Brigstone and his men were ever vigilant for the predatory fauna that could emerge from the fog at any moment and devour a man whole but the flora also posed a danger. Great tentacle-like creeper vines were a constant threat as were the bulbous pods that grew at the base of trees ready to explode in clouds of choking spores at the merest hint of movement. Even the swamp itself was deadly; if it wasn’t the thick viscous mud attempting to suck the unwary to their doom, it was the chemical reaction between agents in the water and the air, turning the steam to acid and dissolving anything that came into contact with it.
As the Catachans slowly made their way back to Atika along one of the known solid paths through the swamp, that was what Brigstone was particularly alert for.
Each member of the squad had their assigned task on the patrol. Brigstone was keeping an eye out for signs of acid-steam: bark stripped from trees, bare patches of foliage. Cimino was on vine duty and every once in a while the ‘rookie’, as he was known to the rest of the squad for his not-quite five years of service, would be forced to loose off a shot to prevent one of the tendrils bringing down an arbosaur, much to the ire of the others who thought the shots were scaring off their quarry. Zens was on guard for any other threatening plantlife while Mack and Furie were detailed with looking out for carovis. Kotcheff brought up the rear, alert for signs of enemy activity.
Though this was ostensibly a peacetime operation, the 183rd simply waylaid and killing time until new transports could make it through the warp and relay them to their theatre of war, the words ‘peace’ and ‘time’ formed an oxymoron at the twilight of the 41st millennium. The enemies of the Emperor were all about and a moment’s laxity could cost them dear. Many a Catachan rested in the dirt feeding worms after thinking that because the regiment wasn’t at war, the war would pass them by. The commanding officer of the 183rd, Colonel ‘Death’ Strike, had survived for more than a decade in service to the Emperor from not thinking that way, and he drilled it into all of his commanders, who in turn instilled that same ethos in the men they led into battle.
A crash in the distance brought them all to attention.
At the head of their formation, Brigstone raised a hand and the other Catachans brought their beasts to a halt behind him. Those with lasrifles unslung them and raised them to their shoulders, barrels aimed into the jungle ready to shoot at the first thing to emerge from it. Mack checked the action of the heavy bolter pintle-mounted to the saddle of his arbosaur. Seconds passed before another crash, closer this time but still some distance off.
‘It’s coming from that direction,’ Zens said in a stage-whisper, her half-ink, half-flesh arm pointing to the left of where they’d come to a halt. As one, six weapons all turned to point in the same direction. Through the swamp haze, the tops of plants swayed as something moved beneath them. Closer and closer it came.
‘Hold your fire. Hold your fire…’ Brigstone’s order was barely audible over the oncoming noise. The shaking foliage was moving closer at speed.
Twenty metres. Fifteen metres. Ten metres.
‘Now! Now! Open fire!’ Brigstone’s last three words were drowned out by a crescendo of gunshots. Concentrated fire poured into an area no more than a few metres wide, shredding anything unfortunate enough to come into the kill zone. As the barrage continued, several small saurians emerged from the undergrowth and darted straight past the mounted Catachans. Many of the tiny quadrupeds were wounded but a steady stream of them continued out of the jungle.
‘Cease fire!’ Brigstone signalled and after a few moments the message got through to the rest of his squad. They lowered their guns and looked on as the last few diminutive beasts scuttled through the legs of the arbosaurs and into the treeline behind them.
‘Hatchlings,’ said Cimino dismounting and moving to pick up one of the dead creatures.’ They won’t make much of a meal on their own but with the amount we’ve–’
‘Wait. What were they running from?’ Brigstone said, interrupting the trooper.
He didn’t have to wait for an answer.
Heralded by a bellow of sheer pain, its approach masked by the noise of the hundreds of hatchlings fleeing in terror, the carovis loomed out of the swamp mist and decapitated Cimino with a brutal swipe of its massive claw. Before the unfortunate Catachan’s head had hit the ground, the beast drove forwards, toppling Furie’s arbosaur. The mount hit the floor with a thud, its neck snapping on impact, but Furie was thrown clear. He reached for the lasrifle that had landed in the mud beside him and swung the weapon to bear on the carovis. He squeezed the firing stud but nothing happened. Furie was about to try again when the sky above him went dark and an enormous foot, the same one that had made the print they found earlier, hovered above him poised to deliver a crushing blow.
