by Henry Zou
He sprinted across the paddy field, hoping that he would not be killed by one of his own. His legs, little more than sinew covering lengthy bone, soon carried him far in front of his men. A shotgun blast roared. One of the guerrillas running behind was hit in the back, his entire right torso and arm smacking into the water. Mautista’s plan was falling to pieces and all because his guerrillas were not putting down enough fire on the two armed Kalisadors.
It was a disaster, but it was not lost yet. Mautista sprinted into the safety of the trees and hurled himself into the undergrowth. Once there, he signalled for his men to regroup. They did so, but only after a further few minutes of ecstatic firing. When he finally gathered his guerrillas around him, their faces were flushed with excitement.
‘That was a slaughter!’ Canao rasped. The men raised their weapons overhead in triumph.
‘That was disaster!’ Mautista spat. He lost control and slapped Canao across the face. ‘Why did none of you follow my orders?’
The men, suddenly chastised, fell silent.
‘You five!’ snarled Mautista, pointing at the rear cover group. ‘Why did you not stay in your sectors? If you disobey me again, may Khaos reject your souls!’ He was frothing with anger. Spittle flew from his mouth.
‘We lost one of our own today,’ Mautista raged, pointing at the body out in the paddies beyond, ‘because you men could not follow simple orders. When I say keep those Kalisadors suppressed, you do it! Not do it when you feel like doing it!’
The sight of the ranting Disciple terrified the guerrillas. Wispy thin and white, he became a tower of rage. He scared them. He was a wraith in their eyes.
But Mautista was not done yet. He squinted at each and every insurgent, cursing, berating and screaming at each of them individually, then as a group, then individually again. He grabbed them by the scruffs of their necks and manhandled them. His wiry limbs had become surprisingly strong and he tossed them around like children.
‘What do we do now?’ said Suloe, a guerrilla who had developed hard, finger-like nails across his face and upper neck.
Mautista calmed himself down to breathe raggedly. He was still clouded with red rage but he was lucid enough to at least speak normally. ‘We regroup and attack. What other choice do we have? At the very least, I will not return empty-handed.’
As the guerrillas refreshed their magazines, Mautista took a moment to remind them of what was at stake. ‘The first fighter who fires before he is told, or breaks orders… the Dos Pares will dispose of you accordingly.’
Like shambling, grizzly primates, the Riverine emerged after two days of hard travel through the aqueous jungle. They were filthier and sicker than they had ever been before.
Their uniforms were sodden rags, hidden beneath a crust of gore, mud, salt and blood. The beard of every Guardsman had hardened into a slab of dirty, dreadlocked hair. No doubt, if Baeder could smell himself or the men around him, they would have reeked of putrid human waste. But they had become accustomed to the smell now and, for most, they were too tired to care.
A third of the men were sick with fever. The conditions had brutalised their immune systems and even the tiniest grazes were prone to rapid infection. Baeder himself had swollen glands and a head that was clogged with mucus. This was compounded by a chronic shortage of fresh water. Their supply barges were down to one-fifth capacity. They did not have enough to drink, let alone wash their infected cuts. The river water was a cesspit of bacteria and the men who had dared to drink from it had only become sicker, wracked by diarrhoea.
The steaming subtropical climate turned their discomfort into sweltering torture. The toils of the past weeks were accumulating now, wearing down their combat effectiveness. The men were not pleased and Baeder could read it on their grimaces. Even the most ordinary tasks of manning sentry guns or refuelling the motors elicited pained groans and grumbles. Many of them had doubted the legitimacy of their mission prior to deployment and now their afflictions affirmed their dissent. Once the initial anticipation of deployment had faded, Baeder could almost hear the discontented murmurs of his men as he lay awake in his bunk at night. Yet they were too deep in the enemy interior for him to be distracted by such things now. They could only go forwards.
According to his maps, which Baeder had learnt not to rely on, the siege-batteries were entrenched no more than eighty kilometres away as they exited the basin. The river system opened out into slow-moving, almost stagnant current as they left the coastal regions behind them.
