Fire Caste Page 4

‘Down to the bone,’ Modine affirmed. ‘Colonel put a lid on them boys pretty quick too. Took a flamer in there and torched the lot of ’em. Didn’t want us greyback grunts seeing what Norliss gone and done.’

  ‘Figures.’ Dix nodded sagely, always quick to back his hero. Another Badlander, he was a scrawny doppelganger of Modine, right down to the jutting crest of red hair.

  ‘But that don’t add up, brothers.’ The voice came from beyond the lantern’s pool of radiance, outside the Dustsnake inner circle.

  ‘You say something back there, greencap?’ Modine snarled over his shoulder.

  ‘Just been thinking is all.’ The speaker ambled into the light, seemingly oblivious to the hostility. He was almost painfully young, but taller than Modine by a head and built like a grox. His straw-blond hair was neatly cropped, his uniform pressed and pristine. The green trim of his flat-topped cap and tunic identified him as a raw recruit, just as the book of liturgies hanging from his belt marked him as a devoted student of the Imperial Gospel.

  Audie Joyce was a misfit in this squad of veteran scum. He’d joined them just before they’d left Providence and Modine would have chewed him up and spat him out if the sarge hadn’t been looking out for him. There was talk the old goat had had a thing going with Joyce’s ma back home, might even be his pa, but not even Boone was stupid enough to ask bullet-head Calhoun about something like that.

  Frowning, Joyce continued, ‘I mean it weren’t just his squad. Norliss killed the commissar too. And he sure weren’t sleeping.’ Gravely the boy made the sign of the aquila. ‘No, brothers, the commissar’s chainsword was buzzing with the Emperor’s own wrath when he walked into that chamber of iniquity. And he didn’t go in alone neither.’

  ‘The greencap’s got a point, boys,’ came another voice from the shadows, even further from the inner circle, mocking and low. ‘Ain’t no way one crazy man could’ve taken down the commissar, especially not with old Whitecrow along for the ride.’

  It was true and they all knew it. Every one of them had been there when the horror had kicked off. It was the noise that had drawn them – a deep, irregular chiming that had run through the walls and shaken their teeth like a quake from hell. There had been no ignoring it so they’d gone looking and wound up outside Dorm 31 just as Verne Loomis had come crawling out. He’d slammed the hatch shut then folded in on himself like he was all broken up inside. The crazy look on his face had stopped their curiosity dead. Modine had hit the alarm. Nobody had gone for the door.

  That was when the lights had died, leaving everyone standing around in the dark fiddling with their rifles as they listened to all the tearing and chewing and screaming going on behind that hatch. Maybe if the sarge had been with them it would have gone down differently, but he’d been up in the mess hall playing cards with the other NCOs. They’d all been kind of glad about that.

  The colonel had arrived in double time, almost like he’d known what was going to happen. And maybe he had, because the witch and her watchdog had been with him and she’d probably seen it like she saw everything else. Then Major Waite and Commissar Brody had turned up and the five of them had gone inside, locking the hatch shut behind them. Five of the regiment’s finest against one crazy man.

  After that there’d been a lot more tearing and swearing, then a hellfire snarling that was more animal than man, but like no animal the Arkan had ever heard. And then the voices had started up and that had been the worst part. They oozed through the steel hatch, sounding like a whole chorus of corpses drowning in an ocean of maggots, laughing and gibbering as they sang the same words over and over, round and round: ‘Trinity in embers… Trinity remembers…’

  Somewhere along the way they’d heard the commissar shrieking like no commissar was ever meant to. That had gone on forever and the greybacks had wondered how there could be so much screaming inside one man, but finally there’d been silence. After a while the hatch had opened and the slayers had come marching out. All except Commissar Brody. Every one of them was splattered with blood and some kind of black slime that reeked like a corpse pit. The witch had been shaking under her robe and Major Waite was watching her like a hawk, almost like he was afraid of her. And then the colonel had grabbed a flamer and gone right back inside. Afterwards he’d sealed the hatch shut and turned Dorm 31 into a tomb for nine men. Nine men and maybe something more than a man…

  ‘It weren’t no crazy greyback the Whitecrow torched,’ the voice from the shadows continued. ‘You gotta think bigger, man. Uglier.’

