Fire and Thunder

by Rachel Harrison

  Contents

  Cover

  Fire and Thunder – Rachel Harrison

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Dark Imperium: Plague War’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Fire and Thunder

  Rachel Harrison

  The people of Balfar call their planet’s twin suns the Eyes of the Emperor.

  Before Severina Raine set foot in the cathedral city of Whend, she thought the name an archaism, something poetic that arose from the world’s particular interpretation of the Imperial faith. That was before Raine stood beneath the twin suns and felt their unblinking glare. Before the Balfar command group ordered Raine and her regiment to abandon their hard-fought forward position and fall back to the cathedral city’s outlands.

  Now, as Raine and the 11th Antari Rifles move through Whend’s labyrinthine streets, the name doesn’t seem an archaism at all. The light of Balfar’s twin suns feels fierce. It feels judgemental. And even though they are faithfully enacting orders and they have no choice but to retreat, there is a part of Raine that feels as though she deserves that judgement, because whether the command group call it falling back or tactical redeployment, it feels like neither to Raine.

  It feels like running from a fight.

  The avenue around Raine echoes to the sounds of war. The hard, dry-wood snap of las-fire, and the clatter of solid-shot weapons. Overhead, aircraft scream by, leaving jet-trail streaks against the wide blue sky. Distant explosions rumble like thunder, sending mortar dust billowing into the air in clouds. It clings to Raine’s uniform and dulls the blade of her sabre. It stings her eyes, as she trains her bolt pistol on the enemy and fires. Penance bucks in her hand and the bolt-round hits her target centre-mass. The Sighted soldier is knocked from his feet in a plume of flame, his dull blue flak armour splintered right at the centre of the spiral painted on the chest-plate. A cloud of black blood mists the air.

  ‘Retreat does not mean surrender,’ Raine shouts, even as the Sighted she killed is replaced by two more. There are dozens of them giving chase from further up the avenue, harrying Raine and the Antari like a flock of carrion birds. Their laughter and heretical chanting carries on the scorching wind.

  ‘Make them pay for every step!’ Raine cries, as she fires the last round in her pistol’s magazine. It sends another of the Sighted sprawling over backwards. More black blood mists the air, and a ragged, hoarse cheer goes up from the Antari falling back all along the avenue around her. Raine ducks into cover with a number of her troops behind a vast slump of rubble and shattered masonry as the Sighted return fire. Hard rounds impact against the white stone, sending gasps of dust into the air. It scatters across Raine as she reloads her bolt pistol with a heavy click. She only has two magazines left before she is down to her sabre and her fists. Raine chances a look over the cover. The Sighted are blue-grey shadows, moving between the columns of pale stone. Shards of mirrored glass glitter against their flak armour.

  ‘They are trying to close a noose around us, captain,’ Raine says to Yuri Hale.

  Hale nods. He is covered in mortar dust that has recoloured his fair hair and settled into the old scars on his face. Raine can barely tell the green of Hale’s uniform from the grey, now. His command squad are just as much of a mess, all bandaged and breathing hard, their lasguns scorched black from use. Across the avenue, the rest of Grey Company’s infantry squads are pinned down. The Fenwalkers, Hartkin and Mistvypers, all caught between fighting back and keeping their wounded from becoming their dead.

  ‘Mark three infantry squads,’ Hale says, as he takes a look over the rubble. ‘Carbines and shotguns, moving to outflank.’

  A twinned whirring sound echoes across the avenue, then, and Hale is forced to duck as heavy gunfire splits the air. The solid shells scatter more thick dust and fragments of coloured glassaic.

  ‘And two heavy guns,’ Hale says, flatly. Blood starts soaking through the arm of his fatigues where one of the rounds nicked him. He pays it no mind. ‘Crew-served and mobile. Moving through the buildings. They’ll chew through us in seconds if we make a break for it.’

  ‘We run, we die. We stay here, we die. Have I got that right?’

  The question comes from Daven Wyck. The squad sergeant is crouched behind the rubble with what’s left of his Wyldfolk. Wyck is sunburned and filthy, his grey eyes bloodshot. A single, smeared handprint is painted in blood on his flak-plate.

