by Dan Abnett
‘Ah, but it’s good to see you, Peto,’ Puis said, taking a swig of liquor and then belching triumphantly.
‘You too, Kai,’ Soneka laughed.
‘What will you do?’ asked Bashaw Jenz.
Soneka shrugged. ‘I dunno. Find another outfit that can use a few officers? I’m not worried about myself. I just want to make sure Lon and the others get placed all right.’
‘Room for you all here,’ said Pius.
Soneka shook his head. ‘No room for two hets like me and you in this outfit, Kai,’ he chuckled. ‘We’d end up fighting to the death.’
‘Maybe,’ admitted Kaido Pius.
‘You know it.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You know it, Kai. Terra, you’re a good friend and generous to a fault. I thank you for that. But I’m gonna hold out, maybe rebuild the company, maybe petition the uxors for a new one. Fug, what is this we’re drinking?’
‘Jenz’s homebrew,’ Pius replied, regarding the bottle he was clutching groggily. ‘It’s basically pure alcohol—’
‘With a secret mix of herbs and spices,’ Jenz added. ‘My gene-da’s special recipe!’
‘You gene-da clearly had sanity issues,’ Soneka told him.
Pius snorted.
‘I’ve been meaning to catch up with Hurt,’ said Soneka. ‘I haven’t seen him since I got here. He’s around right? The Jokers are here?’
Pius nodded. ‘Yes, Bronzi’s here.’
‘The Jokers are camped at line ten south, I think,’ said one of the bashaws.
‘What about Dimi Shiban?’ Soneka asked, trying to make the question sound natural. ‘You seen him?’
No one had. Despite the liquor in his system and the blazing fires, Soneka felt cold.
‘Well, my friends,’ he said, getting to his feet unsteadily. ‘I have to drain now, secret mix or no secret mix.’
Pius and his men laughed and booed Soneka as he meandered away from the campfires in search of the latrine trench. The raucous Maghrebi rhythms of the Gnawa fell away behind him, and the hot, scented smoke thinned into cold, spare desert air.
‘That’s Soneka,’ said Roke, passing the night-vision scope to Boone.
Boone took a look for himself, training the scope down the embankment towards the field of campfires.
‘Yup. So he’s hanging out with Pius, is he?’
‘He’s got no one else to hang out with,’ said Roke sourly. ‘All of his Dancers are bones in the desert.’
‘We should have ourselves a word with Peto Soneka, I think,’ said Boone.
‘Why?’ Roke asked. ‘We’re watching Pius, aren’t we? Pius is the one you’ve got the twitch about.’
Boone shrugged. ‘I know. But Soneka was acting real funny last time I saw him, and now he turns up here, breaking bread with the very man we’re watching. I got a twitch, all right, Roke. Come on.’
Boone signalled to Pharon, and the three genewhips moved off quietly down the slope.
SONEKA STOOD ON the clapboards over the latrine pit, undoing his fly with his one good hand, wrinkling his nose at the rising stink of ammonia. He swayed as he urinated. Behind him, the Carnivales huddled around the crackling fires laughing and shouting. Amber smoke hazed up into the soft darkness of the backwards sky.
Something made Soneka look around. He buttoned up quickly, dearly wishing he could clear his swimming head.
A man was walking towards him along the edge of the latrine gutter, a silhouette backlit by the dancing campfires of the billet behind them.
‘Who’s that?’ Soneka called out. ‘Who is that?’
He hoped Kaido would hear him, but the men around the campfires were making too much noise.
‘How’s it going, Soneka?’ the man asked.
The man was in shadow, but his teeth glinted in the distant firelight as he smiled.
Soneka knew him. Pharon, one of the genewhip’s bulls.
‘I’m fine,’ said Soneka. He turned to walk away in the opposite direction and found Roke blocking his path.
‘What is this?’ Soneka asked, though he was sure he knew all too well. He began to sober up very quickly.
‘You and Pius, you’re tight?’ asked Roke.
‘Of course,’ said Soneka warily. ‘We’ve known each other a long time.’
‘You know him well, then?’
‘Yes,’ said Soneka. The line of questioning was not going where he had expected it would. He braced himself for whatever verbal trap they were trying to lead him into.
