Cutler swung to face him, snarling as he raised his sabre. Vendrake recoiled from the fury in the colonel’s eyes, but stood his ground over the injured man and glared back, willing the madman to back down. And then a stronger will than Vendrake’s joined the struggle and Cutler faltered, his face contorting as he wrestled against the invader. This time Vendrake was grateful for the witch woman’s intervention, but it was a hard-fought battle. He could see her physically quaking with the effort to calm her charge. As she tightened her grip the humidity in the air froze around them and fell in a sprinkling of ice crystals. And then Cutler’s sabre clattered to the ground and he looked at Vendrake with dazed eyes, like a man waking from a nightmare.
‘Seven Furies for the Stars…’ Cutler murmured.
Move! The witch lashed Vendrake’s mind, throwing him aside as a las-bolt streaked towards him from the ground. He spun round and saw the mutilated commissar aiming a laspistol at him.
‘The Emperor con–’ Machen cut the Lethean commissar short with a merciless stomp.
‘That’s becoming a habit,’ he said balefully.
As the skirmish died down, Roach felt Audie Joyce sagging in his grip. He nodded to Mister Fish and they released the greencap. The boy fell to his knees, crying like a big, broken child. Which is pretty much what he is, Roach figured. Still, Joyce was old enough to get himself killed if he didn’t get his act together. The kid had gone wild when Cutler had gutted the crazy priest, screaming about heresy and murder. It had taken two of them to hold him down.
‘Glory Days!’ Dix yelled. Roach grimaced as the rangy Badlander sauntered back from the riverbank, grinning like an idiot. ‘Reckon I just got me a piece of my Thunderground, boys!’
Roach spat in disgust. The skirmish had been a massacre – fifty men torn apart by nearly five hundred, including nine Sentinels! The Letheans hadn’t lasted a minute. Roach had no love for the murderous bastards, but he hadn’t wanted any part of it.
‘What you looking at me like that for, breed?’ Dix growled.
‘I ain’t looking at you no-how, Dixie. You ain’t never been a pretty sight and I sure don’t have the stomach for the new you.’
He turned his back on the mutilated Badlander.
‘Don’t you walk away from me, breed!’ Dix pulled a knife and charged, just as Roach knew he would. The scout spun, catching Dix full in the face with a kick that sent him lurching backwards. If he’d still had a nose, it would be a ruin now.
‘You really want to walk your Thunderground, man?’ Roach snarled as he waded into the stunned Badlander with a flurry of punches. ‘Then you got to look a whole lot harder. You got to bleed for your Thunderground, Dixie!’
The rest of Dustsnake looked on impassively as Roach battered the man, throwing all of the horror and pain of the past day into it. When Dix went down the scout waited, then kicked him as he tried to get up. He turned away, then thought better of it and kicked him some more, just to be sure. He noticed Mister Fish staring at him with wide, troubled eyes and felt oddly ashamed.
‘Hey don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘Me and Dixie there, we go way back.’
‘There is no going back,’ Machen said with finality.
‘But that priest murdered Major Waite!’ Lieutenant Quint insisted. ‘Surely if we were to explain what really happened…’
‘What happened is we killed a ranking member of the Ecclesiarchy and his entourage,’ Machen said. ‘This is the Imperium, not the Capitol judiciary back home. Justice is irrelevant.’
‘You sound almost happy about that, Jon,’ Vendrake said, knowing that Machen loathed being called by his first name.
‘I am merely stating the facts, Hardin,’ Machen spat back.
‘Or maybe the life of a renegade sounds just dandy to you…’
‘We are not renegades!’ Cutler shouted, his voice echoing hollowly around the amphitheatre. The meeting had been running for almost an hour, but it was the first time he had spoken. Now he eyed the seven men gathered around him, sizing each of them up in turn. They were standing in a loose circle, debating on their feet in the old Arkan manner: the last surviving officers of the 19th Confederates.
‘The men we fought in this city, they were renegades,’ Cutler went on, ‘or more precisely, turncoats. They were Guard gone bad, gentlemen.’
‘But do we know that for sure, sir?’ Quint asked. ‘What I mean is, these tau chaps seem to have quite the propensity for mercenaries.’
