Hammer and Bolter 4

by Christian Dunn

  ‘We gotta ship out of here.’ I told him. ‘We can’t wait till morning.’

  General Farris shook his head.

  ‘We’ve been through this before, Straken. I won’t have us marching through that jungle at night.’

  ‘The men can cope with the jungle.’

  ‘Maybe they can, but the villagers…’

  ‘If we stay here, and those mutants attack again, I can’t guarantee we can hold them back. Our best hope is to take them by surprise, punch through their lines and keep on going.’

  ‘With the hostiles at our heels?’ he asked.

  ‘We only have to reach base camp, then the odds’ll be even.’ I said. ’With a couple more platoons, we can turn back around and blast that damned Chaos scum to—’

  ‘But the villagers, man! Some of them are old. There are children. They won’t be able to keep pace with us.’

  ‘So, we lose a few civilians. Better that than—’

  ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘We stick to my original plan. You said yourself that there were no casualties of the first attack.’

  ‘Because the mutants weren’t trying. They thought they could take us alive. Now they know better.’

  ‘If I didn’t know you better, I’d be starting to wonder if you’d lost your nerve.’

  And for the second time that night, I had to fight down the urge to punch this damned Validian upstart in his smug damned mouth. Through gritted teeth I said: ‘You’re asking me to sacrifice my men, my entire command platoon, for a lost cause.’

  ‘You have your orders, Colonel Straken,’ he said coldly.

  One hour till dawn, and a forbidding bird call broke the morning silence. The cold crept into my old bones as I lay waiting, and I longed to feel the warmth of the sun – any sun – one final time.

  In the jungle, nothing had stirred. Still, I was sure that the shadows had grown longer. And darker. A deep, unnatural darkness. The mutants – the monsters – were gathering their forces, increasing in number.

  There were butterflies in my stomach. That wasn’t like me. A Catachan’s patience is his greatest strength. But tonight, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like we were only postponing the inevitable.

  My mind flashed back to my talk with Farris, and I felt my blood heating up at the memory. But I realised something now. The general had had a point. Not about my motives – ‘Iron Hand’ Straken is no damned coward. But I had been reluctant to face the mutants again. I still was.

  I couldn’t explain why. It was a churning in my gut. An itch in my brain. An instinct that there was something wrong here, something I’d missed. Thinking back, I realised that the itch had been there all night. Ever since I had first clapped eyes on this damned place.

  So, what was I doing out here? Waiting for an attack that I couldn’t defend against, waiting to die? I was following my orders. But the Emperor knows, I’ve defied enough fool-headed generals in my time. I’d have stuck my knife in Farris’s damned heart and been glad to do it, if I’d thought it would save a single one of my men. The problem was, this time, I didn’t know if it would. I didn’t know what to do for the best.

  Or maybe I did. Maybe, at some level, I had known all along.

  Maybe I just had to listen to my gut.

  I climbed to my feet, and I walked towards the jungle, grass rustling beneath my feet.

  As I passed the outermost huts of the village, I could almost feel the sights of a hundred lasguns upon me. I was out in the open now, at the mercy of those guns – but not one of them fired. I stooped and laid my guns on the ground, then I shrugged off my backpack and webbing, and set them down too. Finally, I raised my hands to show that they were empty.

  I almost choked on the words I had to say, the last words I had ever imagined would come from my throat. I didn’t raise my voice; there was no need.

  ‘My name is Colonel Straken, and on behalf of the Second Catachan regiment of the Imperial Guard – on behalf of the God-Emperor Himself – I offer you my unconditional surrender.’

  It was a minute – a long, anxious minute – before anything happened.

  Then, I heard a whisper of leaves to my left and a near-human shape detached itself from the foliage. It padded towards me, lasgun raised, and I felt my fists clenching involuntarily.

  The mutant was beside me now. I recoiled from its rancid breath. It spoke to me, in the same unholy language as before, and I wanted with all my soul to lash out. I wanted to punch, to kick, to spit, to pull my knife and to carve my name in that abomination’s chest.

