“Good,” Lieutenant Karis said when it became clear there were to be no questions. “You now have twenty minutes to check your equipment and make your preparations. Zero hour is at 00.00 hours. We go into no-man’s land at midnight.”
“A simple matter, he says,” Davir grumbled afterwards. “I tell you, someone should take that stupid bastard’s swagger stick and shove it right up his arse.”
They were in the barracks dugout. In the wake of the briefing with the lieutenant, they had returned there to be issued with black dubbing and lasgun lubricant by Vladek. Now, their faces and all their equipment painted black, their knives and pistols oiled to glide silently from their sheaths, they made their final preparations while time counted down to midnight. As they did, Larn was suddenly struck by the thought he had been in Broucheroc almost exactly twelve hours. Another three hours to go, he thought, and I will have made my fifteen.
“You ask me, it is the new fish’s fault,” Zeebers spat with sudden venom. “He is unlucky. A jinx.”
“Shut up, Zeebers,” Davir spat back. “Bad enough I have to go stumbling around no-man’s land in the dead of night, without having to hear you mewl and puke about luck and numbers like some halfwit gambler on a losing streak. Shut up, or after I’m finished shoving the swagger stick up the lieutenant’s arse I’ll stick my lasgun up yours.”
“How do you explain it then?” Zeebers said, defiant. “We’ve had nothing but a bad day ever since the new fish got here. He’s a jinx. You saw what happened to the men he came here with in the lander.”
“Shut up, Zeebers,” Bulaven rumbled. Then, while Zeebers fell silent and scowled at him, he turned to Larn. “Don’t worry about what Zeebers said, new fish. You’re not a jinx. I only wish today had been a bad day. Fact is, every day in Broucheroc is pretty much as bad as this, one way or another. After a while you just get used to it.”
“But going out into no-man’s land at night is bad?” Larn asked, hoping the big Vardan could not hear the nervousness in his voice. “Worse than usual, I mean?”
“Yes, new fish, it is worse,” Bulaven said. “Especially after a battle. You remember I told you how sometimes a wounded ork will seem dead, only to get up and start walking about a few hours later? Well, right now, no-man’s land is full of the bodies of orks we shot during the battle. By now some of them could be healed already, just about ready to wake up and start killing again while we’ll be right in the middle of them. Then, to make matters worse, we’ve got to worry about running into gangs of gretchin looking for spare parts as well.”
“Spare parts?”
“Orks are remarkably tough creatures, new fish,” Scholar said by the side of him. “If one of them loses an arm or leg their surgeons will just staple the limb from another dead ork to them to take its place. After a battle such surgeries are in great demand — so they tend to send gangs of gretchin out into no-man’s land to cut undamaged limbs from the corpses. Of course, the real threat lies not so much in the gretch themselves, but in the danger of getting into a firefight in the middle of no-man’s land while the entire ork army is on top of us.”
“The short version, new fish, is that this whole damned business has the makings of a first class snafu from start to finish,” Davir said. “So, this is what I say we do. We will follow Lieutenant Arsehole’s orders so long as there’s no shooting. But the moment the shit starts to fly we get each other out of no-man’s land as fast as we can and to hell with his orders. Now enough talking and let’s get outside. We need to spend at least ten minutes in the dark to get our night vision working. Considering what’s ahead of us, I’d say we’re probably going to need every advantage we can get.”
“Remember the signal, new fish,” Bulaven whispered quietly as they crouched in the darkness of one of the forward firing trenches with the lieutenant and the others waiting for the order for the mission to begin. “We keep to comms silence. But if you make contact with the greenskins you squeeze the comm stud at your collar to create a squelch over the comm-link. You squeeze it three times. Three squelches. You understand? That way we’ll know it’s you. Now, tell me it again so I’ll know you’ve got it.”