‘So you know about him and Uxor Rukhsana, then?’ asked Pharon.
‘What about them?’
‘You know,’ Roke leered.
‘Kai and Rukhsana?’ That almost made Soneka laugh. ‘You’ve got that wrong. If they were carrying on, we’d all know about it.’
‘Why?’ asked Roke.
‘Because… because if Kaido Pius had nailed a piece of ass that fine, he’d be bragging about it to everyone.’
‘Maybe Kaido Pius isn’t who he seems,’ Pharon said, coming in closer behind Soneka. ‘We met Kaido Pius earlier today, at least, we think we did.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Soneka. ‘Have you boys been at the homebrew tonight?’
‘What’s going on with Pius?’ Roke asked, unamused.
‘What’s he into?’ asked Pharon. ‘You know him. What’s he got involved in? Are you involved too? Is that why you’re being so evasive?’
‘I’m… I’m not.’
‘What’s the story, Soneka? How come you survived Visages when every other bastard there got cut to ribbons? Someone looking out for you? Someone tip you off?’
‘Listen, you—’ Soneka began.
‘What’s all this stuff about a body?’ Roke asked. Soneka sank his shoulders, as if about to cave and confess to something. As Roke leaned in, Soneka caught him by the arm and pushed him into the latrine pit. There was a splash followed by furious, spluttered curses. Pharon lunged at Soneka, and took Soneka’s left elbow in the teeth for his trouble.
Soneka began to run. Pharon came after him, hurling as much abuse as his floundering partner down in the pit.
Soneka scrambled up the embankment in the dark, and found the billet road. Torch beams chased him.
‘Stay right there, Soneka!’ a voice called out. Soneka knew it. Genewhip Boone. He started to run away from the beams and heard the crack of a laspistol. A bright puff of dust lit up the ground near his feet.
‘Next one goes in your head, Soneka!’ Boone yelled. ‘Stay right where you are!’
Soneka didn’t slow down. He sprinted along the billet road, looking for cover. Blazing lights suddenly came on and blinded him. He skidded to a halt, shielding his eyes against the glare. He heard the rumble of a turbine engine. A door opened.
‘Get in!’ a voice yelled.
Soneka blinked. Behind the headlights, he saw Bronzi glaring at him from behind the wheel of a battered staff speeder.
‘Just get in, Peto,’ Bronzi repeated, ‘for fug’s sake.’
Soneka got in and the speeder ripped away into the darkness, leaving the pursuing genewhips far behind.
EIGHT
Mon Lo Harbour, Nurth, continuous
‘WHERE ARE WE going?’ asked Soneka after a while. Bronzi was driving in silence, steering away from the Army billets and out along a crude track that ran into the scrubland south of the terracotta palace. ‘Bronzi?’
‘Don’t ask questions, Peto,’ Bronzi replied. ‘I think I will. This—’
‘Is bigger than you, Soneka, so shut the fug up. You’re supposed to be dead.’
‘You don’t seem too delighted to discover I’m not.’
‘Of course I am,’ said Bronzi. ‘You’re my tightest friend. Of course I’m pleased you’re not dead. But this complicates things.’
‘What things?’
‘Just shut up, all right? Just consider this to be your old mate rescuing you from the unpleasant attentions of the genewhips.’
‘Because I’ve been shadowing you all day.’
They left the established track, and went cross country, following dry watercourses between the dusty tels. Bronzi ramped up the speeder’s lift. The vehicle’s main lamps picked out the thorn scrub and dunes in their path in a frosty glare. The further they got from the lights and fires of the vast Imperial encampment, the bigger and blacker the night sky became, and the lonelier it felt.
After twenty minutes, Bronzi decelerated, and aimed the speeder along a deep wadi. At the end of an arid creek stood an old ruin, a place that might have once been a temple or, just as easily, a bier for livestock. Someone had lit a fire inside.
Bronzi stopped the speeder and killed the drive.
‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Follow me. Don’t be an idiot. I can protect you, but only so far. Please bear that in mind.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying they wanted to kill you to keep things tidy. I asked them to give you a chance. So this is my reputation on the line, along with your life. Don’t fug this up for either of us by being stupid.’
