by Paul Kearney
He stopped and loaded his rifle, stripping the plastic from the muzzle and feeding four rounds into the magazine that ran tube-like under the barrel, before clacking the feedbolt up and down to chamber one of them. The bullets were as big as one of his fingers, with hollow-cored points. He had seen a man blown clear in two by such munitions before now. One was sufficient to bring down the largest grazer, if it were put in the right place.
He stopped. The screeching and flapping of the birds in the canopy overhead had stilled. The forest was eerily silent. He turned slowly around, watching, rifle to the shoulder. There was something new here. The cacophony of the dawn chorus had been clamped down, as though the mindless raptors above were watching and waiting even as he was.
There was nothing. Irritated with his own uneasiness, he strode on again. He was a hunter of his people, respected and experienced in the ways of the forest. Most shunned the ironwoods for fear of the beasts that lurked in the shadows under the trees, but Gurian had encountered them all in his years of tracking and trading. He knew when to fight and when to run, when to stand still and silent and let the monsters of his little world walk on by. There were rules. You obeyed them, and you lived. You ignored them, and the forest would take your life. There was no mystery here. It was mere biology.
The trail he was following changed. The grazer had picked up speed. He saw the dull score on an ironwood where the creature’s horns had slashed it, as though it had lunged at something and missed. And there were different marks in the moss. The green sponge of the forest floor had been trampled down. Other beasts had gathered here. He studied the ground, intrigued. And as he did, he saw at the toe of his boot a single bright green fungus with a globular top, a type he had never encountered before.
He knelt and drew out his old iron knife, levering the fungus out of the ground. It came easily. He touched the knife tip to it, and for just a moment he started back in shock. He could have sworn that the fungus had moved, writhing away from the blade.
Fascinated – it was rare, if not unprecedented, for him to find anything in the forest that he had not seen before – he picked up the fungus. It was oddly heavy, and when he sniffed at it he caught a powerful reek, as of some animal-type musk. Hardly of the vegetable kingdom at all.
It squirmed in his fingers.
‘Throne!’ He dropped it, and instinctively brought the heel of his boot down upon the thing, crushing it. In the broken fragments of the fungus, he thought for one moment he saw a shape, humanoid, curled up like a foetus. Then revulsion overwhelmed him, and he stamped on it again and again until it was a mere green paste on the roots of a tree.
The silence was all around him, heavy as fog in the mouth. He felt a momentary impulse to turn around and make his way back out of the woods, feel the wind on his face and see the roofs of the township beyond, his wife and son waiting for him. But that would be an absurd humiliation. What would he tell them – that he, Gurian, finest hunter of the northwoods, had been spooked by a mushroom?
One step, two. He walked on, the trail so broad and broken now that a blind man could have followed it. But now he kept the long rifle poised in his shoulder, the barrel following his gaze.
More of the green fungi, in ones and twos and globular clusters. There was no mistaking it now; they pulsed and throbbed like eggs in a frying pan. They were not of his world – he was quite sure of that. And he thought for some reason of the meteor streak he had seen earlier in the morning. Perhaps they had been brought here by some tumbled meteorite in the night.
They were no threat, at any rate. He crushed half a dozen underfoot as he padded along. They followed the trail in a scattered green line as though the grazer he tracked had been excreting them in its wake.
Now the silence was as loud as singing in his ears, and his own breathing seemed too loud to him. There was blood splashed on the moss at his feet. The beast he was following had been wounded and was bleeding freely. He cursed his luck. Like as not one of the forest predators had chanced across it and–
A noise in the great silence, an animal bellow. But it was not any animal he knew. It carried through the trees like fire in the night, and something old and elemental shivered in Gurian’s spine at the sound.
There were words in that long roar, he was sure of it. Perhaps even a shred of Gothic. A beast that spoke? It was impossible.
