by Toby Frost
He gave a soft whistle and flicked his hand out, and the soldiers spread across the road. Beside him, Lavant swung his lasgun up to cover the windows, the weapon already pulled tight against his shoulder to take the recoil.
Neat little living rooms appeared through the windows, all built to the same design. It must be strange, Straken thought, to live like that – getting up and putting your overalls on each day for forty years, knowing as you did that your neighbours to the side and above were doing the same, praying at your household shrine and your workplace at fixed hours of the day. As he passed window after window, house after house, Straken thought of the stages of life in Dulma’lin. Get born, get your own cube to live in, have children, send them away to find their own cubes… Infinitely safer than life on Catachan – but somehow, far worse.
‘Looks like they just upped and left,’ Lavant said quietly. ‘Like they were coming back the next day.’
‘The recruiters probably told them that they were,’ Straken replied.
‘Commissars,’ Lavant said, and a little way to the right, Marbo looked at the pavement and spat.
A trooper suddenly dropped down, held up his hand in a fist. The whole group froze. Lavant sidestepped to the wall in one movement. Straken pulled his shotgun up, ready to fire one-handed down the road.
The soldier pointed into a doorway.
‘I’m going to see,’ Straken said. ‘Cover me.’
Lavant nodded. He slipped into the shadow of the opposite block and dropped down behind an abandoned groundcar, resting his lasgun on the bonnet.
Straken ran down the side of the hab-block, to the two men covering the door. The nearest man – Straken recognised him as a corporal called Stess – merely nodded into the doorway of the block.
Three human corpses lay in the foyer. A fourth hung by its heels in the stairwell, arms dangling down. The three on the ground were older men, fifty or more, and wore the black and purple flak armour of the local defence force. The fourth man was much younger, heavily built and muscular. A red bandana was tied around his forehead.
‘Emperor,’ Stess cursed. ‘That’s one of our people!’
Straken went in first, shotgun ready. Lavant was second, breathing hard between clenched teeth. Straken checked the edges of the room, the corners, and angled his shotgun up the stairwell.
Corporal Stess squatted down and looked at the dangling body of the Catachan. ‘Scalped,’ he said. ‘Someone’s scalped him. Ork scum.’
Under his breath, Lavant said, ‘If it was orks.’
Stess shook his head. ‘Struck up like that. We ought to get him down.’
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said a voice. He looked round. Marbo stood in the doorway. He walked in, a glum, hulking presence.
Stess glared at him. ‘What? You want to leave him up there?’
‘If I wanted to kill some of you,’ Marbo said, ‘I’d wire up the corpse of someone you were going to search. Someone you’d want to cut down.’
‘He’s right,’ Lavant said. ‘The renegades used to do it on Tasibi.’ He shrugged. ‘Hell, I’ve done it a couple of times. It’s not nice, but when you’re dealing with Khorne cultists…’
‘Wait here,’ Straken said. He bounded up the stairs, boots almost silent on the stone. Two flights up, he took a small torch from his vest, the sort of thing designed to fit under the barrel of a lasgun. He ran the beam over the ceiling. The rope holding the dead body had been tied around a light at the top of the stairwell. Like evil fruit, a bundle of grenades hung next to it, ready to be shaken loose.
Straken’s mouth was dry. He knew the trick – as Lavant said, it was popular with the vicious followers of the Ruinous Powers, as well as some of the more hate-filled Guard regiments – but to see orks using such tactics surprised him. He thought about the corpses he had found when they had first entered the vox tower, mutilated and hung on display in the same way. Uneasy, he returned to the others.
‘Touch nothing,’ Straken said. ‘There’re grenades rigged to go off if we cut him down.’
If Marbo got any pleasure from being vindicated, he didn’t show it. He leaned against the wall, looking awkward and surly in equal measure.
Lavant pointed to the older men lying dead by his feet. ‘They were stabbed from behind. That doesn’t surprise me. But it looks as if the Catachan fellow went the same way.’