Prior to the insurgency, the Planetary Defence Force of Solo-Bastón had patrolled these inland regions. The flotilla passed the remains of their outposts by the water. There were guard stations erected every several kilometres, solitary blockhouses that looked over docking piers on the water. Over the months these outposts had fallen into disrepair. Veiny creepers claimed the walls and rust had corroded the mesh compound fences. The patrol boats had long since been stolen from the now empty piers. Windows were smashed in and graffiti was scrawled spitefully on the stone walls. Looking into those dark, empty windows, Baeder wondered what lay inside. The place smelt of sadness and loss; it was like looking at a portrait of someone who was already long dead.
Baeder remembered seeing pict slides of the former militia forces during intelligence briefs, when he had been en route to planetary deployment. They were all young men clad in fresh brown leather armour. A polished metal pauldron on their left shoulder bore a cauldron crab emblem: an honorary symbol of the Kalisadors who were the custodians of the traditional tribes. They reminded Baeder of his own soldiers. It was haunting to think that most of them were now dead.
Intelligence had reported that the local forces had numbered only six thousand strong. They played no more than a peacekeeping role and were not trained for major theatres of conflict. In reality, their one true purpose had been to operate the colossal siege-battery at the centre of the mainland against phantom enemies. When the insurgency reached its greatest momentum, the PDF had been overrun and it was reported that many of them had turned and sided with the insurgency.
Baeder saluted the guard stations out of respect as they drifted by. Local militia or Guard, they were the Imperium’s fighting men and they had deserved a proper burial.
‘I heard some of those boys could not even bring themselves to fire their weapons. That’s a sad tale,’ said Sergeant Pulver, stepping up on deck.
It was highly unusual and risky for a senior sergeant to sail on the same vessel as his battalion commander. But for Baeder, it had been even more unusual that Sergeant Pulver had requested to do so. Baeder knew the veteran Guardsman would not otherwise do it, unless something was at stake, and so he had bent regulation, just this once.
‘They could not bring themselves to fire on their own people?’ asked Baeder.
Pulver shook his head sadly. ‘No. Poor leadership. On my first patrol here, I found a squad of dead militia boys in the bush. They were all still holding fully-loaded weapons. Their squad leader was shot in the back twenty or thirty metres away. He had tried to run.’
‘It’s not easy doing what they do.’
Pulver chewed his tabac in silence for several long minutes. Then he squinted at Baeder, eyeballing him with steady appraisal.
‘I heard about what you did back in the basin village.’
Baeder stiffened. He clasped his hands behind his back, unsure of what the sergeant major would make of it.
‘It takes a lot to do that for your men,’ said Pulver, pausing to spit his dip. ‘Takes a lot,’ he repeated.
Baeder regarded the sergeant major curiously. The sergeant major had always seemed a broad, imposing man. But now, as Baeder spoke to him, he realised Pulver was a short bundle of wire and sinew.
Baeder was by no means a big man. Back at the schola tactica he had participated as a wrestler in the sixty-five kilogram division. Yet Pulver was even shorter and leaner,
despite being twenty years his senior. The sergeant major had only seemed twice as large as he was through his presence. He had the brick wall disdain of a giant.
‘What scares me is that it was easier than I thought it would be,’ Baeder admitted. ‘Razing that entire village to the ground. I… don’t feel any guilt.’
‘You squashed down that part of you. That’s all. You might never get that back. Those people who weren’t born to be combat officers, they won’t ever understand that. Some do.’
It suddenly dawned on Baeder that Sergeant Major Pulver was making peace. He was bridging the rift that had been between them ever since Baeder had been assigned to the 88th. The days ahead would be hard. The battalion was already battered and they would likely lose many more. Pulver was cementing their leadership for battle. The resolve in Pulver’s sun-creased face told him everything.