  Instead, I just watched as the mutant signalled to its comrades. One by one, they stepped out from the jungle behind it. Each was an abomination, and the sight of them gathered together just made the violent urge grow even stronger.

  From behind me, a single lasgun shot rang out. A mutant fell to the floor, clutching its shoulder.

  ‘Hold your damned fire! That’s an order!’ I cried. ‘No one is to engage these… the hostiles. It’s not us they want.’

  The mutants had brought up their own guns, but now they lowered them again. I couldn’t meet their eyes, any of them. I felt sick inside, and my flesh was crawling like I’d been dipped in fire ants.

  And now the mutants where shambling past me, a score of them – two score, three – and into the village. Towards the meeting hall.

  I saw MacDougal and Stone springing to their feet, getting out of the mutants’ path, drawing their knives but resisting the urge to use them. I was grateful to them. They trusted me. Even though, for all they knew – for all any of my men knew, watching this scene from their vantage points – I must have gone out of my tiny mind. Maybe I had, too.

  But, somehow, this felt good to me. It felt like the smart thing to do. For the first damned time in this forsaken night, something felt right. From behind me, I felt the familiar rush of heat and flame as the mutants’ grenades blew the meeting hall apart.

  The villagers must have heard them coming – but for most of them, there had been no time to escape. The survivors came charging out of the fire and the billowing smoke. I saw old men and young boys, their faces darkened and twisted by hatred and rage. It was hard to believe they were the same peaceful people whose food we had shared. The villagers moved towards the mutants with an angry roar, lasguns firing wildly as they sought to kill the intruders.

  The mutants showed no mercy. Half the villagers were shot down before they could take two steps. The remainder closed with their attackers, but they were unskilled in combat, quickly shredded by mutant claws. Their screams filled the clearing, drowning out the sounds of las-fire and conflict. This was the last thing I wanted to see, but I forced myself to pick up my feet, to get closer. Because I had to see this. I had to know.

  Even transfixed by the unfolding horror, my old battle instincts hadn’t deserted me entirely. Someone was coming at me from behind. I sidestepped his charge, threw him over my shoulder. The figure regrouped quickly, scrambling back to his feet. I was horrified to see that it was General Farris. The left side of his face had been burned away. He must have been in incredible pain. He was cursing at me, calling me all the damned names he could think of, and his fury gave him a strength that I’d never have expected. I may have hesitated too, because he managed to plant his foot in my stomach and push me into the wall of a hut.

  ‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ I forced out. The words sounded pathetic, even to me.

  Farris was marching on me with his pistol levelled and eyes bulging white with fury.

  ‘I knew it would come to this. I’ve been watching you, Straken. You’re undisciplined, insubordinate. I put up with your backchat because this was your regiment. But I always knew you were one step from turning, from betraying us all. I should have put this bolt between your eyes hours ago.’

  The fighting suddenly seemed very far away, and in that moment it was down to just me and him.

  I could have taken him alive.

  But a pair of lasgun beams struck Farris from be
hind, and he stiffened and gasped, then crumpled to the ground.

  Emerging from the shadows, Trooper Vines crouched over the general’s fallen body, and pronounced him dead.

  ‘I had no choice,’ Vines said dryly. ‘He was lashing out, screaming. He was saying crazy things, calling you a monster.’

  I remembered that Vines had been close to Wallenski. I acknowledged, and dismissed, his actions with a curt nod.

  The fighting was almost over.

  The villagers were struggling to the very end, but there were only a handful left standing. It would be – it had been – a bloody massacre. One for which I could take much of the credit. And in that moment, I was filled once more with a crippling self-doubt.

  But only for that moment.

  The meeting hall was still alight – and where the blaze flickered across the faces of the last few combatants, native and invader alike, a transformation was taking place. I blinked and I refocussed, unsure at first if I was imagining things. But I couldn’t deny what I saw.

  In the glow of those cleansing flames, the lies of the moonlight were dispelled at last, and the truth stood revealed.

