Deathwing

by Neil

  Without any great enthusiasm the guards began to check their weapons. Gingerly they passed the web.

  For some time afterwards, as he and Sal limped down the trail, Nipper could feel the dead man’s calm, ecstatic eyes staring at his back.

  NIPPER SURVEYED THE surrounding woods fearfully, looking for signs of the rebel woodsrunners. He knew that if they were concealed his chances were slim. The natives wore chameleoline suits and were expert at blending in with the terrain. He paused for a minute and placed the stimm injector into the conduit on his filter mask.

  There was a hiss of gas and he breathed deep. Artificial energy surged through him and he felt suddenly strong and alert, as if he could count the leaves on all the nearby trees. He knew the feeling would not last and in the end would leave him feeling worse, but at the moment he needed some encouragement to trudge on.

  He offered the injector to Sal but she shook her head. Perhaps it interferes with her powers, he thought.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I’d go bug-crazy if I mixed that stuff with witch-spore. It’s bad enough having to try and tune everybody out all the time but when you’re on stimm it’s like everything is so loud it hurts.’

  Nipper looked at her. For the first time he considered that her gift might also be a curse. He had always imagined what fun it would be to be able to listen in on other people’s thoughts, what advantages he could gain from it, how god-like it must feel to have that power. He had never considered that it might have disadvantages as well.

  Sal smiled knowingly at him. He felt a brief flash of resentment. Damned spy, he thought. She shook her head and looked away.

  Almost at once he was sorry. She had been a good friend to him. It was just that he had never seen her power so active before. She seemed to be reading him all the time. It was as if the proximity of death had tripped a switch within her, turning her power up to full. It was disturbing for him but he decided he could live with it. He squeezed her shoulder.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said but she did not reply. He noticed that her eyes were closed and she was once more in trance. Her eyes snapped open. Nipper could see panic in them.

  ‘They’re out there,’ she said. ‘East and west, about twenty of them. They’re running parallel to us.’

  Overhead the restless movement of branches had stopped. The tree-swingers were gone.

  ‘COMMISSAR, SHOULD WE stop?’ enquired Krask. ‘We could make a stand.’Borski turned and glared into the jungle, keen fanatic eyes searching. ‘What are they waiting for?’

  Krask shrugged. ‘Maybe for us to tire or make camp. Maybe there’s something ahead that we don’t know about. Best be wary.’

  ‘I doubt if we could surprise them,’ Borski said. ‘Best that we continue southward as swiftly as possible. We have our orders.’

  ‘Commissar, Truk would like to fight. Truk will wait for enemy. Cover others.’

  Borski looked at him. ‘The Emperor appreciates your bravery, ogryn. But that will not be necessary.’

  ‘We’ll see action soon enough,’ Mak muttered.

  Nipper examined the nearby trees carefully but could see no sign of the enemy. He was not reassured. He had known men to pass within two metres of rebel scouts who had killed them and they had never noticed their killers. He cast an uneasy glance at the sky. Up there was another invisible threat that was just as deadly.

  By now the Divine Retribution would be in position, awaiting merely the command to fire. He checked his wrist chrono. Ten hours to go.

  GLYN DIED FIRST. A hail of magnetically accelerated shuriken ripped through his body.

  Nipper saw a dozen cuts appear on Truk. The ogryn looked around bemused, as if he did not really feel any pain. He was searching for the source of the attack.

  Nipper flung Sal to one side, then threw himself flat into the hollow of the mainbranch they had been following. He peered around but could see no sign of the enemy.

  He knew shuriken catapults were perfect for jungle warfare. They accelerated their razor-edged weapons to a speed where they could penetrate body-armour. They were rapid-firing and silent. All rebel scouts carried them.

  Nipper lay quiet, feeling his flesh crawl, expecting at any minute to be shredded by their hidden assailants.

  ‘Nipper,’ Sal said. ‘That tree fork fifty metres south-west, about five metres up.’

  He stared at where she directed. He thought he saw something just as he heard Hunt scream. The cry was cut off by a horrid gurgling sound, as if blood clogged Hunt’s throat.