Baeder wasn’t sure what to say. Only now did he finally understand the hostility that Pulver had shown him. The sergeant major had seen Baeder as just another officer who regarded the 88th as tactical fodder. The battalion was a single entity and Pulver was protecting it like a herd mother against anything who would harm them, be it Archenemy or Imperial. In doing so, Pulver had made himself into a cold, logical automaton, he had given up the luxuries of compassion and choice. Baeder felt a surge of respect for the old veteran.
Pulver spat into the water. ‘If we don’t keep our men safe, no one will. High Command doesn’t care about sending us to the meat grinder. It’s us against them. That’s all it is.’
‘Fight and win,’ Baeder said.
‘Fight and win,’ Pulver repeated.
The battalion moved into what was considered the red zone by late afternoon. On their tactical maps, it encompassed a sixty-kilometre radius from where the siege-batteries were expected to be hidden. This was the heart of Dos Pares territory and, incidentally, it had been the target of a relentless bombing campaign since the early stages of war.
The signs of destruction became more evident the deeper the battalion travelled. At first there was a general thinning of the dense foliage. Further on, entire patches of jungle were flattened, visible even from a distance.
Imperial bombs had been thorough. It appeared as if pieces of rainforest had been entirely uprooted, and then wood splinters had been spread where acres of trees had once been. The shockwave of explosives flattened the areas surrounding bomb craters. Gum-saps, buttress roots, flowering cynometra, were all laid down in uniform direction. There was a strange order to the systematic destruction.
Although there was a tense, fragile silence in the air, the day passed without incident. It was not until twilight, when the sun was melting to a diffuse orange, that their overwatch flier voxed Baeder with an urgent message.
‘Eight eight, this is Angel One.’
Baeder had become accustomed to that voice now. Although he had never met the pilot who had helped him time and time again, Baeder had often wondered what their saviour looked like. There was an omnipotence to Lieutenant Duponti’s role. A distant, gravelly voice that had, on multiple occasions, saved the lives of his men. A voice without a face who hovered in the sky.
‘Come in, Angel One. I’m reading you loud and clear,’ Baeder voxed from the helm.
‘I thought you should know, I may have found a loyalist village just two kilometres north-west of your current position. I picked up their distress frequency through a pre-war channel. They are requesting assistance.’
‘What kind of assistance?’ asked Baeder, suddenly wary. He immediately thought of a trap. This close to their objective, the insurgency would be trying everything to stop them.
‘They are besieged and surrounded by a warband-strength insurgent element. There has been sporadic gunfighting for the past four hours. The village has managed to keep them at bay but it seems they are running out of ammunition. That’s all I know from listening in on their broadcasts.’
‘Do you think it’s a trap?’
‘The red zone is too hot for me to go low altitude. I’d be shot out of the sky so hard it’d knock the dirt off my boots. But they sound desperate enough over the vox. Plenty of screaming and crying. I can’t speak to them directly, but I’ve been monitoring their frequency for a good twenty minutes.’
‘Could be a trap,’ said Baeder, still unsure.
‘Could be. Look, I’m not advising you whether or not to send assistance. But I thought I’d brief you on what I just picked up on my frequency.’
‘Understood,’ said Baeder.
‘Whatever you decide, be careful, eight eight. This is deep hell we’re in now.’
‘Understood, Angel One. Stay on vox.’
Baeder heard Duponti whistle into his vox receiver. ‘I can tell by your voice that you’ve already made up your mind to go in. I’ll be on call. If things go wrong, I’ll come down and hit hard. Over.’
‘Right on, ramrod. Out.’
Duponti was right, of course, Baeder had already decided to gather a relief force. If these were loyalists, then he had a duty to protect them. Perhaps several months ago, that would have been Baeder’s sole reason to gather a scouting party. But not any more. Now, all that mattered to Baeder was that his men needed water and, whether loyalist or not, the village would no doubt have a fresh supply. The monsoon season had faded for the past several days and they were parched. Clean water would go a long way to mitigating some of their ailments.
Try as he might, Baeder could not convince himself that he actually cared about whether the village truly needed help. It was simply a way to resupply their rations.