  It wasn’t till some days later that I heard the other side of the story. Colonel Carraway came to see me in my hospital bed, where I’d just been patched up once again, and he told me how lucky I’d been.

  The explorators, it seemed, had left a survey probe in Borealis Four’s orbit – and the tech-priests at HQ had tapped into its scans of the planetary surface. The aim had been to produce a tactical map, locate a few cultist strongholds. Instead, they had discovered a whole damned settlement, where a moment before there had only been trees.

  Carraway and I worked out that the village must have shown up on the scans about the same time my men and I found it. As if, by

  crossing its threshold, we had broken some kind of foul enchantment.

  Anyway, the upshot was that Carraway needed someone to investigate – and, since half my regiment was already in that area searching for me and my platoon, they were quick to step forward.

  Kawalski, one of my toughest, most experienced sergeants, led the recce. He found the village soon enough – but his first impressions of it were quite different from mine. In his report, he described tumbledown shacks standing on scorched earth, twisted trees bearing rotten fruit, and a putrid stink in the air that made him want to retch.

  I don’t know why Kawalksi and his men saw the truth when I couldn’t. Maybe Kadence’s mind-screwing mumbo-jumbo could only affect so many of us at once. Maybe that was why it hadn’t worked so well on Wallenski and Myers, or on Thorn. Or maybe that damned psyker meant for things to turn out just as they did, Catachan at war against Catachan.

  Kawalksi sent a pair of scouts along the village’s perimeter. They returned with reports of booby traps, and sentries hiding in the trees. Even when some troopers exchanged fire with one sentry, they weren’t able to identify him. I had just been a shadow to them.

  It was only when Kawalksi’s men broke cover and attacked us that they saw who we were. That was why they had fought so defensively, trying not to hurt us, though we were trying to kill them. Kawalksi himself took me down, with some help. He was trying to get through to me, but he couldn’t seem to make me understand.

  We thought we were fighting Chaos-infected mutants. Instead, we were the ones infected. I’ll always be haunted by the fact that it was me who killed Trooper Weissmuller, and laughed as I ripped out his throat. Standing orders say that Kawalksi should have shot me there and then.

  But he had more faith in me than that.

  It was a damned relief to be back on my feet again, and to have my time on Borealis Four done with.

  Or so I’d thought.

  We were all sat around a warming fire, with the sights and sounds of the jungle around us. But this wasn’t the familiar scenery of Catachan – this was still a world marked by Chaos, and the ruined village around us was just another reminder of that.

  I was the only one who saw him.

  I don’t know what made me look, why I chose that moment to tear my eyes away from the dying fire. But there he was, standing in the shadow of a hut – a ramshackle, worm-eaten hut, I could now tell. After all that had happened, he appeared unscathed, his robe still pristine and white. Kadence Moonglow.

  He was watching me.

  Then he turned, and he slipped away – and I should have alerted my men, but this was between him and me now.

  I followed him alone.

  Trouble was, the boy was faster than I expected. We were already a good way into the jungle when I caught up with him. Or rather, I should say, when he stopped and waited for me.

  ‘Colonel Straken. I knew it would be you who came after me. Leading from the front. You always have to do everything yourself.’

  I was in no mood for talking. My knife was already in my hand. I only wished I hadn’t laid down my shotgun in the village.

  I leapt at my mocking foe. And missed.

  I hadn’t seen him move. One second, Kadence had been in front of me, and now he was a few footsteps to the left. I almost lost my balance, having to grab hold of a creeper to steady myself. It was bristling with poisoned spines. If I’d gripped it with my good hand, instead of my augmetic one, I would have been on the fast track to a damned burial pit.

  I tore the creeper from its aerial roots and snapped it like a whip, but again, my target wasn’t quite where I’d thought him to be.

  ‘Your men aren’t here now, colonel,’ he said. ‘You were overconfident, strayed too far from them. They won’t hear your cries.’