  ‘Unless we stagger the Sighted, or make a mess of those guns,’ Hale says.

  ‘Aye, captain,’ Wyck says, and looks to his combat engineer. ‘Crys, what have you got?’

  Yulia Crys shakes her head. The bandage wrapped tightly around the combat engineer’s head is flooded dark, and her tattooed knuckles are split almost to the bone.

  ‘Absolutely bugger all, sarge,’ she says. ‘No grenades. Not even smoke. Just det-cord, and I reckon if I try to set that now, they might just notice.’

  Wyck shakes his head. ‘Fat lot of use you are,’ he says.

  Despite how much she is bleeding, and the Sighted trying their best to kill her, Yulia Crys responds the way she always does. She laughs, loudly. For a moment, it seems to drown out the Sighted guns. The rest of the Antari laugh with her. Raine doesn’t. She is busy looking at all of that dust eddying in the air.

  ‘The buildings,’ Raine says. ‘The ones they are moving up through.’

  ‘What about them?’ Hale asks.

  ‘Collapse the frontages,’ she says. ‘It will bury most of the Sighted, and the rest will either be cut off behind the rubble or blinded by the dust. It will give us grace enough to fall back.’

  Hale smiles. It pulls at the scars on his face.

  ‘Now, that’s an option,’ he says.

  ‘You know I’ll have a go at making charges out of most anything, commissar,’ Crys says, ‘but I’m afraid that’s a bit of an ask for what I’ve got left.’

  ‘They do not mean for you to do it.’

  Lydia Zane’s words are an absent rasp. The Antari psyker is kneeling on the hard stone, her grey robes pooling around her. Her eyes are squeezed closed, and steam coils from the psyker’s skin where the heat of the twin suns meets the psy-frost crawling across her hairless scalp. This fight has already tested Zane sorely. Her nose is bleeding heavily, and her arms are criss-crossed with stigmatic wounds. She breathes like a panicked animal, even at rest.

  ‘Can you do it?’ Hale asks her.

  Zane opens her eyes. The silver discs of her augmetic implants catch the light and turn it away, just like the windows in the buildings all around them. She smiles, and that looks vaguely animal, too.

  ‘Make ready to run,’ she says.

  ‘We break cover on my mark,’ Hale says, into the company vox-channel.

  Raine braces herself against the collapsed stonework and the Antari do the same. Zane gets to her feet by leaning on her staff and takes a ragged breath.

  ‘Fire and thunder,’ Hale says.

  Zane raises her fist over her heart.

  ‘Aye, captain,’ she says. ‘Fire, and thunder.’

  Then she steps out into the avenue.

  The Sighted immediately train all of their guns on Zane. The air around her becomes a storm of light and noise. Solid rounds burst against her projected kine-shield. In a tiny moment of silence in the midst of all of that noise, Raine hears the Antari psyker speak a single word.

  ‘Enough,’ Zane says, and she claps her thin hands together.

  The columns and arches supporting the gothic facades of the buildings on either side of the avenue explode outwar
ds. Glassaic rains down like a winter storm, and then the facades slump and collapse under their own weight with a deafening, tectonic roar, sending rubble spilling into the avenue. The advancing Sighted cry out and disappear behind great cascades of stone. Their guns fall silent. Dust rolls out like a wave sent by an angry sea. Zane staggers, and falls to one knee.

  ‘Go!’ Hale shouts, over the company channel.

  And the Antari break cover. Crys runs for Zane, dragging the psyker easily to her feet and helping her clear. As Raine runs alongside her regiment, hidden from the Eyes of the Emperor by the plume of dust, she hears the psyker murmuring.

  ‘Fire,’ Zane is saying, over and over again. ‘And thunder.’

  It takes another three hours of falling back and fighting through the eastern quarter before they reach the city’s edge and the way out of Whend. The avenue leading down to the Bridge of Graces is steep and choked with hastily built barricades and tank traps. The roar of tank engines and aircraft echoes off the faces of the buildings around Wyck, rattling his eardrums and swelling the migraine taking shape behind his eyes. Spent shells lie scattered across the cobbled roadway like lake stones on the shore. For now, this part of the eastern district is still under Imperial control.