  Modine snatched up a lantern and lumbered over to the speaker. The man was sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall, his eyes on the gnarled bone flute he was carving in the dark. The same flute he’d been carving every day of their journey through the warp.

  ‘We talking uglier than you, Mister Roach?’ Modine growled, angry that his safe little lie was unravelling. Scared of the truth.

  Roach kept on carving, unmoved by the tired old insult. His hatchet face had the bloodless complexion of a Norlander, but his hair was bright red. ‘Roach’ had been his father’s name – a solid Badlands moniker – but his mother had been a Norlander. It was a long story with a short, sharp end that had left him an outsider wherever he went. There’d been plenty of hurt and heartache, but after the war he’d decided he didn’t much care either way.

  ‘Ain’t you heard?’ Roach said. ‘There’s things in the warp just waiting to find a way inside a man’s head and outside into the world.’

  ‘We don’t buy that Hellfire crap in the Badlands,’ Modine sneered. ‘All that spook talk’s just to keep the Outlanders in their place! Course, a breed like you…’

  ‘You saying you don’t believe in daemons, Brother Modine?’ Suddenly Joyce was standing beside Modine, his earnest face troubled. ‘Or you saying you don’t believe in the God-Emperor’s Holy Gospel?’

  ‘Now wait, that ain’t what I meant…’ Modine spluttered, not exactly sure what he had meant. He glanced at his comrades for support, but even Dix had looked away. Only Boone grinned back at him, too dumb to pick up on the tension. Modine could feel the intensity of the rookie’s gaze, like he was some jumped up witch hunter angling for a burning. ‘Look, I was just saying…’

  ‘What Trooper Modine was saying is he’s so dense the Emperor’s light bends right on round him,’ Willis Calhoun barked, marching out of the shadows.

  The sergeant was a short, stocky veteran in his fifties whose bullet head seemed to shoot straight from his shoulders, hairless and almost pointed at the tip. Most men in the regiment towered over him, but there was a pent up ferocity in that compact frame that even the apes in Dustsnake wouldn’t cross.

  Calhoun strode over to the pyrotrooper and glared up into his face. ‘See, Trooper Modine here is a piece of deep-fried grox crap, but he’d still lick the rust off the Emperor’s holy throne. Ain’t that right, Trooper Modine?’

  ‘Every golden spot, sir!’ Modine bellowed, staring into infinity.

  ‘Damn straight!’ Calhoun nodded. ‘Right, playtime’s over you righteous maggots. I’ve got our drop-ship designation, so haul your sorry arses!’

  The sergeant sized up his nine charges as they grabbed their gear. They were rough scum all right – the troublemakers and meatheads who’d sunk to the underbelly of the regiment, picking up charges the way heroes chased after medals, but they were his scum and they could pack a helluva punch in a tussle.

  Young Joyce was still frowning as he went past. The sergeant shook his head. The last thing he needed was for the boy to start acting like a greenhorn commissar. He’d told Maude the regiment was no place for him, but she’d argued and wailed until he’d sworn to take Audie under his wing. Willis Calhoun wasn’t scared of any man, but Emperor’s Blood, that woman could nag! If only the boy hadn’t turned out so damn holy! He’d have to have a word with the young fool before he got himself killed. Teach him some basics. Faith wasn’t
optional in the Imperium, but some men believed a whole lot harder than others.

  ‘You said you’d talk to him. You assured me he’d come to his senses.’ As he spoke, Captain Hardin Vendrake kept his eyes on the Silverstorm Cavalry, alert to the slightest misstep amongst the mechanical steeds. So far his riders were keeping things together, guiding their walkers onto the waiting drop-ship with precise, elegant steps. Even Leonora was doing just fine and she was frankly the worst Sentinel rider Vendrake had ever known. He wouldn’t have kept her on if her other talents hadn’t been quite so exceptional…

  Vendrake suppressed a smile as he addressed his fellow officer again. ‘I admit I’m disappointed. Sir,’ Vendrake finished pointedly.

  ‘Don’t question my judgement, captain,’ Elias Waite said irritably. ‘After Trinity, Ensor Cutler deserves our faith.’

  ‘Does he?’ Vendrake asked. ‘Frankly I still don’t know why we burned that old town to the ground.’