‘We found meat tags on the bodies – regimental insignia,’ Lieutenant Hood interjected. He was a Burning Eagle, curt and efficient to a fault. ‘According to the tags every one of those men belonged to the 77th Oberai Redeemers.’
‘And they still fought as a functioning unit,’ Cutler said. ‘The whole sorry regiment’s probably deserted to the enemy.’
‘If they got the kind of reception we did, I wouldn’t blame them!’ Lieutenant Grayburn blurted out.
‘Wouldn’t you, lieutenant?’ Cutler looked at the young officer who had stepped up to fill Waite’s shoes. ‘Well that’s worth knowing, because personally I despise them.’
Grayburn reddened and began to bluster, but Cutler waved away his protests.
‘No, Grayburn, I’m not gunning for you. You did a fine job out there with the 2nd and I know you’re mad after what happened to the major, but mad won’t get us through this mess.’
Vendrake tried to reconcile this scrupulous, charismatic leader with the savage he’d seen scant hours earlier. It was almost as if the rage had purged Cutler, leaving him stronger and sharper than before.
Maybe that’s how he deals with the truth, Vendrake thought uneasily. On the back of that intuition came another, more disquieting one. I’m going to need a solution of my own for that particular problem, because I won’t be able to bury Trinity again. Leonora won’t let me…
‘Gentlemen, something stinks to High Terra about this set-up,’ the colonel was saying. He had begun to pace, as if chasing an idea that wouldn’t quite crystallise. ‘I don’t know what the Sky Marshall’s game is, but it has cost us near on three hundred men and I’m done playing.’ He stopped at the centre of the circle and looked up sharply. ‘But we are not the 77th Oberai. We are the 19th Arkan and the 19th Arkan are not and never will be renegades nor traitors.’
Impulsively Vendrake decided to test the man: ‘I doubt the Imperium would agree with you, Whitecrow.’
Cutler froze at his words. The assembled officers eyed each other uneasily. None of them had ever used the colonel’s mock-name to his face. But when he looked at Vendrake, Cutler’s expression was calm, even faintly amused.
‘I fear you’re likely right,’ he said. ‘And that’s why we’re going to have to play this the hard way.’
Jakob Dix drifted away from the bustle in the plaza, looking for some space before the regiment moved out. Night had fallen and the greybacks were almost done breaking camp. They’d loaded up the captured Lethean gunboat, along with some transport ships left behind by the rebels. It was going to be a squeeze, but the colonel figured they had enough boats to float everyone upriver. Dix didn’t know why they were going upriver and he didn’t much care, which was pretty much how he felt about most things. So long as there was drink and cards and maybe some gals along the way, Jakob Dix just did what he was told, but he sure did miss old Klete Modine. Things had taken a nosedive since his buddy had gone – ‘Bullethead’ Calhoun had bought the farm, Dix had lost his nose and now the breed had all the Dustsnakes ganging up on him. Worst of all, the squad was almost out of firewater.
Dix stopped as he saw Joyce mooning about on the banks of the canal. The big greencap was sitting on his haunches and staring into the water like it was full of gold dust. The Badlander grinned, seeing an opportunity for a little fun. If he just crept up quietly and shoved…
‘Don’t worry, Brother Dix, you’ll get your payba
ck,’ Joyce said without turning. Dix stopped a couple of feet away, caught off guard by the strangeness in the greencap’s voice.
‘I weren’t going to do nothing,’ he said guiltily, not sure why he was making excuses to a lousy rookie.
‘But you will,’ Joyce said fervently. ‘If you embrace His light you’ll do great things, brother. Down among the Dustsnakes, you and me, we’re like candles in the wind. That’s why they hate us. That’s why the breed beat up on you.’
‘Well that weren’t hate exactly,’ Dix said, confused by the way this was all going. ‘We just do things rough in the Dustsnakes is all.’
‘It were hate!’ Joyce snapped and turned to look at him. The boy’s eyes seemed to glitter in the darkness. ‘They hate you because you tried to do what’s right.’
‘I… did…’ Dix said uncertainly.
‘You and me, we were the only ones who tried to save the saint when the heathens turned on him,’ Joyce said bitterly.
‘We did?’ It slowly dawned on Dix that Joyce had got things mixed up. The kid thought he’d run into the skirmish to fight for the crazy confessor, not shoot up dead Letheans. A dim instinct told Dix it was probably best to let things be.
