by Henry Zou
As the fire-team pressed on, the squad vox-unit began to receive from Baeder’s squad. Connected to a bulkier vox array on Trooper Colham’s back, the vox receiver piece transmitted the confusion directly from Baeder’s position for Mortlock to hear.
‘Mortlock, this is One. The colonel is down but uninjured, no casualties to report. We had a fraggin’ native set off a booby trap. Dumb indig scared the hell out of us. Request cover, over.’
‘This is Mortlock’s escort. We’re on our way. Stay calm and hold position. Out,’ relayed Colham on the run.
By the time Mortlock reached them the colonel was waiting for him, his silver hair matted across his forehead, his chest swelling in great heaves. ‘Major–’ he began imperiously.
‘Are you good, sir?’ Mortlock asked.
‘I’m fine. A little headache and some bruised eardrums. That’s not so important right now.’
‘Sir–’ Mortlock began.
‘Not now, major. Look at this,’ Baeder said. Mortlock followed the direction of Baeder’s pointing index finger and saw there, held afloat by four troopers, the body of a subhuman monster.
‘This does not bode well,’ Mortlock said, scratching his chin as he was wont to do when in contemplation.
The ‘monster’ was spread-eagled on the ground at their feet. It appeared human but beyond the continuation of two legs, two arms and something resembling a head, the similarities ended. Sergeant Luster cut away the insurgent’s leather face bindings with his bayonet, peeling them away like loose skin. Beneath its flat, almost inverted face was more mouth than anything else, with a wide, slack maw so deep that its gaping throat was lost to shadow. The skin that covered its body was thickly wrinkled, forming a hard rind that resembled the peel of dried fruit. When Baeder touched it, it felt rubbery and slightly yielding, causing him to rub his hands on his trousers gingerly.
Most tellingly, it wore calf length trousers of white canvas and a leather jacket with one shoulder plate. The leather was a shade lighter where the insignia had been stitched off. There was no mistaking the scavenged apparel of an insurgent. Parts of uniforms foraged from dead local militia troops, mismatched with traditional garb, had in a way become a uniform of sorts for the insurgency.
Baeder sucked his teeth. ‘The taint. Guns. These insurgent warbands aren’t fraggin’ around with us are they? This is serious.’
‘You reckon this is a mutant? Not just some awry genetic accident in the womb?’ Mortlock asked.
‘Let’s be pragmatic, major,’ Baeder said. ‘This is extensive mutation. The thing barely looks human. It’s just too much to be natural.’
Mortlock nodded, his brows knitted in deep concern.
‘What do you want to do with it?’
‘Burn it,’ Baeder said. ‘I’ll log the report to the Ecclesiarchy. They should be intrigued to learn about ruinous mutations among the insurgency.’
Cardinal Avanti strolled out onto the flight deck of the Emperor’s Anvil and into the hard sun glare of the open sea. His bodyguard of battle-sisters in their alabaster armour trailed behind him, keeping even the Persepian armsmen at a respectful distance.
Avanti had a fondness for morning strolls along the flight deck. He walked the full length of the great Argo-Nautical, inspecting the string of parked fighters and bombers. Often, he ran a white-gloved finger along the painted metal and if it came away with dust the flight crew would be flogged. Sometimes, depending on Avanti’s mood, he would be merciful or he would not. It was, he believed, good for discipline and the upkeep of faith. It reminded these soldiers that, despite their guns and training, the ultimate power lay within the Emperor and his highest servants – the Ecclesiarchy.
As Avanti circled the fuselage of a Marauder bomber, peering at the waiting aircraft with cold scrutiny, a young Ecclesiarchal page clattered down the steps of the bridge tower. He appeared to be in a rush, his face red from exertion.
The boy halted just short of Avanti’s bodyguard and bowed, gasping hard to restrain his breathing in the presence of the cardinal. ‘My lordship, there is an urgent vox transmission that requires your attention. It is a Captain Brevet from Riverine Base Camp Alpha.’
At this, the flight crew who had been standing next to their bomber in an apprehensive huddle, relaxed visibly. Some still bore the flog-marks of Avanti’s discipline from several days past.
