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The Enemy of my Enemy – Nate Crowley

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Beast Arises: Volume 1’

A Black Library Publication

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The Enemy of my Enemy

Nate Crowley

Nestor blinked away ash-brown rain and tried to imagine, for the fourth time that day, the words with which he would accept his promotion.

The scene was clear in his head: the immense basilica, drenched with light and cheering, the warm kiss of metal as the laurels were set on his brow. But the words would not come. He stood dumbstruck, gaping like a fool before the glaring statues of his forebears. Could he not even muster a little dignity here, in the safety of his daydreams?

Something gave way beneath his boot and he stumbled, dashing the image from his mind. It was the chest of a Guardsman – some unfortunate wirecutter, sunk in the mire and plastered over with battlefield filth. Nestor retched as the stench billowed up from the carcass, but soon steadied himself. The last thing he needed was to lose his stomach in front of Phocus.

‘General Pyrrhus?’ chirped the younger officer from behind Nestor, his voice a perfect facsimile of loyal concern.

‘I’m well, Colonel Phocus,’ he growled, straightening himself and scraping the worst of the muck from his boot. ‘Just acquainting myself with the mood among the troops,’ he added in a mutter to himself, before setting his jaw and looking forward.

Cavernam Tertius was a bloody mess. A mining world that had never lived up to the hopes of the explorators, it had been a dreary backwater even before it had been visited by war. Now, it was little more than a cesspit. But with the segmentum shipyards ever hungry for ore, it was a cesspit which the Mystras VIII, the Golden Eighth, had been consigned to defend for the last ten miserable years.

Frankly, it was madness to stay. Nestor had often, to his dismay, calculated the cost of defending the world: the squandered ammunition alone almost outvalued the meagre ore shipments it guaranteed, while the human disbursement did not bear considering.

Fortunately, the Departmento Munitorum, in its star-spanning majesty, had no appetite to consider it. The immense bureaucracy dealt with arithmetic on a stellar scale, provisioning wars on fronts light years long. On that measureless counting board, Cavernam Tertius was just a drab speck, a bead on the abacus of some lowly, cable-faced wretch. Nestor and all the men and women of the Eighth – of every other regiment in his battlegroup – were insignificant figures, liable to be swept away in a carried digit.

Of course, this would all be bad enough, thought Nestor, if the enemy had some desperate need to take this world. Some relic they were sworn to recover, or a holy city they would give everything to possess. Indeed, anything that could be denied them by the stalwart defenders of mankind. But this was not the case. As Nestor gazed past the water running from the brim of his cap, at the jagged earthworks and belching smokestacks of the enemy lines, he knew the awful truth: they were just here for the fun of it all.

Despite it all, Nestor managed a tight little smile for himself as he resumed his trudge through the bog and signalled for his staff to follow. The stalemate was about to end. And it was going to end in a fashion that nobody – not the drones of the Munitorum, nor the brutish cretins waiting in the trenches ahead, and certainly not that conniving bastard Phocus – could have foreseen. No, this appalling little war was going to end on his terms. And in the slim eventuality he didn’t end up a drinking companion to that poor wirecutter in the mud, it would be the making of his name.

‘Lord General Militant Pyrrhus,’ he murmured under his breath as he reached the agreed spot. ‘Lord General Militant Pyrrhus,’ he repeated, rattling through the words in the same way his men would invoke the Throne before a big push, and closed his eyes. He let the warm light of the basilica linger behind them for a moment, then opened them and thrust his arm into the dull, brown sky.

‘Pax!’ he cried, and let the white rag bunched in his fist unroll into the drizzle.

A long moment of nothing passed – nothing but the sound of the rain, tapping on his epaulettes and spattering the shell-crater puddles. Nestor stood with his head back and his chest out, ready to be split by a bullet, but none came.

Then the xenos appeared. They rose from nowhere, as if from beneath the sludge, unfolding from their haunches until they towered over Nestor’s party. Seen through binoculars, they had always seemed crooked and hunched – awkward, scurrying things. Up close, however, with little more than a lasrifle’s length to keep them at bay, they were monsters.

It wasn’t their size that was so intimidating. Nestor had dealt with renegade ogryns that would have outmassed these things twice over, and for all their bulk, they had just been bigger targets. No, there was something innately threatening about the xenos – something more primally awful about their proportions. Their gangly, sinew-bunched arms, the blunt enormity of their jaws, made them something out of a child’s night terrors – things that wanted to reach out of the dark, pull you away and gobble you up…

Luckily, it took more than monsters to rattle the Golden Eighth. Before the beasts had even risen past their knees, Nestor heard Vatatze’s hellgun power up with a shriek, and the old NCO had leapt out in front of him in a firing crouch. He was grateful as ever for the staff sergeant’s reflexes, but a firefight now would doom them.

‘Stand down,’ cried Nestor to Vatatze, waving a hand at the long rifles slung on the backs of the xenos. ‘They’re snipers. If they’d wanted us dead, they’ve had this whole bloody walk from the trench to put holes in us.’

‘It’s just a ploy,’ added Phocus, uninvited, to the whole of the cohort. ‘They’re trying to put the wind up us while we wait for the parley, is all. Don’t let the brutes get in your head!’

Nestor was furious at the colonel’s interjection. To be talked over in front of his staff was bad enough – but in front of the bloody xenos? The little turd just couldn’t wait to step into his boots, could he? He considered a reprimand, but this was not the time.

Besides, it was hard to concentrate on anything with those dull red eyes regarding him. The beasts had not moved since rising from the mud. Even with Vatatze’s hellgun sweeping across them, they had just stood there, staring with expressionless curiosity, like predators behind plasglass. Nestor hated to admit it to himself, especially after Phocus’ little speech, but they did put the wind right up him.

Particularly uneasy was the fact the enemy was fielding snipers at all. Every tactical codex Nestor had read suggested they preferred to fight at close quarters or, if firearms were involved, via wild onslaughts of mass automatic weapons. The Cavernam posting had soon revealed otherwise. After the first few heads had popped with no enemy in sight, Nestor had quietly amended his manuals, and the men of the Eighth had kept their heads well below the trench parapets.

Examining the sniper closest to him, he wondered how they had never been spotted in the field – especially now, when his party had been walking almost within arm’s length of them. The creature in front of Nestor was a good head taller than him, and it was by no means the largest of the group: the one standing a few feet to the right must have been half the size of a bull grox. And although they wore long sniper’s cloaks, they were little more than gaudy rags, covered in wild splashes of colour like a fool’s mockery of his own regimental camouflage.

‘Staff sergeant,’ said Nestor softly, beckoning the scowling woman to his side, ‘am I losing my eyesight? Look at the colours on those cloaks, and tell me how in the name of Holy Terra we didn’t see these skaffers a mile off.’ Vatatze shrugged and wrinkled her scarred brow, running her eyes across the line of xenos with a look of contempt.

‘Beats me, general. I dunno – you know what they say in the trenches, though.’

‘Hmm?’

‘Word is they’re born like that, sir. They grow underground like fungus, then just pop out from the puddles, gear and all. That’s why we send ’em back there, sir. Doing ’em a favour.’

Nestor replied with a grunt of grim amusement, then fell silent as he noticed, to his immense discomfort, that the sniper was trying to catch his eye. The beast had clearly caught him frowning in consternation at its cloak, and had dipped its head to stare right into his eyes. And although the leathery wasteland of its face was impossible to read for human emotions, he could have sworn on the aquila that it was giving him a knowing smirk.

