The light was back. Lorenzo noted its presence with a numb feeling of acceptance, because somehow he knew it had been there all along. It was brighter than before—and behind him, this time. In the opposite direction from the one in which Dougan had gone. And closer. Almost close enough to touch, it seemed. For a second, just a second, Lorenzo’s dulled mind grasped the idea that the blue light was fooling him, playing with his thoughts and feelings—but then that revelation slipped away and was forgotten.
It might not have seen him, he thought. It didn’t know he was here. It probably thought he had gone off with Dougan, fallen for its lure. It probably thought it could move in now, for the kill—but the light had underestimated him.
A few steps. A few steps into the dark, that was all it would take. Lorenzo could be the hero for once, the man who had captured the light itself.
To his credit, he did hesitate. He tore his eyes away from the light and shook his head to clear it. He understood that the light had been clouding his thoughts, though he certainly didn’t appreciate the extent of its influence. He remembered what Dougan had said. A question of focus. So he focused on what he knew, his comrades, and reassured himself with the knowledge that they were real and tangible. He tested his senses one by one, listening, breathing, feeling, and found each of them as sharp as he remembered.
Then Lorenzo turned back to the blue light, and found it waiting.
He should have called out to Dougan, but he didn’t want to scare the light away. He should have woken the others, but the light made him think they would steal his glory. He shouldn’t have abandoned them, sleeping, helpless, relying on him to keep them safe, but it was only a few steps and he was in control.
Just a few steps.
Then a few steps more.
The jungle closed around Lorenzo, but that was alright because he hadn’t come far. He knew he hadn’t come far, because he hadn’t reached the light yet, and he knew the light hadn’t moved. He knew that, if he looked back, he would still see the camp. His comrades would hear him if he called.
Not that he was likely to call. He didn’t need them. In his mind, Lorenzo had left the jungle of Rogar III for a different jungle altogether: that of his home world. He was leading a group of children—some of them his children, probably—on a hunt, and they were hanging on his every word of advice, looking at him with awe in their eyes. A man who had earned his name, and more. One of Catachan’s greatest heroes, and yet still humble enough to spend time with them, to pass on his wisdom.
Lorenzo pointed out a deadly spiker plant lurking in the foliage, and they gave it a wide berth. He heard snuffling ahead, and he held up his hand for silence. He crept forward, pushing aside the vegetation with his las-gun. There it was, in the centre of a small clearing, basking in the sunlight: The most fearsome of his world’s predators, near legendary throughout the Imperium. The beast after which his own regiment had been named. A Catachan Devil.
They were downwind of it, and it hadn’t scented them. Lorenzo beckoned to the children to come forward, to take a look at the beast. They obeyed, and let out hushed gasps of fear and wonder. Lorenzo recalled how, at their age, he had been afraid too, and he resolved to prove to them that there was no need, that Man could always triumph over Nature. If he was the right man.
At their age…
He laid his gun aside. This would be a fair fight. Lorenzo drew his knife—a devil claw, the finest of all Catachan blades, over a metre in length—and he pounced. The creature reared up on six bristling legs, opened its mighty claws, and whipped its spiny tail around to sting him. It was fast. He had almost forgotten how fast. Or perhaps it was just that he had slowed down with age. How old was he now, anyway?
He could still take it.
Lorenzo landed in the spot where the creature had been, his knife raised to strike. But the Devil was no longer there. He whirled, disoriented, but saw no trace of it. How could it have escaped from him? From… from… what was his earned name, anyway? He felt confused, standing in that clearing alone. Confused and humiliated. He thought he could hear the children laughing at him.
Then Lorenzo glimpsed a spiny tail a short distance ahead of him, and he knew what had happened. The Catachan Devil had simply wandered away, in search of a better light. A soft blue light. He could see it through the trees, and though he didn’t know what the light was, he didn’t wonder. The light was safe. Everything made sense again. Except…
How had he got so old?