‘You have been excused today,’ said Avanti, addressing the crew chief directly. ‘But consider this, anything shy of the perfection of duty is negligence towards the Emperor. To neglect the will of the Emperor is to invite slothfulness into your soul. It is the first step towards damnation,’ Avanti said, wagging his finger with a mirthful gleam in his eye.
The crew chief stiffened visibly. Although he was a lifer with combat honours and thirty years of service to the Guard, he could do naught but nod. ‘Yes, your lordship.’
It gave Avanti little pleasure to cut short his morning stroll, but he considered himself a pragmatic man. He soon found himself in the command tower of the Argo-Nautical. The vessel was at high anchor and the command bridge, usually thrumming with activity, was largely empty but for a handful of junior officers on standby. Avanti dismissed them. He preferred to handle intelligence personally and decide what it was that the military seniors could and could not know. It simply made things so much easier.
‘My lordship, may I speak?’
It was Palatine Morgan Fure, a sister-soldier from the Order of the Steepled Keep. She was a short, well-muscled woman with a stern, broad jaw and heavy cheeks set like chapel stones. She wore power armour of form-fitting ivory plates, a bolter mag-clamped to her cuirass.
‘Yes, child, you may,’ said Avanti.
‘I can take this vox message in your stead. Your lordship should not have to negotiate the petty foibles of a field officer.’
Avanti nodded. Palatine Fure was, in his opinion, one of the most loyal individuals he had ever encountered. She was intense, not only in her physical demeanour but in all manner of focus and piety. She and her company of sisters had been assigned to him for the better part of a decade since his ascension to cardinal and Fure had taken upon herself the task of his safety with a vigilance that bordered on the obsessive. She slept four hours a day, devoting the rest of her time to her training as a monastic militant. In her supervision of Avanti’s guard detail, the cardinal had never feared for his safety, no matter where he travelled. Avanti enjoyed the rightful obedience he wielded over her and allowed her to display her devotion whenever it pleased him.
Fure snatched the vox receiver from a towering command bay and keyed the frequency.
‘Speak,’ she commanded, with total disdain for Imperial Guard protocol.
‘Halo,’ crackled the other end, using the call sign for high-ranking Ecclesiarchal members. ‘Halo, this is Riverine Base Camp Alpha. I am Staff Liaison Captain Brevet. Who am I speaking to?’
‘You are speaking to Palatine Morgan Fure. What message do you have?’
‘I must speak with either Cardinal Avanti, or any staff officer of high command.’
‘I am his aide. You may speak to me.’
‘As you wish,’ said Brevet with an electronic sigh. ‘This morning our base camp received intelligence from the 88th Battalion gathered during the course of Operation Curtain.’
‘Yes. And?’ Fure snapped.
‘Well, they retrieved the corpse of a slain insurgent. The corpse bears extensive signs of mutation.’
Palatine Fure looked to Cardinal Avanti. The cardinal waved his knurled hand once, in dismissal. ‘Is that all?’ she said in a flat tone that revealed no emotion. Before Captain Brevet could summon a reply she released her finger over the transmit button and hung the handset back in its bracket.
Avanti tutted to himself, drumming his fingers as he thought. ‘This is a good thing,’ he decided finally.
�
�A good thing, my worship? I thought we were to allow the Imperial Guard to know only what we needed them to know,’ Fure asked.
‘It was only a matter of time before they realised this is no simple peasant uprising. At least now we can use the influence of Chaos as legitimacy for waging this war,’ Avanti cawed.
‘But, my worship,’ Fure said with a dull look, ‘these mutations only began to occur many months after we began repossessing the land from the natives.’
Avanti sighed. Palatine Fure was a stoic servant, but she was frustratingly simple at times. Some people were just not set up to think politically. It was indeed true that the Imperial authorities had begun to uncover the beginnings of otherworldly influence many months after the Ecclesiarchy had begun to claim indigenous land for agricultural use, but that was no longer relevant.
