He had aimed for the knee again, it took four shots to penetrate through to the bone, and then the oncoming creature collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, and disappeared below the surface.
By that time, the first zombie had somehow managed to right itself and was bearing down on him. This one took six shots, and fell less than a metre from him, hands reaching for him. He thanked the God-Emperor for the creatures’ sluggish reflexes: if this one had only shifted its weight onto its good leg, it could have stayed upright long enough to wrap its fingers around his throat.
In no immediate danger now, Lorenzo took a second to scan the battlefield. Myers and Armstrong were engaged in their own struggles, each beginning to gain the upper hand—but Braxton was in trouble.
Three zombies had surrounded the Validian, overpowered him, and pushed him headlong into the mud. His face was buried, he couldn’t breathe.
Greiss had seen what was happening, and was just finishing up with his own opponent. Astonishingly, he had whittled into it with his Catachan fang until he had exposed its spine, which he had then seized and yanked right out of its body. He tossed the wretched creature’s remains aside, with a sneer, and began to wade towards Braxton, but the mud was up to his stomach and his progress was slow.
Storm was firing in from the sidelines, and as Lorenzo watched, the first of Braxton’s attackers fell beneath his las-fire at last. Storm switched targets, and Lorenzo joined him, their shots converged on the back of the second zombie’s knee and burnt through it in seconds.
The third and final zombie swung around to greet Greiss with a hefty punch, which the grizzled sergeant dodged. His face was level with the creature’s stomach—with its greater bulk, it looked like it could crush him with its thumb—but he drove the butt of his lasgun into its leg and, to Lorenzo’s amazement, shattered it. The bone must have been old and brittle. But this zombie’s reflexes were better than most. Instead of falling, it swayed on one leg, and looked down to where its other leg hung loose, still attached to its body by muddy tendrils.
Then Greiss laid into it with his gun butt again, roaring like an animal, and slowly, as if it was fighting gravity itself, the zombie fell and was gone. Greiss’ path to Braxton was clear—but the Validian was gone now, too.
There was nothing Lorenzo could do for him, no chance of reaching him. He shifted his attention to the zombies still standing, supporting Myers and Armstrong’s efforts with his las-shots. But his eyes kept flicking to the patch of mud where Braxton’s head had gone under, and he found himself holding his breath as Greiss propelled himself towards that spot and plunged his hands into the shifting earth.
Myers was free of ork zombies, but his struggle had cost him. He was sinking fast. Storm leapt back into the quagmire, and waded to his comrade’s aid. He reached Myers and gripped him beneath the arms. He tried to drag him free, but for every two centimetres the pair gained, the quagmire reclaimed one, and Myers was buried up to his neck now.
Lorenzo concentrated on freeing his own legs. When the planet let go, it did so suddenly, and he fell back into a bush and lost vital seconds disentangling his vest from its thorns. He raced around the edge of the quagmire, to the point at which Storm had re-entered it. He could reach him from here, by placing one foot in the mud while leaving the other braced behind him. He caught Storm’s reaching hand, and pulled at it with all his strength.
Across the clearing, to Lorenzo’s relief, Greiss pulled Braxton, coughing and spluttering, to the surface—but the effort had cost him, and now they were both treading mud, only their heads visible, helpless.
Armstrong’s las-bolts despatched the final zombie, and he was in trouble now too, he wasn’t too far from the edge, but with his useless arm he had no way of reaching it. Lorenzo gritted his teeth and pulled harder, and at last Storm stumbled onto the bank beside him, and they took one of Myers’ arms each and dragged him up after them.
Myers was trying to bring something with him. He strained and pulled, and the earth released its grip on his muddied backpack. Lorenzo had lost his, along with his jacket and his bandolier. Myers was rummaging in the pack before his legs were even out of the quagmire, and Storm grinned behind his black beard as his comrade produced a rope. He must have woven it himself from plant roots, after they’d lost the others at the river.