Withstanding the urge to shiver, Nestor tore his eyes away from the monster, and looked towards the xenos front line. Aside from the usual plumes of smoke from engines and cook fires, the enemy trenches were still eerily quiet. The wind was picking up now, the rain smacking against them in fat streaks, and Nestor felt a cold stab of doubt. There was still no sign of the enemy commander. What if it wasn’t coming at all?

After another minute of unbearable silence, the men began to murmur. Clearly, they were beginning to have similar doubts. He would have to put a stop to things before he was undercut by Phocus yet again. Turning his back to the bestial snipers while Vatatze stared on at them, Nestor straightened himself to address his soaked-through comrades, radiating parade-ground confidence despite his clenching guts.

‘We give it ten minutes from here,’ he decreed, making a point of glancing at his timepiece, ‘and then we make a controlled retreat to our lines. Colonel Phocus will lead, while Staff Sergeant Vatatze will bring up the rear with me. Until then, we wait in silence. Am I understood?’

‘Very clearly, general’ said a voice as low and rumbling as distant shell fire, and Nestor felt his shoulders stiffen. Spinning on his heel, he scanned the wasteland for the source of the voice, but they were still alone with the snipers. Then the voice came again, this time with a guttural chuckle, and Nestor’s eyes shot to the largest of the beasts. In their savage hierarchy, leadership was determined by size alone (‘large means in charge’ was the mnemonic drilled into the marksmen of the Eighth) so surely it was their leader? But the hulk stood sullenly silent.

‘I’m here,’ said the voice from a few feet to the left, and Nestor could barely believe the evidence of his eyes as they flicked to its source – it was the sniper who had smirked at him, calmly addressing him in serviceable Low Gothic.

‘And may I say,’ it continued, the words bubbling up from deep in its boulder chest, ‘what a pleasure it is to meet my adversary in the flesh at last. Shall we… make parley?’

Negotiations were brief.

After the enemy commander had revealed itself, ‘refreshments’ had been called for. A bark from one of the snipers had summoned the atrocious, scampering slave-creatures of the xenos, who had come boiling from some rathole bearing trestles, boards and cans of stinking meat. With the bizarre feast set up, Nestor’s party of eight had taken their places across from the eight xenos, and each side had begun weighing the other up. Phocus had been paired with a vile creature whose left side was a mess of scar tissue and leaky hydraulics; he looked at the thing like he had a mouthful of battery acid. Vatatze, meanwhile, had her elbows on the table, offering a mocking grin to the mountain of green meat opposite, as if she were at ease in the regimental mess. And across from Nestor was the xenos commander.

The thing seemed absurdly proud to be offering its ‘hospitality’, making a long, rambling invitation to the humans to partake in the food and drink available. As the oration lumbered on, it became clear how doggedly rehearsed the creature’s opening lines had been, and how limited its command of Low Gothic really was. Nestor couldn’t help but curl his lip. This was no aberrant mastermind; it was just another beast, foolishly aping the customs of its enemy in the hope some quality might rub off.

Needless to say, nobody touched the food – not even the xenos. By the time the parley began, the tins of charred offal were sodden: sad tokens of civility, awash in rainwater.

Next, their host introduced itself. Intercepted transmissions in the early days of the war had forewarned them of its name: in the alien tongue it was Eats-Face-Of-Face-Eater, and so ‘Face-Eater’ had become the common parlance among the ranks of the Eighth. But in its own head at least, the alien had apparently cultivated another identity.

‘I… am Colonel Taktikus,’ it announced, gesturing proudly at itself with a leathery green claw, and Nestor had to stifle a laugh. This thing called itself a colonel. Now he looked closer, he saw its chest was covered in dented, rusty medals – meaningless things hammered from scrap metal, and looted Imperial insignia on loops of wire. Then, his amusement turned to pure misery. This savage clown, for all its buffoonery, had been the mind keeping him in stalemate for the fading years of his career. His greatest achievement, his entry in the annals of the line of Pyrrhus, was to be the equal of a barbarian playing at soldiers.

As if to hammer home the mockery, the brute’s retinue began chanting. While the creatures seemed insensible to most words in Low Gothic, the name of their commander had drawn an instant and explosive reaction.

‘Kurnel Taktus!’ bellowed one of the other xenos, hammering the flimsy table with the butt of an axe, and the rest joined in. ‘Kurnel Taktus! Kurnel Taktus!’

As the aliens roared, Nestor winced at the stink. Whatever weird chemistry boiled away inside them made their breath nearly unbearable. The smell was somewhere between penal battalion wine and the deep mildew of canvas stored in the damp, with undertones of promethium fumes and rotten meat. It was a relief when Taktikus finally silenced them.

‘Colonel… Taktikus,’ acknowledged Nestor with a sigh, swallowing his distaste. ‘I am General Nestor Pyrrhus–’

‘–commander of the Mystras Eighth,’ finished Taktikus, ‘and director of the Astra Militarum battlegroup on Cavernam Tertius. I know you.’ The alien stumbled over the High Gothic terms, but spoke at least with confidence in their meaning.

‘Well then,’ answered Nestor smoothly, ‘if you know so much, I dare presume you will know why we’re here now?’

‘You are here to offer peace,’ said the brute, with what was definitely a smile this time.

‘On the contrary, my good colonel. We come to invite you to war.

‘Allow me to elaborate,’ said Nestor, as the group of soldiers and monsters huddled over the table in the rain. And so he did.

The doom of Cavernam Tertius had announced itself on a day like any other in the long, grinding war. The Basilisks at Ferghal’s Wood had cut short the dawn bombardment of xenos trenches on the Blackpine Front, citing a missed delivery of shells. The colonel from the 318th Dolmen Blackhands had voxed yet again, requesting the rotation of his men to the rear, and the damn Belisarians were demanding engineers and heavy weapons platoons from the Eighth, after a night raid had nearly made it into their trench on the Dunrust Salient.

‘It’s the same story every bloody day,’ Nestor cursed to Vatatze, his knuckles tightening the sheaf of reports into a grubby crumple. ‘I spend every waking hour telling these boneheads they can’t have the things they need, and if I’m lucky, I get to squeeze in the time to be told the same myself. Throne forbid I ever get five minutes to fight a war.’ Vatatze said nothing, but that was fine – this was their ritual. He would wear himself out ranting about the day’s frustrations, and she would lean in the doorway, inspecting the glowing tip of her lho-stub and occasionally cursing in solidarity.

‘Oh, and speaking of which,’ Nestor continued, in a tone of sarcastic brightness, ‘word’s in from the Munitorum on those reinforcements I requested. Guess what?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Not coming. Again. Just reams of platitude and bloody scripture, imploring me to do more with less, in the Emperor’s name.’ Nestor made the sign of the aquila in a way a commissar would find deeply questionable, and threw the papers to the floor. ‘Frankly, it’s getting to the point where I’m not sure why I bother asking. We’re old news.’

Vatatze nodded her agreement, and aimed a wad of spit into his waste paper basket. Everyone knew their war was a footnote. The massive xenos migration from which their enemies had split was now light years past Cavernam, and deep into the sector interior. Having smashed through the redoubt at Perikal IV, it was now dangerously close to several vital worlds, and was soaking up appalling quantities of materiel as a result. As such, when the bureaucrats did see fit to send something to Nestor’s half-forgotten little conflict, it always came as a surprise, and was almost never what he needed.

‘Hey, general,’ Vatatze quipped, ‘remember the horse guys?’

‘Ugh, don’t remind me of that.’ The last big bolstering, two winters past, had comprised a bulk carrier bearing seventy thousand horsemen from a feral world, who had been handed lasrifles en route, and who had gaped in astonishment at the first tank they had seen.