They walked across the sand from the speeder to the ruin. Soneka could smell fuel bricks burning. The flame light inside the place flickered and danced the shadows.
They went inside. A small fire of fuel bricks and dry thorn sheaves was blazing in the middle of the baked earthen floor. A man sat beside the fire on a lump of tumbled stone, cleaning his fingernails with a dagger.
‘This is Thaner,’ said Bronzi.
Thaner looked up at them, his face expressing very little interest towards either of them. He wore the uniform of a bajolur in the Outremars. His face was blemished down the left side by an old las burn. Even without the burn, his face would have been mean and tight.
‘You took your sweet time,’ he said. ‘Yes, well, I got it done,’ Bronzi replied. ‘You’re Soneka?’ the man asked, still fiddling the tip of his blade along his fingernails. ‘Yes.’
‘You came out of Visages alive?’
‘Yes.’
The man pursed his lips. ‘That makes you either tough as a bastard or very lucky.’
‘Little of both, maybe.’
Thaner rose to his feet and sheathed his dagger. He brushed dust off the front of his uniform.
‘I’m going to ask you a few questions,’ he told Soneka. ‘You give me the right answers, things will be thoroughly civilised. You give me the wrong ones, no amount of tough bastardy or luck is going to see you out of here.’
Soneka smiled. ‘Did they change the rules? I don’t remember there ever being a time when an Outremar bajolur got to threaten a geno het like that.’
‘Yes, they changed the rules, all right,’ said Thaner. ‘Trust me.’
‘I have no reason to trust you,’ Soneka replied.
‘Yes, you do,’ said Bronzi. ‘Me.’
The fire crackled.
‘I’m waiting,’ said Soneka.
‘Who have you told?’ Thaner asked. ‘About the body at CR345?’
‘No one.’
‘Come on, you’re not fooling me. Who have you told?’
‘No one,’ Soneka insisted. ‘Not even my men, the ones I got out of Visages with. Bronzi knew. I knew. Everyone else who knew about it died at Visages. Except Dimi Shiban, and I don’t know what happened to him.’ Soneka looked at Bronzi. ‘What happened to Dimi, Hurt? You’d be the one to know that. What happened to him?’
Bronzi stared at the floor and didn’t answer.
‘So you haven’t told anyone, that’s what you’re saying?’ asked Thaner.
Soneka nodded.
‘What about Uxor Mu?’
Soneka shrugged. ‘All right, yes. I spoke to her about it when I got in yesterday. But she already knew.’
‘Did she?’
‘Bronzi and I voxed her from CR345 and—’
‘When you told her,’ Thaner cut in, ‘did she act like she knew about it?’
‘No.’
‘No,’ Thaner nodded.
Soneka cleared his throat. The flickering fire was beginning to play tricks on him. He kept tensing, as if seeing things out of the corner of his eyes, shadows in the shadows around the edges of the ruin. There was something – someone – out there.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why she decided to deny it. I assumed she was confused, or had her own agenda. I—’
‘She denied it because she didn’t know about it,’ said Thaner.
‘But Bronzi spoke to her. I heard her voice.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ said Thaner. ‘I did!’
‘You really didn’t,’ said Bronzi quietly. He put his hand on Soneka’s arm. ‘It was an intercept. We weren’t speaking to Mu at all.’
‘That’s not possible,’ said Soneka. ‘She used the codes, the encrypts, all the—’
‘They’re way ahead of us,’ said Bronzi. ‘Peto, they know all the codes. They listen to us.’
Soneka turned to look at Bronzi. ‘Who’s “they”, Hurt? What the hell is this?’
Bronzi glanced at Thaner.
Thaner shook his head.
‘One of you had better start making sense,’ Soneka growled. ‘Peto…’ Bronzi warned.
‘I’m serious with this, Hurt! Someone explain this now. What happened to the body? Did you deliver it?’
‘Yes,’ said Bronzi. ‘I made the rendezvous. I handed the body back to the people who’d made it.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ snapped Soneka. ‘I don’t know what the fug that means, Bronzi. What happened to Shiban? Where is he? Is he dead?’
Bronzi stared at Soneka. There was a hard look in his eyes. ‘He was dead before he got on the transport,’ he said.