Myers made the throw, of course. The end of the rope slapped into the mud a centimetre or two from Greiss’ head, but was absorbed before he could free an arm to reach for it. Both Greiss and Braxton strained to move their submerged limbs, to find their sinking lifeline, and Braxton’s chin went under and he spluttered again as he took a mouthful of earth. Then, a tense moment later, the Validian yelled out, “Got it!” and Myers and Lorenzo pulled for all they were worth.
Storm, in the meantime, had found a branch that jutted out over Armstrong’s position. He climbed up to it and swarmed along it, the branch bending beneath his weight. Armstrong raised his good arm, and their fingers strained to find each other.
At last the struggle was won, and six muddy, exhausted soldiers lay on dry land and looked mournfully at the swamp that had been their campsite, thinking of the precious kit they had lost to its embrace, and of how much more they could have lost.
They had just three half-filled water bottles between them now, Lorenzo’s, Storm’s and Armstrong’s having gone down with their backpacks. The flamer could never be assembled again without the parts Storm had been carrying. They were just grateful that Myers still had the power packs for their lasguns.
But Lorenzo felt most sorry for Armstrong, because his devil claw knife had been snatched from him. The veteran Jungle Fighter looked devastated about that, far more hurt than he’d been by his shoulder injury. Braxton offered him Woods’ old devil claw, but he just shrugged the Validian away. It wasn’t the same.
“I hate to say this,” announced Greiss, “but we need to move on before we can bed down again.”
“You think there’s anywhere safe on this damned planet?” asked Armstrong, sullenly.
“I’m gambling it takes a good while for Rogar to turn an area like this into a bog,” said Greiss, “else why would it have waited till now? In future, we’re just going to have to move between two or three campsites a night, grab our sleep a few hours at a time.” They all saw the sense in that, though it was a disheartening proposition.
In the event, they moved only a few hundred metres before Greiss gave the order to start clearing the ground again. Lorenzo and Armstrong took their watch while the others slept. Armstrong was poor company, sitting on a tree trunk and stared at his own feet. Lorenzo, fortunately, had slept long enough to feel relatively refreshed. He hoisted the protective plastic sheets over his comrades’ heads by himself, though shortly after he had done so the rain subsided at last.
A few silver-backed snakes hissed in the undergrowth—but to Lorenzo’s relief, the rest of the night passed without incident.
The next morning, the Jungle Fighters had an unexpected visitor.
The figure stepped out of the trees as they were making to move out—and instantly, six lasguns were drawn and aimed at it. The figure made no threatening move, however.
Lorenzo peered at it curiously. It was humanoid in shape, about his height and build—and to an extent, it resembled one of the ork zombies, fashioned as it was from Rogar’s vegetation. But this figure was wearing a jacket woven from varicoloured leaves, and a branch slung across its back where the Jungle Fighters kept their lasguns, and it even seemed to have a face, wide-eyed and grinning, though this was just a pattern formed—accidentally?—by the twisted stalks and plants that ran through its rough, sculpted head. A thatch of straw was perched atop that head, like a mop of blond hair.
It grinned at the Jungle Fighters for a minute or more, as they watched it warily. Then the figure let out a bizarre, inhuman noise: a series of guttural clicks and warbling vowel sounds. Then it turned, and with a clumsy, rolling gait like it might shake itself apart, it moved away f
rom them, in the direction they intended to go, until its path was blocked. Then it brought up an arm, jerkily, and sliced it down, then up and down again.
“What the hell is it meant to be?” breathed Myers.
“Best guess?” growled Greiss. “It’s meant to be one of us. Look at it, Bullseye! Pretending it’s cutting its way through the jungle like we’ve been doing.”
“I think it was trying to talk.” Armstrong said. “It was trying to sound like us, imitate the noises we make, but it doesn’t understand language.”
“You think we’re supposed to be taken in by that?” asked Lorenzo, not sure if he should be amused or disturbed by the idea. “We’re supposed to think that’s one of us, let it join us, and—then what?”
“I vote we don’t give it the chance to show us,” said Myers.
“I’ll second that,” said Greiss.
Six lasguns converged on the unlikely doppelganger—and it whirled around to face the Jungle Fighters, and if Lorenzo hadn’t known better he could have sworn it seemed surprised. Then the figure exploded.