Lorenzo knew what the children said about him behind his back. They said he couldn’t be a hero as he claimed, because he had survived the war when all the real heroes had died. They called him a coward, said he’d never taken a risk, never distinguished himself. Never earned his name after all. He could hear their taunts now. He tried to blot them out, tried to focus on the creature in the blue light ahead of him. He couldn’t see it anymore, but he could see the light, and he approached it with increasingly urgent steps. In that light, he would prove them all wrong about him. “I don’t know but I’ve been told, Jungle Fighters don’t grow old…”
This wasn’t what Lorenzo wanted.
Even if it had been, he knew it was an impossible dream. Few Jungle Fighters ended their days like this, and he had never expected to be one of them.
It wasn’t real.
It wasn’t real.
With that sudden knowledge, he snapped back to the present, to Rogar III. It hit him between the eyes like a smack of cold air, and he was on the bank of a stagnant lake, one foot poised over its surface. He pulled back, and sent loose dirt skittering over the side. As it hit, it evaporated in a cloud of white steam. Acid.
The blue light was hovering in the centre of the lake—but now, as if it knew its ploy had failed, it blinked out again and left Lorenzo in the dark. Alone. Without his lasgun.
In a part of the jungle he had not seen before.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lorenzo was afraid.
It was a feeling to which he wasn’t accustomed. But then, nor was he used to being alone, separated from his squad—to having abandoned them. It was their lives he was afraid for, not his own.
He didn’t know where he was, nor where Dougan had got to. He didn’t know how far he had walked, mesmerised by the blue light. He just knew he had to get back to the campsite. He crashed through the jungle, following a trail he didn’t remember leaving, cursing himself for his weakness.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been warned. He could see it clearly now. The light had been inside him all the time, a more subtle presence than he could have imagined. It had heightened his desires and his fears, whatever it had taken to lead him where it had wanted him to go. To his death. He had been lucky. It hadn’t been strong enough.
Somehow, he had found the will to focus, to snap himself out of its spell.
The only thing he wanted right now, the total of his hopes and ambitions, was to find his comrades alive. He remembered what Dougan had said, how he’d suspected that the blue light was trying to lure them away. What if there had been an attack in his absence? What if they were all dead, and it was his fault?
Dougan. Suddenly, Lorenzo could hear his voice again, and see the intensity in his gaze. “Let me do this… I need to do this!” He hadn’t questioned him, hadn’t seen that the light had cast its spell over Dougan too.
He stumbled to a halt. Somehow, impossibly, his trail had petered out.
He was lost for a moment, scrabbling in the undergrowth, looking for something—a snapped twig, a crushed leaf—anything to show he had passed this way before. There was nothing. Until, just as he was beginning to give up hope, wondering if he should risk calling out to the others, Lorenzo’s fingers brushed against something. Something cold, hard, smooth, angular. Wood and metal.
His lasgun. He had to tear it from the clutches of weeds, as if it had lain here for weeks, been claimed as the jungle’s own. He felt another stab of anxiety. He didn’t feel as if more than a few minutes, maybe a half-hour, had
passed, and the pre-dawn sky supported that theory—but in the blue light’s embrace, time hadn’t meant a great deal. His comrades’ corpses could be rotting already.
He tried not to think about it. No point in worrying about what he couldn’t change. Just get back to the campsite, and deal with what was real.
A pair of yellow lizard eyes blinked at Lorenzo from under a flowering plant. He fried their owner with a las-round, just to test that his gun wasn’t clogged.
A faint breath of air caressed his face, and made his scratches sting. So, he hadn’t been entranced long enough for them to heal. He remembered stalking an imaginary Devil, standing downwind of it. He had to hope that this part of the fantasy, at least, had been real. He closed his eyes and oriented himself at the spot where he’d found the lasgun, tried to transport himself back to that Catachan clearing and to mentally retrace his steps towards it.
When he opened his eyes again, he knew which way he had to go.
Lorenzo heard movements through the trees—and was that the sergeant’s voice?
He broke into a run, and came up short when two familiar figures loomed before him, Armstrong and Landon.
