Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  ‘He’d better be, or he might get shot in the back by an ork,’ Gesht said.

  ‘Like the last one did, you mean?’

  Their last lieutenant had been the special kind of stupid that had almost got thirty of them killed when she marched them straight into an ork ambush despite Sergeant Drachan’s insistence that it was a trap. It had only been the honed reactions of the veterans, and Steeleye’s stone cold sniping, that had got them out of it alive. The lieutenant had been gunned down from behind by a lone ork on their way back to the base. No one ever found that ork, and platoon lore had it that perhaps its name had been Gesht, but of course no one could prove anything and in honesty no one much cared. As far as Cully was concerned that was all well and good.

  The jungle did strange things to a man’s sense of right and wrong, and he had long since come to accept that.

  ‘Don’t know what you mean,’ Gesht said, and her voice was flat and emotionless.

  Cully could have kicked himself for a fool for bringing it up. That had been before.

  Before Drachan made the list.

  Before Gesht lost her mind to grief.

  ‘Don’t mean anything,’ he assured her. ‘We’re good.’

  ‘We’re good,’ Gesht agreed, and the moment passed.

  Cully remembered the day Steeleye had come and told him Drachan had made the list. He remembered going to Gesht’s tent with his illicit flask of sacra, to see how she was.

  Deranged, that was how she had been. He had found her field-stripping her lasgun and anointing its few moving parts with her own blood as she recited the Emperor’s Litany of Vengeance over and over again. She’d had plenty of blood to work with, what with the mess she had made of her left arm.

  The scars were still plain to see even now, hard ridges of white tissue against her tanned skin where she had half-flensed her own forearm with her combat knife in a furious outpouring of grief and rage. Cully had had to restrain her, he remembered, pin her down before she bled to death, and call in a very private favour from their squad medic to keep it quiet. He had drunk the sacra himself, afterwards.

  He had kept her secrets, for all that he should have made a report, and he honestly thought that was the only thing that had stopped her from killing him in his sleep when she was nominally recovered. He had seen her in her weakness, in her shame and her torment, and he knew that didn’t sit easy with her.

  She had never been quite right in the head since, all the same.

  He keyed the vox to the platoon channel.

  ‘Cully to Rachain,’ he said. ‘One Section, coming up on your eight.’

  ‘Two Section,’ Gesht said. ‘Five hundred to the nine, closing.’

  ‘Three Section,’ Corporal Dannecker chimed in. ‘Closing on the four, eight hundred.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ Rachain said. ‘Form up on the command squad.’

  The patrol fan began to close in on the command position, the veterans moving silent as ghosts through the crushing humidity of the jungle. The fresh recruits in each unit, the raw boots who had yet to earn their names, made enough noise for everyone.

  Cully winced as he heard Webfoot from his own section trip over an exposed root and land in a stinking pool with a splash. He turned with an angry gesture, but Steeleye already had the stupid boot back up on his feet with her iron-hard arm around his throat. She jabbed him hard in the ribs, doubling him over, and met the corporal’s eyes over the boy’s back. There was no emotion on her ruined face, but Cully caught her meaning all the same.

  Emperor’s sake! that look said, and Cully had to agree with her.

  Webfoot eventually stopped gagging, and they moved on.

  He didn’t trip again.

  The whole patrol platoon made camp together that night, on a relatively dry knoll that rose above the endless mud and filth of the jungle floor. Rachain had ordered a double watch, and Cully supposed that was sensible even if it meant no one got anywhere near enough sleep that night.

  Double watch or not, though, come the dawn Webfoot was dead all the same.

  Cully was roused from his bedroll by Hangnail screaming.

  She was a boot from Two Section, one of Gesht’s, and she was the one who found him.

  You poor bitch, Cully thought. Welcome to the sodding Guard.

  Cully himself was a hardened veteran and he had seen worse, but not by much. Hangnail wasn’t, and she hadn’t, and she was on her knees puking even as the platoon came to full alert all around her.

  Webfoot had been disembowelled.

