Fire Caste Page 9

  The burst of strength drained out of the co-pilot and he slumped against the helm, breathing hard. His sweaty face was spattered with blood from his comrade’s pulverised nose. Slowly at first, then with increasing violence, the ship began to shake.

  ‘Ortega!’ Cutler growled.

  The Verzante threw him a dazed look as the shuttle groaned and the cockpit canted sharply downward. Ortega swore and crashed down into his seat. His hands darted over the controls like birds of prey as he struggled to rein in the vessel’s neglected machine spirit.

  ‘Padre de Imperios…’ Ortega breathed as the turbulence finally subsided and the world steadied around them. His eyes were fixed rigidly ahead.

  ‘You still with me, flyboy?’ Cutler asked.

  ‘That was… a very long time coming,’ Ortega said through harsh gasps.

  ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’

  ‘And what exactly is it that I’m feeling so good about?’

  Cutler stared at him for a long moment, suddenly unsure himself. Then he sighed, dredging up a soul-deep weariness that made him seem much older than Ortega. Instead of answering he hauled the unconscious pilot to the floor and sank into his place, gazing at the nebulous fog swirling past the windows and seeing nothing. Ortega lost himself in the old, trusted task of steering the ship while he waited for an answer. His rasping breaths had slowed by the time Cutler replied.

  ‘Tell me Guido Ortega, would you have the balls to fly this tug into a hot zone?’

  ‘I might say that I could do it with my eyes closed and my hands bound,’ Ortega said. ‘But that would be a manifest exaggeration.’

  ‘I guess I’m going to take that as a yes,’ Cutler said. ‘Which is just as well, because we won’t be stopping off on the Spider Admiral’s boat.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I follow you, señor.’

  ‘Does a place called Dolorosa Breach mean anything to you?’ Cutler was watching him with bright, angry eyes.

  ‘Nothing that I like,’ Ortega said carefully.

  ‘Well that makes two of us, sir.’ Cutler nodded. ‘But I’m not asking you to like it. I’m just telling you to take me there.’

  Keeping his eyes on their guide, Captain Templeton slashed a path through another snarl of creepers with his sabre and swatted hopelessly at the swarming flies. The vermin had hit the Arkan in a furious, biting wall the moment they had entered the jungle, then harried them every step of the way like tiny winged daemons. Nothing seemed to deter them and some of the men had already given up the fight, but their sly bites made the captain’s skin crawl and he kept slapping at them stubbornly. The Phaedran veterans probably had some kind of repellent for the vermin, but if so they hadn’t offered it to the newcomers. They hadn’t offered much of anything except a rapid passage into the Hells.

  There had been little respite at the ramshackle base called Dolorosa Breach. Templeton’s company had been met by a patrol of slovenly sentries and waved on to the tree line where a craggy-faced officer had been overseeing all the new arrivals. The crew-cut ogre had ridiculed their tardy landing and ‘dandy boy’ uniforms, gloating that they wouldn’t last a day in the Mire, but he’d soon grown bored, almost as if the newcomers weren’t worthy of his wit. Without bothering to offer his name or rank, the brute had launched into a mission profile that was so thin on detail it would snap from a sharp glance. In short – and there was no long – their orders were to reinforce a push on an ancient temple complex some three kilometres inland. Designated ‘the Shell’, the necropolis was thought to serve as the primary rebel base for the region. The attack had begun three days ago and there were at least two other Imperial forces involved, but the composition, disposition and current status of those forces was unknown. Intelligence on the enemy seemed equally threadbare to Templeton: they would be facing a small contingent of tau, probably a few xenos mercenaries and a whole heap of ‘fish’.

  ‘Fish?’ Templeton had asked, trying to ignore the furious itching in his left hand where the skrabs had bitten him.

  ‘Yeah, Fish. The indigenous scum.’ The officer had pointed to a band of gangly figures in grey jumpsuits slouched by the perimeter. Templeton had assumed they were simply bedraggled Guardsmen, but that mistake hadn’t stood up to closer scrutiny. The Phaedrans – or Saathlaa as Cutler had called them in his briefing – were clearly of human stock, but their degeneracy was obvious. There was nothing overtly wrong about them, but nothing that was quite right either. All were at least a head shorter than an average man, but their stature was further diminished by their spindly bowlegs and hunched posture. Their faces were uniformly broad, flat and brutish, with widely spaced goggle eyes and fat, rubbery lips.