“What happened?” asked Armstrong and Landon at the same time.
“We’ve been searching for you,” said Armstrong. “Where—?”
“Is everyone—?”
“We thought something must have dragged you away. We were lucky Sharkbait woke when he did, and started yelling. Landon here had a lizard on his neck, we only just got it off him in time.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Where’s Steel Toe? Is he with you?”
Lorenzo felt as if his blood had just frozen. “You haven’t seen him?”
He swallowed, and told Armstrong everything, burning with shame beneath the veteran’s one-eyed gaze. Before Lorenzo’s story was done, Armstrong was leading the way back to the camp. En route, they were joined by Myers and Storm, both bursting with questions. Armstrong filled them in brusquely, and Lorenzo pointed across the ashes of last night’s fire to where he had last seen Dougan. Myers and Storm went straight off to resume their search in that direction.
Armstrong mimicked the screeching call of a Catachan flying swamp mamba, and the rest of the Jungle Fighters answered his summons, appearing two by two to hear the news and to have their own efforts redirected.
Sergeant Greiss cast an appraising eye over Lorenzo, and asked if he was alright. Lorenzo nodded, and Greiss crooked a finger in his direction and growled, “You’re with me, trooper.”
Lorenzo fell in at the sergeant’s heels, avoiding his gaze. He knew what he must have been thinking.
The search went on for another hour, aided by the reappearance of the sun. Donovits and Woods found a partial trail, and Donovits identified the uniquely heavy indentation of Dougan’s bionic leg—but as with Lorenzo’s trail earlier, it led them nowhere.
Greiss was about ready to give up, Lorenzo could feel it. Until he gave the order, though, there was still hope. He found a path they hadn’t searched, because it was so overgrown, and he started to hack at the vegetation with his knife. Greiss regarded him for a second then, to his immense gratitude, the sergeant drew his own Catachan fang and joined him.
They hadn’t gone far when a figure dropped out of a tree in front of them. It was a lithe man in camouflage fatigues and the customary bandana, with tanned skin and dark hair like Dougan’s. Lorenzo’s heart leapt—and it stayed in his mouth as he recognised this newcomer, not as the man they were looking for but as Sly Marbo.
He had never been this close to the legendary one-man army before. In other circumstances, he might have felt honoured—but Marbo seemed hardly to have seen Lorenzo. His face was taut, denied so much as a flicker of emotion, and his eyes were white and penetrating but dead inside, as he addressed Greiss. “You won’t find your trooper this way.”
Greiss accepted the pronouncement without question. “Have you seen him?”
Marbo shook his head. “This jungle has a way of hiding things, and people. Haven’t worked it out yet.”
Greiss sighed, and called out, “Right, let’s call it a day. Reassemble at the campsite.” There was no response, but Lorenzo knew that one of the others would have heard, and passed the message on.
“One more thing,” said Marbo in his deep, throaty voice. “There’s an ork encampment forty kilometres from here, twenty-two degrees. A big one. Don’t think the Validians know about it—but your course will take you right through it.”
Lorenzo didn’t question how he could have scouted so far ahead. He was Sly Marbo.
“No way round?”
“Not unless you want to go wading through an acid swamp—or adding four days to your journey.”
Greiss expressed his gratitude with a curt nod—then Marbo was gone. Just gone, in the time it took Lorenzo to blink, leaving not the faintest ripple in the foliage. Sergeant Greiss turned to retrace his steps too, but Lorenzo stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “No. You can’t… Trooper Dougan, he could still be…”
Greiss raised an eyebrow. “You heard what Marbo said. Steel Toe’s gone. Accept it and move on.”
“But what if the light still has him? If he’s been hypnotised… He could be out there!”
“You say this light of yours tried to give you an acid bath.”
“Yes, but I broke free.”
“And if Steel Toe had done the same, he’d have found his way back to us, like you did. What’s up with you, Lorenzo? You’ve lost comrades before.”