Straken shone his torch on the dead Catachan. The face looked empty, somehow unfinished, as if it had never had a mind behind it at all. The priests would say that by now the man would be sitting with the Emperor. Straken found it easier to believe that sort of thing when he wasn’t standing next to a corpse. Very carefully, he pushed the man’s combat vest open at the neck.
‘What’re you doing?’ Lavant asked.
‘Looking for his dog tags. Then I’ll get him down.’
‘I’ll do that. I’m the demolitions expert here.’
Straken stepped back. ‘If you want. But be careful.’
‘I always am,’ Lavant replied.
‘Good. Everyone, out!’
They waited on the steps of the hab-block. Four minutes later, there was a loud thump from within. Straken looked in, saw the dead man lying on the ground beside the others. Lavant came down the stairs, a pair of grenades in his gloved hands.
‘His dog tags are gone,’ he announced.
12.
The Temple of Our Protector of the Healing Word stood in its own grounds, surrounded by wide roads and ornamental gardens that were either overgrown or dead. A servitor stood broken in the gardens like a metal statue. The main building was almost the size of a cathedral, made of a blue-grey stone that Straken had not seen elsewhere on Dulma’lin. Veins of metallic impurities ran through the stone like lightning, twinkling in the artificial sunlight.
The spires were as delicate as antennae, ornate and brittle looking. Further down, the church became more functional. Its base was like a bunker, a hard stone cuboid with slits for windows. At ground level, only the doors were ornamented, and they were thick plasteel.
A perfect fortress, Straken thought. Too bad we didn’t take it first.
They stopped in the ruins of a row of shops, facing towards the church. The orks had definitely been here: not just the windows but several of the support columns were shattered, as if some great vehicle had rammed the shop fronts. The Catachans crouched down in the rubble and waited for signs of life.
‘It looks deserted,’ Straken said. ‘Let’s see if anybody’s home. You people stay back. Cover me, but don’t make any sudden moves. Some of these locals are so jumpy they’ll shoot at anything.’
‘The one thing worse than a civilian,’ said Corporal Stess, ‘is a civilian with a gun.’ It was an old joke, but there were a couple of smiles.
‘Wait for me,’ Straken said.
He stepped out of cover and started across the road. The church looked as dead as a cliff-face. The impurities in the stone glinted, long glittering streaks of blue and green.
There was a sudden loud bang and an invisible fist crashed into the side of Straken’s head. He was knocked sideways, stumbling, the road yawing in his vision like the deck of a sinking ship. He staggered upright and ran forward, into the shadow of the church wall, out of the angle of attack.
His vision blurred and contracted, became narrow and wide like a badly tuned vid-screen. Shadow covered him; he looked back and saw lasgun shots flicker out of the buildings behind him, from his men. Straken flopped against the wall of the church and felt his head – some lunatic had sniped him, putting his artificial eye out of true. The buzzing in his head was a hard, constant whine as if an insect had crawled into his skull. Gunfire rattled from the wall above – an autogun, from the sound of it. More answering fire crackled from his own team. Straken rubbed his head, feeling the jagged edge of torn metal against his palm like the lid of an opened ration-tin, and suddenly realised that someone was running towards him.
‘Back!’ he yelled, waving his arm. ‘Keep back
!’
It seemed only to encourage his would-be rescuer. The soldier began to sprint, and Straken recognised the scarred face with white hair.
The side of Yalsky’s head disappeared in a puff of red. He fell backwards, lascarbine clattering on the road. The soldiers in the ruins shouted. The lasguns cracked out again, and Lavant yelled, ‘Cease firing!’ Straken glimpsed the captain’s face, set in furious concentration, and he flashed his palm twice to get Lavant’s attention.
Straken pointed upwards. Lavant raised his hand, one finger extended, and mouthed ‘Dug in.’