“We go quiet,” Larn whispered back, reciting the things Bulaven had already told him twice. “Staying low and keeping together until we get halfway into no-man’s land. Then, while Davir and the lieutenant go forward to scout out the ork lines, the rest of us spread out into a wide diamond formation with you at the base, Zeebers on the left flank, me on the right, and Scholar on point. If any of us see or hear orks we squelch on the comm-line: one squelch for you, two for Zeebers, three for me, and four for Scholar — so that way the others will know where the orks are.”
“Noise discipline, troopers,” Lieutenant Karis whispered testily. Then, cupping his hand over the chronometer on his wrist as he pressed an illumination stud to briefly light its face, he gave the order. “Zero hour. Time to move out.”
With Davir in the lead, they climbed over the lip of the trench and crawled out into no-man’s land. Then, at a hand signal from Davir showing the way before them was clear, they stood into a half-crouch and began to move slowly and quietly forward. Ahead, the night seemed impossibly dark, the stars dim and distant. Seeing no sign of a moon in the sky to guide them, Larn found himself wondering if the planet even had a moon or whether it was just hidden from his view. Whatever the case, keeping close to the others he followed them further and further into the forbidding wasteland between the human and ork lines. His every step wary, his senses sharp, his heart beating a tattoo of restless anxiety in his chest.
Around them no-man’s land was silent, made even more threatening in the darkness now its flat and desolate surface was covered over with the shadowy foreboding shapes of so many bodies. There were corpses everywhere, strewn haphazardly across the landscape and fallen together so deeply in places the going was made treacherous with splayed limbs and uncaring torsos. Feeling the outstretched fingers of unseen hand touch his ankle, Larn looked down in sudden terror expecting the monstrous form of a wounded and reawakening ork to rise up before him. Only to see he had inadvertently brushed against a severed hand lying in the mud. Another dead hand like so many more around it.
They advanced further, slowly spreading out further apart from each other until they reached the centre of no-man’s land. Then, as Davir and the lieutenant disappeared from view to go scout the lines, Larn abruptly realised he could no longer see the others. For a moment he fought the urge to call to them on his comm stud. Then, he reminded himself they had been ordered to maintain vox silence: even if he did use the comm, no one would answer. Nor could he go in search of them. Robbed of all sense of direction by the darkness and the unfamiliarity of the landscape around him, it would take him a miracle to find anyone. Worse, hopelessly lost, he could easily stray into the ork lines. Terrified, Larn held his position and did the only thing he could.
Alone in the darkness, he waited.
Time passed and as he stood waiting, afraid that every shadow might belong to some subtle and stalking enemy, Larn realised it was the first time he had been on his own in weeks. More than that, here in no-man’s land, surrounded by corpses and barely within a stone’s throw of thousands of sleeping orks, he felt more alone than he had before in his entire life. So alone now, in fact, he might as well have been the last man left in the entire galaxy.
Then, deep through the gathering haze in his mind of fear and loneliness, Larn heard a sudden sound that set cold fingers at his spine and turned his blood to ice. A single squelch on the comm-bead in his ear. Bulaven’s signal. The signal that meant the big man had made contact with the enemy and from Larn’s point of view it meant something worse. It meant the enemy was behind him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
00:37 hours Central Broucheroc Time
Giving Aid and Comfort to the Wounded — As Hell Breaks Loose Larn is Forced to a Decision — A Final Madness in Zeebers’ Smile — Unknown, a Bullet Finds its Mark
/> One of the orks was moving…
Standing alone in the darkness of no-man’s land, not quite sure if it was only his imagination or if he had really seen a slight movement in the legs of one of the corpses lying on the ground before him, Zeebers decided it would be better to make certain the creature was dead. Sliding his combat knife from its sheath as he dropped to his knees beside the body, he quickly pulled the ork’s unresisting jaws open and silently stabbed the blade up through the weak point in the roof of the mouth and into the brain. Then, pulling the knife free, he glanced briefly at the other corpses around him and wondered if he should do the same with them as well.
I will do another three of them, he thought, wiping the blade on his trouser leg as he crept towards a second body. That way I will have done four altogether. And I could do with some extra luck, what with that bastard new fish being such a jinx.