Lorenzo didn’t say anything. How could he articulate the pain he’d felt, like a body blow, when Greiss had called off the search? That terrible moment when his last hope had been snatched from him. The sergeant was right, he had lost comrades before—you couldn’t fight the Emperor’s war, nor grow up on Catachan, without seeing death on a regular basis, becoming inured to it almost. But it was different this time. Different, because he could hear Dougan’s words in his head: “I’m counting on you, Lorenzo.”
He had let Dougan down. He had let them all down. Lorenzo had been given his chance to be a hero, at last, and he’d failed. He had seen what happened, just a couple of times, to Jungle Fighters who lost the trust of their squad. It was as if they weren’t there, as if they didn’t exist. And he had felt no sympathy for those wretches. In this environment, if you didn’t have the trust of your comrades, you had nothing. Lorenzo would be as invisible to the others as he had been to Marbo.
“I can’t help wondering,” said Sergeant Greiss as they trudged back to the campsite empty-handed, “how you did it.”
“Did what?” asked Lorenzo.
“Broke the spell. Brought yourself to your senses before you took the big plunge. I mean, no disrespect to Steel Toe, God-Emperor rest his soul, I’d have said he was as strong-willed as any of us—but you’re the one who made it back.”
“I don’t know, sergeant. I just don’t know.”
“Must’ve taken some force of mind. You know, some of the others and me, we were talking—figured you were about due your earned name.”
“No!” said Lorenzo, firmly. “Not for this, sergeant.”
Greiss nodded, and Lorenzo suddenly realised that the grizzled sergeant knew what he was feeling, and understood. He hadn’t lost the sergeant’s trust. Quite the opposite—Greiss didn’t blame him for losing Dougan because he trusted him, because he knew Lorenzo had done all he could and that few among them could have done better, not even a veteran of Dougan’s experience.
Lorenzo felt ashamed, now, for not trusting him—for believing that his squad would turn their backs on him, when he should have known them better. He swore he’d make it up to them. His tread felt just that little lighter as he and Sergeant Greiss walked on. They wouldn’t talk about it again.
The commissar was in a foul mood.
He hadn’t recognised Armstrong’s Catachan call, so he and Braxton had been searching alone in the wrong area all this time. Macke
nzie blamed Armstrong personally for this, but Woods had leapt to his defence and a row had broken out. As Lorenzo and Greiss arrived, Mackenzie was jabbing a finger into Woods’ chest, yelling almost hysterically about how he had almost died because of the Jungle Fighters’ negligence.
“I was attacked out there—by the biggest jungle lizard you’ve ever seen! It dropped from a branch, right onto my shoulder. It’s only because of Braxton’s quick thinking and keen aim that I’m here to tell the tale.”
Lorenzo hid a smile, imagining Mackenzie’s expression as his adjutant was forced to shoot the lizard from his shoulder. Woods was less polite, and just laughed. Armstrong turned to Braxton and congratulated him. “I’m not sure I could’ve hit such a small target.”
The commissar was already scowling, but before Mackenzie could give vent to his anger again, Greiss marched forward, his fists clenched, a scowl on his face. “I’ll tell you what I told your sergeant back at the encampment, commissar,” he growled. “You have a problem with my men, you bring it to me.”
Mackenzie squared up to him, his nostrils flaring. “And what good would that have done, Greiss? You’ve demonstrated repeatedly that you can’t keep your squad in line. We’ve wasted the best part of the morning looking for two of your men—contrary to my explicit wishes—because they decided to go for a stroll in the night.”
“And I suppose your Validians would have stayed put?” sneered Greiss.
“My Guardsmen know better than to follow pretty lights into the jungle, sergeant. That’s because they’ve been taught self-control! If Trooper Dougan couldn’t hold himself in check, then we’re better off without him.”
Greiss’ voice was low, but the threat it carried was unmistakeable. “Don’t push me, commissar. I’ve just lost a good man, who deserved better than to be taken down without a scrap. I’m in no mood for this right now.” He handed his lasgun to Woods, who received it without comment.
[Imperial Guard 02] - Death World Page 8