A nasty silence settled on the road. Straken’s head didn’t hurt, as such; it just felt as if he had drunk a lot, and quickly. He imagined the sniper above him, the long barrel pushed through the thick temple wall like a pipe through stone, watching the road and the dead body in it, waiting for the chance to fire again. Straken wondered whether his men had spotted the assassin. From the look on Lavant’s face, they knew exactly where to shoot, and were just waiting for the opportunity.
He tapped his chest and motioned across the road. A ripple of movement spread through the ruins, as men reloaded and readied themselves. Straken caught Lavant’s eye again and nodded. Lavant nodded back.
‘Covering fire, on my mark,’ Lavant said to the men. Straken could only just hear him. He took a deep breath, and ran.
He tore across the road, weaving crazily, and like an unfolding machine a dozen las-barrels swung into view and opened fire. Lasguns crackled and fire smacked into the stone. Straken heard chips break loose from the wall. Something struck his steel arm and spun away. He reached the ruins, scrambled up the slope and threw himself into cover.
Straken landed heavily on his side in the dirt. He sat up slowly, careful not to show himself. He looked down at his body; besides cuts and grazes, he was unhurt.
A voice barked, ‘Cease fire!’, and suddenly the road was silent.
Grimacing, he brushed dirt off his metal shoulder, and carefully reached to his head.
His vision seemed fine. He shook his head and ran through the list of mental commands to change the zoom and focus of his bionic eye. It flicked into the fuzzy-edged green of night-vision and back again. It hurt to zoom in; not much, but enough.
‘How’s your head?’ Lavant said. He crouched three metres away.
‘It’s all right. Looks like they nailed that Yalsky kid.’
‘Yeah. And they’re probably waiting for us to go back out to him.’ Lavant shook his head. ‘Throne-damned snipers,’ he said, disgusted.
Straken wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He could taste grit. ‘Looks like we found our killers, then.’
‘And it seems they’re human.’ Lavant rubbed his chin. ‘The church is clearly fortified – if they’ve got hold of sniper rifles, they may have all manner of other Guard equipment. Listen, we’ve got three krak mines back in the truck, with the rest of the gear we brought up. Give me a while to bring them up here, and I’ll rig them to blow the place wide open. Otherwise, we’ll need to fetch missile launchers from one of the rear bases, maybe even a Sentinel…’
Straken did not like the thought of the delay. It had been hard enough to take the hab-zones quietly, and not to obey his instincts and charge in against the orks, but to be here, eight metres from the dead body of one of his own men, and twenty from the sniper who had murdered him… He clenched his fist. Tempting as it was to run straight in, what would it achieve? If they reached the temple, how would they even get inside? If the Catachan Second had a weakness, it was their lack of gear for punching through heavy armour.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Let’s post a watch and get back to the vox tower. Then we’ll arm up and take this place to pieces.’
‘I could get in there.’
It was not Lavant. The two officers looked round. Private Marbo crouched a few metres away, behind a metal table turned on its side for cover.
‘You?’ Straken said. ‘How do you mean, on your own?’
‘Yeah. It’s a one-man job. Break in, kill the guards and get the doors open. They’d see a load of people coming, but for one man, it’s not too bad.’
‘You’d have a hell of a time not being spotted,’ Lavant said.
‘I’d need a distraction.’
Broad, dirty and squatting down as if to leap into an attack, Marbo looked almost inhuman. His sheer size made Straken think of a small ork, but it was the man’s eyes that disturbed him. They were at once cold and distant, unfocused but lethal. He was like a machine running on low power, saving its energy for the fight to come.
‘What the hell,’ Straken said. ‘Do it. We’ll give them something to think about.’
Marbo simply turned and crept away, disappearing back into the shadows.
There’s something very wrong with that man, Straken thought as the soldier slipped into the ruins. But he’s crazy enough to try it – almost crazy enough to respect.
Marbo heard the other soldiers moving around behind him, making too much noise. People always made a racket, wasting their time with small talk and stupid jokes, chattering to keep the dark away like children shouting to prove that they weren’t scared. For once he welcomed it; with luck it would give the snipers in the church something to look at, and distract them from his work.