‘They didn’t exactly turn the tide of the conflict, did they, staff sergeant?’

‘Nope. Horsemeat made for better rations though.’

Nestor laughed then, as he only tended to with Vatatze, and found the strength to continue working through the day’s pile of unfulfillable requests.

After another hour, he put down the papers and rubbed his eyes, feeling a creeping thirst gathering. His glass of morning amasec was down to a fingernail’s depth, dwarfed by the stack of requests he had yet to read.

‘What do you reckon, staff sergeant – would a second glass constitute a problem, or just a habit?’ There was no reply, which was odd. Vatatze was always game for opening a bottle: along with her brutally dispassionate sense for logistics, it was what made her such an invaluable NCO.

‘Staff sergeant?’ he repeated, but there was still no answer. Nestor looked up to find Vatatze staring at a roll of printouts that had just been handed to her by a trembling courier. Her face was as grey and still as stone, which, on an officer who considered leading a charge across no man’s land to be a reasonable afternoon’s recreation, was not a good sign. Wordlessly, she walked over to hand him the papers, before uncorking the bottle of amasec and taking a deep, joyless pull from its neck.

‘Tyranids,’ Nestor said in a husk of a voice, ten minutes later, after reading through the astropath’s report for the third time.

‘Aye,’ Vatatze said, with a bleak smile. There was nothing much more to say. The tyranids would end the war on Cavernam. They were, almost always, the enders of wars. The arrival of one of their swarms put a full stop on a conflict, a vicious inkblot that pooled and spread, erasing all that came before and after. They were profoundly alien, incomprehensible to a degree that made the monsters in the opposing trenches seem brotherly by comparison. They had no insignia, nor logistics, nor language, nor tactics. Just teeth, and claws, and numbers that beckoned giddy madness.

‘The Blackpine offensive, the crossing at Tahl’s Rest, the Dunrust Salient… None of it means a damned thing any more, does it?’

‘No, general,’ Vatatze replied, pouring him a wounded man’s measure of amasec.

‘The war’s over, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Yes it is, general.’

He drank, and his thoughts turned grey. Against the constant, miserable drizzle of the campaign, he had always cupped a flickering hope in his hands. A hope that one day he would outmanoeuvre the xenos, that he would find a way to rout them despite their numbers, and be immortalised as another genius in the line of Pyrrhus. But the tyranids, the Great Devourer, had eaten that future. His only option now was to pull as many civilians as he could off-planet, with as many troops as the carriers would hold, and flee in disgrace.

‘How quickly can we evacuate?’ he asked, mouth dry. But as Vatatze began rattling off a plan based on her almost preternatural memory for planetary statistics, he found himself not listening. A thought had come to him – one that made his head buzz with the rising tide of the amasec. An idea so preposterous that it offered only glory or immediate death – both of which seemed preferable to the options currently on the table.

The tyranids were so alien as to make his monstrous enemies seem brotherly. And he would require a tremendous number of troops to have even a hope of staving them off. The sort of numbers which the Munitorum had denied him for ten years. The sort of numbers, in fact, which his enemy had in abundance…

‘Staff Sergeant Epiphania Vatatze,’ he announced, knowing the use of her hated forename would stop his comrade in the middle of her tally of civilian populations.

‘General Pyrrhus, sir?’

‘I may have just solved all our problems. Bring me whoever knows most about enemy communications, as many logistical specialists as can get here in the next hour and another bottle of amasec.’

‘And Colonel Phocus…?’ Vatatze added, her shrapnel-pocked face creasing into a smile as she pre-empted his thoughts.

‘…can stay blissfully ignorant in his bunk until it’s too late to complain. I’m sure he’ll have his own view of things, but if the bloody tyranids don’t make a case for unilateral action then I’m not sure what will.’

‘So… you offer me death?’ growled Taktikus, picking a sprig of mycelium from between greying tusks as it ruminated on his words. The other xenos had grown bored during Nestor’s explanation of the incoming tyranid swarm, but now they hunched forward, sensing the challenge in their leader’s response.

‘I always offered you death, Taktikus. But so far, to your… credit, you have been unwilling to receive it. Now, however, I fear the tyranids may have an overwhelmingly compelling proposition for us both. What I can therefore offer you, in the light of this development, is a longer and a better fight against the tyranids… If you make war alongside me.’

At this, the brute gave a long and thoughtful rumble, working a claw into the rotten corner of its maw, as if trying to winkle out the logic of the situation. But Nestor knew there could be only one outcome. While Taktikus’ warband were peculiar in their obsession with Imperial doctrine, they were still beasts at heart. Beasts that valued the potential for bloody conflict above all other things. Victory, to them, was incidental – any resources and territory acquired through a fight were secondary to the fight itself. It was why they had stayed committed to a stalemate on Cavernam for ten years, despite full knowledge of how poor a prize the planet would make. Now, that mad alien logic would at last work in Nestor’s favour. Given the choice between a war on two fronts that would be over in days, and a war on a single front that might last a month, the ugly green knot of Taktikus’ mind could only flex towards one conclusion.

‘If you know death certainly is,’ said Taktikus, Low Gothic beginning to fray with the effort of concentration, ‘why look for fighting together us? Surely… no difference, us or tyranid?’

‘Because we are sworn to defend this world in the name of Holy Terra,’ said Nestor, segueing smoothly into the lie. ‘And if we can hold it for even an hour longer through allying with your forces, then we honour the Throne, even as we die.’

Amusingly, this was almost the logic Colonel Phocus had espoused when he had been informed of the looming tyranid threat. A vainglorious, pious bore, the man had been itching to die for the Throne the moment he had heard the news. The only difference was that he wouldn’t countenance an alliance with xenos scum. As far as he was concerned, the only way forward was to evacuate as many civilians as possible who couldn’t hold a lasrifle, then go down fighting both sets of xenos. To even consider alternatives, in his mind, was heresy.

But then, Phocus was not the battlegroup’s general. By the time he had been let in on the plan, with the swarm just days away, there had been no time for extended debate. Nestor’s word, for once, had been law.

Crucially, what neither Phocus nor Taktikus knew was the real goal of the proposed alliance. This was no case of delaying the inevitable. It was a chance to achieve the impossible. While Nestor was by no means certain of the maths, he had an inkling that with Taktikus’ horde at his disposal, there was a slim chance the tyranids (whose already vast numbers he had exaggerated in his report to the beast) might in fact be beaten back.

And if such a miracle was to occur, Taktikus’ forces, after being fed into the meat grinder of the front line, would be so weakened that Nestor could sweep them from the face of the planet. He would be remembered as a defensive mastermind on a par with Dorn or Invictus – and Phocus as the boneheaded naysayer who had tried to impede him.

All it relied upon was for Taktikus to seize the big shiny bauble it had been offered, and give in to its genetic thirst for a big scrap. The enemy commander might have surprised him with snipers and a penchant for language, but there was no helping the nature of the beast. Nestor was certain of the outcome, even as the guttural words emerged in a puff of stench.

‘So be it,’ boomed Taktikus, and let loose a string of battered consonants in its native tongue. ‘An alliance, of orks and men.’

The beast stood to settle the deal, and Nestor allowed himself just a moment to shoot Phocus a look of pure dominance before he too rose from his seat. But in the brief moment his head was turned, chaos erupted on the other side of the table.

The creature to Taktikus’ left – the towering hulk that Nestor had at first taken to be the xenos leader – had gone berserk. Letting out a bowel-loosening roar like a Leman Russ trying to power its way out of a quagmire, the beast drew a monstrous axe from its back and dashed the table before it into splinters.

