Maledictions

by Graham McNeill et al.

  Death and death and death.

  Kill. Kill. Kill.

  That was what the Imperial Guard were for.

  ‘Emperor’s teeth!’ Rachain swore, the next morning.

  Triple guard, and still they had lost two. Lieutenant Makkron had been almost inevitable, but they had lost Sharpknife, too. She had been a real soldier, not just some recruit boot. Rachain wanted to beat his head against a tree in frustration. Rachain very, very badly wanted to kill someone.

  Anyone, anyone at all.

  ‘Cully!’ he roared, when he was shown the hanged corpses. ‘Get here!’

  Cully got there, fast as fast. Rachain was his friend, yes, but sometimes you just didn’t mess with a veteran sergeant.

  ‘I… I don’t know what to say,’ Cully said, as he stared at Sharp­knife and Makkron’s disembowelled bodies.

  The lieutenant was a kid and an idiot, but Sharpknife had been one of the tough ones, one of the veterans. There had been nothing not to like about Sharpknife, except…

  ‘She liked to play Crowns,’ Cully said, the words vomiting out of his mouth before he had time to think about them.

  You didn’t tell tales to the boss, not about a comrade, you never, never did, but when she was found hanged from a tree and you could smell the shit running out of her ruptured guts maybe you did after all, just that once.

  ‘Oh holy God-Emperor, Rachain, don’t you see it? He hated gambling. He hated wet-behind-the-ears officers and he hated weakness, too, in every form he saw it. Webfoot fell over in the swamp and gave our position away, and Hangnail threw up when she saw Webfoot’s corpse, and the lieutenant…’

  ‘Shut. Up,’ Rachain said, and the tone in his voice made Cully take a long, hard look at him.

  ‘You know I’m right,’ Cully said. ‘He’s purging us. Getting rid of what he sees as the weak links in Alpha Platoon.’

  ‘What about Gesht?’ Rachain said.

  Cully gave him a level look.

  ‘Gesht’s next,’ he said.

  Gesht wouldn’t hear it, of course.

  There was no way, according to her, just no bloody way. Her Drachan was dead, everyone knew that. Of course he was. He’d gone down fighting orks like an Imperial Hero. He was an Imperial Hero.

  He hadn’t survived, of course he hadn’t. Heroes never did.

  He wasn’t the man who was hunting them. Killing them.

  Eating them.

  Except of course he was.

  Cully and Rachain and Steeleye knew damn well he was. Deep, deep, deep down, Gesht had to admit she knew it too.

  She remembered how Drachan had walked her back from the mission where they had used heavy flamers on an unmapped rural settlement, how he had kept her together afterwards. The settlement hadn’t been on the Munitorum survey.

  Afterwards, no one could put their hand on their heart and swear that the settlement hadn’t been Imperial after all.

  Drachan had just shrugged. ‘They might have been orks,’ he had said to her.

  Yeah, they might have been orks, Gesht told herself, for the hundredth time since that dark, burning day.

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ Drachan had told her.

  Always.

  Always better safe than sorry, she knew that now. That was what you learned, on Vardan IV. It was always better to be safe than sorry, however sorry that made you.

  So you creep into a settlement, rotting prefabs standing in a jungle clearing. What’s on the other side of that wall?

  An ork warband?

  A scholam?

  A hospital?

  A nest of anti-aircraft guns?

  Who knows.

  Darn it, throw a grenade over. Better safe than sorry.

  Bodies are bodies, meat is just meat.

  Burning.

  The roar of the flamers.

  Bodies, burning in the jungle.

  At least it’s them not me.

  Burn it all, he had said. Better safe than sorry. Burn it all, and tell no one.

  I know, Gesht thought, all at once. I know it’s you, you mother lover.

  She straightened up all at once, checked her webbing and her reloads. Looked across their camp fire, saw the slick gleam of the snot that oozed forever out of Steeleye’s face. Met the other woman’s eyes.

  ‘I’m doing this,’ Gesht said. ‘Tonight. Come, or don’t.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ Steeleye said.

