by Henry Zou
News spilled onto the streets of Mantilla, and for a while even the refugees danced and laughed. A hasty artist’s rendition of the Imperial standard being raised on Magdalah, borne aloft by a noble-chinned officer, was plastered all over the city walls. Although no such officer existed, the image became the prevailing face of Imperial resistance for many weeks after.
Chapter Twenty
Silverstein watched the Ironclad from concealment.
He was coated in red earth, a sandy film of dust that grazed even the lenses of his bioptics. He stayed low, splayed out against the rim of a dry riverbed. His breathing had been regulated, slow and shallow. A layered cloak, mantle and shawl of matted taproot, tangle stem and other stringy desert foliage splayed from his figure. Like him, the guerrillas were also shambling with camouflage. Had it not been for Silverstein’s expertise, the Ironclad patrols, which had hounded them for the past five days, might have already found them. Bone dust and salt had been rubbed into the camouflage to conceal his smell. It had thrown the Archenemy attack dogs off their scent during their initial escape, and Silverstein had insisted on maintaining the ritual. The guerrillas did not argue. Under the cover of night, they were just another wrinkle in the ridges and ribs of the rock basin.
Less than twenty metres away from them, three fuel tankers, caterpillar-tracked beasts with snaking carriage bays, were draped in camouflage netting. In the dark, the eighteen-metre long vehicles formed swollen silhouettes, but Silverstein knew from experience that aerial reconnaissance would only discern three long banks of shrubbery.
Apartan, the ex-sergeant, rustled over to Silverstein, the shrubbery of camo-shawl nodding gently. ‘That’s the eleventh fuel cache we’ve come across in the past three days,’ he hissed urgently into Silverstein’s ear.
‘This one is a source depot,’ Silverstein said to the guerrillas spread out around him. ‘See the extraction tower?’
Asingh-nu shook his head. The rural Cantican had never seen an extraction tower before. The skeletal structure of steel girders before him looked awkward and vague. ‘What is it used for?’
‘Plumbing fossil fuel from the shale deposits. The Archenemy are collecting resources for a massive campaign, discreetly I might add. Spreading out their caches and amassing their forces in the wilderness, far away from Imperial auspices.’
‘Why? Why don’t they just attack and claim it like they have with Orphrates, Tarsis, Ninvevah…’ Apartan paused and swallowed. ‘And Cantica.’
Silverstein had no answer.
The Ironclad had been operating this way for some time. They were amassing resources, rearing their supplies for invasion, all the while carefully concealing their movements from Imperial reconnaissance. Silverstein’s optics had picked up the distinct outline of Naval scout Lightning soaring high overhead, no doubt on aerial surveillance. The Archenemy were going to great lengths in order to hide themselves. It was a most methodically clandestine preparation, distinctly removed from the Ironclad’s mass aerial deployments. It was too unusual to ignore.
‘Get low!’ Apartan hissed.
They all went low, pressing their faces into the rock. The stone was still warm from the residual heat of the previous day. Silverstein counted backwards from ten, slowly, clutching his looted laspistol. He looked at his hands and saw that white spots of discoloration dotted the back of his hand. Then he realised it was the other way around. The tiny white specks were the colour of his natural skin, otherwise caked in a scabby bark of dirt, grease and too much dried blood. His hands were mauve and so too was his face. It had been weeks, if not months since water had cleansed his skin. Five days since their escape, and for how long before that?
‘Enemy, down below,’ Temughan whispered to them as he peered over the ridge with a rifle scope.
Silverstein looked and affirmed that fact with his bioptics. Ironclad sentries were posted around the petro-extraction tower. More Archenemy soldiers were stripped to the waist, hauling barrels and connecting clamp hoses to the waiting caterpillar carriers. It was a bizarre contrast between scarred, pallid torsos and the faceless iron masks. Until now, Silverstein had often doubted whether they were truly human beneath the jagged sheets of metal.
++Distance: horizontal 17 metres – vertical depression 6 metres.