Hidden spines shot out from its chest and mouth, like slender darts, and the Jungle Fighters leapt for cover, and fortunately had kept enough distance between them and the twisted effigy to avoid being struck. Lorenzo raised his head to find a dozen spines embedded in a tree beside him. More lay in the grass, and he noted that their needle points dripped with poison. Of the effigy, there was no trace at all now. It had fallen apart, returned to its constituent components and reclaimed by the jungle, and Lorenzo couldn’t tell which of the leaves and plants that strewed the ground before them had belonged to its mass.
The second effigy showed itself almost four hours later, just stepping out behind the Jungle Fighters into the path they’d cut, greeting them with its incoherent warble. It didn’t last a second before it was gunned down, falling onto its back and shooting its poisonous payload into the sky. Lorenzo had barely set eyes upon it before it was gone—but he was left with the distinct impression that this doppelganger had been more sophisticated, a far more accurate likeness of its template, than its predecessor had been. It was about then that they all felt the first tremor.
It had been a quiet day by the Jungle Fighters’ standards. They had dealt with routine attacks by jungle lizards, snakes and spitter plants, but nothing that had really challenged them. Since the incident with the second effigy, they’d had no sense of being followed, so it seemed that—for now at least—they were safe from zombies.
As they had progressed, so too had their spirits lightened. Lorenzo had started to feel like they had finally got the measure of this deathworld, like Rogar had run out of new ways to torment them and accepted their mastery of it. It was a good feeling. A reaffirming feeling. It made their sacrifices worthwhile.
They didn’t speak about the tremor. With luck, it had been an isolated incident—and the more time passed without a recurrence, the more likely this seemed.
Then, as the daylight began to die, the jungle opened up again, and they were able to sheathe their knives as their passage through it eased. Shortly thereafter, they uncovered gretchin footprints and knew they were close to their goal. They withdrew a short way, and found a secluded spot in which they could rest for a time. The last time, they all knew, before the culmination of their mission. Find the ork warboss and take him out. They were starting to look forward to it again.
Greiss agreed to let them light a cooking fire, because the canopy was thick here and a small amount of smoke would likely go unnoticed. Anyway, they were low on standard rations, but they did have the lizards Myers and Storm had caught, along with a few handfuls of Rogar’s choicest spices. Myers tasted each one before he added it to the pot, in case its nature had changed since the last batch he’d gathered. In case the planet had brewed up a new poison to surprise them.
They knew there was a small chance that foraging gretchin would happen upon them, so Lorenzo helped Armstrong set up a few traps. Any creature that came within earshot of them would be strung up in a net, unable to raise an alarm.
They ate, and their conversation turned to the usual subject: to comrades gone but not forgotten. They spoke of Hotshot, Sharkbait and Brains’ defiance of the ork hordes. They had all heard the stories by now, of course, but it helped to reiterate them. It comforted them, and ensured that they had the details right, for the next time the stories were told. They talked of Landon’s bravery, and of the heroic fight Steel Toe Dougan had no doubt put up against the blue light. In time, their conversation turned to earlier exploits, and they found these stories were even more worth the telling because Armstrong and Guardsman Braxton were new to their squad and hadn’t heard them before.
Greiss recalled how, as an eager young rookie, Hotshot Woods had rushed an ork sniper that had pinned the squad down, miraculously reaching it without a scratch and wrestling it from its emplacement. Myers and Storm took it in turns to relate how Brains Donovits had survived an encounter with a stranded Chaos Space Marine, simply by outthinking it, and were pleased when Braxton asked questions and made expressions of admiration in all the right places. Then they all listened attentively to Armstrong’s fresh tales of heroes from his former squad, and expressed a collective wish that they could have known these great men and witnessed their deeds.
Myers followed that with the tale of how Old Hardhead had earned his name. It was a story from before Lorenzo’s time, of course—before Myers’, for that matter—but they had both heard it often enough. Trooper Greiss, as he had been then, had been part of a single platoon that had taken down a Chaos Dreadnought. He had lain some of the snares into which it had walked, and planted a mine on its leg as it had struggled to free itself. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to outran the explosion that had ripped the Dreadnought apart. Or maybe it hadn’t been fortune but fate that had lodged a sizeable hunk of shrapnel in Greiss’ skull. The surgeons had reportedly written him off, but his strength of character had buoyed him to a full recovery. “Without that metal plate they put in his head,” Myers concluded, “he wouldn’t be the cantankerous old sod we know today.”
