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Cover
A Company of Shadows – Rachel Harrison
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Cadia Stands’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
A Company of Shadows
Rachel Harrison
The city falls away to the thunder of turbojets. Shattered buildings recede. The smell of smoke is stolen by the cold wind as it buffets the Valkyrie gunship.
Commissar Severina Raine holds on to the frame of the side door as it rattles under her hand. Other gunships lift off and move away, grey metal rising to meet the grey sky. In the distance, a pall of dust rises into the air, indicating where the Antari tank companies are rolling towards the edge of the city. A mass retreat that stings more than the las-burn across her shoulder.
‘Silver two away.’
The voice comes over the vox, but she can see the speaker in the distance. It’s Andren Fel. The storm trooper captain is braced in the side door of another Valkyrie that goes out of sight behind a slumped habitation block. Raine can hear the whisper of hellgun fire behind his words.
‘The fastest route,’ she says, speaking up over the wind. ‘Through the Maw.’
There’s a noise like vox distortion. Raine knows it’s Andren laughing.
‘Through the Maw,’ he says. ‘Aye, commissar.’
The Maw marks the edge of Gholl’s primary city, Caulder’s Reach, where the metal spires of the city end and the stone ones of the mountain ranges begin. The peaks punch upwards, the wind howling around and between them like the breath of a beast. The ravines go deep and dark. That’s why her Antari soldiers have taken to calling it the Maw. A dangerous name, for a dangerous place.
‘The Maw?’
Raine turns away from the side door at the voice. Saleen Mayir is strapped in across the troop compartment. Her bright yellow cloak stands out against the gunmetal and olive. She clings to her harness with white-knuckled hands, her fingernails filed to sharp points.
‘It is completely under enemy control,’ Mayir shouts over the roar of the engines.
Raine moves along the Valkyrie’s troop compartment and lowers herself into a seat opposite Mayir. As she locks her restraint harness in place, the Valkyrie judders. There’s a split second of weightlessness, then a loud rattle as the gunship drops a few metres. It knocks the breath out of Raine, but she keeps her hands steady, her face impassive.
‘It is,’ Raine says. ‘As is Caulder’s Reach, now, Tacticae Principal.’
Mayir narrows her eyes. In the dim light, Raine sees the flash of bionics. Good ones, almost invisible. Priceless.
‘The plan for the city defence was sound,’ she says. Her accent is clipped and precise. ‘If the regiments had been up to the task of holding it, then we would not be having this conversation.’
Sergeant Daven Wyck starts laughing. It’s an ugly sound. He’s not sitting, not restrained like the rest of his six-strong squad. Instead he has his arm looped through the grab-netting on the wall of the Valkyrie. He’s flexing his bloody, blackened fingers. There’s soot and filth in his fair hair.
‘Three Antari souls spent for you,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Three of my Wyldfolk just to get you out of the city. Seems a poor trade.’
Raine doesn’t get up or move her hand towards her gun or sword. She just looks at him.
‘Enough,’ she says.
He rolls his fingers into fists, but he doesn’t challenge her. Nor do the rest of his squad. They all know better.
What they don’t know is that this time a part of Raine agrees with him.
‘Antari,’ Mayir says, looking at Wyck. ‘Splinter camouflage. Icon of the crossed rifles against a circle of thorns. The Eleventh Rifles, am I correct?’
Wyck stares at her, his fists still curled.
‘Yes, Tacticae Principal.’
The way he says her title falls just short of open disdain.
Saleen Mayir smiles, thin-lipped.
‘And upon meeting, how disappointing you are.’
Raine sees Wyck open his mouth to speak, but he never gets the chance to. There’s a sudden loud blare. The impact alarm. The pilot, Kain, shouts something over the internal vox. Raine picks out the word missiles.
‘Brace!’