  The worship-halls on either side of the avenue are thick with razor wire and heavy guns have been set up behind heaps of sandbags. Wyck catches the tell-tale glint of longshot lenses through broken windows in the upper floors. The air is fouled by white stone dust and the smell of blood and sweat from the hundreds of soldiers making their way to the bridge. It is the last Imperial-held bridge in the city. The last way out by land. The bridge juts out from the city’s edge, spanning the ravine that surrounds Whend. It is vast and old and lined with weather-worn statues that stare up into the twin suns. It was built to give the poor a path into the cathedral city from the outlands. There are no pilgrims in the outlands now, though. No shanty towns or wooden monuments. There’s nothing out there any more but the Imperial encampment. Miles and miles of tents and flakboard huts and temporary airfields. Somewhere in the middle of all that is the Antari camp and Wyck’s own tent. A sixty-second shower, and a clean set of fatigues.

  And his kitbag, with the rest of his pills and stimm injectors sewn into a pocket in the lining.

  ‘Don’t you think, sarge?’

  Wyck shakes his head to clear it and looks at Crys. He has no idea what she was asking him.

  ‘Don’t I think what?’

  ‘That this feels an awful lot like standing in the forest all bloodied and hoping the wolves won’t show.’

  Crys nods down the avenue to the Bridge of Graces, and those crossing it. It’s slow-going, because the bridge is long and the armoured companies are taking their blessed time. There’s a growing crowd of soldiers waiting their turn. Wyck sees Kavrone uniforms, blue and white. Some Antari, too. Devri’s Blue Company. Fel’s five Duskhounds in their matt-black carapace. They are all stood close together, hemmed in by the city on one side and the deep ravine on the other. Unease claws at Wyck, and he scowls.

  ‘Just keep your eyes open, then at least we’ll see the wolves coming.’

  Crys snorts a laugh, and the other Wyldfolk join her. Awd and Efri. Dal and Vyne. Broga and Ona. Even Kori, who is pale and dizzied and nursing a badly broken arm. Wyck doesn’t laugh with them. He keeps one hand on his slung lasgun as they reach the bottom of the avenue and join up with the crowd waiting to cross. It’s even hotter down here, with the press of people. Their voices become a swollen muddle of languages and accents. Prayers and curses and snatches of songs. Wyck glances up at the sky with every scream of aircraft jets. Looks back over his shoulder at every distant detonation. He keeps moving forwards with the others until the armour and the Kavrone and Devri’s Blue Company have all made it to the other side. The Duskhounds hang back a moment before crossing the bridge. Wyck sees Fel talking with Hale, and the commissar. Wyck doesn’t know where the storm troopers were sent, or what for, but going by the state of Fel’s carapace plate, it was bloody. And going by the set of the Duskhound’s face, they didn’t get chance to finish it, either.

  The Munitorum officer on the bridge speaks over a tinny vox-caster.

  ‘Grey company,’ he says. ‘You’re up.’

  ‘The wounded go first,’ Hale calls out, stepping aside.

  The walking wounded move up. The ones that can’t walk are carried or field-stretchered. Wyck turns and looks at Kori. She hasn’t moved an inch.

  ‘Get a move on,’ Wyck says.

  Kori shakes her head. She is really pale now. Her dark hair is soaked with sweat, and she’s swaying a little on her feet.

  ‘I’m good, sarge,’ she says. ‘It’ll wait.’

  ‘I’m not asking,’ Wyck says. ‘You can go now, or I’ll have Crys carry you the rest of the way like a punch bag. Make your choice.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Crys says, taking a step towards her. ‘Wouldn’t even be hard, little thing like you.’

  Kori pulls a face. She raises her good hand and waves Crys away.

  ‘All right, all right. I’m going.’

  She salutes the old way with her good hand closed into a fist over her heart, then she moves off through the crowd towards the bridge.

  The Duskhounds go next, followed by the Hartkin and the Fenwalkers. All three squads are as good as clear by the time the wounded have made it halfway across.

  ‘Mistvypers,’ the Munitorum officer calls out, without looking up from the battered data-slate in his hand. ‘You’re next.’