  Now Nipper could just make out the outlines of a humanoid form. It was almost invisible, so perfectly did its cham-cloth suit blend into the surrounding green.

  Sweat rolled down Nipper’s face. He made himself take careful aim at the target, all the time fighting to hold down the fear that the rebel was drawing a bead on him.

  He opened fire, praying to the Emperor that his aim was true. He saw a line of fire blacken the branches he had aimed at. He heard a scream of intolerable pain and it seemed for one obscene moment as if the tree was screaming. Then something fell from the bole onto the carpet moss below. For a second it was conspicuous, a green body on the brown forest floor, but then it seemed to vanish as its suit did its work.

  Nipper looked at Sal. ‘Where are the rest?’

  She concentrated. ‘They seem to have pulled back out of range. I think it was a lone sniper. Hunt and Glyn are dead. I felt them die.’

  Her face was white and she seemed close to tears. Nipper was truly glad that he was not a psyker. It’s bad enough watching comrades die but feeling it from the inside must be dreadful, he thought. There was a void inside him, a vacuum. He had known the two men for most of his life. Now they were gone. He shook his head.

  He noticed how drawn Sal looked. A tick twitched far back in her jaw. Her eyes were wild and staring. He wondered how much more of this she could take. Wearily he checked his chrono. Eight and a half hours left.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘We’ll make it.’

  He wished he sounded more convincing.

  ONE FOOT IN front of the other, Nipper thought. And again. And again. It was physically painful for him to move now. It was as if a great weight had been attached to each foot and he had to swing it to move. He no longer watched the forest for rebel scouts. He was past caring. There were times when he would have welcomed being cut down by enemy fire. It would have put him out of his misery.

  The forest had become a green hell. His companions were damned souls on their way to purgatory. The light hurt his eyes and made the trees seem like looming gigantic daemons. It was if the forest had taken on a malevolent sentience and mocked them. It sneered at the tiny people who crawled across its body like ants.

  Well, you’ll get yours, Nipper thought feverishly. You won’t laugh at us when the Divine Retribution blasts you right out of existence.

  Beside him Sal was a constant drag, pulling at him like the gravity of a black hole, slowing his steps, draining his energy. Her eyes were half closed and her movements were stiff. Nipper felt that if she had not been leaning against him she would have fallen right off the main branch. By the Emperor, he would probably fall over himself if she had not been there.

  From behind him he could hear Trak singing in a deep tuneless bass. He seemed to be repeating the same words over and over again, occasionally changing the order in which they came. The monotony worked on Nipper’s frayed psyche. It was exquisite torture. Ahead of them Mak and Colquan bickered like two drunk men. Their arguments had the relentless circularity of people too weary to think. They were reduced to making statements that they had said before. Their words had become mantras as leeched of meaning as Trak’s song.

  ‘We should wait and ambush those daemon-loving scum-suckers,’ said Mak, flexing his metallic fingers.

  ‘Naw, we should push on back to Zone Amber before the bombardment, otherwise we’ll all fry.’

  ‘Look, if Damian’s little buddies get us, we won’t care about
the bombardment. We’ll all be dead anyway.’

  There was an edge of hysteria to Colquan’s voice. ‘We’ve got to move. That way we can keep ahead of them.’

  ‘They know the terrain. They’re natives. We’ll never outran them.’

  They seemed to be about to come to blows.

  ‘Silence,’ said Borski in a hoarse rasping whisper that cut through all the other noise. ‘Such bickering is unseemly among the Emperor’s chosen troops. You are a disgrace to the uniform.’

  Both Мак and Colquan stiffened and pulled themselves up straight. They said nothing but nodded shamefaced and began to march with renewed vigour.

  Six hours, thought Nipper. Let them pass quickly. All I want is an end to this. He stumbled and both he and Sal fell. It was nearly a minute before they could get up again.

  THEY CAME TO a vast open space between the nation-trees. All around the forest was burnt. Nipper looked down. For a moment his curiosity overcame his weariness.

  Already weavers were throwing their silk cables across the gap. He could see a huge web, brilliant in the green light. It was anchored against the boles of the nearer trees. Strands of carpet moss were starting to fill in the gaps. He could see the dull lumps that were the weavers continue their work. It was hard to believe that the mindless dog-size arachnids could build such a perfect structure. ‘What caused this?’ Borski asked.