Heavy bolter fire rang out followed by impact thuds. Furie recoiled as the carovis’s foot exploded, showering him in blood and gore. The beast roared again and unsteadily turned to direct its attention on the source of its pain. Readjusting his firing angle, Mack rattled off a flurry of shots into the beast’s chest, opening up rents in the thing’s orange-scaled flesh and bringing it to its knees. It tried to cry out again but its scream was curtailed as Brigstone, Kotcheff and Zens concentrated their las-fire at the freshly opened wounds, internal organs cooking-off under the intense heat of their energy weapons.
Prone and helpless, the carovis’s breathing was ragged but even at the edge of death, its claws were still capable of inflicting devastating damage. Manoeuvring around the beast in a wide sweep, Brigstone unsheathed the dulled blade of his combat knife and positioned its tip at the soft, fleshy area where the saurian’s spine attached to its skull. The commander braced himself but, just as he was about to force the blade through muscle into brain matter, he noticed the look in the beast’s eye. Where he had expected to see rage and primal fury, instead he found what could only be described as terror. Both hands on the hilt of the knife, he drove the weapon in with all of his considerable strength and the beast breathed its last.
Wary that the carovis might be one of a breeding pair or part of a larger pack, it was several minutes before any of the Catachans spoke or lowered their weapons. Once the sound of the hatchlings had trailed off into the distance, they set about tasks with a resolve as dark as their knife blades. Mack and Furie rounded up the spooked arbosaur mounts while Kotcheff and Zens set to work on the still-warm corpse of the carovis. Brigstone found Cimino’s headless body and retrieved the dead man’s night reaper blade. After several minutes searching, he also found his detached head and recovered the Guardsman’s bandana. Tying the red strip of cloth around the hilt of the knife, Brigstone placed a foot firmly on the fallen soldier’s body and with several firm movements of his leg, rolled the corpse into the undergrowth. What the jungle takes, the jungle keeps, such was the Catachan way.
‘Chief. Come and take a look at this,’ Zens called, standing over the dead carovis.
Brigstone slid Cimino’s blade into his belt alongside his own weapon and joined the two Catachans over by the felled beast. ‘What have you found?’
‘Not sure. These are the wounds Mack inflicted,’ Zens said using her knife to indicate where chunks of flesh had been rent from the carovis’s hide. ‘And these are burns from our lasrifles. But this…’ She pointed the tip of her weapon to a blackened patch of scales across the rump. Pus oozed from between cracks in the hide and the smell of decomposing flesh was amplified in the stifling jungle heat. ‘I have no idea what caused this.’
Brigstone crouched down for a closer look, but the oppressive scent of decay caused the battle-hardened veteran to retch and cover his mouth and nose. ‘Leave it.’
‘But, chief, Cimino died bringing this thing down. It seems wrong to let it go to waste,’ Kotcheff countered.
‘And if we take it back and feed it to the regiment, it’ll kill a lot more than just Cimino.’ As if to reinforce the commander’s point, maggots spilled from the necrotised area. ‘Now come on. We still have a
chance to make it back before nightfall.’
Mack, who by now had rounded up their arbosaur mounts, led the beasts over and the surviving Catachans mounted up and set off in the direction of Atika at pace.
Before they’d even made it out of sight, the jungle of Pythos was feasting on the corpses they had left behind.
823959.M41 / Atika Hive, Pythos
The sun was retreating behind the Olympax Mountains by the time Brigstone’s squad made it back to Atika. The late-evening twilight bathed the Catachan base in a crimson aspect as thousands of jungle fighters checked weapons, sharpened blades and filled packs with rations and ammo. As they rode through the high metal gates under the watchful eyes of the sentries up in their watchtowers, a few of the Catachans stopped their activity and cast hopeful glances in their direction but, upon seeing that Brigstone and his squad were not dragging a saurian carcass behind them, carried on about their business.