Heat/Movement Signatures: 8 Human/Sub-Human (85% Variation)
Temp: 31 degrees Visibility: Low.+++
‘Eight hostiles in view,’ Silverstein said, relaying the information to his companions as he processed the data. ‘This is how we’re going to play, I want the ex-Guardsman and the farm boy with me,’ Silverstein said, indicating to Apartan and Asingh-nu. ‘Temughan, hold this ridge and cover us, pick them off if anything goes… awry.’
Temughan, the clocksmith with his steady hands, nodded in acknowledgment. He racked the lasgun, the only real weapon they had managed to salvage since their escape five days ago. The others slithered over the ridge line on their hands and knees, clutching looted weapons and braces of munitions and improvised explosives.
They moved with agonising slowness, sometimes not appearing to move at all, creeping forwards with small, controlled shifts of muscle fibre. They moved in a wide circle around the encampment, sweeping out to come in the flank. The silhouettes of Ironclad flickered ever-present in their periphery. Silverstein tried not to look at them. It was an old hunter’s myth that looking at your quarry would give them the kindling, warn them they were being encroached on. It was like children who believed if they covered their eyes they could not be seen. There was some truth in that. A good huntsman was guided by other senses.
It took them twelve minutes to sweep around to the side, and a further ten minutes to close the distance towards the extraction tower.
‘Stop!’ Apartan hissed urgently at Silverstein.
The huntsman was already still. With his left foot, Silverstein quivered the camouflaged reeds around his ankle softly, to match the nodding movements of the dry rush grass that he had crawled over.
An Ironclad staggered into the darkness towards them. It was dark and Silverstein could see only the silhouette of broad, boxy shoulder guards. The huntsman chose not to analyse the trooper in any greater detail. He did, however, notice that the Ironclad had the unmistakeable outline of a heavy stubber yoked across his shoulders.
The three of them lay very still. The Ironclad came closer. A metal-shod boot complete with bolted ankle plates stamped onto the ground a mere five metres or so from Silverstein’s face. The Archenemy trooper began to prod the strip of dry rush grass with his foot, as if searching for something.
Slowly, Silverstein’s hand slid towards the trigger of his EN-Scar autogun. The Ironclad stepped closer, prodding the grass with one boot. Silverstein placed a hair of pressure over the gun’s trigger.
With a grunt of satisfaction, the Ironclad found what he was looking for. The trooper fumbled with his chainmail tabard, muttering under his breath. Silverstein heard the drizzle of hot liquid hissing against dry grass and breathed a sigh of relief. The trooper had been searching for the latrines.
They waited until the trooper was finished, then for several minutes after that. Finally, Silverstein flashed the hand sign for them to continue.
Bellying forwards on their elbows, they crept on to the Archenemy fuel depot. Here, the enemy’s need for concealment meant the camp was unlit except for the light of the moon. The darkness was to Silverstein’s advantage.
The huntsman made one more scan of his area with his bioptics. He counted eight Ironclad, no more. Rising onto one knee, he signalled for the others to take aim at targets to his far left. Looking down his own iron-sights, Silverstein sighted the six others. He searched for a fluid pattern of fire that would carry him seamlessly from one target to the next. He considered firing at the sentry by the base of the extractor, but realised that by the angle of his position, it would leave the furthest target, lounging by
the cab of a fuel carrier, open to escape. He could begin firing from the middle outwards, at the two Ironclad smoking tabac at the centre of the camp, but the variance of visibility might alert the enemy to the angle of his muzzle a fraction of a second too early.
After much deliberation, Silverstein settled on a linear pattern of fire, from right to left, darting from one target to the next. If the wind did not affect his aim, which it probably would not, he could put down all six of them in under three seconds.
There was a crackle of shots. Frantic and urgent. The guerrillas reared up, firing on full auto.
‘Hit the trucks!’ Silverstein shouted.
There was another stutter of barking muzzles followed by a tremendous explosion. For a brief second, night became harsh white day. A roaring mushroom of angry red gas erupted from the ruptured tankers.
