Commissar

by Andy Hoare

  ‘Saint Nadalya’s mercy…’ Bukin mouthed.

  Flint shouldered past the chief provost to get a better view and he bit back a bitter curse as he took in the spectacle before him. The rebels were mustering, not as a huge, unruly mob, but as an organised body of troops. As he looked on, Flint saw squads organised into platoons, and platoons organised into companies. The voices he’d heard before must have been the last of the rebels gabbling as they settled into position, but now, silence descended on the massed ranks. The rebels were standing to attention, almost like proper, drilled and trained soldiers.

  Then it came to him. They were proper, drilled and trained soldiers. If the convicts assimilated into the 77th were anything to go by, the majority of the rebels must be erstwhile members of the Imperial Guard or other bodies such as planetary defence forces. Granted, they’d been expelled for transgressions too severe for the regimental provosts and commissars to deal with, but nonetheless, many must have been well used to military discipline. The rebels were scruffy and ill equipped, but there was no doubt they were being drilled as soldiers. It made sense. If the infamous Colonel Strannik was in charge, he’d be using rigid military discipline to keep the murderous scum under his command in line.

  And then, Flint saw the huge figure of the Catachan come into view as he passed through a downward shining beam of wan daylight. The man was a mountain of scared and tattooed gristle, his oversized frame barely contained within his ragged combat fatigues. His left shoulder was bound in crude bandages, the result of the bolt pistol round Flint had clipped him with during their last confrontation. His face was cast in harsh shadow by the light source directly overhead, emphasising his heavyset features. But by that light, the Catachan’s face was revealed as bruised and his lip was split, as if he’d been savagely beaten sometime in the last few hours. Trained by the Commissariat and a veteran of dispensing similar justice, Flint knew for certain that the Catachan hadn’t been set upon by any of his fellow rebel convicts. None would have been able to take him down and if they had he’d no longer be in a position of command. No, the Catachan had submitted to the beating, administered by, or at the command of, the only man with the power to do so – the renegade Colonel Strannik.

  As Flint watched, the Catachan walked the length of the first rank, his steely gaze sweeping over the men lined up before him. Even the toughest of those men shrank before the Catachan’s gaze, his eyes smouldering with menace. Flint recognised the signs of a man recently humbled by a superior and who needed scant excuse to enact his vengeance on those weaker and further down the pecking order than himself. Clearly, this was the only form of discipline that would keep such men in line.

  As the Catachan reached the end of the first rank, Flint saw movement at the far end of the chamber. A shape appeared through a hatch in the far wall, silhouetted against the harsh column of light shining down from above. But the form was far from that of a normal man, even though Flint could barely make it out from his hiding place. It was twisted and distended, and moved with a hideous shuffling gait. Its every step was imbued with unbreakable threat and sullen menace.

  Silence descended on the assembled rebel convict soldiers, the single figure cowing hundreds of his underlings by his very presence. Flint couldn’t make out the face, but he knew instantly exactly who the figure was.

  ‘Strannik,’ Vahn hissed, ducking back into the mouth of the stairwell he and his squad were hiding in.

  ‘You’re sure?’ said Katko. ‘You’re absolutely sure that’s our target?’

  ‘That’s him,’ Solomon gulped before Vahn could answer. ‘You don’t forget that bastard in a hurry…’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Vahn. ‘Solomon’s right. Once you’ve seen that murdering scum up close you don’t forget, even if you’d rather.’

  ‘Then we extract,’ said Katko. ‘Inform the boss and call in the regiment.’

  ‘You forgetting something?’ Vahn growled. ‘We’re going nowhere. Not the way we came at least, not with that power shield operational.’

  Katko’s face twisted in frustration and he sighed as he looked back down the stairwell. ‘You know a better way?’

  ‘There was a junction a hundred metres down,’ said Solomon. ‘We could take that and hope…’

  ‘Hope it bypasses the power shield?’ Katko interrupted the Jopalli. ‘That’s a pretty big ask.’

  ‘It’s the only way,’ said Vahn. ‘Unless you know how to deactivate the shield trips.’

  ‘No?’ Vahn pressed, hefting his carbine and preparing to head back down the stairwell. ‘Then it’s the junction. Come on.’