For the past two years Avanti had implemented a policy to reclaim the land for Imperial use from the indigenous tribes. The local militia had been given Ecclesiarchal clearance to forcefully evict the indigenes from their lands. The parameters for ‘force’ were open to interpretation. It had been a glorious time of productivity for the Ecclesiarchal coffers. Convoys of local militia trucks rumbled into the heartlands to claim regional provinces for direct use of the Ecclesiarchy. Those very same trucks would return, their cargo holds swollen with Bastón tribals ready for placement into work camps.
To Avanti’s concern, the natives had begun to fight back, in small resisting mobs at first. Trucks began to disappear. Then isolated outposts both civilian and military were burned and razed. The Imperial authorities had not suspected those primitives capable of such a thing. Then the resistance became organised. Roving mobs became warbands; random acts of violence became planned raids. Rumours began to surface of a faction known as the Two Pairs. That was when the Imperial Guard from distant worlds began to deploy. For a moment, things hung in the balance for Avanti. The involvement of Guard forces meant the cardinal did not have the autonomy to pursue Ecclesiarchal interests at a whim. It frustrated him that officers would be so daring as to question why he was ordering both the killing of insurgents and civilians. Now things were falling into place quite nicely. If Chaos were indeed exerting influence on the insurgency then it was a good sign as far as Avanti was concerned. Now he had legitimacy to cleanse the mainland of its inhabitants and he would be right in doing so.
‘Palatine, if the inland is corrupted, then we will scour it clean,’ Avanti declared, using the impassioned tone that he reserved usually for sermons. ‘We will have to sanctify the land of Bastón so that further generations of good Imperial citizens may make use of its soil.’
Chapter Six
At exactly 16.00 on the one hundred and twenty-second day since deployment, the Persepian fleet steamed one of its grand Argo-Nauticals – the Manifest Destiny – to within sighting distance of the mainland. Their intent was to sail the vessel, by cover of darkness, into the placid Torre Gulf. From there, fourteen thousand Guardsmen would be deployed with supplies and motor fuel to establish an Imperial foothold on the island and reinforce the Riverine Amphibious already on the mainland.
It was a brave effort. Eight kilometres out from the coastline, Carnibalès spies planted in the coastal villages alerted the enemy of the Imperial movement. Three minutes later, the first Earthwrecker shell landed in the water just shy of the Manifest Destiny. Despite its gargantuan bulk, the Argo-Nautical was rocked by tsunami-level tidals created by the warhead. The second warhead, howling on contrails across the sky, did not miss. The hyper-velocity round – more missile than ordnance shell – split the Nautical’s deck and released its charge inside the ship’s hold. The resulting explosion whitened the night sky. Within the Imperial administrative cities occupying the coast, thousands of loyalists were awakened from their sleep by light streaming through their windows. Upon waking, their first sight was of a mushrooming cloud out on the horizon. They knew, one and all, that the Earthwrecker had spoken and Imperial salvation had been denied again.
Mautista’s early days of training were hazy and fragmented. It did not seem so long ago that he had lived an enviably simple life as the warrior custodian of his people. Now he shared an underground bunker with fifty other recruits, their living spaces confined to narrow cots three shelves high. His days became a blurred routine of training, eating and negligible amounts of sleep. He was no longer subject to the troubles or joys of common life. Mautista no longer worried about the dry season harvest. There were no village festivals to look forward to, nor the courting of village girls. He knew exactly what his training day consisted of, from the moment the instructor roused them from sleep to the time he collapsed exhausted in the early morning. Mautista felt like his life had already ended.
The absence of any distraction allowed his mind to focus only on the task at hand. Upon receiving his standard-issue kit – a press-stamped lasgun and canvas bandoleer – Mautista began his indoctrination. He learnt the basic use of a firearm and its maintenance. He learnt how to shoot and, at night, their instructors would take them above ground to practise their shooting at nocturnal game. Mautista came to enjoy the firing, especially the reassuring recoil against his shoulder. He remembered the mix of awe and frustration he had felt when he had seen those soldiers brandishing their brutal las weapons at Luis. That same fear drove him on to master the rudiments of insurgent warfare.