  She stood up, and she shouldered her long-las, and followed Gesht.

  Cully looked at Rachain, and the veteran sergeant looked back at him.

  ‘Yes,’ Rachain said.

  Together, their few surviving men behind them, they set off to hunt a ghost.

  Sergeant Drachan wiped the grease off his fingers.

  It was time to go again.

  They were coming for him, he could smell them.

  Time to kill, and kill, and kill again.

  He was Guard.

  This was what he was for.

  Cully led his squad through the drenched, reeking green. They were doubled up with Three Section, following Gesht and those of Two Section who had gone with her.

  Drachan was a master scout, silent as a ghost and deadly as a shark. No one else in Alpha Platoon could hope to match him for stealth.

  So they didn’t even try.

  Every sound, every flicker of movement, earned a burst of full auto.

  Overkill. Anykill.

  Kill, kill, kill.

  Moonface kicked the body of the indigenous simian he had just blown apart, and cursed.

  ‘I don’t get it, corporal,’ he said. ‘Shooting at everything like this. He’ll hear us.’

  ‘He can hear us breathing, you stupid sodding boot,’ Cully snapped at the boy. ‘Drachan was – is – the most dangerous man in Alpha Platoon. There’s no sneaking up on him, my lad. We’ve just got to–’

  ‘Blood and fire!’ Rachain roared, blasting away into the trees on a furious rampage of full auto until he drained his lasgun’s power-pack to empty.

  His finger stayed clamped down on the trigger even then, the weapon clicking empty in his hands in impotent desperation.

  Cully raced towards the sergeant’s position, stopped short when he saw what had provoked Rachain’s outburst.

  Dannecker was down, his throat hacked out by a heavy knife.

  ‘He was right behind me,’ Rachain cursed, ‘and I never heard anything!’

  Strongarm hurled a grenade into the trees, throwing up a great fireball of shattered branches and pulped vegetation. Somewhere in the green, someone laughed.

  Cully’s blood ran cold.

  There was nothing sane in that laugh, nothing human any more.

  ‘Drachan,’ he whispered.

  Rachain nodded.

  ‘That way,’ he said.

  Steeleye heard the laugh.

  That was Drachan’s mistake. His one and only and final mistake.

  Drachan is the most dangerous man in Alpha Platoon, Cully had told Moonface. Steeleye hadn’t heard that conversation of course, didn’t hear about it until much later, but she wouldn’t have cared anyway even if she had. He was probably right, looking back on it, but Steeleye wasn’t a man and she knew exactly what she could do.

  She was already up a tree, the custom long-las held tight to her shoulder and her bulbous, augmetic eye snugly interfaced with the scope. It clicked as the bezel rotated in her face, dialling from night vision to the heat spectrum.

  The steaming jungle showed as a livid background of green and red. The simians that swarmed in the canopy were flashes of yellow as they moved.

  There.

  The bright white patch of human heat, moving oh so quietly through cover, deep in the undergrowth a hundred yards off Two Section’s position.<
br />
  Drachan.

  Steeleye took a breath, lined up on the shot, ignored the hot rain that fell relentlessly across her back and shoulders. Data scrolled across the scope and into her eye.

  Range, obstructions, refraction index, diffusion potential.

  This would probably be her one and only opportunity, she knew.

  Better safe than sorry.

  She pushed her hotshot charge up to absolute maximum, a whole power-pack discharged in a single furious shot. Released half her held breath. The crosshairs flashed red in the scope as the heavily customised rifle made guaranteed target lock.

  She squeezed.

  ‘Holy Emperor!’ Cully shouted as the hotshot bellowed across the jungle night, a single, searing flash of power like lightning and the very wrath of the Emperor Himself. ‘Tell me that was Steeleye?’

  Rachain tapped his vox-bead.

  ‘Alpha sergeant to Steeleye,’ he said. ‘You read?’

  ‘Five by five,’ the woman’s voice came back to him. ‘Give me ten, I’ve just got to see to something.’

  Gesht was there before her, as she had expected, standing over the body of her lover.