Something struck Brigstone as being odd: it was almost dark and the base should have been getting ready for lockdown. Instead, it seemed the entire regiment were out of barracks and preparing to mobilise. A trooper he recognised bustled by and Brigstone hailed him.
‘Goldrick. What’s going on? Have we been given orders to ship out?’
The barrel-chested gunner stopped and looked up at Brigstone, elevated several metres off the ground in the saddle of his beast. ‘No, sir,’ Goldrick said, saluting briefly. ‘A shuttle came in just before sundown. Small thing but armed to the teeth. Covered in aquilas too and some other symbols none of us recognise.’ Both men looked skywards towards the spire of the hive city and the now occupied landing pad jutting awkwardly from its flank. ‘A bunch of bigwigs in robes disembarked demanding to see the colonel. They’ve been in with him for the past few hours but Strike immediately ordered us to battle stations.’
‘Robes? Were they Ecclesiarchy?’ Brigstone had encountered the Ecclesiarchy before, back on Catachan when the missionaries had arrived to reinforce the will of the Emperor on what they saw as nothing more than savages. The people of Catachan were loyal servants of the Golden Throne but they did not take fondly to having any kind of will enforced upon them, and after the first few shiploads of missionaries found adapting to life on the death world difficult, Ecclesiarchy mission ships started bypassing Catachan altogether. Not all who hailed from the planet were such reluctant devotees and there were those in the 183rd – the colonel and many of his officers included – whose worship of the God-Emperor was heartfelt and unstinting.
‘Don’t think so. Two of them were women so I’ve heard, but not Battle Sisters. Rumour is there’s more of them on the shuttle that haven’t come out yet. Some of Batawski’s squad are guarding it and swear blind they can hear people moving about in there.’ The gunner looked around furtively, keen to be getting back on with his duties.
‘On your way, Goldrick,’ Brigstone said. ‘But let me know if you hear anything else.’
The gunner scurried off in the direction of the hangars storing the regiment’s tanks, leaving Brigstone and his squad to take their mounts back to the beast pens.
When they got there, somebody was waiting for the commander.
Brigstone dismounted and handed the reins of his arbosaur to Mack. The figure waiting by the entrance to the pens snapped off a quick salute which Brigstone returned.
‘Commander Brigstone. The colonel has asked me to escort you to him the instant you got back in from patrol.’
Unlike Brigstone and his squad, the newcomer wore a sleeved khaki jacket with brass buttons fastened right up to the lapel over which rested an aquila symbol affixed to a chain. In place of a bandana was a red beret, a brass likeness of the Catachan regimental symbol pinned to it. His grizzled features were assuaged by the smoothness of his chin but the cuts to his cheeks suggested a man unused to shaving.
‘Major Thorne. The colonel really must be receiving distinguished guests to get you dressed up in ceremonial togs. You look more like a Vostroyan than a death world veteran,’ Brigstone smirked.
The older man shook his head and scowled before breaking out into a wide, toothy smile.
‘You don’t know the half of it, Piet,’ he said, clasping the commander’s hand and locking forearms together in a traditional tribal greeting. He glanced cautiously at the rest of Brigstone’s squad. ‘Can’t say any more now. Strike will fill you in when we get up there.’
‘I just need a few moments, Eckhardt.’ Brigstone motioned to the extra blade tucked into his belt. Both men stopped smiling.
‘Who was it this time?’
‘Cimino. Carovis came out of nowhere and took his head clean off.’
Thorne nodded grimly and breathed a sigh of relief.
Back on their home world, the Catachan maintained strong tribal traditions and structures, and this carried over to the regiments drawn from the death world. Whereas the tribe would elect a headman, the regiment would elect its own captains, sergeants and other ranking officers and entire regiments could be drawn from relatively small geographical areas. The 183rd hailed almost entirely from a tiny archipelago chain in Catachan’s southern hemisphere and as a result, many squads were made up of men related to each other. Cousin fought alongside cousin, brother alongside brother and quite often served under an uncle or, in exceptionally rare circumstances, a grandfather. None of the men in Brigstone’s squad were blood relatives but Thorne’s nephew fought under his command.