  ‘Fish. You see it, right?’ The officer had grinned and Templeton had reluctantly agreed that yes, he did indeed see it. In fact the degeneracy had unsettled him deeply.

  Is the human bloodline really so open to corruption? Templeton had wondered. And if so, might our entire race not sink back into the primordial slime with the passing of ignorant aeons?

  ‘Webbed fingers too,’ the brutish officer had continued. ‘Personally I’d cleanse the lot of ’em, but apparently they just about pass muster for human. Well, they’re ugly scum, but they’ve got their uses. The ones who didn’t rebel are almost pitifully loyal, probably because they know the rest will skin ’em alive if we lose the war. And they make damn fine guides.’ He pointed to the gang by the trees again. ‘These boys call themselves askari. I guess that means “scout” in Fishspeak.’

  After three hours trekking through the Mire, Templeton had come to share the officer’s faith in the askaris’ jungle craft. The native assigned to his platoon had led them through the jungle with swift, knowing steps, steering them around impenetrable clusters of vegetation and creeper infested fissures. They were travelling a clotted, broken land that conjured up visions of a vast weed-choked regicide board where the light and dark squares corresponded to vitality and decay. Aware that one misstep in this tangled disharmony of life and death could prove fatal, the captain found himself growing more grateful for their guide the deeper they went. For all his degeneracy the native was their lifeline in this maze.

  Occasionally the askari would bring them to a halt with a raised hand and drop to his haunches, sniffing suspiciously at the ground like an animal, then nod and scurry on. Often he would stop to peer at a glistening fungal tree or a swarming curtain of creepers, keeping his distance as he searched for some obscure telltale clue. Then he would either hurry past or urge his charges back with sharp gestures. On one occasion he had fled from something on the path ahead, frantically shooing the platoon away. As he retreated, Templeton had caught a glimpse of a titanic violet bloom leering at him from the clearing ahead and shuddered at its gently undulating mantle of tendrils, both fascinated and repelled. He hoped the other platoons had been gifted equally talented guides.

  Their force was spread out, advancing through the jungle in a loose wedge of twelve platoons, each numbering around fifty men. The platoons of the 2nd Company had taken the centre, while those of the 3rd and 4th had fanned out on either flank. They had entered the jungle in a much tighter formation, but the labyrinth of trees had played havoc with that plan and the teams had soon lost sight of each other. Although they maintained vox contact, nobody really knew where they were anymore and Templeton could only pray that they were all going in the same direction.

  The wiry askari guide raised his hand and the greybacks of Dustsnake and Hawksbill squads crowded up alongside him, peering into the murk. A few paces ahead the ground dipped sharply and the jungle dissolved into a mist-wreathed swamp. The water was strangled by a tangle of mangrove-like trees, but those weren’t the only things choking the swamp. There were bodies everywhere, floating languidly with their limbs splayed like broken dolls. Some were so riddled with arrows that they looked like human pincushions, while others were shockingly charred and sundered, ev
idently the victims of powerful energy weapons. Although the corpses were crawling with flies and leeches, they were obviously still fresh.

  ‘Must be at least a hundred of ’em down there.’ Sergeant Calhoun had to raise his voice over the buzzing feeding frenzy of the vermin. ‘Looks like the poor bastards never even saw it coming.’

  ‘The Jungle Sharks,’ Lieutenant Sandefur said sombrely. The tall, square-jawed veteran had been given overall command of the two squads and Calhoun figured that was just fine. Sandefur might be an academy boy with a pole rammed up his backside but he was actually a half-decent soldier. By Willis Calhoun’s reckoning that was a pretty good result for an officer.

  ‘Aren’t those the boys we’re meant to be linking up with?’ Calhoun asked.

  ‘Indeed, but let’s not be in a rush to link up with them now, eh sergeant,’ Sandefur said with grim humour. He shot a questioning look at their guide and the Saathlaa nodded, indicating that their path lay through the corpse-choked swamp.

  ‘Well now, don’t the Emperor just love his greybacks today,’ Roach muttered, drawing a frown from the lieutenant.

  ‘It isn’t a question of love, Dustsnake,’ Sandefur said. Then he spotted the scout’s tassels hanging from Roach’s cap and smiled. ‘Care to take point with our swampy friend, scout?’