‘No fight with mans!’ it bellowed as it lunged forward, and for a heartbeat Nestor wondered if he was about to meet his end in the most shockingly simple betrayal in the history of the Astra Militarum. But then, just as suddenly as the beast had erupted, it was smashed sideways by a blur of deep green muscle – Taktikus, moving with terrible, animal agility. The two creatures fell to the mud in an explosion of limbs, and the rest of the xenos contingent began baying in excitement.

The strength of the larger beast was horrifying to behold, but for every blow it landed, the smaller xenos delivered three. The speed, the ruthlessness of the thing, was shocking to witness, and left Nestor with no doubt as to how it maintained authority over its larger fellows. After a furious scramble, Taktikus had the big xenos in a headlock, and a fist wrapped round the largest of its tusks. There was a wet, tearing crack, and the fang came loose in the colonel’s hand. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, the tusk was jammed once, twice and three times into the giant’s neck, springing torrents of thick blood.

Then it was over. Dropping the blood-black tusk in the mud, Taktikus stood back up and sauntered over to the table.

‘Forgive the major, general,’ it said, wiping its hand on its striped cloak and extending it. ‘Their mouth… gets them in trouble sometimes.’

Nestor shook the creature’s great, cold brick of a hand, and caught Phocus scowling from the corner of his eye. Maybe, he thought, these beasts could teach him a thing or two after all.

Less than a week later, Nestor was stood on the turret of his command tank, watching mycetic spores streak through the evening sky.

It was a rare clear evening: Cavernam’s clouds, having parted grudgingly like theatrical curtains, now wallowed in the sun’s weak, orange light as the spores carved fierce gashes in the gulf between them. High up, where the sky faded to deep indigo, smaller puffs of light signalled the destruction of further spores by the planet’s defences. It was all rather beautiful, thought Nestor, although he suspected it was mildly heretical to do so.

Of course, any prettiness would not last. This was just the start. The leviathan vessels of the tyranids were already deep in the system’s gravity well, but would still take weeks to arrive. Nevertheless, they had launched a vast swarm of spores on a hard burn ahead of them, like the slithering feelers of some corpse-pile crawler. Spiny pods grown on vicious biorockets, their only purpose was to slam into the planet, then peel open like rotten fruit to disgorge their innards.

They had no targets, nor any strategy. Wherever the pods landed, their occupants emerged, marshalling in instinctive packs deep in the wilderness. Reports were rife of abominations glimpsed on the edge of searchlights, and Nestor had seen snatches of grainy footage from the scout platoons, the layers of fibrous husk sloughing away, the chitinous shapes clawing themselves clear of sacs of shock-absorbing gel. Needless to say, they were already running short on scouts.

And still the pods came. For now, they were still able to shoot down most of them. Cavernam’s orbital defences had been augmented by the two frigates attached to Nestor’s battlegroup and then – after much negotiation – by Big Animal, the appalling warship that had originally brought Taktikus’ forces to Cavernam, which had spent years skulking in the icy rubble at the system’s edge. Still, it would not be long before their torpedoes were outnumbered by their targets, and as the brood-ships lumbered closer, vomiting a swelling stream of pods from their bellies, orbital space would have to be abandoned entirely.

But while this stage of the defence held, the race was on to bed in for the ground war to come. Most of the main population centres were being evacuated and laced with mines, while the combined forces of the xenos and the Astra Militarum were deploying in rings around the loose triangle of hive-cities deemed defensible. Restructuring a labyrinth of opposing trenches was proving to be a logistical nightmare, but the sheer earth-moving potential of xenos muscle was staggering. Given shovels and simple charts, the beasts – who of course had been offered the outer line of defence out of supposed courteous deference – had thrown up towering earthworks virtually overnight.

A Chimera column rumbled past on squeaking wheels, like beetles beside the bulk of Thriambos, Nestor’s ancient Baneblade. Drawn-faced troopers on their flanks threw salutes up at his turret, although Nestor couldn’t be quite sure if they were for him or for the vehicle itself. Older than his own family line, the gilded colossus had been with the regiment since the breaking of the gates of Krax Prime, and was decorated all over with statuary and inscribed scripture. Nestor caught himself sneering at one of the sculpted lions that adorned the cupola, and sighed with self-disgust. Was he so bitter as to be jealous of a tank? Purging the thought, he found a salute for the men, along with what he hoped was a stern, fatherly smile. Throne knew they’d need the encouragement when the Great Devourer came.

He doubted Taktikus would be having any such problems with morale. While Nestor’s forces were digging in with a grim, tight-lipped anxiety, the xenos lines were alight with revelry. As they rotated from trench duty, the brutes roared and wrestled by the light of bonfires, choffing down rancid meat and bellowing along to what was either music or engine noise. There were rumours that the gunners on Big Animal had turned the orbital defence operation into a drinking game. As far as the xenos were concerned, the eve of annihilation was a festival of pure joy.

For the most part, their lines and the humans’ were as separated in distance as they were in mood, as there was no easy cooperation between the two forces. Nestor’s soldiers hated the beasts they had been fighting for years, and the beasts in turn had nothing but contempt for their fragile new allies. Nestor had been forced to make examples of several officers who had refused to collaborate, and he imagined Taktikus had done the same in his own alarmingly direct fashion.

Tonight, the alliance would face its first acid test. The miners’ barrack-town of Low Digbeth, separated from Imperial lines by half a continent, was due to have its occupants emptied into the hold of a bulk hauler before it could fall to the swarm. What’s more, its former defenders had been recalled to headquarters three days previously, leaving only the town’s former besiegers to oversee evacuation. As far as Taktikus – and indeed Phocus – knew, this was a strategic oversight on Nestor’s part. Privately, however, it was a tray of meat left before a sitting hound: a test of obedience. If the xenos could resist the sport of a perfect massacre, it would put all dissent to rest among Nestor’s staff. If not…

‘Savage Rush,’ said Colonel Phocus behind him, as if conjured by doubt. Nestor was so startled he almost failed to question the non sequitur, but mastered himself enough to give an inscrutable grunt as he turned to face the younger man.

‘Savage Rush,’ repeated the colonel, turning a well-worn green hexagon between his gloved fingers. ‘Pelekys, seventy-fifth edition – If a greenskin token is within six spaces of a civilian token in a sector with no more than eight command points,’ he recited, ‘it automatically moves to the space and gains three materiel. Surely you remember the rule, general?’

‘Of course I remember,’ snapped Nestor. How could he not? Like every other alumnus of the Mystrasian Academy, he’d played that bloody wargame over and over, with its appendices and its token stacks and its insistence that the Adeptus Astartes were the solution to every damned problem. It would be just like Phocus to resort to it now. ‘I remember it as well as you do,’ he continued, ‘but I fail to see its relevance now. Unless of course you’re coming to resolve a rules query, in which case I’d ask you why in the name of Holy Terra you’re mucking about with bits of card when there’s an actual war on.’ To this, Phocus gave an oily smile of false deference.

‘I suppose it is a rules query of a sort, sir. The rules, of course, being distilled from thousands of years of combat experience, not to mention the tactical insight of Lord Guilliman himself. Quite simply, general, they tell us what to expect from the enemies of the Imperium, and to prevent disasters such as the one which may be about to unfold at Low Digbeth.’

‘Disaster? Do you question my decision?’ spluttered Nestor, incredulous at the youth’s patronising tone. The thing Nestor hated most about the man was his inability to be properly insubordinate; he always had to come at it from an angle.