Under the belching smoke and confusion, Silverstein rushed towards the drilling rig and hurled a single fragmentation grenade down the drill pump. The huntsman then ran and did not turn back. The resultant explosion would likely have scorched the hair from his face.
Silverstein and the guerrillas exited the area swiftly, their quad-bikes long gone before Ironclad units could be alerted. As they fled, the horizon fluttered a satisfactory yellow against the deepwater sky. It was the ninth oil well that they had set fire to in just five days.
Roth was retired to the officers’ infirmary, kept quite separate from the hospice tents of the enlisted men. In the aftermath of Magdalah, combat medics tied him to a horse and led him back into Mantilla for treatment. Had he not been numbed by metadine and hyproxl, the shuddering trot of horseback would have been agony to his battered body. The inquisitor was billeted in Bocob House, once an orphanage within Mantilla and far away from the fighting outside its walls, and there he was allowed to rest.
Bocob House was a large, double-winged Imperial building, as austere as Kholpeshi design would allow. Despite this, the structure was still a domed collaboration of glazed tile, mosaic and coloured glass inlay. The clay earth court which surrounded the orphanage was scattered with wooden structures of children’s play. There were slides, teeter-saws and climbing rings, structures that resembled the skeletal carcasses of animals picked clean by scavengers and bleached by sun. Of the children, there was no sign. No one seemed to know where they had gone.
No one thought to ask.
Wounded officers were cycled through here quickly. They didn’t have enough beds, and the frontline combat exacted a heavy toll on the officer cadre. Officers with anything short of a grade-two injury were sent back to the front after a maximum of three days at Bocob House. Those who died were taken to the cellars that had once been used for food stores. The pallets they had vacated were hosed down with water and new occupants assigned to them. Blood and waste collected in the sheets and soggy mattresses. It was the reason why Bocob House now smelt of decay.
Roth was a grade-four injury.
The pain was probably at least a grade three. He had sustained blunt force trauma to his sternum and chest, enough to cause minor internal bleeding. The medics had also braced his spine with iron rods to limit movement in his back. The sledgemaul had slipped a disc and almost herniated a fluid sac in his seventh vertebrae. His collection of injuries most likely warranted more than a grade four, but the medics had deemed his injuries ‘non-life threatening/absence of bodily severage’.
Rather, Roth had languished for the past twenty-four hours in a semi-comatose fever. He had developed an infection that was more likely the result of poor infirmary hygiene. The medics hooked him up to a fluid drip with a halo of tubes. Amongst the inflow of war casualties, no one noticed he was an inquisitor. In Bocob House he was simply a grade-four patient and they let him ride it out.
‘This is just an opinion. But I think you want to get yourself killed.’ A voice roused Roth from his heavy slumber.
Roth woke with the heated flushness of a man on the tail-end of sickness. Groggily, Celeminé swam into his vision. She was still clad in her petal dress. Heavy eye shadow of iridescent green gave her eyes a feline slant. She was also wearing long fluttering faux eyelashes and had removed her lip ring. Roth barely recognised her.
‘What in Throne’s name are you wearing?’ Roth murmured weakly.
Celeminé crossed her arms and pretended to be angry. ‘This was for the Golias meet. But you wouldn’t know because you were too busy trying to make a name for yourself amongst the Guard,’ Celeminé chided.
‘I think she looks quite pretty,’ Madeline said, drifting to his bedside. Likewise, she too was clad in her festive garb. Her chestnut hair was worn long and straight with a blunt, severely fashionably fringe. Her lips were ruby-red.
‘You both look like street walk–’
Roth was cut off in mid-sentence by a hard cuff to his shoulder.
‘That’s no way to talk to a lady,’ Madeline admonished.
‘Maybe you both should go back to the Golias Estate. He seems to know what a lady should be,’ Roth said, still juddering with a delighted burble.
‘I don’t think we are welcome there any more,’ said Celeminé.
Roth stifled his humour. ‘How did the meeting play out?’
‘Bad,’ Madeline said. She shot a look at Celeminé, but said nothing.
‘How bad?’
‘He tried to have us killed,’ Celeminé replied.