‘The heretics held me down and you had to fight for the saint alone,’ the boy’s voice quavered with emotion. He rose to his feet and grasped the Badlander’s hands.
‘You couldn’t save him, Brother Dix, but don’t you be despairing none. The Emperor, He don’t let His chosen die easy.’ Joyce nodded at the canal. ‘The saint, he’s only sleeping down there. I been talking to him and I tell you he’s going to come back some day. And he won’t forget what you done.’
‘He won’t?’ Dix licked his lips, peering uneasily at the murky waters.
‘Ain’t nothing ever lost in the Emperor’s eyes, but until that day comes, lesser men got to carry the burden.’ Joyce was staring at the Badlander with the intensity of a hunting cobrahawk. ‘You and me, Brother Dix, we got to be like Space Marines among the sheep.’
‘Space Marines,’ Dix said with wonder, imagining himself in the awesome armour of the Emperor’s finest. Even with his face all messed up he reckoned that would win him plenty of gals. Real Space Marines probably had to fight the ladies off every night!
‘That’s right, brother,’ Joyce urged. ‘It’s going to be a long, dark road out of the Hells, but we got to lead our folk true, ‘coz if we don’t…’ He paused and Dix found himself hanging onto his words, mesmerised by the boy’s intensity. ‘Well, the Emperor condemns, Brother Dix. He sure does condemn.’
Imperial Seabase Antigone, the Sargaatha Sea
There are Arkan on Phaedra! They have been here nearly seven months and I never knew – an entire regiment of my kinfolk, or whatever’s left of them, lost in the hell of the Dolorosa Coil. And they have gone rogue… But no, you are right. I am getting ahead of myself.
From the beginning then...
My meeting with High Commissar Lomax was perplexing and I am still trying to weigh up the implications as I prepare for my departure. The news about the Arkan was the most surprising part of it, but everything about our encounter was unexpected. Except for her dislike of me of course. Some things never change. But her contempt aside, Lomax had changed. She was already old when she arrived on Phaedra, but she had always carried the years with a grim ferocity that seemed to elevate her into something ageless. Like my mentor Bierce, this compact, dark-skinned woman with the close-cropped iron hair had once seemed the epitome of our unbreakable kind, but Phaedra had finally worn her down…
Iverson’s Journal
The haggard ghost who met Iverson in the windswept watchtower of the Antigone was not yet broken, but she was close. Lomax had shed so much weight that her greatcoat hung loosely from her bony shoulders, dragging across the floor like a sloughed skin as she prowled the confines of the tower. The whole time they talked she kept moving, flitting from corner to corner like a condemned prisoner looking for a way out. But if there was fear in her, Iverson sensed it was the fear of dying before her work was done. Even at the end, Lomax was a creature of duty.
She never questioned him about his desertion. It was almost as if she knew that pursuing the matter would oblige her to take his life. He didn’t understand her mercy until he realised it was no mercy at all, but necessity. Despite her long-standing dislike, Lomax trusted him.
‘You and I are relics, Holt Iverson,’ she said. ‘Between the two of us we’ve given more years to the Emperor than any ten of Phaedra’s so-called commissars taken together, and I’m not talking about the snot-nosed cadets the Sky Marshall sends me these days! He chooses them himself, you know – draws them from the regiments he favours and orders me to train them up. Oh they’re brutal enough, but it takes more than muscle and spite to wear the black. These idiots get themselves killed almost as fast as I can send them into the field! I haven’t had a genuine graduate of the schola progenium in years. You’re a bloody mess, Holt Iverson, and you brood like a Space Marine on downtime, but you’re the closest thing I’ve got to a real commissar on this side of the planet. On Phaedra we’re a dying breed.’
That was one reason why she had chosen him for the task ahead. The other was his heritage. Although he had been little more than a child when Bierce took him from Providence, Holt Iverson was still Arkan and the High Commissar’s problem was with his kinfolk. And so he listened as she told him the story of a wayward regiment who had been thrown to the wolves and lived through it to become the wolves in turn.
Naturally she didn’t put it quite like that – she was a High Commissar after all – but she made it easy for him to read between the lines. Besides, they both knew the reputation of Admiral Vyodor Karjalan and his hellish battleship. The admiral wasn’t nicknamed the Sea Spider for nothing, but like so much else on Phaedra, his rot had been allowed to fester and spread. By the Seven Hells, Iverson was proud of the way his kinfolk had escaped the Spider’s web!