‘Do you question the nature of the enemy?’ came the reply, loaded smoothly as a shell into a greased barrel, beneath a cocked eyebrow. Nestor’s mouth hung open, half in outrage at Phocus’ challenge, half in horror at the truth of the question. He had left ten thousand civilians in the hands of ruthless monsters, based entirely on intuition, and against the wisdom of the primarchs themselves. Was he mad? Struggling to form a reply, Nestor was almost relieved when Vatatze appeared at the hatch to interrupt the discussion. When he saw her face, though, his heart sank even further.

‘It’s Low Digbeth, sir,’ said Vatatze, with uncharacteristic alarm. ‘The xenos have opened fire.’

‘Get me a live feed now,’ bellowed Nestor over the din of Thriambos’ command deck, as junior officers scurried frantically across his path. If this was going to be the end of his career, he’d at least go out shouting. The vehicle’s comms officer was rummaging desperately at the thicket of controls beside the strategic display unit, mopping sweat from her forehead with a braided cuff as she tried to bring up a secure link. It was hellishly hot inside the tank at the best of times, but the crimson situation lights made it seem to swelter like an oven. Nestor was glad of this at least, as it would disguise the anxious sweat pouring from his temples.

If Taktikus had gone rogue this early, they were all doomed, and yet Phocus stood watching proceedings like a man waiting to be served a feast. The sod didn’t even care about death, so long as he died in the right. As the display unit’s holographic surface crackled to life, he craned forward, squinting for vindication in the resolving static. Sound came first, and it was all Nestor could do not to cringe – from the tinny speakers came the brutal clatter of crude gunfire, the raucous howl of xenos laughter, and under it all, the thin screaming of children.

Nestor put his hands on the table’s edge and sagged forward, his head drooping. He was just clearing his throat to resign his command, when the image snapped into perfect clarity. At the table’s centre, a child wailed in the dirt, clutching a wooden doll to its chest. Lumbering towards them, pitted blade in hand, was a xenos warrior in a fighting crouch. Nestor stared at the image, unwilling to be seen looking away from what he had done, and bit a hole in his lip as the monster snatched the child up by the scruff of the neck.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

Barreling in from out of shot, right into the space the child had occupied just a moment ago, came a monster. A real monster, with limbs like knives and a face (if that was its face) like a mass of writhing intestines. It chittered and reared, lashing out with a barbed tail so quickly that Nestor couldn’t follow the motion. Then the end of the thing’s tail was severed and flopping on the floor, and the ork’s boot was on its neck, stamping down with a liquid crack. And that was that. The brute set the child aside with a motion that might generously be called tender, and sprinted out of view, leaving only a trail of viscous footprints and a receding bellow. With eyes as wide as Nestor’s, the child ran for safety.

‘Horus’ teeth,’ swore Vatatze, to a room too shocked to even register the blasphemy. Phocus simply gawped, as if he had been slapped in the face.

‘Well then, colonel,’ said Nestor quietly, feeling strengthened by the rumble of Thriambos’ ancient reactor as it travelled up his arms. ‘Rather looks like the rules of the game need updating, doesn’t it?’

Nestor swept his eye over the immaculately modelled contours of the strategic map, and let half a breath hiss slowly between his teeth. He counted off the units arrayed round the hives for the fifth time, but still could not find the weakness he was sure in his bones he had missed. Despite the sick dread that rose up from his guts each morning, the war was – for an apocalyptic last stand, at least – going well.

The fall of Low Digbeth had signalled an earlier start to the ground engagement than even the most paranoid of his staff had predicted, and yet still they had been prepared. Within hours of the xenos-led evacuation, creatures had begun rushing from the wilds like ants boiling from a hole, and by the first night the trench-lips had been piled with twitching corpses. Things had only intensified since then, but the lines were holding. Even where they faltered, the sheer ferocity of the defence had ensured that every inch of ground cost the tyranids kilotonnes of biomass.

Nestor looked to the drab grey spires of Primaris Hive, where nearly half his forces were concentrated. Ghostly figures hovered over the model, offering mute reports of the city’s efforts to forge shells from its remaining ore stockpile, while blinking lights signified fresh deployments of artillery in the rear lines. The whole edifice twinkled with defiant life.

Two days ago, he had been prepared for the lights to go off altogether in Primaris, replaced by the virulent purple of infested territory. The city had been caught in a vicious claw, hammered on both sides by waves of tyranids, and denied reinforcements by the eruption of burrowing horrors among the supply lines. The situation had teetered on the very brink of collapse – and then the xenos had swept in. They had come out of nowhere: an armada of ramshackle vehicles driven at maniac speed, carving straight through the western pincer of the enemy advance like spilled plasma. With the tyranids reeling, the Third Karakum Airborne had been able to launch a mass drop operation, securing the ground taken by the xenos, and relieving the siege.

Such strange synergies had boiled up over several fronts. In the mudfields at Dunrust, the tyranids had been stopped in their tracks by the mad, clanking war machines of the xenos, pinned down by hydraulic claws while human sharpshooters finished them off. At Thar’s Bluff, the enemy’s grotesque living artillery had been swarmed by xenos slave creatures, erupting from tunnels as a line of Imperial armour had advanced as a distraction. Time and time again, human precision and xenos ferocity were being boiled up into a brew stronger than it had any right to be.

As the two forces had realised this, their long-term enmity had begun to express itself as brash competition. Where humans held trenches next to the xenos, kill tallies were kept on tall wooden boards, while in Ferghal’s Wood, where the aliens’ exotic artillery had been pooled with Imperial batteries, the bombardiers were engaged in constant one-upmanship over the reload speed, the accuracy, and even the volume of their guns. As far as Nestor was concerned, this was to be encouraged, as it gave his troops something to do other than imagine death beneath a swarm of writhing nightmares.

Before his own thoughts could sink too far in that direction, he was distracted by a shout of protest from across the bunker.

‘Filthy skaffing greenskin!’ barked Vatatze, as the brute sitting opposite her shook with growling laughter. The xenos, one of Taktikus’ retinue, was a crookbacked mess of scars and metal plates that – so far as Nestor could tell – fulfilled its species’ archetype of ‘grizzled NCO’ as thoroughly as Vatatze did for the human race. The two had been engaged in a game of dice for the best part of an hour, playing for lho-stubs and coming up with increasingly profane ways to accuse each other of cheating.

Glancing at the staff sergeant, with her face riven by shrapnel from a xenos grenade and her prosthetic arm gleaming, he saw someone with every reason to put a blade in the creature across from her. And yet, despite all the cursing, she was wearing the same fierce, weights-room grin as she might in human company. That was the astonishing thing about infantry, he mused, as the pair of bruisers set into another exchange of insults. No matter what world – or species – they came from, if you gave them a shared enemy and a way to cheat each other out of smokes, soon enough they’d end up willing to die for each other.

Yes, there had been mutinies. And yes, there had been examples made of those officers who would not cooperate. By and large, however, you could almost forget the members of the alliance had been locked in a brutal trench war for the last decade. On the xenos side especially, there was simply no grudge – while they viewed their new comrades with a mixture of amusement and contempt, they had regarded the war as fantastic sport, and had no scores to settle.

For the more bitter human troopers, this was perplexing – it was hard to hate an enemy that didn’t hate you back, after all. And when it became apparent how recklessly enthusiastic the xenos were to die for the cause, they had been stumped altogether. Nestor would have called the aliens’ attitude suicidal, if it wasn’t so carefree: as far as they were concerned, a violent death was just the ultimate culmination of good living, a mindset that the soldiers of the Astra Militarum could only regard with awe. When a platoon of Taktikus’ self-styled ‘kommandos’ had lured an advancing swarm into an abandoned smelting plant and then overloaded its reactor, creating a fireball six miles across, the hives had shaken with human cheering.