  He was hanging from a great tree, maybe a hundred yards from the camp, with his intestines dangling from his open belly in great stinking purple ropes. His hands had been bound in front of his chest with the stiffening fingers spread in an awful travesty of the sign of the Aquila.

  They had set a double guard, and still no one had heard a thing.

  ‘Orks ain’t quiet like that,’ Corporal Dannecker said softly to Cully, when there was no one else close enough to hear. ‘No ork did that.’

  Cully just nodded slowly. He had been thinking much the same thing, and he would have bet a month’s pay that Rachain was thinking it too.

  ‘Don’t be saying things like that in front of the boots,’ he cautioned the junior corporal. ‘They’re spooked enough as it is. The first person I hear so much as whisper eldar is getting my bayonet up his arse, you understand me?’

  ‘So what are we saying it was, then?’ Rachain asked from behind them.

  Cully managed not to jump. Dannecker didn’t.

  Rachain could move quiet as the night, when he wanted to.

  ‘Don’t know, sergeant,’ Dannecker said, too quickly.

  Cully winced. That wasn’t the right answer.

  Rachain belted Dannecker in the guts almost too fast to see, knocking the younger man to his knees in the mud.

  ‘Orks, you bloody idiot,’ he said. ‘What else could it be? It was orks. We’re here fighting orks, scouting orks, so it was orks. Is that abundantly clear, you stupid bastard?’

  ‘Yes, sergeant,’ Dannecker wheezed, trying to get his breath back.

  Cully nodded. ‘Orks,’ he said. ‘Course it was. Really quiet ones.’

  He exchanged a long look with Rachain, and the sergeant nodded.

  ‘I’ll explain it to the lieutenant,’ he said. ‘You go and take a proper look.’

  ‘Sir,’ Cully said.

  He gave Dannecker a pitying look, down in the mud and the filth, and made himself go and inspect the corpse.

  Webfoot had been hanged with a rope made of twisted jungle creepers, plaited thick and strong. Someone had taken their time to make that rope properly, Cully thought. The man’s hands had been bound with a finer version of the same stuff, and thin cords of it had been used to pull his fingers out into the distinctive spread and to hold his thumbs twisted together like the double heads of the sacred eagle.

  Someone, Cully thought, had gone to a lot of trouble with that. Someone was making a point, and they had made it far too bloody quietly for his liking.

  Cully sighed and took his helmet off for a moment, pushed a hand back through his sweat-sodden hair. He bowed his head and spoke the Emperor’s Benediction over Webfoot, then turned away. There was nothing there to tell him anything. The man had been murdered, silently and expertly, and then someone had strung him up and bound his hands in that symbolic way. Cully was about to return and report to the sergeant when he paused for a moment.

  He never did know what made him do it – perhaps it was just instinct, or perhaps the Emperor responded to his prayer. Whatever it was, he paused and walked around the hanging body to look at it from the rear.

  What he saw there made him vomit violently on the ground in front of him.

  The back of Webfoot’s combat trousers were drenched with blood. Both of his buttocks had bee
n hacked off with some sort of heavy blade, the sort that the orks carried. Whatever had killed him, they had cut themselves a couple of good steaks afterwards.

  ‘No,’ Rachain said, when Cully told him. ‘No way is that going in the official report.’

  ‘But sergeant,’ Lieutenant Makkron said, in the sweaty darkness of the command tent, ‘surely we have a duty to–’

  ‘No!’ Rachain snapped. ‘Sir.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Cully said. ‘The Officio Prefectus…’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ Rachain said.

  The lieutenant looked from one man to the other in obvious confusion. Cully idly wondered whether the boy had actually started shaving yet.

  ‘Will one of you please explain what you’re talking about?’ Makkron said.

  He was trying to sound commanding, Cully realised, but all that he could hear was a plaintive, childish whine.

  Rachain sighed.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘do you have any idea how many men the Astra Militarum have lost on this miserable bloody planet in the last two years?’

  ‘No,’ Makkron confessed.

  Two years ago your balls hadn’t even dropped yet, Cully thought. You wouldn’t have so much as heard of Vardan IV.

  He envied the lad that, if little enough else.