He kept going. Curiosity drew him on, the bane and blessing of man’s nature. The rifle, his hunting companion of twenty years, seemed far too heavy in his sweat-slick palms. He clung to it as a man on a cliff will cling to a thrown rope.
There was a small clearing ahead. He could see it by the light, which thickened and grew, green and bright with the rising sun. And in that clearing–
He stopped short, heart hammering in his chest. Slowly – so slowly his knees creaked – he knelt down in the moss. The rifle barrel dipped in his grasp.
He took in all that his eyes showed him of the scene ahead, but it seemed to him that his brain could not quite process the information.
He knew what they were – he had heard of such things. But they were… more, than he had ever imagined. Larger, more grotesque. Misshapen oddities brought to sudden, stark, terrifying life.
The grazer lay dead in the clearing, a grey mound, the body broken open and steaming, shredded to scarlet. And around the torn carcass stood creatures out of mankind’s oldest nightmares.
They were huge, almost twice a man’s height, and six feet across at the shoulder. Their arms were as thick as Gurian’s waist, longer than their short, bowed legs. And on their corded shoulders were set massive fanged skulls with outsize jaws and cavernous eyes ringed by bone. The eyes glinted red, and red were their clawed hands, and red was spattered liberally over all of them.
They were tearing into the body of the dead animal at their feet like ravenous animals, but animals that wore armour, and belts, with wide cleaver-like blades dangling at their waists, and outsize squat-barrelled contraptions, which might have been parodies of firearms, holstered there too.
They were green, where the blood did not paint them, the same green as the fungi that had sprung up on the forest floor. But the shade of their hides ranged from the dark olive of stagnant water to the pale bile-brightness of new leaves. Some had painted their skin with crude glyphs and sigils that were meaningless to Gurian. Others had dark-inked tattoos, and iron rings that pierced ears and lips. One had an iron claw for a hand, but it opened and closed as if part of the beast, the steel cables that controlled it running into the very flesh of its forearm.
And they stank. Even thirty yards away, Gurian could smell them, a rank, foetid stink that filled the clearing and threatened to overwhelm his own senses. It was the smell of large unwashed animals, but underlying it was the reek of rot and mould.
They were gabbling and snarling at one another, a noise which was loathsome to hear, and which was not the mere growling of animals. It was indeed speech of some kind, a violent, guttural explosion of noise that nonetheless had within it elements of Low Gothic.
Words came through it to Gurian’s ears. They were arguing over the taste of the animal they had brought down, quarrelling over the choice cuts. They seemed about to launch at one another’s throats, and clashed their great tusk-like teeth and waved their broad-bladed swords in paroxysms of bestial fury.
These, then, were orks. He had seen them at last.
The Great Enemy of mankind was Chaos – every man and woman alive knew that, it was drilled into them all their lives. But orks were the green storm that rolled across the stars, leaving desolation in their wake. They infested worlds, consumed them, then moved on. They fought among themselves more than with any other species. They were cunning, brutal beyond belief, violent beyond the edge of sanity. And they knew no mercy, either for themselves or anyone else. There could be no negotiation with such foes; their minds worked on a different level of understandi
ng to that of all other sentient races.
They were as relentless as a virus. They had to be stamped out, every last one, or a planet might find itself plagued by them for decades. They–
Now Gurian looked down in horror at the fetid little green fungi that dotted the ground around him. They were somehow connected to the orks – he was sure of it.
The thought turned his stomach, as if he had uncovered a secret charnel house in his own backyard.
The orks were busy shoving and lashing out at one another, throwing chunks of torn meat through the air. As Gurian watched, two of them fell to fighting in a writhing struggle of roaring fury. The rest of them stood back and cheered and bellowed and laughed. The sound hurt the ears.
The town must be warned, Gurian thought. I must go back. He thought of Mina and Mardian, his wife and son, in the hands of these monsters. It could not be contemplated – it was too horrible.
Know when to fight and when to run, when to stand still and silent and let the monsters of the world walk on by. Those are the rules. You obey them, and you live.