Raine’s voice is drowned out by a colossal explosion that shakes the Valkyrie. Shakes the Antari. Shakes Raine’s eyes in her head. There’s a second boom and the gunship starts to spin. The internal vox goes live with more shouts from the cockpit. There’s another moment of weightlessness, and the Valkyrie drops again, this time much more than a few metres. Raine’s stomach lurches. The engines scream. Tacticae Principal Mayir screams too. Through the open side door, Raine sees dark stone, then sky, then stone, then sky. Spinning coils of thick, dark smoke. Her vision tunnels as G-forces press against her.
Then something strikes Raine on the side of the head, and there’s nothing at all.
Daven Wyck snaps awake and realises he’s looking up at the sky, and that it looks strange. Blurry. He blinks hard and his eyelids gum together. His fingers are locked tight around the stock of his gun, but he can’t raise it. There’s a ringing in his ears. Under that, the howl of the wind. He can’t think where he is. Can’t think straight at all.
There was an explosion. Heat and light and noise. Screams.
A memory surfaces. A Chimera transport, torn apart by a land mine. Blood on his face. Not his own blood, but everyone else’s. Staggering out of the wreck and into the jungle, forgotten by death.
But then Wyck blinks again. There’s no jungle here, just jagged peaks of dark stone. The Chimera, all those deaths, they were a long time ago on Cawter. He hadn’t been a sergeant then. He hadn’t been anything much at all.
He manages to drag himself into a sitting position. There’s debris heaped around him. Grey metal on the grey stone. It takes him a moment or two to realise he’s looking at parts of a Valkyrie gunship.
Parts of their Valkyrie gunship.
The memory of the crash comes back in pieces. He hadn’t been secured, just holding on to the grab-netting. He’d lost his grip. Fallen clear of the gunship as it dug a furrow across the mountainside. Wyck looks down at his left arm and sees it loose and awkward, the shoulder dropped. Dislocated.
‘Mists alive,’ he says, his voice hoarse.
It’s not because his shoulder hurts, though it does. Like a bastard. It’s because for the second time in his life, he should definitely be dead and isn’t. Forgotten by death, again.
Wyck lets his rifle hang by the strap and lifts his injured arm, holding it out like Lye had shown him once. He takes hold of his bad wrist with his good hand, takes three quick breaths, then pushes against it slowly. It makes him whine through his teeth. His vision bursts with spots of light, then there’s a pop as the joint reseats itself. He counts to ten until his vision clears and the nausea fades, flexing his fingers and feeling the way his nerves jolt in his injured arm.
‘Okay,’ he says, though there’s nobody around to hear it.
Wyck puts his good hand out and gets to his feet. Once he’s standing, he can see just how dead he should be.
He’s standing on an outcropping jutting from one of the Maw’s jagged teeth. The gunship’s carcass lies about one hundred metres away from him, just clear from the edge. He can’t see the nose of the Valkyrie at all, just the remains of the troop compartment, torn open like a ration tin. Around the wreckage, fires burn on slicks of fuel. Wyck can’t see any of his Wyldfolk.
No grey-green camouflage. No bodies. He realises they were all strapped down, and that they probably still are. The damned commissar and Mayir, too.
Wyck starts towards the remains of the Valkyrie, the wind tugging at his fatigues. His broken ribs shift and grind together, and he slips on the scree, nearly falling.
No good. No good at all.
Wyck searches the pouches at his belt, one after the other. The first two vials are cracked and empty, but the third is good. He holds it up to the light. A stubby capsule of glass with a dark liquid inside. On the end, there’s an injector. He rolls back his fatigues and presses it against his arm.
Another dose so soon after the first is risky. Stupid, even. He flexes his numb fingers and his vision swims. Everything is distant. Muffled. Blurry.
No good, Wyck thinks, and he thumbs the injector.
There’s a gentle hiss. A bite from the needle he barely feels. Then there’s something else. Something familiar.
The crack of lasgun fire.