  ‘Target confirmed,’ Flint growled beneath his breath. ‘Kohlz?’

  Flint’s aide failed to answer, and in a moment, he knew why. Something was happening in the chamber, and that horribly familiar stink was back, now stronger than ever before. But it wasn’t just a taint that filled the air, Flint realised as the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. A charge was building, one he hadn’t experienced in a long time, not since going into combat alongside the Imperial Guard’s dreaded battle psykers at the height of the Siege of the Iron Bastion. The air thickened, the light bending in ways no tech-savant could possibly explain. Time stretched and became distorted, so that a single breath took an age of screaming torment to inhale and exhale while a billion thoughts flashed through Flint’s mind in the same span of experience.

  If the effect upon Flint was drastic, those in the chamber beyond were affected a thousand times worse.

  As one, every rebel in the chamber staggered to his knees. Hands clamped over ears as the crimson glint of spilled blood twinkled in amongst the shadows. Two thousand and more pairs of knees slammed into the hard floor and those hands not struggling to contain rapidly expanding grey matter thudded hard to the ground. A cacophony of torment erupted as rebels moaned, wailed or vomited, even the Catachan reduced to a helpless form splayed at his master’s feet. Waves of malevolence washed outwards from the colonel and as each one broke against the ranks of his followers the rebels were forced into ever-greater acts of obeisance. Foreheads ground into the dirt in abject supplication until the skin was rasped off to reveal the bloody, white bone beneath.

  All the while, the figure of Colonel Strannik, his features thankfully obscured by the shadows of the chamber, drank in the enforced adoration of his personal army. Hatred welled inside Flint’s heart as he struggled to break the spell, the words of every catechism he had ever learned spilling through his mind in an instant.

  The moment stretched on forever, Flint’s perspective altering in every possible way. He caught a hint of movement in the periphery of his vision, though it was gone by the time he could fix his gaze upon it, his reactions glacially slow. Another burst of movement darted across the centre of his vision and he thought he caught the sight of a ghostly skull face imprinted upon the strained reality before him. It was almost as if a shoal of oceanic predators was circling the shadowed form of the colonel, as if drawn to him, though Flint couldn’t tell if it they were circling around him like hunters, or if they were answering his call for obeisance.

  Then it ended. The colonel lowered his spread arms and uttered a groan of hideous release. Where minutes before his army had been arrayed in perfect ranks, now it was a sprawling mass of writhing, bloody limbs. What blasphemous display of dominance Flint had just witnessed the commissar could not fully explain, for it defied all logic. The rebel leader had wilfully reduced his own warriors to mewling, puking victims of his psychic brutalisation simply to demonstrate his power, and for that, he was damned. Colonel Strannik must surely have been a psyker, an abominably powerful one at that, and his control over his subjects was total.

  Even as Flint composed himself, the rebels were recovering; men and women staggering to their feet as the colonel turned and made his way from the chamber. Soon, the Catachan was staggering to his feet too and lashing out at his underlings, bullying the ranks into some semblance of order.

  There must be
two thousand of them, Flint estimated, and most were armed, with weapons looted from slain clavigers. That put the rebels on a rough par with the 77th in terms of raw manpower, but the calculation was nowhere near that simple. The Vostroyans were better equipped, that much was true, but then the rebels were on home territory. The 77th would be assaulting a prepared position and the rebels were both experienced and cornered, a lethal combination in Flint’s experience.

  Right now, the odds were stacked in the rebels’ favour, unless Flint could bring the regiment down on their heads, hard and fast, before the enemy could react.

  ‘Sir?’ said Flint’s aide as he knelt down beside him, his voice cracked and strained.

  ‘Time to call regiment, Kohlz,’ said Flint. ‘Do you still have that carrier signal?’

  Kohlz worked the dial at his headset, evidently grateful for a distraction from what he had just witnessed and experienced. Very soon however, his expression darkened.

  ‘Kohlz?’ said Flint.

  Kohlz fiddled with the controls for a few moments longer, then looked up at the commissar. ‘The signal’s gone, sir. It’s being blocked.’

  ‘Who by?’ said Flint. ‘Who would…’

  ‘There’s something else, sir,’ Kohlz added. ‘Another signal.’