  Rachain fixed the lieutenant with one of his famous glares, and dropped his voice to a flat tone that even the junior officer could tell meant he was in no mood to be messed with.

  ‘Almost two million,’ he said.

  Makkron swallowed, and he paled under his new boot’s sunburn.

  ‘How… how many?’

  ‘Two. Bloody. Million,’ Rachain said. ‘Give or take. No one knows, don’t you understand that? That’s the whole problem, sir. People go out into the green, and they just… don’t come back. Over and over and over again. And now it’s us. Now it’s us sent out of our nice strong firebase and into this hell!’

  ‘But I still don’t see…’

  Rachain slammed a hand down on the camp table in the command tent and got to his feet.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m in no mood for this level of stupid. It’s your turn to babysit, Cully. I’m going to walk the line, talk to the troops. Do my sodding job.’

  He stormed out and let the tent flap fall closed behind him, leaving Cully alone with the lieutenant.

  ‘The sergeant… well, he cares about the troops, sir,’ Cully said awkwardly. ‘He’s under a lot of pressure just at the moment.’

  ‘I understand, corporal,’ Makkron said. ‘I’m not as naive as Rachain thinks I am. Well, perhaps I am about this particular theatre of war, but I do understand all the same. Morale, and all that.’

  This particular theatre of war, Cully thought with disgust. Like you’ve ever seen any other theatre of war, you utter oilrag.

  ‘The point is, sir,’ Cully said, ‘that this war is utter and total grinding hell and it has been for years. The orks are bloody unstoppable. There are millions of them, and this is their terrain, not ours. And we’re not winning. You do grasp that, right, sir? We are not winning this war, not even a little bit. But now? Now there’s something else out there! You saw Webfoot, right?’

  ‘I saw what?’

  ‘Webfoot,’ Cully said. ‘The body?’

  Dear Emperor, how slow is he?

  ‘Ah, you mean Trooper Verlhan? Yes, yes I… I saw the body.’

  Verlhan, was that his name? Cully supposed it must have been, not that it mattered any more.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, him. Well, listen, sir. He was killed in the middle of the night, when we had a double watch set. Not everyone in this platoon is a recruit boot, you know. Emperor’s sake, Steeleye had watch last night, and still no one heard a thing, not even her. Orks are about as stealthy as a grenade in a promethium plant. It wasn’t an ork who did Webfoot, and it wasn’t an ork who cut his arse off for its dinner, either. There’s something else out there. Something even sodding worse than orks, as if this war wasn’t going badly enough as it is. Something that looks an awful lot like a drukhari. Do you really think the Officio Prefectus want to hear that? Even more, do you think they want anyone else to hear that? You put that in the official report and there will be a commissar’s bolter up your arsehole before you can say Ave Imperator, do you understand me, sir?’

  Makkron just sat and stared at Cully, blinking like a newly landed fish as sweat rolled down his smooth face in thick rivers.

  ‘I…’ he started, and fell silent.

  The Officer Cadet Scholam probably didn’t prepare Command Lieutenants for being soundly and loudly sworn at by corporals, Cully realised, for all that it really should do.

  Lieutenant Makkron looked down at the reeking black mud that encrusted his new Munitorum-issue boots for a long moment, then back up at Cully.

  ‘Drukhari? Do you really think so?’

  Cully nodded slowly. That was what it was, he was sure of it. It had to be.

  He refused to think about the alternative.

  They buried Webfoot that day, and broke camp the next morning. When Rachain called the roll there was a name missing.

  ‘Where the hell is Hangnail?’ he demanded.

  Cully led the search of the camp and the surrounding jungle, but in his heart he already knew what he would find. No one would desert in the deep jungle, after all.

  He was right.

  Hangnail had gone the way of Webfoot. They found her dangling from a tree five hundred yards from camp with her guts hanging in tangled loops around her feet. There were rough tracks where she had been dragged, alive or dead, from her sentry position to the place she had been hanged. Again, her hands were bound in front of her in the sign of the Aquila.