  ‘Because it needed the burning!’ Waite snarled. He knew Vendrake didn’t like to talk about Trinity. The town had shaken the man up badly, but he was too proud to admit it. Or maybe it just didn’t fit in with his neat little worldview. Seeing the unease on Vendrake’s face, Waite calmed himself and tried again: ‘By Providence, you were there, man! You saw the sickness with your own eyes.’

  ‘Frankly I’m not sure what I saw,’ Vendrake said, growing agitated, ‘perhaps some kind of mass delusion… We were all half-starved and frozen when we stumbled on that place.’ He waved the subject away. ‘Besides, Trinity isn’t the issue here.’

  Waite shook his head in disgust. He despised true patricians like Hardin Vendrake, men bred with an unflappable faith in their own excellence. With his chiselled jaw and aquiline nose the captain had the look of a war poster hero, the kind of man who’d seen thousands of comrades die but never suffered anything worse than a tasteful scar. Vendrake actually had that scar, a tidy little line along his left cheek that had always gone down a storm with the ladies. But despite his rakish façade and wilful blindness, the man was no fool and Waite didn’t need him for an enemy.

  ‘Look, I’d trust Ensor Cutler with my soul,’ Waite insisted, trying to believe it himself.

  ‘And what about the witch?’ Vendrake said, cutting to the chase. He smiled at the major’s hesitation. ‘Personally I don’t give a damn who the old man cavorts with, but this is hurting the reputation of the 19th and I won’t stand for that.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him after we make planetfall. You’ve got my word on it,’ Waite said coldly and marched away.

  ‘I’m just thinking of the regiment,’ Vendrake called after him. He winced as Leonora’s Sentinel slipped on the boarding ramp and she struggled to regain her balance, the clawed feet of her machine scrabbling on the metal. It looked like she was going to topple when Van Hal nosed his steed in and nudged her back to stability. Vendrake nodded his approval. A fine pilot and a gentleman was Beauregard Van Hal. A fellow made of the right stuff.

  Still, he couldn’t entirely blame Leonora for the error. He’d kept his riders on their toes but they’d only had a couple of months to play with the modified machines. Unfortunately there had been no choice about that. The colonel had warned him they would be fighting in swampland, where the Arkan-pattern ‘hooves’ of the Sentinels would be a liability. The heavy, flat pads were designed to race across the open plains and savannahs of Providence, but on Phaedra the design would mire the machines in no time, which would be fatal if they came under fire. Sentinels were light hunter-killers that relied on speed and agility to stalk their prey. While they might intimidate an infantryman, it didn’t take much to penetrate their armour. Cutler had even hinted that Vendrake’s force might have to sit this one out, but the captain was damned if he’d let that happen. The Silverstorm Cavalry was a bastion of nobility amongst the 19th and it would have its share of the glory!

  Determined, Vendrake had sequestered the ship’s forge and holed himself up with the regimental tech-priests to crack the problem. During the voyage they had replaced the Providence-pattern hooves with wide, splayed claws that distributed the weight of the machines more evenly and enabled a limited gripping action. Their research revealed that this was actually the prevalent model on many worlds of the Imperium. While extreme divergence from the sacred construction templates was deemed heretical by the Mechanicus priests, modest alterations were permitted, if not exactly encouraged.

  Poring over reports of customisation throughout the Imperium, Vendrake had been drawn to the Drop Sentinels of the Elysian regiments. Fitted with grav-chutes, such machines were capable of diving directly into battle from airborne transports. Fired up by the tactical possibilities, he had resolved to win that capability for Silverstorm. At first the tech-priests had hesitated over such a radical deviation, but he had soon cajoled them into it. Under their soulless augmetics Arkan blood still ran through their veins and they hadn’t lost the old thirst for invention. Lacking access to grav-tech they had opted for single-use jump packs and retro stabilisers, granting the Sentinels limited manoeuvrability during a drop.

  Once the project had caught their imagination, the cogboys had pursued it with almost human passion. After that it had been a small matter to push them a little further with the modifications to his own steed, Silver Bullet. And over the months a little further had stretched the abilities of his Sentinel far beyond the norm. Bristling with directional thrusters and gyro-stabilisers, it was capable of swift contortions and great leaps that filled Vendrake with fierce joy whenever he trained in the hangar bay. The fact that some would have deemed his Sentinel a new kind of machine altogether – and likely denounced it as an abomination – cut no ice with the captain. He had lost himself wilfully in the challenge of forging the perfect steed. It was the kind of problem that made sense to him, unlike old Waite’s obsession with that vile town…

  No, he wouldn’t think of that. The things he had seen there were impossible and impossible things could not be. He was a gentleman of Providence – a rational man. He wouldn’t buy the propaganda the Imperium used to terrorise its ignorant rabble into submission.