“Help me,” he heard a failing voice whisper in Gothic as he knelt beside a second ork.
Startled, Zeebers turned to see an arm rise falteringly from beneath a nearby pile of bodies. Going over to it, he saw a human face peering out from among a nest of greenskin limbs. One of the Guardsman from the lander he realised, mortally wounded and left for dead in no-man’s land but still clinging desperately to life.
“Please… help me,” the Guardsman said again, the weak voice was loud against the silence and forced Zeebers to clamp a firm hand over his mouth to keep him quiet.
Weakly, the Guardsman began to struggle, his free arm flailing and flapping around him. Feeling the man grab pleadingly at the edge of his greatcoat, Zeebers felt a sudden flush of disgust and anger to find yet another new fish was endangering his life.
It cannot be helped, he thought as he pushed down once more with his knife. He is too far gone to live much longer anyway. And he will bring the orks down on both of us if I don’t make him quiet.
Seeing the arm fall and the Guardsman’s spasms grow still, Zeebers pulled his knife free and turned to get back to the orks. The Guardsman did not count, he decided. He was not part of the pattern. Leaving Zeebers with another three orks to deal with if he was going to improve his luck.
Then, abruptly, he heard the signal. A single squelch over his comm-bead. The fathead Bulaven must have run into some trouble.
For a moment Zeebers considered leaving him to it. He did not like Bulaven, or any of the Vardans for that matter. It would be easy enough to slip back towards the line and claim he had lost track of the others in the darkness. Just as quickly he was forced to abandon the idea, if Bulaven or any of the others survived and thought he had left them to die they would frag him without even thinking. No, for better or worse, he had better go and try to save the fat man’s hide.
Putting his knife back in its sheath, Zeebers turned to hurry in Bulaven’s direction. Then, as he picked his way past a particularly large pile of ork corpses he saw shadowy movement at the corner of his vision and realised he had blundered upon a gang of gretchin harvesting limbs. Swinging his lasgun towards them while the gretchin were still dumb with confusion, Zeebers fired, hitting the nearest gretch in the chest. Swiftly, he fired again, unleashing another half-dozen lasbeams, hitting two more gretch and causing the rest to flee. As Zeebers made to hurry once more on his way he heard something scraping wet and eager behind him followed by the whine of whirring motors. Turning, he saw a threatening shadow loom up in the darkness and knew the day he had feared for months was finally upon him.
Tonight, his luck had finally ran out…
“Fall back! Repeat: fall back!” Davir’s voice shouted forcefully in his comm-bead as Larn heard the sound of shots and all hell began to break loose around him. “Everyone back to the trenches!”
Lost and still on his own, Larn turned to move quickly towards what was his best guess at the position of the human lines. Suddenly, he saw a staccato burst of white tracer lines in the distance to the right of him as somewhere in the darkness a lasgun fired.
“Help me,” he heard Zeebers yell in fear and agony over the comm-line. “Sweet Emperor, it’s got me! Someone help me.”
Unsure what to do, for the briefest instant Larn stood rooted to the spot. Then, as Zeebers’ voice in his ear became a jumble of incoherent screams, he made a decision. Turning in the direction the lasfire had come from he ran towards it, jumping and stumbling over the ork corpses littering his path as he raced to help the pleading trooper. Seeing two shapes coming together in the darkness ahead of him, Larn ran closer, only to find a scene of horror. He saw Zeebers, arms flailing in useless spasms, belly ripped open and guts hanging out, held like a limp puppet in the hand of an enormous ork while with its other hand the creature used a whirring circular blade to further eviscerate Zeebers’ screaming flesh. Then, tossing Zeebers’ rag doll body aside, the ork turned to look at Larn and began to advance towards him.