Wyck drops and rolls and the las-bolt skims him instead of punching clean through. The shot came from one of two Sighted hiding among the rocks higher up the slope. They have grey-and-blue armour, like the stone around them, and storm goggles for the wind. Wyck brings his gun up and fires, forcing them to duck back behind those rocks, then gets to his feet and runs towards them. The Sighted panic-fire at him. Another bolt grazes him. He barely feels it. The stimms are kicking in. Everything is growing sharp. All edges. He hears them shout in their own tongue. Wyck shoots the legs out from under one of them. The other starts to run. He catches him and knocks him to the ground. Hears bones snap. More snapping as he breaks the Sighted’s neck. The other one is still shouting. Shouting into a vox-set. Wyck takes the knife from the dead one and uses it on the one still living until the shouting stops. Until there’s blood all over his face and his hands and his fatigues. Red and rich and strong with the stink of iron. He blinks, then spits. Drops the knife. His heart is thundering, and the Sighted is so very still.
‘Mists alive,’ he says again.
Commissar Raine often dreams of flames. Of the sky alight. Of screams she cannot escape. Usually, upon waking, those dreams fade, but not this time.
This time, the flames follow her.
Raine tries to get up, and realises she can’t. That she’s strapped down, or more precisely, strapped up. The troop compartment of the Valkyrie is on its side, and she’s hanging in her restraints, suspended halfway up the wall. Raine looks to her left. Trooper Dayn is dead in his harness, his neck broken. The two seats to her right are gone altogether, along with their occupants. Below Raine, on the opposite side of the compartment, a heavy, twisted bar of metal pins Tacticae Principal Mayir and the rest of the Antari in their seats.
‘Mayir!’ Raine shouts, trying to release her restraint harness.
The Tacticae Principal stirs, but she doesn’t reply. Her face is a mask of blood. Raine gets an answer from Yulia Crys instead. She has her arms locked against the metal bar, trying to keep it from crushing her chest. Crys is strong, broad in the shoulders and chest, but the bar is heavy and she’s weak from the smoke and the crash.
‘Need a little help, commissar,’ she shouts, hoarse.
Beside Crys, Yevi and Nial are unmoving. Raine can’t tell if they are alive or dead.
‘Hold strong,’ Raine says.
Raine pulls at her harness, trying to free the locking mechanism one-handed while holding on to the grab-netting with the other. On the third try, it gives. The harness retracts, and Raine is left hanging from the netting. She half-climbs, half-slides down until she reaches Mayir and the Antari. The heat of the flames beats at her and takes her breath away. Raine is dizzy from the smoke and from whatever knocked her out. The skin pulls tight on the right side of her face when she blinks.
‘It’s like Drast,’ Crys says. ‘The way the fire roars.’
She is bleeding from several deep cuts in her face. More scars for someone already so scarred.
‘We survived Drast,’ Raine says. ‘We will survive this.’
The metal is hot to the touch, but Raine doesn’t flinch. She takes hold of the bar and starts to pull as Crys pushes from the other side. It moves, but not enough. There’s a loud crack from Raine’s left and the flames bloom hungrily. For an instant she is as paralysed as she is in her dreams, but then Raine pulls on the bar again with all of her weight. Crys pushes from the other side with a yell of effort and it finally moves clear. Clear enough for Raine to drag Mayir free. For Crys to slide out of the gap and pull the unconscious Nial from his seat. She tries to free Yevi, but his harness has run in the heat and fused. Yevi’s skin has run too. Under the roar of the flames, there’s a creaking. A hissing. A line of flame shoots across the ceiling.
‘The fuel lines!’ Raine shouts. ‘Leave him!’
Crys pulls on the harness one more time, but it doesn’t give. She lets go with a pained sound, then grabs Nial and runs. Raine is right beside her with Mayir, so she hears her clearly, saying the same words over and over.
‘No fate,’ Crys is saying. ‘It’s no fate.’
Wyck sees Crys run clear of the Valkyrie, dragging Nial with her. Raine’s there too, and Mayir. The Tacticae Principal is white as fog and covered in blood. She staggers and collapses. Raine is bleeding too, from a deep head wound. Her eyes go wide when she spots him.
‘Wyck!’
Her accent twists the sound of his name.
‘Where are the rest?’ he says.
Raine grabs his arm, halting his run.
‘Where are the rest?’ Wyck shouts it at her this time.