  Krask looked up and then moved ahead to the edge of the webbing. ‘Crash,’ he said.

  Nipper saw that above them a huge swathe of topside had been cleared away. In the clear sky above he could see hive balloons floating, their long stinger lines dangling.

  Nipper moved to the edge of the burned-out area and looked down. He peered into the gloom. Something was half-buried in the humus-swamp below. He upped the magnification of his goggles and saw that it was an armoured transport flyer. It looked like a gigantic beetle.

  ‘Side’s been torn out of it,’ Krask said. ‘Somebody must have hit it with a rocket-launcher. It’s no use to us.’

  Nipper shook his head. He wondered who had been on the flyer, whether he had known any of the people for whom the vehicle was a coffin. It all seemed so futile.

  What are we doing here, he asked himself; walking the surface of a world so far from home that the distance is incomprehensible. Fighting people I don’t even know, against whom I have no quarrel. In this jungle thousands of people are dying, and for what? The glory of the Emperor? The megalomaniac dreams of an insane governor?

  He was shocked to find himself thinking such thoughts. They ran totally against his training, his indoctrination. What had happened to him? Once he had been proud to be an Imperial guardsman, to fight for the safety of the Empire. Now he just felt hollow. He was thinking like a heretic.

  He was suddenly ashamed of himself. He was staining the honour of the regiment for which many of his comrades had died. He looked over at Borski and envied him his faith. Nipper had reached the limits of his. He felt an overwhelming urge to go to the commissar and confess his failure, to say that he was unworthy to be a soldier of the Emperor, to beg for the release from the endless fear that the commissar’s gun would bring him.

  He was afflicted by a weariness not only of the body but of the spirit. It seemed pointless to go on. Even if, by some miracle, he escaped the bombardment he would just be sent back into the jungle to fight again. He did not want that. He had failed. The only thing left to do was atone.

  He began to move towards the commissar. He felt Sal clutch at his hand with desperate strength.

  ‘No, Nipper, don’t,’ she said. ‘We can do it. If only you can make yourself go on.’

  He tried to shake her off.

  ‘I can’t make it without your help,’ she said imploringly. He looked at her. She seemed desperate. He could not let her down. He did not feel capable of living up to the Imperial tradition of discipline and self-sacrifice but this was personal. The Marauders looked after their own.

  They trudged on, a step at a time, away from the abyss. Behind them the weavers continued to work mindlessly, unaware of the passing of men or the imminence of their own doom.

  Only three more hours, Nipper thought. And it will be over one way or another. I can put off death for that long.

  ‘I THINK THEY’RE getting ready to attack,’ Sal said. Nipper had thought he was too tired to be afraid but found he wasn’t.

  ‘You sure?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘They’ve been following us all this time. They thought we might lead them to a hidden base. Now they’re getting impatient. Something seems to be affecting their minds. They want to kill.’

  ‘You hear that, sergeant?’ Nipper asked.

  Krask nodded and muttered something to Borski. The commissar straightened up and brushed spores from the cuff of his uniform.

  ‘Break out what’s left of your stimm. We are going to kill some heretics.’

  Nipper emptied the inhaler and felt a trickle of nervous energy pass through him. It was enough to make him alert. He saw Mak and Colquan looking at him. I wonder, he thought, do I look like that?

  There was a jerky quality to the other guards’ movements and their eyes seemed dead beneath their bubble goggles. They cocked their heads like caricatures of people listening, assumed postures of exaggerated wariness. They looked so ridiculous that Nipper almost laughed, but he recognized that as a side-effect of the drug and fought to bring the mad hilarity under control.

  ‘It’s going to be dark soon,’ Krask said. ‘That’s when they’ll attack.’

  ‘This looks like as good a position as any to defend,’ Borski said crisply. ‘Krask, use your chainsword to cut down those fungus trees. They will give us some cover.’