  Sergeant Drachan lay sprawled against the trunk of a massive tree, a smoking hole in the middle of his chest. He had a Guard-issue combat knife clamped in one hand, a heavy ork cleaver in the other. Long ropes of twisted vines wound around his waist.

  ‘I thought headshots were your signature,’ Gesht said, not looking up as the other woman approached her.

  Steeleye shrugged in the darkness.

  ‘Tricky shot through the undergrowth,’ she said. ‘Had to go for the centre of mass.’

  Gesht nodded, and still she wouldn’t look away.

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ she said, her voice sounding bitter and far away.

  She unslung her lasgun, flicked it over to full auto, and opened up at Drachan from point blank range.

  ‘Better safe than sorry, mother lover!’ she bellowed.

  That was how Cully and Rachain found her, still shooting, and Drachan was nothing but chunks of burning blackened meat in the undergrowth, and Steeleye watching and saying nothing.

  ‘Enough, Gesht,’ Rachain said at last. ‘It’s enough, now.’

  Gesht lowered her weapon and looked at the sergeant.

  ‘It’s never enough,’ she said. ‘Kill and kill and kill, remember?’

  All Rachain could do was nod.

  They returned to Advance Firebase Theta 82 eight days later, those of them who had survived. Rachain had salvaged the ident-tags from those Drachan had killed, so at least their families could receive The Letter and take what closure from that they could.

  He had sworn every survivor of Alpha Platoon to secrecy, Cully and Gesht and Steeleye and Strongarm and Moonface and the others. They had run into a lot of orks, and that was all it was.

  That was nothing new, on Vardan IV.

  Drachan’s name was never mentioned again.

  Three weeks later Gesht went into her tent alone, and shot herself.

  Death, and death, and death.

  It was just another day in the glorious Imperial Guard.

  The debris dropped from orbit and fell beyond the horizon. The explosion of its impact lit up the night, the flash reflected by the toxic clouds of Eremus. Dominic Seroff lifted his goblet of amasec. ‘To your health, inquisitor,’ he said to Ingrid Schenk.

  She raised her drink in return. ‘And to yours, lord commissar.’

  The amasec was a poor vintage. It made Seroff’s tongue curl against its sweetness, and it tasted of machine oil. It was the best he and Schenk could manage. There was no good amasec to be found anywhere on Eremus. This poor synthetic was the least offensive that could be had. It had the benefit of being potent, at least. It warmed Seroff’s chest as it went down.

  Commissar and inquisitor were seated on the balcony of Seroff’s quarters at the top of a thin tower of blackened rockcrete and iron. It overlooked the endless vista of wreckage and decay that covered the entire surface of Eremus. If the planet had once had individual hives, they had long since blended together, their names lost to history. Eremus did not even have the filthy grandeur of Armageddon’s towering hives. The mounds of this human anthill were low. The higher structures that had existed had been scavenged for parts over the course of the last few thousand years. On Eremus, everything and everyone had been brought low.

  The planet was dying. Its population had been in decline for centuries. There were fewer than five billion citizens struggling in the wastes now, a tenth of what there had been five hundred years ago. There were no more resources, no more ore, and very little coin for the few imports that still arrived. Eremus’ civilisation had become cannibalistic, everything used and used again, until it broke down into nothing.

  The world was moving towards extinction, but the process still took time. Seroff did not expect the end to come in what remained of his life span, and he did not care what happened after that. There wasn’t very much he did care about. There hadn’t been since Armageddon, and that was a very long time ago now.

  Seroff leaned back in his chair. The leather cracked. The rusted iron framework squealed. He took a healthy swallow of the amasec. ‘Do you know,’ he said to Schenk, ‘I can no longer remember if we use each other’s titles out of respect or as an insult.’

  Schenk nodded. She brushed a strand of lank, grey hair out of her eyes. Her face was gnarled with age, clenched and hard as a mummified fist. ‘I think it was about ten years ago,’ she said, ‘that I last asked myself that question. I couldn’t remember then, either.’

  Seroff shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’

  ‘Does anything?’ Schenk asked.