Baeder and Serpent Company’s Third Platoon beached their rubberised landers beneath the branches of a bomb-felled cynometra. The thirty men and their colonel spread out into an open file and swept inland under the cover of darkness. They hugged the riverbank north-west, keeping low by the rushes and moving quickly.
Baeder had chosen Third Platoon not because they were the best or most experienced, but simply because they were one of the few platoons at full fighting strength. The platoon commander was a Lieutenant Hulsen, a young officer on his first off-world campaign. Although he was a combat virgin, Hulsen was keen and possessed by the wide-eyed vigour of a newly-minted platoon commander. He wore a belt of grenades across his chest, chewed tabac without pause and swore too often. He had even managed to trade a meltagun from the base quartermaster. Baeder would have to keep an eye on the lieutenant’s enthusiasm lest it ran rampant during the heat of engagement.
Pulver and Mortlock had both initially protested Baeder leading the relief force. Although it was agreed that the village was a potential water source, the threat of their battalion commander going into a trap did not sit well with the others. This far into their mission, the death of Baeder would plummet morale. Yet Baeder had insisted. Neither Pulver nor Mortlock were noted for their diplomacy and the siege would likely require more than brute force.
The platoon realised they were nearing the site of the distress beacon when the crump of a shotgun shattered the night. The shot was followed by a flurry of small-arms fire. Although it was too dark to make out anything, the direction of the shooting was clear enough to practised ears.
‘Hulsen. Take a knee,’ hissed Baeder as he settled down behind a waxy shrub.
‘They’re still fighting, then,’ whispered Hulsen as he crouched down next to Baeder.
‘Must be. If this siege is not some elaborate set-up, then we will need to reach the village without being caught in a crossfire. It’s going to be dark and I don’t want to be shot at by the very same indigs that we’re here to help.’
Hulsen chewed vigorously, his jaw clenching and relaxing, his eyes wide in the gloom. ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’
‘We need to contact the village on their distress frequency, let them know we are going in. We need them to cover us as we make a run across the open ground. Then
we’ll curve up along the riverbank and enter the village from the river edge to avoid the crossfire. Understood?’
Hulsen punched the side of his helmet twice in acknowledgement. He hobbled away at a low sprint to find his vox-officer. Meanwhile, Baeder turned back to survey the land with his magnoculars. He filtered the lens into night vision and took a moment to adjust his vision.
The land was a two-dimensional monochrome green. He could see the village at two or three hundred metres to his front, the lights of the town appearing as white stars. In between the sporadic bursts of fire, Baeder could make out defenders firing along the long village wall, and enemy gunmen hidden amongst the cassam paddies to the left of his platoon. It was obvious that the insurgents were amateurs. The very fact that the village had managed to keep them at bay told Baeder that the warband was too frightened to make any determined assault on the village. Instead, they skulked out in the rural fields, firing at the fortified town. They were probably hoping the villagers would run out of ammunition before they did. Any Imperial Guard platoon with good fire and movement could have taken that village in minutes.
After several tense minutes, Hulsen returned. ‘Contact made, sir. We should get moving,’ he hissed as he dropped down heavily beside Baeder.
Baeder immediately signalled for his men to rise. He slapped the helmets of his men as they ran past him. The platoon broke out into a sprint towards the walled town, rifles up and webbing swinging on their hips.
Kalisador Mano Mato-Barea racked his shotgun pump and fired over the barricade ledge. He crouched down quickly as the inevitable blast of counter fire kicked up sparks along the upper wall.
On the other side, he could hear the whoops and taunts of the insurgent raiders. They were creeping closer. Mano could feel them swelling with boldness as the hours dragged by, their insults getting louder and their laughter more cruel. Once he ran out of shotgun shells, the raiders would come and it would be a massacre. Mano loaded six into the breech, counting another twenty-four laid out on the ground in front of him. At the beginning of the day, the village had had five hundred shells saved up in storage, foraged and bartered over the past months. They had been a precious insurance. He never imagined they would use up everything in the span of a single day. Their situation was so desperate now it did not even seem real.
