyway. Carwen couldn’t think like that.
Two ghouls were coming for him, outflanking the Guardsmen in each direction. Carwen didn’t know which to aim for, which one would reach him first, and by the time he had chosen the ghoul on the left he knew it was too late, that he had no hope of stopping them both. At least he could make his one shot count, he thought. He resisted the urge to close his eyes, to flinch from the terrifying visage of the oncoming monster. He gritted his teeth and he fired…
…and missed, but the ghoul fell anyway to a well-placed bayonet thrust from behind. It sprawled in front of the still-kneeling Carwen and, shaking, disgusted, he trained his sights upon the motionless body and squeezed his trigger. He struck only a glancing blow, and to his horror the corpse attempted to stand although the left side of its body was weeping molten metal. The creature fixed Carwen with a burning, malevolent glare, even as an eye socket elongated and dribbled down its face. Then its left leg bowed under its own weight, and the ghoul crashed back to the ground and thrashed its remaining limbs impotently until it could thrash them no longer.
Carwen wasn’t dead yet. He swung his melta gun to the right, expecting to meet the talon-knives of the second ghoul, but there was no sign of it. Panicking, he dropped his right hand to the ground and pivoted on it, but the ghoul wasn’t sneaking up behind him as he had feared, and now Carwen realised that the half-melted corpse in front of him had gone too, and he could no longer hear the hissing discharges of the meltas or the sounds of his own comrades’ lasguns. The fighting had stopped.
There were no ghouls left, either dead or alive
. They must have blinked away, as suddenly, as inexplicably, as they had blinked in, but that meant…
That meant they would almost certainly be back. The metal ghouls could strike again at any moment, replenished and recharged, and no one would see them coming.
Hesitantly, Carwen picked himself up and started forward, his footsteps loud in the sudden stillness. The other survivors of his squad were emerging from their doorways; a few minutes ago they had been ten in number, now they were just four.
‘Who leads your unit?’
It took Carwen a moment to work out who had spoken, to be sure that the question had been directed at him. A Guardsman with the rank insignia of a lieutenant loomed over him, and Carwen swallowed to compose himself as he looked up into a blank-eyed face. ‘Sergeant Flast, sir,’ he said, ‘but he’s dead. You just cremated the body.’
‘What were his last orders?’
‘We were making our way out of the city.’
‘That is no longer possible.’
As the lieutenant spoke, Carwen saw the first red fingers of the morning sun, feeling their way across the skyway. The ground trembled with the force of an explosion somewhere below him, and he knew that the officer had spoken the truth. The ghouls had delayed him too long, he thought, his throat turning dry.
‘My designation,’ said the skull-masked officer, ‘is Lieutenant 4432-9801-2265-Phaesta, officer in command of the first grenadier platoon of the 81st Krieg Infantry Regiment, Beta Company. Your men will place themselves at my disposal.’
Carwen couldn’t tell if that had been a request or an instruction. He still couldn’t speak anyway, so he just nodded. Trooper Parvel was on the vox, reporting his squad’s situation, but Carwen held out little hope that Colonel Braun or the Governor or whoever was in charge at the moment might spare a flyer to extract four lowly PDF troopers from the city. There had to be hundreds like them in the same predicament, and likely a similar number of more important people.