  They toasted each other again.

  Debris streaked the clouds again, but it burned up before reaching the surface. The wastes of the land were mirrored by the graveyard of Eremus’ orbit. The planet moved through an endless cloud of broken ships, military and civilian, of satellites, and of dead defence platforms. Eremus’ Mandeville point was little better than a cosmic sewage outflow. Seroff sometimes felt that the wreck of every ship caught in the warp found its way out of the immaterium and into this system, and then to Eremus. The derelicts fed the scavenger economy, and were, for Seroff, yet another symbol of the world’s identity. Eremus was decay. It was a refuse dump for the galaxy, and Seroff and Schenk were just as much refuse as the debris burning up in the atmosphere.

  A large chunk came down midway between the tower and the horizon. The blast was huge. The fireball filled the night for a satisfying length of time. Seroff listened carefully. Faintly, over the night wind, came the screams of the wounded and dying. There would be many casualties from that blow, though the deaths would barely be noticed outside the zone of destruction. Life on Eremus meant accepting the fact that death could come at any moment. Seroff was at ease with the knowledge that every day he was granted was the result of blind chance. He nodded at the expanding fire. ‘What about that one?’ he said. ‘Shall we say he was on that one.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Schenk. ‘That would be a true, fiery end.’

  They raised their goblets.

  ‘Sebastian Yarrick,’ said Seroff.

  ‘The Emperor grant you were on that,’ said Schenk.

  This was part of their nightly ritual. They watched for the best debris impacts, and then drank a toast, hoping for the death of the man they blamed for their fates.

  Seroff acknowledged the mistakes he had made. Allying himself with Herman von Strab on Armageddon had been foremost among them. It was the error that had, for all intents and purposes, ended his career. He had, at least, cut ties with von Strab early enough in the Second War of Armageddon to have avoided the appearance of treason. Seroff had simply been part of the political establishment of Armageddon, though it was an establishment that
had failed in every way that mattered. He had remained loyal to von Strab longer than he might have otherwise because of his opposition to Yarrick. Seroff had let decades of hatred for Yarrick blind him to his own self-interest, and to what was right for Armageddon.

  Seroff and Yarrick had been friends once. They had come up through the schola progenium together, they had become commissars together, and they had served together under Lord Commissar Rasp. When Rasp had proven weak, Yarrick had shown how little personal loyalty mattered to him, and had put a bolt shell through Rasp’s skull. Seroff had never forgiven him for that, and when Seroff had ascended the ranks, becoming one of the youngest lord commissars on record, he had made it his mission to ensure Yarrick never received the same title. He had been successful in this. He only wished that Yarrick had cared.

  It was hard for Seroff to believe that his career had once risen so far, so fast, and blazed like a comet. That was someone else’s life. His punishment after Armageddon had been this posting to Eremus. Here, he oversaw the conscription of troops to be sent off to fight for the Emperor. What Eremus could offer was very poor. Its soldiers were the weakest sort of cannon fodder, fit for nothing except to absorb enemy fire for a time while the Catachans or the Death Korps took the fight to the enemy.

  Schenk had just as much reason to hate Yarrick as Seroff. Her encounter with him was also well over a century ago, when she too had been young. Schenk was a Revivificator. Her faction of the Inquisition dreamed of finding the way to restore the Emperor to true life. A worthy goal, Seroff thought, one that justified many extreme means. On the planet Molossus, Schenk and her fellow inquisitors had been experimenting with the Plague of Unbelief. In order to control it, they needed to understand it. In order to understand it, they needed to see it in action. They had unleashed it in an underhive. Yarrick had brought ruin to the experiment, to the plans and to the careers of the inquisitors involved.

  Schenk still performed tests on the population of Eremus. Her means were limited, the material for her work barely acceptable as specimens. As far as Seroff could tell, she had succeeded in giving her subjects new and unpleasant ways to die, but had nothing to show for that work. He suspected that, for a long time now, she had really just been going through the motions. She had no real expectation that the torture she engaged in would lead anywhere.