He picked his way through the rubble, then dropped onto his belly and crawled past a fallen motorcycle, the promethium tank torn away. The ground reeked of spilt fuel. Marbo reached a doorway and stood up in the shadow inside.
Quietly, he climbed the stairs of the hab-block, past doors opening into unimportant lives. Little people, the ones on whose behalf he was supposed to be fighting. He felt nothing for them at all.
It was always better to fight alone, away from the risk of anyone giving you away. When you had nobody else to rely on, your victories were your own, and you had no risk of some fool letting the enemy know where you were.
A couple of lasgun shots rang out in the street. Straken’s men were firing at the church, trying to locate the sniper. Good, he thought. Perhaps the enemy would even think they were winning, and come out to encircle the Catachans. They would be easy meat then.
Two more flights of stairs, in near darkness. Halfway up the building, Marbo thought he heard something rattle on the steps. A creature slipped out of the shadows, a small, furred animal with no eyes and enormous ears.
The animal looked at him, clicking to itself, and realised that he was not a friend. It hurried past, as quiet going down the stairs as Marbo was ascending them.
He reached the top floor. Marbo saw a ladder on the right, leading to the roof. He crouched down and took the coil of rope from his shoulder. Marbo tied a noose into the rope and climbed the ladder. He pushed the skylight open and crept onto the roof, almost bent double.
The temple had two advantages as a fortification: the walls were thick and high, and the open ground around it gave it a comparatively wide field of fire. If you wanted to get to the walls, you had to move very fast – not like Yalsky. Marbo thought of the corporal, his head blown open, and for a moment another face appeared in Yalsky’s place: Marbo’s eldest brother, cut down in the open by orks in the Urgok war. The face vanished, and he was crouching at the edge of the roof, looking at the temple across the road as if mimicking its gargoyles.
Marbo hurled the rope. The noose dropped around a gargoyle’s snarling head. He pulled the rope tight. The gargoyle’s extended tongue made it look like he was strangling it.
Swinging across would get him to the temple quickly – but would also send him straight into the side of the building. Instead, he tied the rope off on the trapdoor leading back downstairs, leaving plenty of slack. Then he returned to the edge of the roof.
Marbo spat on his palms and took hold of the rope. He pushed out and dropped. The rope caught, sagging between the hab-block and the temple, Marbo hanging at its lowest point. He drew his knife with his free hand and began to slice through it.
The razor-sharp blade slipped
through the taut rope, and suddenly Marbo was swinging downwards, to the other side of the road. He gritted his teeth and his shoulder thumped against the side of the temple, knocking the breath out of him. He put his knife between his teeth, grabbed the rope with both hands and hauled himself up.
The first few metres were the worst: hand over hand, dragging himself up the rope by strength alone. Then his boot found a foothold – the top of a frieze showing miners bowing around the Emperor – and he rested his weight on his feet. His palms stung from the rope. Marbo slid his knife back into his belt and climbed.
He reached the gargoyle and wrapped his arms around it as though he were wrestling the beast. Marbo hauled himself onto its back. For the first time since stepping onto the roof of the hab-block, he looked down. The cut rope hung down the side of the block. The street was empty below.
There was a small window two and a half metres across from the gargoyle’s head. A double-headed eagle, carved into the stone, wrapped its wings around the frame. Marbo leaned out, hooked his fingertips around the bird’s nearest beak, and swung himself across. He paused, listened and dropped feet-first over the windowsill.
The inside of the temple was dark and cool and still. The air smelt of sawdust and brick. From alcoves, saints glowered out with a sort of angry sorrow, as if burdened by disappointment.
Marbo crouched there for a moment, watching motes of dust twinkle in the rafters, and heard bootsteps coming from the left.
He crept behind the statue of a robed cleric raising a power maul. Marbo drew his knife, using his left hand to muffle the soft hiss of the blade leaving its scabbard. He tilted his head and closed his eyes, hearing the footsteps get closer.
About nine metres away, to the left, on stone, and rising. That meant there was a staircase on the left. Good.