  A feeling almost of relief swept over the other Marauders. They seemed happy. It was as if they were tired of running, as if they had already given up on their lives and relished the chance of some action, Nipper thought. At least it would be a break from the monotony of the march, he found himself thinking crazily. Still he was full of fear.

  ‘COME ON,’ COLQUAN muttered.

  They had been waiting twenty minutes and there was still no sign of the enemy. Their drug-induced energy was starting to fade. Lying behind their fungal barricades reminded them of how tired they were. Darkness swept over the dense forest like a wave.

  ‘Truk is feeling peckish,’ the ogryn said.

  Borski glared at Sal. ‘Are you sure they are going to attack, psyker?’

  ‘Yes, commissar,’ she said. She had drawn her laspistol and was inspecting it carefully. ‘They are out there now. About two hundred metres and closing. They’re advancing warily. They wonder what we are up to.’

  ‘Keep your eyes peeled, soldiers,’ said Borski. Nipper sighted in the direction Sal had indicated. He ventured a quick glance at the sky, visible through a gap in the foliage. Was that rapidly-moving star the Divine Retribution, he wondered, or just the nearest planet, Ka’ana? He checked the time. Under an hour till the bombardment starts, he thought. How far had they come? He felt sure it wasn’t far enough.

  It was strange. Earlier, filled with shame at his own weakness, he had wanted to die. Now when death seemed imminent he found that he desperately wanted to live. He was filled with disgust. Truly I am a spineless creature, he thought.

  Was that movement he saw? He felt a thrill of fear pass through him. He stared at a patch of shadow suspiciously. No, he thought, just jumpy. Adrenalin was pumping through his system and weariness had begun to recede.

  Was that shadow lengthening? It was, and in no natural way. Emperor guide my hand, he prayed, and squeezed the trigger of his lasrifle. There was a hum as the weapons generator kicked in. A perfectly straight beam of light crackled though the night and hit the shadow, illuminating the figure of a man. Nipper heard a scream. In the torchlight of the burning figure other rebels were revealed.

  All of a sudden everyone was firing. Nipper saw the flash of las-fire out of the corner of his eye, partially dampened by h
is protective goggles. He heard the strange coughing sound of the grenade launcher as Truk fired it. A brilliant explosion shattered the night. Nipper saw rebel bodies tumble through the air away from the point of impact. He felt vibration ripple through the carpet moss.

  Mist rose from the fungus tree trunk. For a second he wondered what was happening, then he realized that shuriken darts were hitting it.

  Nipper took a wild guess at where they were coming from and fired a burst in that direction. He was rewarded with a shout of pain. He dropped flat just as a hail of shuriken hissed through the air where he had been. Pure terror surged through him. That had been too close.

  Once more the ground trembled, once more he heard the sound of an explosion. He fought the urge to remain still, to huddle up in a ball and beg for mercy. He remained frozen in place. He could not move. Tears streamed down his face.

  Suddenly a shadow passed over him. He cringed with fear, forced himself to look up. It was Borski. He looked calm and unafraid.

  ‘Get up, soldier,’ he said, ignoring the hail of darts which blurred by him. Nipper shook his head. Borski raised his pistol and snapped a shot off into the distance. Nipper heard a ricochet, saw Borski grimace with annoyance, like a man who had just missed a target on a practice range. He fired again and something close by groaned.

  ‘You can die like a cringing dog or like a soldier of the Imperium,’ Borski said. His calm voice carried clearly over the noise of battle. He fired again. The noise of his pistol seemed impossibly loud. ‘Be quick, your soul is in peril.’

  Momentarily the noise of battle seemed to recede. Nipper looked up at the face of the commissar. Borski was strong and certain. His faith seemed to shield him as he stood amid the hail of enemy fire. Nipper knew his own hopelessness and lack of faith and felt diminished. He was filled with terror at the certainty of his own death. It turned his limbs to liquid.

  He tried to make himself move. We all die in the end, he told himself. It is the manner of our dying that counts. Insight filled him. He knew as Borski knew that they were going to die here. That being the case, he had nothing to fear. His fate was already sealed. There was nothing he could do to alter it. His only choice was the way in which he met his end. Borski was setting him an example of how to do it. He smiled up at the commissar and rose to his feet.