While Vatatze had adapted surprisingly well to this new madness, Colonel Phocus had collapsed entirely. Vindicated by the events at Low Digbeth, Nestor had relegated the upstart to logistical command, where he could be lord and master of biscuit crates and promethium barrels. Of course, the man still droned on about the risks of trusting the xenos, but it was increasingly obvious he was just bitter. And with Phocus exiled from the war room, Nestor found his droning easier and easier to ignore.

It was then that Nestor noticed Taktikus playing with the war map. The ork commander – which had awarded itself several more bottlecap medals since the start of the defence – was pushing a model tank around the Dunrust Salient with a sinewy claw, making contemplative engine noises as it went. Nestor sighed.

‘Taktikus, that’s the Nineteenth Cambrian Heavies, and they belong in sector six – could you please put them back?’

Taktikus snapped its gaze from the table with eyes that made Nestor’s scalp prickle, and he found his hand darting towards his sidearm before the beast’s glare softened.

‘Apologies, general,’ it rumbled, putting the tank company back in place. ‘I was… ronternating strategy.’

‘Of course, we all have our habits,’ conceded Nestor. ‘But perhaps you’d like to share your thoughts with me? And it’s “contemplating”, for future reference.’

Taktikus made the growling noise Nestor had come to translate as ‘let’s agree to disagree’, and gestured for a slave creature to bring food. After inspecting the repast – some sort of dreadful, charred bird with feathers still attached – the xenos commander took a great bite from it as if it were a piece of fruit, and raised a finger.

‘Have you considered…’ it said through a grim mouthful, puffing itself up with parade ground pride, ‘…a full charge at the enemy, with everything we’ve got?’

Nestor shut his eyes momentarily, after catching Vatatze stifling a laugh from the corner of his eye. Taktikus had already asked the question four times that day, with subtly different phrasing each time, and it was beginning to test his patience. Regardless, Nestor took the time once more to explain why, in a frantic defence against an enemy that was coming from everywhere, a massed charge wasn’t always the wisest course of action. The brute nodded along, soaking up every word, with its reverence for Imperial tactics that was almost as endearing as it was pathetic. When Nestor finished by gently suggesting a xenos airstrike on the armoured beasts gathering in the hills north of Secundus Hive, however, Taktikus surprised him.

‘A capital idea,’ agreed the alien, nodding sagely. ‘But doomed to fail. Many spitters in those hills, you see.’ With this, Taktikus mimed the action of the enemy’s anti-aircraft batteries, and shook its head sadly.

‘Instead,’ it enthused, snatching up an Imperial bomber wing from an airfield by its elbow, ‘airstrike from Imperial bombers – more boom, general – with ork planes flying low and light to soak up spit.’ Concluding with a sweep of the model over the hills, and a series of explosion noises that it clearly thought sounded dignified, it replaced the bomber delicately, and grinned over the table at Nestor.

Nestor could only smile back, if a little uncertainly. Although it had been expressed with characteristic crudity, the plan was a solid one, revealing a surprising understanding of Imperial assets, and their place in a combined arms operation. At moments like this, when the creature’s walnut of a mind cracked to reveal a kernel of insight, Nestor could almost respect Taktikus. It almost made him feel less of a fool for being the alien’s equal for all those years.

As he voxed through the order to air command, Nestor felt a twinge of sadness. They might yet actually win this war – and if that happened, it would almost be a shame to wipe the xenos from the face of the world.

Nestor was dreaming of the basilica and the laurels again, when the hammering started. Although he knew he was dreaming, he was furious at the interruption, and tried to shout for it to go away. What came out was something between a croak and a murmur, and the vision began to collapse. All of a sudden, the hands bequeathing the laurel were huge and green and calloused, and the laurel itself was a mass of wriggling gut. The banging continued, and Nestor tried to scream, but his lungs were empty.

‘Ugh,’ he gasped as he awoke, bolt upright and drenched in sweat. Rubbing a hand over his itching stubble, he glanced anxiously around the dim red confines of the room, swimming in confusion until his brain caught up. He was at his desk, in his cabin on Thriambos, and it was day twenty-five of the invasion. Or was it day twenty-six?

The hammering came again, and he jerked round to the cabin door as he realised it was urgent, and real.

‘Wuh… Come in,’ he blurted, trying to sound awake, and rubbing his eyes with the coarse fabric of his uniform cuff.

‘It’s locked,’ said Phocus from outside, and Nestor gritted his teeth as he got up to let him in.

‘What do you want?’ he growled as the colonel stepped into the cramped, sweat-stale cabin. It was some small consolation that the younger officer looked every bit as rough as him, with red-rimmed eyes and a week’s worth of straw-coloured beard on his jaw.

‘You’re making a mistake,’ said Phocus.

‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Nestor in a hollow whisper, daring the man to say more.

‘You’ve doomed yourself,’ answered the upstart, and Nestor struggled to reply. After all, he was probably right.

What Nestor had come to think of as the war’s honeymoon period, when the enemy had just been a mass of chitin to be pulverised by the guns of the alliance, was long gone. The civilian evacuation was over, while the Naval blockade had been forced to retreat out-system, leaving the planet entirely encircled. There would be no reinforcements now, even if some miracle transpired in the halls of the Munitorum. Something in the bellies of the tyranid vessels was curdling the warp, trapping Cavernam deep in shadow. From now until the last body dropped, the planet was a cage in which they were locked, with insects swarming between the bars.

‘You know I’m right,’ pleaded Phocus, causing Nestor’s blood to surge in his veins. ‘There’s been no signal from Secundus Hive since the breach last night, and Primaris might last, what – another three days? We’ve only got ammunition left because we’re running out of hands to fire the guns. The Belisarians are gone, general, and the Eighth itself is down to two-thirds strength. How long–’

‘Good riddance to the Belisarians,’ spat Nestor. ‘All they ever did was beg for kit. And of course we’re losing men, you bloody fool – we’re fighting a war. Besides, we have the orks!’

‘General, sir, with all respect, we can’t rely on those… beasts. I’ll admit they’re tough as tank treads, but they’re not our troops. This is a game of numbers, General Pyrrhus, and they have more bodies they can comfortably lose. If the balance tips, and they smell our weakness–’

‘So don’t let the balance tip, colonel. We keep the orks in the teeth of the enemy, and make sure there are Imperial bayonets behind them when we run out of tyranids.’

‘Nestor, please,’ cried Phocus, forgetting his manners, ‘this is… this is a fantasy. This is madness. I tell you as a loyal officer of the Eighth, there’s another way.’

Nestor’s vision throbbed crimson at its edges. Even now, at the height of the battle that his life had led to, this wretch dared to question him. There was no second option – they would fight with the orks, and by the Throne, they would win. It needed to be real. It was the possibility Nestor had staked everything on, and which would see his name last ten thousand years, as the brightest in the line of Pyrrhus, if it came to pass. This war could still be won, and he’d be damned before he let some snivelling career officer drag him from what little rest he could gather to tell him otherwise.

‘Another way?’ roared Nestor, surging forward and pinning Phocus against the doorway. ‘Doom? I thought that’s what you wanted, boy. A noble death in the name of the Emperor? A chance to put on your shiny officer’s cap and go down under a hill of monsters?’