  ‘Imperator nos defendat,’ Cully whispered, one of the few phrases of High Gothic he knew.

  Emperor protect us.

  Cully was a man of devout faith, but as he looked at Hangnail’s corpse swinging from the tree he wondered if perhaps the Emperor’s gaze had turned away from Vardan IV. Hangnail’s left arm had been taken off at the elbow, the gristle of the joint neatly butchered and showing white against the ragged red of the surrounding meat. There was no sign of the missing limb.

  Someone’s taken themselves a shank, he thought, and swallowed bile.

  ‘Oi,’ he said quietly to Rachain, when he could be absolutely sure there was no one else around who could hear them. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Rachain said. ‘It’s the drukhari. I know that, you know that. What’s to talk about, other than how to kill it?’

  ‘What if it isn’t?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Are you sure about that, Rachain?’ Cully asked, putting a hand on his old friend’s arm to stay him as he tried to turn away. ‘Because what if it isn’t?’

  Rachain turned and looked at his corporal.

  ‘I know what you’re trying to say, Cully,’ he said, ‘and I’d like it a lot more if you stopped right now. It’s drukhari, you hear me?’

  That sounded to Cully a lot like the way Rachain had told Dannecker that it was an ork, even though they all knew it wasn’t. He swallowed. Him and Rachain had been friends for years, and not too many Guardsmen lived long enough to get to say that. He trusted the older man, and could only pray to the Emperor that he was right.

  But he didn’t believe it.

  ‘So let’s talk about how to kill it,’ he said.

  Whatever it is, he thought. Because it’s not a drukhari, Rachain, and you know it isn’t every bit as well as I do.

  Cully thought that, but he didn’t say it. Rachain was his friend and his boss, and, if Cully was utterly and totally honest with himself about it, he had always been a little bit afraid of the veteran sergeant.

  ‘Anything that lives can die,’ Rachain growled
. ‘We find it, corner it, kill it. We’ve got Steeleye in our platoon, for the Emperor’s sake. There’s nothing alive within half a mile she can’t drop with a clean headshot. We just need to give her that shot.’

  Cully nodded. At least Rachain was prepared to do what needed to be done, that was the main thing. They could argue about how to cover it up later.

  They lost Booger Boy and Twitchy and Pretty Girl the next night.

  All three of them were found hanged, the same as Webfoot and Hangnail had been. All three of them disembowelled. Booger Boy’s left leg had been taken off at the hip, neat as neat.

  There was a lot of meat on Booger Boy, Cully couldn’t help but think. How the lad had ever passed basic training carrying that much weight was a mystery, but one that he supposed was largely irrelevant now.

  He was dead, after all.

  So was Twitchy, who had been Steeleye’s spotter and the platoon’s up and coming apprentice sniper. So was Pretty Girl, who had been one of the best scouts they’d had.

  It took Pretty Girl, Cully thought, and his blood ran cold. She was young but her scout skills were extraordinary. Had been extraordinary, he corrected himself as he dragged his eyes away from the gaping wound in her abdomen. Something had crept up on Pretty Girl. Something even quieter and scarier than she had been.

  Cully swallowed.

  He was right, he knew he was. Whether Rachain wanted to hear it or not.

  Of course he didn’t want to hear it. Cully didn’t want to hear it himself, and it was him thinking it.

  I’m wrong, he told himself. I must be.

  But he knew he wasn’t.

  They were deep in the jungle now, perhaps a hundred miles from where they had started at Advance Firebase Theta 82. They fought orks on a daily basis as their recon patrol cut deep into enemy territory, but to Cully that was almost secondary now. He had been fighting orks in the steaming jungles of Vardan IV for two years and more. He understood orks, he respected orks, but he no longer truly feared them.

  Cully feared the other thing.

  Voxjockey was gone now, and Wanna-be-a-pilot, and Lickspittle.

  Voxjockey had died in combat like a normal person, shredded by an ork’s heavy stubber, and Cully had managed to gather the boy’s ident-tags as they fled the ambush zone. His family at least would get The Letter. Well, they would if Cully made it back himself, he supposed. If not, what the hell did he care?