  And suddenly he threw out his arms – and although he wasn’t close enough to touch me, I felt as if I had been punched. The impossible blow staggered me, and Kadence was quick to press his advantage. More strikes followed – once, twice, three times to the head, once in the gut. I was flung backwards into a thorny bush, caught and held by its thin branches. A thousand tiny insects scuttled to gorge themselves on my blood.

  ‘You wanna hear crying, kid?’ I yelled, wrenching myself free from the clinging vegetation. ‘How about you get the hell out of my head? Stop making me see things that aren’t damn well there, and face me like a… like a… whatever the hell it is you are.’

  Kadence just smiled. And he gestured again, and my left leg snapped. It was all I could do not to gasp with the pain, but I refused to give him that satisfaction. I just gritted my teeth, transferred my weight onto my right foot, and continued to advance on him.

  ‘I didn’t ask for this fight,’ said Kadence. ‘I was content with my tiny domain, and a handful of followers who would do anything for me. For centuries, we hid from the outside world. Until, by the whims of a cruel fortune, you came blundering into our safe haven.’

  I thrust at him with my knife. I missed again, his dodge too quick to even register.

  ‘Your followers were mutants. Perverted deviants. And you tricked me into eating with them. You made me think… You made me see my own men as…’

  I roared in frustration, my rage getting the better of me. I was swinging wide now, hoping to nick my target wherever he might be. My blade whistled through the empty air, and he was suddenly behind me.

  ‘I knew that, once you had found us, more of your kind would come.’ he said. ‘I could not cloud so many minds at once. I hoped it would be sufficient to make you few see my followers as friends, your comrades as the thing you most despise.’

  ‘You didn’t count on me.’

  ‘No. No, I did not. But for all you have taken from me this night, Colonel Straken, you will pay with your life.’

  He made an abrupt slashing motion with his hand, and my leg broke again. A flick of his fingers, and my left shoulder dislocated itself. Kadence extended his right arm, formed his fingers into a claw pattern and twisted his wrist, and something twisted inside of me.

  I was buckling under the pain, straining to catch my breath, but determined to close the gap between me and my tormentor, even if I ha
d to do it on my hands and knees.

  ‘Think you can finish me?’ I struggled out. ‘Good… good luck, kid. Better monsters than you have… have…’

  I felt my ribs crack, one by one. My augmetic arm popped and fizzed, and became a dead weight hanging from my shoulder. I was on the jungle floor, not sure how I had got there. There were tears in my eyes and blood in my throat. And as I looked up, trying to focus through a haze of black and red spots, I saw Kadence making a fist, and it felt as if he had reached right into my chest and was crushing my damned heart.

  And that was when something miraculous happened.

  I felt the warmth of the rising sun on my back, saw the first of its light piercing the jungle canopy above me. And where those red rays touched the slight form of my assailant, like the flames of the fire back in the village, they exposed his deceptions for what they were.

  Kadence Moonglow – the boy in the white robe – faded from my sight. But a few steps behind him, exposed by the sunlight, was a twisted horror.

  I couldn’t see the whole shape of the monster. The parts still in shadow were invisible to me. But I could make out a rough purple hide, six limbs that could have been arms or legs, and a gaping, slavering maw that seemed to fill most of the monster’s – the daemon’s – huge head.

  I could make out a single red eye, perched atop that great mouth. And it blinked at me as it realised that I was returning its glare.

  As my Catachan Fang left my good hand.

  As it flew on an unerring course towards that big, bright target.

  It was the shot of a lifetime. My blade struck the dead centre of the daemon-thing’s eye, piercing its shadow-black pupil. It buried itself up to the hilt. And the daemon that had been Kadence Moonglow gaped at me, for a second, with what I took to be an expression of surprise.

  And then he exploded in a shower of purple ash.

  I don’t know how many hours I lay there, face down in the jungle.

  I couldn’t lift my head, couldn’t move my legs without my broken bones grinding against each other. My insides felt like jelly, and most of my augmetics had failed. I was dying.