‘I said you’ve doomed yourself, you old fool,’ hissed Phocus between gritted teeth, with a flash of sympathy in his eye that caused Nestor to waver. ‘I’m ready to die in the Emperor’s name, general. We all are. And I’ll be the first to concede that we’d all have died sooner if you hadn’t made parley with that… thing. But events are coming to an end now, sir. And you’ve still got a way out of this. A way that could save billions of lives.’ Nestor squinted in disbelief, his hands falling to his sides as he wondered if he was still dreaming. After a steadying breath, Phocus continued.

‘There are still ships, general. Fast clippers, message carriers, capable of slipping through the net and making it out-system. What we’ve learned in this campaign – the data we’ve gathered, the insights we’ve gleaned on both sets of xenos – could turn the tide when the tyranids hit the rest of the sector. The Golden Eighth won’t make it, sir, but you might… And you could save a hundred worlds.’

‘Colonel Phocus, what exactly are you proposing?’

‘There’s a clipper fuelled and loaded on the east pad, sir. We can have you on board before dawn, with all remaining aircraft scrambled to cover the launch. Leave Cavernam to me, sir – let me die here. I can overload the hive cores, make a quick end for the troops, and put a hole in the tyranid ranks as we go. It’s… all we can hope to do.’

Nestor stood motionless, his mind tumbling. The thought that he could be away from here, out of the stifling heat of the tank and the moronic discourse of the map room, in a matter of hours, was intoxicating. The thought that he could leave this awful world, this awful war, behind. For a brief moment, he wanted it more than he had ever wanted anything.

But then he caught sight of his grandfather, stern face sculpted in gold, in the cornice above the door. Last of the line of Pyrrhus, said the old man, fleeing the battlefield at the darkest hour. Leaving a lesser, more cunning house to raise the flag come dawn. Coward.

‘Intriguing,’ said Nestor, deathly calm. ‘And what if the situation should happen to improve once I am gone, Phocus? What if you beat the tyranids back, and wipe out the last of the xenos? What then? I suppose that would leave me as a lone deserter, a collaborator with xenos, and you…’

‘No!’ yelled Phocus, raising his hands. ‘We can’t win this war! And the xenos, Taktikus, they’re not what you think. General, please – even if we did win–’

Phocus was silenced then, as Nestor smashed his nose sideways with the butt of his laspistol. A second blow caved in his front teeth, and a third to the back of his skull sent him crumpling to his knees. The colonel raised shaking hands, trying to mumble more lies, but Nestor’s boot sent him sprawling into the corridor. He fled, limping like a beaten dog, leaving Nestor drawing ragged breaths and waving his gun like a club. From the bridge at the passageway’s end, Thriambos’ command crew stared on with horror, and Nestor stared back, before closing the door with a shaking hand.

When the rage had subsided enough to allow speech again, Nestor lifted the receiver of his desk’s vox-rig, and dialled it to an encrypted frequency that only he knew. Holding a palm to the side of his face to keep his grandfather’s from view, he listened to the growling static that rose from the endless synaptic chatter of the tyranids, and waited for the other side to pick up. When it did, there was a brief silence, followed by a curious grunt.

‘General,’ said Taktikus, like a host welcoming a guest to dinner, as gunfire rattled in the distance.

‘Taktikus,’ acknowledged Nestor, his voice hoarse. ‘I require your counsel.’ There was another pause, in which he swore he could hear the commander’s leathery skin stretch into a smile of delight.

‘You… honour me,’ said the alien, clearly taken aback. ‘Have you considered… a full charge at the enemy, with everything we’ve got?’ Nestor couldn’t help but let out a bleak laugh at the response, but Taktikus continued unfazed.

‘The Devourer prepares itself to feed, general. It has sent a new creature. A very big monster, with a big, big mind, on the northern plain. It will come here, and eat us up like grots. But with your tanks…’ said Taktikus, with a twinkle of intrigue, ‘we could punch through. Fight our way to the middle of the swarm, before tyranids can adapt. With the iron of Taktikus, the gold of Pyrrhus. We fight through, and make meat of it! Meat to share!’

Nestor had never heard Taktikus manage such a long speech in one go, but every word was like nectar.

‘And what happens if we do, Taktikus?’

‘The swarm dies. We win the planet. We win the war. Together. But it will need… everything. Every tank. All bombers. And in space. Every gun, all the boom. The ork way.’

‘The ork way…’ mused Nestor, his mind racing. If he pulled this off, he would rewrite rules of war that had stood since the Emperor had walked. Maybe he would even spare Taktikus; he would grant him vassalship under the flag of Mystras, and create a fighting force the likes of which had never been seen. Golden light, tinged with green, now rippled at the edge of vision.

‘So be it,’ he breathed, sounds of glory ringing in his ears. ‘Prepare your vehicles, Taktikus, for we charge at dawn.’

Nestor experienced the battle in flashes, as if in the throes of a fever.

He stood at Thriambos’ turret hatch, soot-streaked rain lashing his face, as he signalled the charge. He felt the machine-spirit howl beneath him as the ancient vehicle advanced, the rumble in his bones as the great gates opened. All around him, the dying city sang a hymn of steel, a battle dirge from the throats of a thousand engines. Armour from a dozen worlds advanced, every hull crowded with grim-faced troops, while among them weaved the rattling, smoke-belching vehicles of his ally.

The orks were glorious, in their own way. Even if they were born in mud, as the men liked to mutter, they came into the world without fear, without a moment’s doubt of their right to win. Without any of the drills or the decorum or the endless bloody manuals of the Astra Militarum, they were everything a soldier could hope to be. To fight alongside them was not just an advantage; it was a thrill.

He screamed into the wind as the first chitinous bodies cracked under the treads, shook his fist at a sky that swarmed with horrors. Thriambos was a ship afloat on a terrible sea, a mass of shrieking things that covered the world from horizon to horizon. They scrabbled at the sides and boiled up onto the hull, but he picked them off with his sidearm, cursing them as they fell back into the morass. Spittle flying from his mouth, he beckoned them on with wild taunts.

He saw tank after tank die, ripped open by the claws of abominations or simply pulled down beneath the gibbering waves. Bombers plunged screaming from the sky, drowning the darkness of the plain in holy light as their payloads went up. Their death-flashes rippled across an ocean of teeth; a galaxy of unblinking eyes.

At some time point in the fugue, Vatatze came to him on the tank’s parapet, face etched with worry. She waved her steel arm at the orks massing at the back of the Imperial column, babbling words he could not hear through the thunder of glory. The words did not matter; how could her words weigh anything, against the voice of war?

Dawn came like a sabre, cleaving black clouds to sear the world with golden light. In that first brightness he saw it, distant and dim with haze: a beast like a mountain, moving with the slow threat of a glacier, lowing a challenge deeper than an earthquake. Reckoning he could lock eyes with the thing across the miles, he lifted the blade of his grandfather and slashed down with a shout that echoed in the voices of orks and men alike. As Thriambos surged forward, he stared ahead at the behemoth as if his gaze could sear its hide. There was no need to look back now, no need to glance around like a trench-hole rat trembling at imagined threats. The enemy was ahead of him, Taktikus was at his side, and they were unstoppable.

New stars blazed in the morning sky, erupting from the bellies of dying voidcraft. Fumes pounded in his lungs, and he was deafened by the rapture of war. Trembling officers brought him reports, but he shouted them away, exalting in the moment. He had been bred for this, had dreamed of this, had lived every crippled moment of his life in the shadow of this incandescence. As Thriambos’ main cannon fired again and again into the wall of flesh ahead, he felt as if it were his own will, the will of his line, conjured into fire.