He rose to his feet slowly, knowing that a sudden movement drew attention like no other. His heart thundered in his chest, and seemed about to rise up into his throat. He was beyond fear. He knew that his skin was cold and pale. His body was sending all his blood to organs and muscles he would need if he were to fight or flee.
He backed away, one step, two. No fear of making a noise. The racket around the downed grazer would cover the approach of a tank, and the moss underfoot accepted his steps without a sound.
He had a tree between him and the clearing now, and his breathing came a little easier. It was hard to do, but he set his back to the orks and began picking his way back along the trail. He would strike off into the forest and find another way home. The beasts of the ironwoods held no fears for him, not any more.
He was perhaps fifty yards away from the clearing when he struck off to the right, away from the trail and into the depths of the great trees. There was little vegetation on the forest floor aside from hummocked mounds of moss, but some of these were higher than his head, a second, softer forest growing at the feet of the immense ironwoods.
There was light ahead, another clearing, and a smell in the air as of a great burning. He hefted the rifle and walked on, wondering what new horror was lurking in the trees. It was not the smell of a fire, but heavier. Smoke hung in the air, the acrid taint of smouldering ironwood, and underlying it was the scent of something else, a metallic taint utterly unfamiliar to him.
This clearing was many times larger than the one in which he had seen the orks, and all around it, stately ironwoods stood broken and toppled. Some were glowing, the blackened ends of them turning to black pitch, bubbling with heat. And there was the deep, dark fragrance of upturned earth also, as though someone were digging here, deep into the black loam of Chrisannon.
It was an enormous meteorite, lying amid the clearing it had smashed into the forest. As tall as five or six habs, it was burnt black, a massive rounded crag that had careered through the trees leaving a trail of destruction for fully half a mile to the north. A relic of the void, it sat steaming and smoking in the forest like some gargantuan beast resting after long labour. Gurian stared at it. In its own way it was as astonishing as the sight of the orks had been.
Things were scurrying about the black base of the rock. Not orks – they were far too small for that. Gurian, drawn by that irresistible curiosity, moved closer, keeping in cover.
It was like seeing a stone upturned and insect life come teeming out from under it.
These creatures stood no higher than his waist, and some reached barely to his knee. They were the same rancid green as the orks and they swarmed in the clearing like maggots in a corpse’s eye. They set up a muttering, high-pitched cackling, as loathsome to listen to as the ork bellowing had been. Gurian saw spindly limbs, tiny clawed hands, bald green skulls surmounted by pointed ears. These were kin to the orks, had to be. Individually, they were not to be feared, but there were scores of them busy about the base of the meteorite. He saw them wielding hammers and chisels, carrying lengths of rust-flecked cable and fragments of machinery on their thin shoulders. They were as busy as a broken termite mound of old Terra, almost comical to behold. Orks? Surely not.
Something poked him from behind and he whipped round. One of the creatures was right behind him, holding a rod of black iron. Its eyes glinted red and its head reached barely to his belt buckle. It gnashed its teeth, cocked its green skull to one side, and snarled, baring its needle-thin fangs.
He did not think. He lashed out with the ironpitch stock of the rifle, smashing it into the bestial little face with all the disgust and fear of his adrenaline-fuelled muscles. He broke open the skull, saw the brains leap out. The little creature collapsed like a puppet whose strings have been slashed. Its blood was red and bright as new paint.
It was still moving. Even with its head caved in, the hands were scrabbling in the moss and the legs were kicking. Gurian brought the rifle stock down again and again, the blood spattering his clothes and face as he pounded the creature’s head into mush.
He heard a high shriek from the clearing behind him. Turning, he saw more of the creatures closing in, jaws agape. They were pointing at him and gabbling, jumping up and down and waving their tools.