Roth shot up. His spine brace was awkward and cut into him but Roth didn’t care. ‘He did what?’
‘Tried to kill us both when the transaction went sour. He’s playing the deal cautious. I didn’t think he was going to let us even examine the merchandise.’
‘But you know the relic is genuine?’
‘I don’t see why he’d try to kill us over it, if it wasn’t,’ Madeline concluded.
Roth began to tear out the tubes from his wrist, unplugging them from his flesh with a frantic fury and then unbuckling his spine brace. The exiting needles left puckered welts of purple.
‘Roth, what are you doing?’ Celeminé cried out in protest. They tried to push him back down onto the pallet.
But Roth’s temper was up. He brushed their fussing hands away and tore off the last of his bandages. ‘Find me Captain Pradal. I want him to hand-pick a platoon of Cantica’s best. We’re going to pay that bastard Golias a visit. Tonight.’
The Lancers were one of the founding units of the Cantican Colonials. They were an elite formation that had been a Regiment of Origin, amalgamated from the fractious colonies of Medina. Even during the Reclamation Wars the Lancers had fought with sword and halberd as the loyalist Frontier Auxilia. That had been six thousand five hundred years ago.
As a poorly equipped force, Cantican Guardsmen were defined by the quality of their men not the superiority of their equipment, and the Lancers were the apogee of this philosophy. Much like the Kasrkin of Cadia or the Commandos of Kurass, selection into the Lancers was limited and highly selective.
A minimum height of one hundred and eighty-five centimetres was enforced and physical demands were high. The regiment largely selected its own. Candidates could be drawn from any unit within the Cantican Colonial regiments and thus selection was egalitarian in a rough, uncompromising way. They were a hard bunch and the company, not the officers, decided who was permitted to wear the Lancer pin.
Recruits, referred to as ‘Ponies’, were hazed mercilessly regardless of background. They were constantly beaten by up to five fully fledged Lancers at once in a ritual called ‘Callusing’. Ponies were mentally and physically broken. It was a process much like the sharpening of a stick. Stripped down to nothing but a jagged mess, the real mettle of a man could be seen and judged by his peers. Those who did not break were welcomed into the fold. For those who did, the Lancers joked, they could always join the Mounted Infantry.
Roth could not have asked for a better selection of soldiers for his r
aid on the Golias Estate. Captain Pradal had taken him to the Lancer billet, a commandeered building known as the House of Jealous Lovers. It was a courtesan’s hall on the fringe districts of Mantilla, illicit and since the war, closed. The House’s front façade cascaded with silk drapes of a red and the interior was much the same. Expensive off-world textiles in shades of red, black and tan rippled down the walls, fanned by the open-framed windows.
He found the Lancer reserves cleaning weapons and making kit checks beneath the voluminous gauze curtains. It was a strange visual composition – lean, hard-faced Guardsmen, clacking and snapping rifles with focus, while silk drapes billowed around them. Most of them sat on large oval beds, their gun parts and kit laid out on the linen in greasy black lines.
‘This is Captain Almeida, he will be the commanding officer of Two Platoon. Call sign Jackal,’ Pradal introduced proudly. Although they were of equal rank, it was evident that the younger Pradal was in awe of the Lancer officer.
The captain shook Roth’s hand. The skin of his palm was hard and horned and Roth noticed the skin of his knuckles was coloured dusty white. It was the sign of a bare-knuckle fighter.
‘Inquisitor. Your command of the Magdalah offensive was magnificently daring, I applaud you and so does my camp. But I hope your reputation does not give you the wrong ideas. We’re Lancers, and these are my Lancers. You work with us, understood?’
So Almeida was the archetypical special duties officer, Roth thought. He warmed to his gruff candour immediately. It was not every day a field officer spoke so openly with a member of the Inquisition.
‘Perfectly understood, captain. We storm the Golias Estate and we’re done. In and out,’ Roth said.
Almeida didn’t look at him. His face was creased with focus as he strapped the trademark bandoleer of fuse-bombs and frag grenades across his chest. The explosives clustered in their leather harnesses like swollen metal fruit.