The days were long and they trained hard for eighteen hours of the day, with short breaks in between. Recruits were expected to volunteer for an insurgent warband within two weeks of training, but they were also expected to be ardent supporters of the Dos Pares philosophy, known as the Primal State. When they did rest, the insurgent recruits would be lectured on the insurgent cause, philosophy and their many grievances towards the Imperial cult. In essence, the Primal State was a renaissance of the old religion and culture of pre-Imperial Bastón, yet at the same time there were distinct elements of anarchy, of revolution and of a strange, foreign theology known as Kaos in the native tongue. Here too, the Kalisador’s keenly-focused mind excelled, and he engaged his instructors in lively theological debate. The destruction of the Taboon had deteriorated his faith in the guidance of his Emperor and the philosophy of Mautista’s instructors suddenly made so much sense to him.
So great was his advancement, that Mautista was soon singled out amongst the recruits. There were hushed whispers that the insurgent leaders were watching him, that he would be a candidate for becoming one of the Dos Pares Disciples. So it came as no great surprise that, on the fifteenth day of Mautista’s indoctrination, an instructor came to visit him.
‘They’re here for you,’ said his instructor just as he had returned exhausted from a night training march. Mautista had just collapsed into his cot when he realised his instructor was standing over his bunk. ‘Get up and pack your belongings.’
‘Who is here for me?’ Mautista groaned wearily.
‘I am,’ said a tall man, standing outside the underground barracks. His face was daubed in chalk and ink, his forehead deeply knotted with bony growth. Dressed in leather armour, with a lasrifle slung across his back, it was obvious that he was a Disciple of the Dos Pares.
Mautista immediately sprang to his feet. ‘Why?’
The Disciple said, ‘The Dos Pares have granted an audience with you.’ It was the phrase every recruit wished to hear. It meant that he was selected to become a Disciple, a leader of the insurgency. Or at least have the chance to be deemed worthy. Whether successful or not, no recruits ever returned to their warband again.
‘Pack your belongings,’ the instructor said. Mautista was not sure, but he thought he saw a taint of envy sour his instructor’s expression.
Mautista reached beneath his bunk and pulled out a roped bundle. Since his recruitment he had eschewed his Kalisador garb. His possessions were meagre – a lasgun, a canvas bandoleer, a canteen and a scavenged militiaman’s leather jacket with one metal pauldron on the lef
t shoulder. This was all he owned beside the canvas rural garb upon his back.
‘I’m ready,’ he told the Disciple. With that Mautista left with the tall man to meet the Two Pairs.
The Dos Pares, to most, was a standard bearer of rebellion. In the old language it translated to ‘Two Pairs’. It became a synonym of unity steeped in an even older culture. To most, even to the common insurgent who was farmer by day and guerrilla by night, the Dos Pares was nothing more than a spiritual motif. The words were inked in the propaganda posters distributed by the guerrilla network, or whispered amongst old men in drinking dens.
Most Bastón-born did not truly know who or what the Two Pairs or the Dos Pares were. There were many who believed it was simply a term that encompassed the insurgency as a whole. Others still, believed the Dos Pares to be nothing more tangible than a philosophy, a rebel ideal that had spread from the jungle interior to the outer provinces.
The Disciples, however, knew the truth. These select few saw the Dos Pares as flesh and blood. To them, the Dos Pares was the physical, driving force of the entire insurgency. They were the masterminds of strategy, the leaders who trained natives in modern forms of combat and the entire reason that the Bastón-born insurgency had not already collapsed under the Imperial war effort.
Since the early days of Imperial aggression, the natives were rallied by the Two Pairs. These mighty beings taught all they knew to their Disciples, nurturing both their minds through instruction and their bodies through chemical treatment. This cadre of Disciples in turn marshalled a crude yet determined force of heretic rebels against the Imperium. Although many thought of the Dos Pares as a product of vivid propaganda, very few knew them to be real.
Mautista however, would be one of those privileged few.
A Disciple by the name of Phelix took him through the tunnel complex, through the tracts of freshly excavated tunnels. Mautista was led down passages he had never known existed. Only while lost in those claustrophobic depths did Mautista realise the enormous scale of the underground earthworks. The tunnels resembled bowels of freshly uprooted soil, coiling and uneven. Finally, Phelix and Mautista emerged in one of the many gun production facilities hidden underground. There amongst the workbenches, milling machines, lathes and grinders, Mautista met the Two Pairs.