  Koy’s lot move forwards, leaving Wyck and his Wyldfolk waiting with Hale and his command squad. Everyone is watching those crossing the bridge, save for Zane. The witch is oblivious, smiling absently and murmuring to herself. The commissar is watching her with half an eye.

  ‘First in, last out,’ Crys says, with a laugh. ‘Is that how it goes?’

  His squad all laugh together, again, but Wyck isn’t laughing, because he can hear something. Something that carries over the noise of the city afire and what’s left of Grey Company milling around him. Something that sounds like the sky screaming.

  Artillery.

  Wyck yells for the others to take cover as the first shells hit all around them. Up and down the avenue. The buildings. The bridge. It’s a constant, deafening thunder roll. A huge pressure wave sends him sprawling as he tries to run. It’s fire and tremors and smoke and ashes and huge pieces of debris falling like rain. It’s death, come to claim him.

  But it never does.

  Lydia Zane screams as she conjures a shield to spare them all from oblivion. The witch falls to her knees, new wounds opening on her arms and throat and face. The shield cracks, but Zane keeps up her barrier until the shells and debris have stopped falling. Until death turns away to look elsewhere. Only then does Zane drop her hands and let the shield collapse.

  Wyck’s vision is smeared and blurring. His ears are aching and ringing as if the barrage is still going. Smoke rolls in as the others stir and get back on their feet. The commissar is the first one up. Raine is covered in mortar dust that turns her black uniform grey. It makes her look like a spirit glimpsed at dusk. Something cruel, sent to haunt them.

  ‘On your feet,’ Raine is saying. ‘Regroup, quickly.’

  Wyck’s legs try to buckle under him as he goes to get his Wyldfolk back on their feet. They are bloodied and battered and dizzy with shock, but they can stand, and they can fight.

  Not everyone is so lucky.

  Lara Koy’s Mistvypers weren’t all under Zane’s shield when the shells hit. It takes Wyck a second to realise that the one that Koy is kneeling beside is Asah, because he’s such a mess. He moans shapelessly, all red and open to the sky. Hale has to pull Koy away so that Nuria Lye can put Asah out of his misery with one of the needles from her medicae kit. Asah falls quiet, then, but another noise fills the space. A second roll of th
under.

  ‘Sarge,’ Crys says, her voice hollow. ‘The bridge.’

  Wyck looks to see the Bridge of Graces coming apart. The stone shifts and splits and falls away in pieces and the weatherworn statues turn their faces from the sky. Then the whole damned thing collapses into the ravine below, cutting them off from the outlands. From the encampment. From the rest of the regiment.

  ‘Mists alive,’ Wyck says, and he turns to Hale. ‘We’ve got a problem.’

  ‘I see it, Dav,’ Hale says, hollowly. He calls Kayd over and takes up the vox-handset.

  ‘Anybody alive over there?’ Hale says, over the vox. ‘This is Hale, raising Grey. Do you read me?’

  There is a long hiss, and a lot of distortion. Wyck catches the barest edge of a voice underneath it. Kayd flips switches and turns dials until it comes clear.

  ‘–hear you, Yuri.’

  It’s Fel.

  ‘What’s your status?’ the Duskhound asks.

  ‘We lost eight Mistvypers to the barrage,’ Hale says. ‘The rest are bloodied badly, save for Koy. Everyone else can move and fight, but we’ve barely a powercell between us and no way out.’ Hale takes a breath. ‘What’s the damage on your side?’

  ‘Half of Dol’s Fenwalkers were killed outright,’ Fel says. The schola-bred stillness in his voice makes Wyck want to hit something. ‘Three of Odi’s Hartkin, too. I’ve got two of my own hurting, but they’ll live.’

  ‘And the wounded?’ Hale asks.

  There’s a momentary hiss before Fel replies. This time, there’s something other than calm in the Duskhound’s voice. ‘They were still on the bridge when it collapsed,’ he says. ‘We couldn’t get them clear, Yuri.’

  Hale is quiet for a moment. Wyck looks out at the void where the bridge used to be and thinks of Kori.

  Of how he ordered her to cross it.

  ‘Understood,’ Hale says. His voice sounds laboured, as though he’s been running drills. The vox-set clicks again, and Fel says something else. Every word is lost to distortion, save for the last two.

  Fighters incoming.