He fired one round from the hip, the rifle bucking in his hands. It splattered three of them to shattered pieces, tearing through their ranks. The sound of the gunshot was shockingly loud. He racked in another round and fired again, felling a whole line of them as the heavy bullet tore through the green flesh and hit the side of the meteorite, ricocheting off with a crack of sparks and a high whine.
There was a roar, and he saw a full-sized ork come raging through the crowd of its lesser brethren, throwing them aside and kicking its way through them. It seemed to have just materialised out of the side of the meteorite itself. Gurian’s bowels turned to water at the sight of it. But he was a hunter, and he had faced down great beasts before.
He cocked the rifle again, and took careful aim this time. The ork powered towards him with a huge cleaver upraised in its fist, mouth agape and fangs shining.
He shot it through its open mouth.
The ork staggered. The heavy bullet had blown out the back of its head. Gurian saw the red eyes blink, the broken teeth clash. But it kept coming, while at its feet the smaller creatures of its kind hooted and cackled and gabbled in hate and alarm.
Like some hulking green monolith, the great ork loomed up closer in the rifle’s sights as Gurian fired his last round at where the heart of a man would be. The huge beast was knocked backwards, but it kept its feet. It could not roar, for its tongue had been blown off, but it uttered a horrible wet gargling noise as it came on, shrugging off the heavy slug that had smashed into its chest. There was no life in its eyes, yet still the beast moved, sluggish but relentless.
Gurian, bewildered beyond terror, turned to run.
He crashed into something and fell on his back. For a moment he thought he had hit a tree, but when his vision cleared he looked up to see a second ork standing over him. It seemed huge beyond belief, armoured in crudely forged iron. Something like a smile was splitting its jaws. It stood on his arm as he reached for the fallen rifle, and Gurian screamed as his bones broke under the weight of its boot. It bent over him, and he gagged on the miasma that welled out of the tusk-ringed mouth. But there were words being spoken to him. He heard them distinctly, Low Gothic mangled by the beast’s oversized jaws.
‘Fresh meat,’ it said. And then the jaws came lower, and closed over his agonised face.
Four
Lord Fennick stifled a yawn. The room was stuffy and hot, a long low expanse of desks and data-slates and flickering screens before which the planetary communications staff sat dutifully, sending messages out into the aether, receiving and recording them on old
-fashioned plastape. Streams of it littered the floor, remnants of conversations that were not worth his attention. Even a small world such as Zalidar accumulated a bureaucracy over time, one that seemed to delight in talking to itself.
Thus do we justify our existence, he thought with an internal shrug. When the heavy lifting of establishing a settlement is done, it is a case of sitting back for a time and letting the lower orders of the world create and build and bicker and wheel and deal amongst themselves. Even the Imperium of Man cannot regulate everything. But we can monitor it at least.
He caught a fragment of his own thoughts. The lower orders.
I was one of them myself once. A man should never forget where he came from.
Idly, he picked up a plastape reel from a near desk, running it through his fingers to read the verbose Low Gothic that ran black along the tape. The township of Meriolus was short of iron ore and quicklime, and its praetor, one Vlad Municius, deemed these supplies vital to the arresting of jungle growth along his borders.
Fennick frowned. The jungle. They cut it back, burned it down, hacked it to the very roots, and still it sprang up again.
Here, around Zalathras, the native vegetation had been tamed, but a hundred miles to the south the Deep Forest still loomed large over almost every settlement. Zalidar was a fecund world, that quality part of what made it potentially a rich one, but the native flora had to be battled daily by those outside the city, beyond the cleared croplands that opened in a belt around it.
The great beasts that had haunted its past had withdrawn to the high mountains and the fastnesses of the Deep Forest, what men here called the Tagus, but the creeping trees still patiently struggled to reclaim the cleared, tilled country he had created. It would never end, not until the continent had been scoured like a dirty pan sanded clean.
He dropped the tape – some lower-level functionary would investigate further and decide whether good Municius’ request was worth kicking up the ladder – and turned to view the map that hung framed on the moist, gleaming stone wall behind him.