It was huge, wearing a bloodstained apron across its body and a thick-lensed monocular over one of its eyes. Seeing the cruel curiosity written in the creature’s monstrous inhuman features, Larn knew at once it must be one of the ork surgeons Scholar had mentioned. Instinctively raising his lasgun to ward off its advance, he fired, the first blast flying wide to hit one of the corpses lying on the ground behind it. Adjusting his aim, Larn fired again, hitting the monster in the stomach. Then again. The chest. Again. The shoulder. Again. The face. The lasbeam briefly flaring brighter as it burned through the lens of the monocular. Tearing the melted mounting of the device away uncaring from the scorched socket of its now-blind eye, the ork kept coming no matter how many times Larn hit it. It seemed unstoppable: as inured to the pain of its own flesh as it was to the agonies of others. All the time, the whining blade in its hand grew closer and closer, as eager as its master to test its edge against the outlines of Larn’s body.
Then, incredibly, salvation came from an unlikely source. As if from nowhere, Larn saw Zeebers appear in the darkness behind the ork and jump screaming onto the creature’s back to wrap his arms about its throat. Horribly wounded, the spool of his intestines unravelled in the mud behind him, as the ork tried to pull him off, Zeebers briefly smiled towards Larn in pain-fuelled madness, before raising a hand above his head and letting out a bloody-mouthed and psychotic roar of triumph. Seeing the gleam of a half-dozen rings around Zeebers’ fingers, Larn realised the madman must have pulled the pins from every grenade on his belt.
Knocked on his back as Zeebers and the ork disappeared in the roar and flash of the resulting explosion, Larn staggered to his feet once more and became aware the volume of firing about him had risen dramatically. All around him no-man’s land was alive with bullets as, fully roused now from sleep, the orks fired blindly from their lines in search of targets. A last glance confirming there was no more he could do for Zeebers, Larn turned to run for the human lines in the hope of safety. Only to trip, not realising at first he had been shot, before he could go even a dozen steps.
The sun was rising in the west, the first red fingers of dawn revealing the brooding and foreboding shape of Broucheroc on the horizon. And still lying wounded in no-man’s land in the same place where he had fallen, Larn looked up at the brightening sky above him and knew he should fear the sun. With the gathering of the light soon the orks would be able to see him from their lines. But where once he would have felt anxiety, even perhaps terror at that prospect, now all those things had left him. Instead, he lay on his back watching the sun slowly rise and he felt peace. He watched it and he knew contentment.
I have made it past fifteen hours, he thought, at last given answer by the coming of the dawn to the question that had plagued him throughout the night. More than that even, now the sun is rising. And with it I have proved the others wrong. I have beaten the odds. I have survived this place. I have passed the test. The orks cannot kill me now. The laws that rule this monstrous city will not let them.
Certain now that his fate had been decided in his favour and it was only a matter of time before someone came to rescue him, Larn set
tled calmly down to wait. All the fear had passed through him now. All the loneliness. The desperation. The despair. They were gone, replaced instead by a growing sense of detached serenity.
Over the last fifteen hours he had faced the worst this city could throw at him. It was over now and with it he was forever free. Free from doubt. Free from worry. Free from his fears. He did not even feel the cold anymore. He felt safe and warm. He felt whole. He had survived his fifteen hours. He had lasted. He had proved himself. This place could no longer hurt him and with that last happy thought, Larn smiled and closed his eyes. Closed his eyes to drift away to dreamless sleep, the last shreds of his consciousness flying away from him like dead leaves on the wind as the relentless babble of his mind gradually gave way to silence. Drawing a last contented breath, his beating heart slowed and stilled.
Then, finally, there was only darkness.
About the Author
Mitchel Scanlon is a hot new talent residing in the sheep-infested valleys of Derbyshire. His first break was with the Black Library’s Warhammer Monthly comic and the character Hellbrandt Grimm. He has since penned the adventures of the assassin Liliana Falcone and the ruthless vampire Helmar von Carstein for Warhammer Monthly and several short stories for Inferno! as well as superhero tales for the UK market. Fifteen Hours is his first novel.
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