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 behind, 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 had 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.
And if I didn’t go soon, I knew there were any number of predators gathering in the brush, ready and eager to help me on my way.
I wasn’t worried. Far from it.
I knew that my men were nearby. I knew they would never stop searching for me. And I knew that, whatever it took, they would find me. They would carry me off to the surgeons, as they had done a hundred times before.
I could trust them.
And when I heard their distant footsteps, I was still able to force a smile.
The Barbed Wire Cat
Robert Earl
In the darkness, the thing called Skitteka sat and schemed and stroked his pet. A single lantern lit his stone-gnawed burrow. The guarded flame produced barely enough light to lend a twinkle to his beady eyes, although it was sufficient to set the blonde of his pet’s hair aglow. Everything else was in shadow.
Skitteka hadn’t had a pet before. Apart from anything else, not many humans could have borne his touch. Most would have cowered or flinched, or just broken and tried to run. But Adora was not most humans. She purred as he dragged his filthy claws through her hair, and pressed herself into his verminous caress with every semblance of pleasure.
‘I wonder, little cat,’ Skitteka said, ‘how long I will have to wait to become chief overseer.’
Despite his bulk Skitteka’s voice was a high-pitched shriek, like nails being drawn down a slate. Adora seemed not to mind. Quite the opposite, when she cocked her head to listen it was with a keen interest and that, at least, she didn’t have to fake.
‘The slaves all wonder the same, master,’ she told him, her voice perfectly modulated to that sweet spot that lay just between terror and adulation; that sweet spot she’d spent so many hours practising. ‘They see that you are the most powerful, and the most magnificent. And they fear that when you become chief overseer they will have to work harder.’
Skitteka hissed with pleasure, the twin chisels of his incisors gleaming in the scant light.
‘They are right,’ he boasted, his claws scratching deeper into her scalp to show his pleasure. ‘That fool Evasqeek doesn’t know how to handle humans. He should be removed. Replaced.’
The tremble in his paw belied the defiance in its voice and Adora felt a flash of frustration.
So she thought about her father. He had died when she had been a toddler, all she remembered about him was a kindly face, the smell of pipe smoke, and the one thing he had said which she had understood and remembered. It’s a poor craftsman, he had told her three-year old self, who blames his tools. Perhaps he would be proud to know that, whatever else Adora had turned out to be, it was not a poor craftsman. Ignoring the tremble in Skitteka’s paw she arched her back and hummed in a way that she knew pleased him.
When he had stopped trembling she said, ‘Some of the slaves heard Evasqeek talking yesterday, master. He was in the main seam hiding behind his stormvermin.’
‘Hiding, yes,’ Skitteka said, finding reassurance in the description. ‘And what did he say?’
‘He said that he was tired of being frightened all of the time,’ Adora decided. ‘He said that it was too much and that he just wanted to go back to his burrow and sire lots of whelps.’
‘He said that it was too much?’ Skitteka asked, his voice as flat as a blade on a grindstone.
‘That’s what the slave who heard him told me,’ Adora said, and wondered if she had gone too far.
She had.
‘No,’ Skitteka said. ‘No, no, no. Evasqeek wouldn’t tell his stormvermin that. They would kill him’
‘That slave must have got it wrong then,’ Adora said, letting the blame slide from her with a practiced ease.
‘Perhaps,’ Skitteka said, grabbing a fistful of her hair and squeezing so that every root screamed out in pain. ‘Or perhaps it’s lying. Either way, it can’t be trusted. Which one was it?’
Hammer and Bolter Year One Page 52