‘Their commander is called Ensor Cutler,’ Lomax explained. ‘He’s the kind of man some would call a maverick hero. I don’t share that view. As you know, I have little patience with... unpredictability.’ She threw him a pointed glance. ‘However, neither am I inclined to trust that old monster Karjalan at his word.’
Iverson was surprised by her frankness. Karjalan was a favourite of the Sky Marshall, a paragon of his stagnant regime and not a man to cross lightly. On other worlds, under other overlords, a High Commissar would have removed a cancer like Karjalan long ago, but this was Phaedra and the Sky Marshall’s word was the only law. It seemed Lomax was growing reckless in her twilight.
‘Colonel Cutler has led his men into the Dolorosa Coil,’ she said. ‘They’re operating deep inside enemy territory, well beyond our advance…’
‘Our advance?’ Iverson snapped. ‘There’s been no advance into Dolorosa for years. All we do is shuffle back and forth along the same lines, winning and losing the same beaches, pushing just so far upriver before being pushed back. The whole campaign is a travesty!’
Lomax looked at him sharply and Iverson thought he’d gone too far, but her eyes were sly and calculating. Suddenly he realised she agreed with every word he’d said. She was quietly crossing a line of her own, which was why they were meeting in this remote tower rather than the confines of her office. Nothing about this encounter was quite what it seemed.
‘The intelligence I’ve received has been sketchy at best,’ she went on, ‘but it seems that Cutler has spent the last seven months turning his regiment into a Titan-sized thorn in the enemy’s backside. His renegades have been waylaying rebel patrols and supply convoys, sabotaging comms relays, even raiding small outposts.’
‘He’s loyal,’ Iverson said firmly. ‘Despite whatever those degenerates on the Puissance did to his regiment, the man is still fighting for us.’
‘Or for himself,’ Lomax said. ‘Either way, he’s stirre
d up a vespid’s nest amongst High Command. They say the Sky Marshall has come down on Karjalan like a virus bomb, even threatened to sink his little empire unless he ends Cutler’s spree.’
‘Ends it? The first real incursion we’ve made into Dolorosa since this Emperor-forsaken war started and the Marshall wants to end it? That’s insanity.’
Again Lomax threw him that sly look: ‘Sky Marshall Kircher is not insane, Iverson.’ There was something telling about the way she said it, almost as if the denial was a condemnation, but she moved on before he could dwell on it.
‘As you’d expect, Karjalan has sent kill teams after Cutler, but the Letheans are little more than sledgehammer zealots. I doubt any of them got anywhere near the renegades. Certainly none of them ever made it out of the Coil. The Sky Marshall has demanded another approach. We need something with more finesse.’
‘Surely you’re not signing up to this debacle, Lomax?’
‘High. Commissar. Lomax. As always, you forget yourself, Iverson. It’s a failing that may do worse than kill you one day. And no, I am not signing up to any debacle. I am however, tasking you with tracking down our rogue colonel.’
‘You want me to kill Cutler because he’s actually hurting the enemy?’ Iverson was aghast.
‘I want you to test Colonel Ensor Cutler before the Emperor’s Justice,’ Lomax said, emphasising the words with steely precision. ‘And then I expect you to do your duty.’
Mission Log – Day 1 – The Sargaatha Sea:
Beginning an End?
Finally I am away, bound for Dolorosa Vermillion, the western archipelago where my errant kinsmen made their landfall seven months ago. There’s no telling how deep into the Mire they’ve travelled, especially if they’re following the tangle of the Qalaqexi River, but it’s my best starting point. I’ll follow in their footsteps and trust in the Emperor’s providence. I have to believe that such a thing still exists.
Regardless, it’s good to be out on the open sea again, even if that sea is more like an open sewer than a sane ocean. It’ll be a long crawl in this transport tug – a rusty crate that’s as worn as the war itself – but at least I’m free of the Antigone. There’s a slow doom creeping up on the old sea base that’s drawn closer during my absence. Or maybe it was just Lomax getting to me. That brittle, sly-eyed raven was like a harbinger of my own doom. You see, at the end she entrusted me with more than the fate of a rogue regiment...
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