  ‘Who,’ Flint pressed, glancing impatiently back towards the mustered rebel army. ‘Quickly…’

  ‘I can’t tell, sir,’ said Kohlz. ‘It’s encrypted, high level. I can’t break it with this set.’

  ‘Sir?’ Bukin interjected before Flint could press the matter further. The chief provost’s face was almost completely drained of colour and he appeared to have aged at least a decade. ‘I really think we should be moving out, sir…’

  Flint looked back into the chamber, the distant form of Colonel Strannik shambling away on mechanical callipers. ‘What the…’ he mouthed.

  ‘Sir?’ Bukin insisted, pointing towards a large group of rebels starting to move out, directly towards Flint and his force. ‘They are on the move, sir…’

  ‘Understood,’ said Flint. ‘We’re moving out too, but only when I say so. Bukin? Gather up all the frags you can. We’re not leaving without a parting shot…’

  Vahn was the last out of the stairwell having allowed Katko to lead Solomon, Vendell and the rest away from the air scrubber chamber. He leapt from the stair onto the landing beyond, scattering debris as he dashed after the last of the squad. As he ran Vahn fought to recall the route they’d taken and find the path that avoided the area seeded with power shield trips. His mind was all but shot by the warp craft that bastard colonel had unleashed, and he was running on a noxious cocktail of instinct and adrenaline. He cursed inwardly as he ran along the dark corridor, his night vision goggles robbing him of depth perception so that several times he almost tripped or slammed into the trooper in front. He cursed Colonel Strannik, he cursed Alpha Penitentia, and he cursed Commissar Flint. A terrible sense of entrapment was welling inside him, the rebel army behind and the power shield somewhere up ahead.

  Katko had halted the squad, his hand raised for silence.

  ‘What?’ said Vahn as he skidded to a halt, almost knocking into Solomon.

  ‘Shh!’ the provost hissed. ‘I thought I heard…’

  ‘There!’ said Solomon, un-holstering his laspistol, his sniper rifle next to useless in such cramped environs.

  Vahn strained his hearing until he heard it too. Footsteps. Lots and lots of footsteps…

  ‘They’re coming!’ Solomon gulped. ‘The whole pashing lot…’

  ‘Get moving,’ Vahn ordered, shoving Solomon ahead. ‘It’s the third branch on the left, but watch out for more trips, got it?’

  As the squad moved on and the sound of hundreds of tramping feet echoed madly about the rockcrete tunnels it became clear that Solomon was right, the rebel army was definitely on the move. Each time he halted Vahn imagined the rebels gaining ground, but in truth he couldn’t tell if they were actually pursuing or just moving out. Then, he heard the first of the gunfire.

  The distinctive whip-crack of a las-bolt sounded from somewhere nearby. The sound rang through the tunnels and rebounded in such a way that Vahn had no way of discerning its source. Then another shot rang out, followed by an angry shout and Vahn thought the source might be a tunnel branching off not far ahead.

  Katko had his Mark III raised and pointed into the dark mouth of the side tunnel. Vahn pressed himself against the wet tunnel wall and leaned in to peer along the side passage.

  A shot rang out, impossibly loud in the narrow tunnel, and powdered rockcrete spat in Vahn’s face. He ducked back instinctively, swearing loudly as he rubbed the grit from his eyes.

  ‘That was a knock-off piece,’ Vahn growled as he cleared his eyes and raised his weapon to his shoulder. ‘Return fire!’ he shouted as he leaned around the corner.

  Vahn and Katko swung into the tunnel mouth as one, their weapons scanning left and right for a target. The tunnel was barely wide enough for one man to pass along it and its floor glistened with moisture running down from its walls. The passageway turned twenty metres ahead, and Vahn and Katko both saw the rebel figure as he cleared the bend, a bright smudge of pale green through the grainy vista of the night vision goggles.

  Both men opened fire as one. Katko’s shotgun blast took the rebel square in the chest, while Vahn’s las-bolt struck him in the throat. The rebel flew backwards, twisting and flailing as his chest cavity emptied itself across the ground.

  The weapons’ discharge filled Vahn’s vision with pulsating static, the goggles’ viewfinder fouled by the sudden brightness. Vahn jerked his head back and flicked the goggles onto his forehead, his vision replaced with almost pitch black.