‘How’s he doing?’ Thorne said motioning with his head in Mack’s direction.
‘You worry about him too much, Eckhardt. He’s as strong as an ox and has the heart of one too. Show me a braver man in this regiment and I’ll show you my arse.’
Thorne threw back his head and laughed, dislodging his unfamiliar beret and causing it to slip back over his bald pate.
‘Go on,’ he said, readjusting his headwear. ‘Do what you need to do. I’ll wait here for you.’
Brigstone nodded solemnly and headed for the clearing around the back of the beast pens. Hundreds of red bandanas fluttered in the warm breeze, each one tied to the hilt of a knife that had been thrust into the dry ground, constant reminders of those Catachans already claimed by Pythos. Carefully weaving his way between the memorials, Brigstone found a bare patch of earth and pulled Cimino’s knife from where it had been sheathed at his belt. Kneeling, he stabbed down sharply and embedded the knife at a perfect vertical angle before returning to Thorne.
‘Right, let’s go and see what’s got everybody so worked up,’ Brigstone said, following the major to the base of the spire.
To the few souls in the Imperium who had ever heard their name uttered, the Inquisition were nothing more than a myth, a legend of a bygone era used by mothers and fathers as a bogeyman to scare wayward children or as a convincing lie by carousing drifters to work their way into another’s bed. Many a child has gone to bed terrified that the Black Ships would come to claim them in the night, just as many a heart has been broken upon waking to find that the agent of the Ordos who had shared their bed and promised them so much had disappeared under the cover of darkness.
To others, those unfortunate few, the Inquisition were quite real and, as a force within the Imperium, highly destructive. Few who had dealings or even brief contact with the Ordos came away unscathed. At best, lives were left in tatters or people displaced once their usefulness to an agent of the Throne was at an end. At worst, it resulted in death, not only of individuals but of entire worlds, planetary systems and cultures.
Up until two hours ago, Colonel ‘Death’ Strike of the Catachan 183rd sat squarely in the camp of those who believed the Inquisition was a myth, the subject of conjecture and speculation by Imperial naval ratings with too much time and too big a drinks ration on their hands, or regimental lags who knew a trooper who once knew a trooper who was seconded by an Inquisitorial agent. In light of what was to follow, Strike would look back and wish that it had ever remained so, but for now his most pressing concern was that not one, b
ut three of these ‘myths’, clad in identical crimson robes, stood in his command room and were making very real demands of him.
‘It is a simple request, colonel,’ said Inquisitor Mikhail Dinalt, idly pacing the room as if it were his own office, his crimson robes flowing behind him. ‘I need to commandeer three of your Chimeras and their crews to take us deep into the jungles of Pythos and assist me and my team in the recovery of an…’ He paused, considering what to say next. The two similarly robed women accompanying him looked on impassively. ‘An object.’ He let the word hang there euphemistically.
‘My lord, with the greatest respect, that is a far from simple request.’ Strike had faced down Catachan devils back on his home world and lived not only to tell the tale, but also to wear their teeth on a chain around his neck. Although he’d just become aware of their existence, he would not be cowed by the Inquisition.
Dinalt rose to his full height, a few centimetres taller than the taut figure of the colonel, and moved his face so close to Strike’s that the Catachan could feel the inquisitor’s breath upon his cheeks.
‘If I so willed it, colonel, I could bring your entire regiment under my command and march every single one of them out into the jungle to find that which I seek,’ said Dinalt. From under her cowl, Brandd smirked. Tzula, who had grown to despise the woman more with each passing day, cast her a disapproving glance.
Strike pulled his shoulders back and expanded his chest. What the colonel lacked in height over the inquisitor, he made up for in girth. ‘And if that was your intention, you would have done it already.’
Dinalt arched an eyebrow.
‘You work for an organisation so secret that until you showed up on my shuttle pad, I thought it was as real as a two-metre tall ratling, a commissar with a conscience, or a necron.’
Tzula looked as if she were about to say something then thought better of it.
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