  ‘And here I was thinking you’d never ask, lieutenant.’ Roach tipped his cap and grinned sourly at their askari guide. ‘You and me, we’re going make a fine team, Mister Fish.’

  To his surprise the native grinned right back at him.

  ‘Do you smell that?’ Valance asked. The black-bearded scout had stopped, sniffing suspiciously at the smog rising from the marshland.

  Machen couldn’t smell anything through his sealed helmet, but he trusted the ex-trapper’s instincts. Unusually for a scout, Jaques Valance was a barrel-chested bear of man, but he could move as silently as any Norland tracker. Rumour had it he’d learned his craft smuggling skins past the feral ork tribes.

  ‘What do you have, scout?’ the captain growled, scanning the skeletal trees for a target. The damnable mist was filtering everything into a soft focus blur.

  ‘Don’t know captain, but it’s something new.’ Valance was frowning as he tried to make sense of the odour. ‘Smells like milk that’s turned sour… and something else, something sharp. Maybe blackroot or…’

  ‘We’ve lost the Fish!’ someone shouted from up ahead.

  ‘Prentiss, Wade, with me,’ Machen called on the intra-suit vox. He tore his iron boots free of the clinging sludge and clanked towards the unseen speaker with his brother Zouaves on either flank. For the last hour or so his platoon had been up to their ankles in mud and over their heads in smog. The stuff rose from the ground in thick streamers, transforming the vegetation into a ghostly graveyard parody of the jungle. Everything looked withered and desiccated here.

  Even by the standards of this arsewipe planet this region is ugly! Machen reflected gloomily.

  ‘Hill and Baukham are gone too!’ There was an edge of panic in the point man’s voice as the Zouaves stomped up alongside him with Valance at their heels.

  ‘They were there a moment ago!’ The greyback pointed ahead. ‘Just past those trees…’

  Machen signalled to Valance and the scout advanced cautiously. He stopped by the suspect cluster of trees, his sharp eyes picking out a residue of black slime splattered across the trunks. Gingerly he sniffed the stuff and gagged at the stench. Catching a glint of metal, he dropped to his knees and ran his fingers over the bark, wincing as something drew blood. Squinting, he saw the trunk was riddled with a web of tiny, razor sharp metal filaments.

  ‘I’ve found…’ A soft hiss came from the smog ahead and Valance froze. A moment later the hiss was followed by a low, wet rattle. The scout rose and backed away, his eyes never straying from the mist ahead.

  ‘There’s something out there,’ he breathed. ‘Something more than an animal.’

  ‘Form up around me, greybacks,’ Machen commanded, stoking up the old fury in his gut like a loyal friend. If the Hells were going to break loose then Jon Milton Machen was ready to oblige them.

  Templeton had lost his bearings hours ago, but their guide clearly knew his business so he had immersed himself in the nightmare trek, hoping to embrace the living dead phantasmagoria of the jungle. It offered such a wealth of allusions to a refined spirit, such potential for metaphor and wordplay… Yet try as he might the words eluded him, lost in the smog of pain that had slowly seeped across his mind. It was the bites of course, some infection he’d caught from those damnable corpse crabs back on the beach. His left hand had been throbbing for hours now, summoning up a fever that was turning his thoughts to sludge.

  The captain paused to catch his breath, letting the others march past as he unwound his makeshift bandage and inspected the wounds. His whole hand had swollen up and he could see a tracery of purple lines weaving up his wrist. Once again he cursed himself for letting the bites go untended at the outpost, but they’d seemed so trivial back then. Besides, he hadn’t wanted to look weak in front of Machen. His fellow captain already had precious little respect for him.

  Something whirred by overhead with a sonorous, buzzing drone. Templeton glanced up and caught a shape flitting between the treetops, dark and jagged against the emerald canopy. It was gone in the blink of an eye, but he was left with the impression of something thorny and misshapen, like a huge insect…

  The Lord of Flies, chitinous monarch of sickening skies.

  ‘One helluva big bug that, eh sir?’ Sergeant Brennan said, disturbing Templeton’s vague inspiration. Brennan was a cheery, pragmatic bruiser who might have been the captain’s polar opposite. ‘Seen half a dozen of ’em fly past in the last hour. Don’t much like the look of ’em.’