“Knock it off, Bullseye,” growled Greiss, “unless you want latrine duty when we get back to civilisation.”
“You wait till you’re splashed over the front page of Eagle & Bolter, sergeant,” said Myers. “We got their star reporter in our midst, you know.”
“Yes, that’s right,” remembered Storm, turning to Braxton. “Didn’t I hear you were working on a story about us?”
“We give you enough material yet?” put in Myers.
“Ease off, you two,” said Greiss. “You know what those rags are like. The higher-ups wouldn’t let Braxton print any of this stuff if he wanted to. They’re only interested in their own truths.”
“I wish I could argue with that,” said Braxton, “but you’re right, yes. I always wrote what I was told to write—about successful missions, and ground that we’d gained. I don’t think half of it was even true. I didn’t ask.”
“Never saw a broadsheet that was any different,” remarked Myers.
“And I thought that was alright,” continued Braxton, “because it was all about morale. That was what Mackenzie always said, and the commissar before him. Put the best possible spin on it, they said. Tell the troops about the overall campaign, about the Imperium resisting its enemies, and remind them why they’re doing it. Don’t let them dwell on the details, how people like them—like us—are suffering and dying for the cause. Your story would have been no different. Just a few lines about your great victory, maybe a name check for the commissar. They’d never have let me write about Woods or Dougan or the others.”
“All the more reason for us to make it back alive,” said Storm. “Because if we don’t tell those stories, who will?”
“I will,” swore Braxton. “One day. I’ll tell them how it is with you—how you make sure that everyone matters, every life counts for something.”
“Keep talking like that,” said Gr
eiss, “and your next commissar will probably boot you right out on the first suicide mission to cross his desk.”
Braxton grimaced, but took the joke in the spirit it was intended.
They were all still smiling when the ground shook again.
This tremor was worse than the first one. It lasted longer, felt deeper and more destructive, although the only visible signs of it above ground were a slight blurring of the trees and the dislodging of a few leaves and fruits. The tremor died down with no harm done, but Lorenzo could see his apprehension mirrored in die other Jungle Fighters’ eyes, because they knew what it might presage.
Maybe Rogar III hadn’t conceded defeat after all. Maybe it was just waiting, planning, and building up to its biggest offensive against its interlopers yet.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Sergeant—you’ve got to see this.”
As the Jungle Fighters had ventured deeper into ork territory, they had switched to stealth tactics, as they had by the encampment. This time, it was Myers who had the task of scouting ahead for traps. He had already guided the squad around several tripwires and a concealed pit. Now he came scurrying back to them, face flushed.
They followed him through the foliage, all too aware that they were moving parallel to a path worn down and churned up by footprints. Lorenzo could hear clinking and clunking and the guttural sounds of ork voices ahead, and he moved as carefully as he could, disturbing hardly a leaf.
A light spilled into the jungle, and Lorenzo feared at first that it was the mind-altering blue light. It was white, though, far more harsh, and it seemed to emanate from many sources. The Jungle Fighters were careful to stick to the shadows, not to let the light reveal them.
Then, with a cautious touch, Myers parted a cluster of spiny fronds, and Lorenzo saw what the excitement was about.
The orks had set up a mining operation. They were working well into the night. A clearing was illuminated by lanterns strung up in trees, turned inwards, their light bleaching out all but the faintest hints of colour. Across the clearing, the ground rose steeply, and a tunnel had been dug into the side of this hillock. A square wooden frame propped up its entrance—and as the Jungle Fighters watched, another light appeared in the tunnel’s depths. An ork emerged, the light streaming from a battered helmet that was balanced atop its misshapen head. It was wheeling a lopsided barrow overloaded with rocks, which it dumped unceremoniously onto one of several heaps dotting the area.
[Imperial Guard 02] - Death World Page 17