  At that exact moment, Katko fired down the tunnel a second time, the report of his shotgun almost blinding. His target was a second rebel edging along the bend in the tunnel and stepping gingerly over the remains of his comrade. Katko’s blast took the man in the stomach and he tumbled forward, his improvised firearm clattering across the ground before him. The instant Vahn’s eyes recovered from the sudden flash he squinted down the barrel of his carbine just as a third rebel appeared.

  This one was smarter than the first two, and he stooped as he threw himself forward, a claviger-issue shotgun raised towards Vahn and Katko.

  But Vahn was ready, and the rebel passed right into his iron sights. He squeezed the trigger and the carbine spat its las-bolt straight and true, right into the rebel’s forehead, explosively vaporising the man’s head.

  A mass of angry bellows betrayed more rebels massing beyond the bend in the side tunnel. It was time to get moving.

  ‘Go!’ Vahn shouted as he unclipped a frag grenade from his webbing. Katko grinned wickedly and was gone. Vahn flipped the fuse to three seconds.

  As Vahn stooped to roll the grenade along the tunnel’s wet floor, another shot blasted from its depths, striking the wall where he had been standing less than a second before. Mouthing silent thanks to the God-Emperor, Vahn sent the frag skidding across the ground and dived clear of the opening.

  Another shot hammered out of the side tunnel as the rebels swarmed down its length, then a savage curse echoed from its depths. Mad laughter erupted from Vahn’s mouth as he hit the ground at the exact moment the grenade detonated. The blast tore everything in the side tunnel to shreds and the overpressure hammered down the main passageway, throwing Vahn and the rest of the squad forward as flame and black smoke erupted all around.

  His hearing replaced by a high pitched whine, Vahn staggered upright, feeling his arm grabbed by another trooper. It was Solomon and he was saying something, but Vahn’s ears were still ringing after the explosion. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘I can’t hear…’

  Then Vahn’s hearing returned in a wave of noise, the once eerily quiet tunnels now echoing with gunshots and shouting.

  ‘… the side passage!’ Solomon was saying, pointing along the passageway with one hand as the other dragged Vahn along. ‘Katko’s fo
und it!’

  Realising what Solomon was trying to tell him, Vahn staggered forward and caught up with the provost, who was aiming his Mark III down another passage. ‘This the one?’ said Katko. ‘You reckon its safe?’

  ‘No,’ Vahn laughed humourlessly. ‘But I don’t see we have much choice, do you?’

  ‘What we waiting for then?’ he said as he pressed into the passage that Vahn hoped would take them back down towards the carceri chamber floor and avoid the power field trip they had encountered on the way up.

  Katko disappeared into the darkness and Vahn waved the other members of the squad after him. Having checked behind him one last time, he ducked into the passageway and followed after them, the black smoke of the grenade’s detonation roiling down the corridor in his wake.

  ‘If I find out it was one of ours that fired first,’ Flint shouted to Bukin as he and his companions powered down the corridor, filthy puddles splashing around them, ‘I’ll shoot him myself.’

  ‘Not if I get there first, sir,’ Bukin shouted back as he ran, his waxed moustaches trailing behind. A muffled explosion sounded somewhere in the labyrinth of tunnels not far behind, the combined force of the dozen or so frag grenades Flint had rigged as a trap for their pursuers. He’d learned that trick on Gethsemane stalking the rebels’ notorious cannibal death-squads in the equatorial war zones, and used it several times since.

  The tunnels concentrated the blast so tightly it sounded to Flint like a mass-yield nucleonic detonating at his back, backwash flames licking at his and Bukin’s ankles as they pounded down the tunnel. The explosion must have slain dozens of rebels.

  ‘Commissar!’ Karasinda shouted from up ahead. The medic had discovered something sprawled across the wet tunnel floor. Flint skidded to a halt and Bukin quickly moved to cover their rear.

  ‘What …’ said Flint as he looked down at the ground.

  ‘More like who, sir,’ Karasinda said.

  ‘Looks like one of Vahn’s mob, sir,’ said Kohlz, his words coming out in ragged bursts as he fought to regain his breath after the mad flight. ‘Tobos?’ he said, ‘Or something like that.’