  ‘The Mire is full with the xenos filth, yes,’ Commissar Cadet Rudyk interjected as he came up alongside them. Much to Templeton’s irritation the youth had fastened onto his squad. ‘Here all animal and all plant is tainted. One day we burn them all, but it is not today.’

  Rudyk marched past and Templeton saw that the back of his storm coat was riddled with bullet holes. The young cadet wasn’t the first man to wear that coat and probably wouldn’t be the last. In all likelihood commissars didn’t last very long on Phaedra.

  Another of the giant insects flittered by overhead, punctuating its flight with a rhythmic medley of twitters and chirps. Its strange song drew a chorus of replies from a dozen unseen companions. Through his growing delirium Templeton felt something nagging at him. Something about that song…

  ‘You all right, sir?’ Brennan asked, peering at the captain’s pallid, glistening face.

  ‘Just a touch of heatstroke, sergeant.’ Templeton smiled weakly, unsure why he was hiding the truth. ‘Best get on. We don’t want to fall behind in this maze.’

  But as they went deeper into the Mire, Templeton found his eyes returning to the canopy, watching the treetops for a flash of chitin.

  Imperial Seabase Antigone, the Sargaatha Sea

  I was discharged from the infirmary two weeks ago, yet High Commissar Lomax still hasn’t summoned me. Doubtless she’s engaged with more pressing matters than an errant commissar, but sometimes I can’t help thinking she’s playing games. I have occupied my reprieve by exploring the abandoned lower tiers of this rusting old sea platform, delving through the flooded under-chambers as I try to straighten out my story. Any lie will do, so long as it convinces Lomax of the one truth that matters: I am going to kill Commander Wintertide.

  Number 27 accompanies me on my wanderings, a mute reminder of Indigo Gorge, where my quest began nine months and an eternity ago. Indigo Gorge. In twenty years of soldiering across more worlds than I care to recall I’ve never seen the likes of that killing ground. We were dying in droves, wading upriver through the red corpse paste of our fallen as the flickering lances of the blue
skin guns sliced down from the escarpments high above. They had the cover, the range and the elevation. What good was faith against that? And what possible purpose did my twenty-seventh execution serve? If that murder had somehow turned the rout, well what then? Another thousand lost, probably more, yet we’d have been no closer to victory. But Niemand’s shade was with me that day, filling my heart with ice, so when the charge faltered and my charges fled, I didn’t hesitate to take the shot. There was no calculation in my choice – the sacrifice was just another fleeing shape amongst so many. A coward. Expendable. Execrable.

  I’d still believe it if I hadn’t seen her eyes, but as she fell she rolled over and I caught her gaze. Her features were made strange by the distorting waters, stranger still by the perfect geometry of the third eye my bullet had punched through her skull. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, a plain girl already haggard with the rigours of life in the Guard, but as she slipped into the water and out of life she looked right at me and I caught the last flicker of something that I can only call holy.

  And so Number 27 became the third member of my shadow triumvirate, but while Bierce and Niemand despise me, her gaze burns with a terrible pity that is so much worse. It is for her that I will kill Wintertide and end this meat grinder war.

  Iverson’s Journal

  The men of Dustsnake were wading waist deep through the curdled soup of the swamp, their rifles held over their heads to keep out the muck and their mouths shut to keep out the flies. Together with the Hawksbill greybacks they followed their guide through the morass with silent determination. All except Boone.

  The burly Badlander was cussing and splashing about, angrily chewing up insects as he tried to dislodge the razor-toothed thing that had latched onto his boot. Toomy was still slung across his shoulders, a dead weight that sometimes burbled and groaned, but showed no other sign of recovery. A couple of the others had offered to take a stint carrying him, but Boone had refused. The sniper had always been good to him, never calling him a groxbrain and even letting him win a few hands of cards now and again. Sergeant Calhoun had wanted to leave the injured man behind at the outpost, but Boone hadn’t liked the looks of that place and eventually old bullet-head had backed off. The big man had it all worked out. Even if Toomy didn’t get better, it would be fine because then Boone wouldn’t be the dumbest greyback in the squad anymore. This was probably the deepest insight of his life and it had made him intensely happy. Despite the heat and the flies he’d carried his burden with a big smile, sure that life was finally on the up. And then the eel thing had started biting at his boots. It spoiled the last few minutes of Gordy Boone’s vague life.