‘I don’t know what that means either,’ Soneka growled.
‘That wound he took, the shrapnel wound here,’ Bronzi said, gesturing towards his throat. ‘Some of it was bone, Nurthene bone.’
‘I know. That happens,’ said Soneka.
‘You don’t know, Peto,’ said Bronzi, uncomfortable. ‘It was in him. It was in him and it was just a matter of time before it turned him. They knew that. They shot him. They would have had to anyway.’
‘You keep saying they. Who the fug is they?’
‘We don’t have to tell you anything we don’t w—’ Thaner began to say.
Peto Soneka had always been quick. The snub-nosed laspistol was in his hand and aimed at Thaner before either he or Bronzi had a chance to react.
‘Start explaining this mess now,’ Soneka ordered. ‘Right now.’
‘Oh, Peto, come on—’ Bronzi moaned.
‘You shut up. Don’t think I won’t aim this at you too.’
‘Put it away,’ said Thaner.
‘I want answers first,’ said Soneka.
Thaner sighed. Keeping his hands clearly open, so Soneka could follow what he was doing, he reached down to his midriff and untucked his tunic. He pulled the garment up, along with the vest beneath, and exposed the corded muscle of his right hip. Soneka could see the brand mark quite clearly.
‘Oh… shit,’ Soneka murmured.
‘The body was one of our people,’ said Thaner, lowering his tunic. ‘It got recovered from the field before our retrieval teams could locate it. We needed it back.’
‘It was dressed as one of my men,’ said Soneka.
‘It was a Hort sergeant called Lyel Wilk,’ said Thaner, matter-of-factly. ‘He was operating as one of your men.’
Soneka had a million questions, and knew every single one of them had an ugly answer. None of the questions would form in his mouth. He was struck dumb by the sensation of the universe as he knew it grinding out of joint around him. Since that bloody dawn when Visages had been sacked, and most especially since his meeting with Honen Mu the night before, total dislocation had been looming. Now everything he trusted tore away and revealed nothing: no answers, no explanations, no single thing he could trust or recognise.
>
Simple panic seized him. He aimed the pistol at Thaner’s head and squeezed the trigger. Something crunched into him from the side and the shot went wild as he fell. The something was Bronzi. Bronzi had punched him.
Before Soneka could begin to process that information, Thaner had kicked the pistol out of his hand. It skittered away into the crawling shadows. Thaner put a second kick into Soneka’s gut to keep him down. It was a brutal blow. The air crashed out of Soneka’s lungs and he felt a deep, internal pain that could only be organs rupturing.
‘He’s no use to us,’ Soneka heard Thaner tell Bronzi. Thaner drew his dagger.
‘Don’t!’ Bronzi warned.
‘He’s a liability. We can’t use him.’
Gasping, agonised, Soneka writhed. He saw Thaner coming towards him, dagger held low for the old jab and twist.
‘We’ve taken him this far,’ said a voice. ‘Why don’t we show him the rest? If he still objects, you can put that in his heart, Thaner.’
Soneka’s lungs began to work. He sucked in air, choking, tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘Peto?’ Bronzi was calling. ‘Peto, look at me. Peto?’
Soneka looked up. Bronzi had pulled up his own shirt. His right hip was a good deal more upholstered in flesh than Thaner’s, but the brand was exactly the same.
‘Oh glory,’ Soneka wheezed. ‘No… not you too, Hurt…’
‘It’s the mark of the hydra,’ the voice said. ‘It’s the mark we bestow upon our friends, the friends we can trust.’
Soneka heard heavy footsteps crunch across the hard-baked floor towards him. A shadow fell across him, blocking out the light of the fire.
Even in silhouette, Soneka recognised it. An Astartes in full plate.
‘Alpha Legion…’ Soneka whispered.
‘Exactly.’ The Alpha legionnaire knelt down over Soneka. ‘I believe you’re a good man, Peto – honest and trustworthy. I think we could be friends. I have no wish to kill you, but I will, without compunction, if you maintain this stance of resistance.’
‘Then stop lying to me,’ Soneka moaned, his voice shrunk by pain.
‘I’m not, Peto.’