  Like many Arkan patricians Vendrake was no great believer in the Emperor’s Light. After all, He hadn’t shed much light on Old Providence. Just two centuries ago, blithely unaware of the approaching Imperium, Vendrake’s ancestors had revelled in the new-found glories of steel and steam. It had been a time of unfettered innovation, with the Grand Machinists churning out new wonders every day. The Senate had declared the old gods dead and the Seven Hells mere fables. Men were free to explore a puzzle box universe where everything was possible and nothing was forbidden. Then the warships of the Imperium had arrived and crushed the dream, but the grand families had never forgotten their past.

  Maybe that’s why we keep on making the same mistakes, Vendrake mused. Maybe that’s why we keep on rebelling. The fools amongst us anyway…

  A klaxon buzzed and he saw the colonel stride into the hangar. Vendrake had to admit the old man had got his act together. His hair was tied back into a neat ponytail and he’d trimmed that scruffy beard. It looked like he’d finally washed too. The captain nodded approvingly, but then he caught sight of the witch trailing Cutler like a second shadow. Her giant watchdog was carrying the regimental banner, unfurled and resplendent. Vendrake’s heart soared at the sight of the ram’s skull and crossed sabres overlaid on the Seven Stars of the Confederation. It was good to see Old Fury awake again, even if it was in the hands of a savage.

  The trio marched wordlessly through the silent ranks of the Arkan and stopped at the centre of the hangar. Suddenly Cutler let out a ferocious howl and leapt onto a crate, his agility belying his years. He held out a fist and the savage threw him the banner. The colonel caught it with a flourish and spun about, brandishing the flag above his troops as they gathered round.

  ‘Seven Stars for Old Fury!’ Cutler bellowed.

  ‘Se
ven Furies for the Stars!’ The men bellowed back.

  ‘For Providence and Imperium!’ Cutler roared, completing the regimental canticle. Then he led them through the litany again and again, binding them together with those glorious words, defying the horrors they’d come through and the ones still ahead. And despite himself, Hardin Vendrake shouted along with the rest of them, his heart soaring. This was the Ensor Cutler of old, the man whose audacity had won the day at Yethsemane Falls and turned him into a living legend! And then it was done and Cutler became the Whitecrow again. Vendrake could almost see the bitterness seeping back into the man as Trinity exerted its curse.

  There is no curse, Vendrake told himself. Cutler’s intellect is weak. That’s why the horror is eating him alive, but I won’t fall for it.

  ‘I won’t lie to you, Arkan.’ Cutler’s voice was flat with suppressed rage. ‘And I won’t dress things up nice and pretty either. You and me, we’ve come too far for that.’ There were murmurs from the crowd, agreement and unease in equal measure.

  Damn it all, Vendrake thought, we’re so far from home even the memories are stale. This isn’t the time for truth. Give them some hope, man!

  ‘So I’m just going to tell you what I know,’ Cutler continued, ‘but frankly that’s not a whole lot.’ He touched a switch on his belt and a murky sphere flickered into life beside him. ‘Gentlemen – and all you Badlander scum too – meet the Lady Phaedra.’ The hologram was blocky and riddled with distortion, but the planet’s essential ugliness still bled through.

  I don’t want to breathe Her air, Vendrake realised with sudden conviction. The intensity of the instinct disturbed him. It was entirely irrational.

  ‘Pretty name for a rat’s arse of a planet,’ Cutler growled. ‘She’s got swamps, rain and a thousand dirty ways to kill you. Gentlemen, you’re going to hate her like the Hells, but I’ve got something else you’re going to hate even more.’

  He threw another switch and the planet morphed into a disembodied alien head. Its skull was hairless save for a braided topknot that looked fibrous and fleshy. The face was a flat wedge from brow to chin, bevelled with deeply recessed cheeks that gave it a vaguely cadaverous look. Its mouth was a lipless slit and there was nothing resembling a nose.