Raine’s answer is to grab him and push him to the ground as an explosion engulfs the wreckage. Raine shields her face. Wyck doesn’t. He lets the heat sting his skin and the light dazzle him. Somewhere, under the bellow of the flames, he swears he hears a scream. Then the flames retreat and the wind blows the smoke clear. What’s left looks like blackened bones. Wyck gets to his feet. The way the stimms make everything sharp means he sees what’s in among the bones, too.
‘Wyck,’ Raine says.
He looks at her. At her inscrutable dark eyes and the pale scars that stand out against her skin. At her greatcoat and her sash and the pistol she holds, her finger never far from the trigger. He wonders if she even notices the deaths, or if they cut out that part when they made her.
‘We need to move,’ she says.
Those words make him stop wondering.
Raine turns and walks away. She pulls Mayir to her feet and shouts for Crys to get up. Wyck is about to follow her when he notices something at his feet, glinting in the dirt. He stoops down and picks it up. It’s a coloured gemstone, red like a bead of blood. There’s a crude aquila scratched into the surface. Wyck’s seen it plenty of times, because Yevi used to roll it in his hands before a fight.
He used to say it was lucky.
Wyck lets out a slow breath, then pitches the stone hard and high over the edge of the cliff and into the Maw.
‘How many?’ Raine asks.
Mayir is groaning as Raine packs the wound in her stomach. Something punched into the Tacticae Principal during the crash and cut her deep. Very deep. The dressing floods red immediately, soaking through to Raine’s hands.
‘Two,’ Wyck says. ‘Scouts, by their gear. More will be coming.’
It doesn’t give them long. Certainly not long enough for real field treatment. Raine unclasps her sash and takes it off, then winds it around the Tacticae Principal’s waist over the top of the dressing. When she pulls it tight, Mayir cries out.
‘They will kill you,’ Mayir mumbles. ‘They will kill you, and they will take me.’
‘They will not take you,’ Raine says. ‘I will not allow it.’
Mayir shakes her head. Her artificial eyes are still crystal clear, but she can’t seem to keep them locked on Rain
e.
‘They have taken dozens,’ she says. ‘Those of value. They are never seen again.’
A good deal of that is true. The Sighted have taken many prisoners, all of some value to the Imperial war machine. It’s why High Command wanted Mayir out of Caulder’s Reach. For the things she knows. It’s the last part that isn’t quite true. Raine heard that General Lorin’s ruined corpse was displayed at the head of the Sighted armoured column when they came to retake Caulder’s Reach. His value, it seems, was in spreading fear. It has certainly worked on Saleen Mayir. The Tacticae Principal is shaking, flinching at every distant sound.
‘Get me out of here,’ Mayir says. ‘I will make sure you are rewarded for it. I have influence. Anything you want.’
There’s no trace of the Tacticae Principal’s haughty manner now it’s her own blood being spilt. Now she’s just desperate to stay alive. It makes Saleen Mayir weak, and if there is one quality that Raine cannot abide, it is weakness.
‘Duty is its own reward,’ she says.
Raine looks over at Crys. She’s crouched over the vox-set Wyck took from the Sighted scouts, broadcasting a repeat emergency message in Antari battle-cant. Nial is sitting beside her with his back against a rock, conscious now. His face is a mess, his nose broken and his chin cut open to the bone. Most of his teeth got knocked out in the crash. He’s got his lasgun raised, though, watching the mountain paths.
‘Anything?’ Raine says.
Crys shakes her head.
‘Unless you count static, commissar. I think we need to go higher to get a clear signal.’ There’s a pause. A frown. ‘Unless it’s because there’s nobody around to answer.’
It’s Raine’s turn to shake her head. The Sighted might have put them on the back foot, but defeat is unthinkable.
‘Keep at it,’ she says. ‘We will go higher, as you say. They will hear us.’
Raine puts her hands under Mayir’s arms and pulls her to her feet. The Tacticae Principal cries out in pain. She has to lean against the cliff face to stay upright. Her face is pale and Raine can hear her bionic eyes struggling to focus.
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