When at last the hide of the beast cracked, when its innards spilled in a steaming avalanche and it boomed its death-cry, it was as if a clap of thunder had gone off in his head. All around him, men screamed in sudden agony, and the world seemed to twist and shriek. Blinding white consumed his vision, followed by deepest black, and he watched the golden hull of the tank streak by in flashes, as if lit by strobe-light, as he fell from its turret. The ground met him with a lung-crumpling thud, and he waited for the swarm to fall on him, but there was only silence.

All around him were the twitching, ruptured bodies of the enemy. And above them, even as vision faded, he fancied he could see it. Descending from the heavens was the laurel itself, offered by the hands of his forebears. His triumph.

Nestor woke on his side, listening to the wind. Opening his eyes to a murky world, he blinked away stinging muck until it came into focus. All around him, convulsing weakly like crushed insects, were the bodies of the tyranids. And moving among them, putting blades through skulls with the methodical rhythm of harvesters, were orks. Some way off, the gore-blackened hull of Thriambos steamed under a clear sky.

Despite the tranquility of the moment, he felt a surge of panic down his spine at the sight of the vehicle. Of course – he had fallen from the hull! He tried to stand, but his arms would not move; they were lashed together behind his back. Filling his lungs to call out, he fell into a coughing fit, which made his eyes water again. When they cleared, Taktikus was kneeling beside him, admiring Nestor’s sabre as he wiped ichor from its blade.

‘General, you’re awake,’ said the creature, in a tone of pleasant surprise.

‘Taktikus…’ croaked Nestor, voice raw from the battle.

‘Are you going to ask me what happened? I thought… you would have guessed.’

‘The tyranids…’

‘All dead now. Or… scattered.’ Taktikus searched for words, but resorted to mime instead, of an exploding head and creatures running to and fro. ‘Big head bang. Sigh… kick, I think you say? Knocked you out, and most of your troops. Not orks though… Thicker heads.’ With that, the xenos tapped a claw to the side of its cinderblock skull, and grinned.

‘And then?’ said Nestor, head pounding as realisation dawned. To his astonishment, Taktikus looked almost sheepish, like a vast child caught red-handed in an act of minor theft.

‘Well, I betrayed you, of course. The charge, with the tanks. It was… you know… a trick. We held back and… we got you.’

There was an awkward silence, and the xenos grumbled, before continuing. ‘You didn’t think…?’

‘No,’ said Nestor, trying to hide the lie. ‘I had… planned the same.’

‘It was an excellont campaign, still.’

‘It was an excellent campaign, yes, Taktikus.’

Another long silence followed. Taktikus looked curiously at Nestor, and Nestor looked at Taktikus, who was no longer the nightmare hobgoblin he had first met in no man’s land, nor the clownish oaf who had played with model tanks in the war room. No, while his betrayer had plenty of each aspect, it was also something else entirely. He supposed that alien might be the right word for it.

‘I suppose the lesson,’ said Taktikus, with a faint glumness, ‘is something about knowing your enemy? Hmm. Reminds me…’

Then the beast issued a string of throaty barks in its own tongue, and Colonel Phocus was dragged from Thriambos’ shadow, led on a rope by a dull-eyed hulk.

‘Now this one,’ said Taktikus, indicating Phocus with a flick of a claw as the man glared at Nestor through a swollen eye, ‘he knows his enemy. He was a sharp one. In fact, I’m going to keep him.’ It was only then, as Nestor figured out what was about to happen, that his heart truly deflated.

‘Colonel Phocus,’ said Taktikus, with an odd air of ceremonial solemnity. ‘Please tell the general the big Imperial rule about negotiating with xenos?’

‘Don’t,’ mumbled Phocus through broken teeth, and spat blood on the ground.

‘Good,’ said the alien, nodding, and handed the man Nestor’s sabre. ‘Now, teach the general his lesson.’

Phocus trudged forwards, under the inquisitive gaze of the ork. Sighing with what he suspected was relief at last, Nestor closed his eyes and waited for the sabre’s kiss.

About the Author

Nate Crowley is a writer and compulsive over-imaginer. He lives in Walsall with his partner and a cat he insists on calling Turkey Boy, where he loves going to the zoo and making good stew. ‘The Enemy of My Enemy’ is Nate’s first story for Black Library, and he has recently impulse-purchased some orks.

An extract from The Beast Arises: Volume 1.

The Chromes were relatively easy to kill, but they came in ferocious numbers.

Eight walls of Imperial Fists boxed one of their primary family groups into a scrub-sided valley east of the blisternest, and reduced them to burned shells and spattered meat.

Smoke rose off the hill of dead. It was a yellowish air-stain composed of atomised organic particulates and the backwash of fyceline smoke. According to the magos biologis sent to assist the undertaking, sustained bolter and las-fire, together with the chronic impact trauma of blade and close-combat weapons, had effectively aerosolised about seven per cent of the enemy’s collective biomass. The yellow smoke, a cloud twenty kilometres wide and sixty long, drained down the valley like a dawn fog.

The magos biologis told Koorland this as if the fact had some practical application. Koorland, second captain of Daylight Wall Company, shrugged. It was a non-fact to him, like someone saying the shape of a pool of spilled blood resembled a map of Arcturus or Great-Uncle Janier’s profile. Koorland had been sent to Throne-forsaken Ardamantua to kill Chromes. He was used to killing things. He was good at it, like all his company brothers and like every brother of the shield-corps. He was also used to the fact that when things were killed in colossal numbers, it left a mess. Sometimes the mess was smoke, sometimes it was liquid, sometimes it was grease, sometimes it was embers. He didn’t need some Terra-spire expert telling him that he and his brothers had pounded the Chromes so hard and so explosively that they had vaporised part of them.

The magos biologis had a retinue of three hundred acolytes and servitors. They were hooded and diligent, and had decorated the hillside with portable detection equipment and analysis engines. Tubes sniffed the air (this, Koorland understood, was how the magos biologis had arrived at his seven per cent revelation). Picting and imaging devices recorded the anatomies of dead and living Chrome specimens alike. Dissections were underway.

‘The Chromes are not a high-factor hostile species,’ the magos told Koorland.

‘Really?’ Koorland replied through his visor speakers, obliged to listen to the report.

‘Not at all,’ the human said, shaking his head, apparently under the impression that Koorland’s obligation was in fact interest. ‘See for yourself,’ he said, gesturing to a half-flayed specimen spread-eagled on a dissection stand. ‘They are armoured, of course, around the head, neck and back, and their forelimbs are well formed into digital blades–’

‘Or “claws” ,’ said Koorland.

‘Just so,’ the magos went on, ‘especially in sub-adult and adult males. They are not harmless, but they are not a naturally aggressive species.’

Koorland thought about that. The Chromes – so called because of the silvery metallic finish of their chitin armour – were xenosbreed, human-sized bugs with long forelimbs and impressive speed. He thought about the eighteen million of them that had swarmed the valley that afternoon, the sea of silver gleaming in the sunlight, the swish of their bladed limbs, the tek-tek-tek noise they made with their mouthparts, like broken cogitators. He thought of the three brothers he’d lost from his wall during the initial overwhelm, the four taken from Hemispheric Wall, the three from Anterior Six Gate Wall.

Go tell them not naturally aggressive.

The Chromes had numbers, vast numbers. The more they had killed, the more there were to kill. Sustained slaughter was the only operational tactic: keep killing them until they were all dead. The rate at which the Imperial Fists had been required to hit them, the duration, the frenzy – no damn wonder they aerosolised seven per cent of their biomass.

‘Chromes have been encountered on sixty-six other worlds in this sector alone,’ said the magos biologis. ‘Twenty-four of those encounters took place during compliance expeditions at the time of the Great Crusade, the rest since. Chromes have been encountered in large numbers, and have often defended themselves. They have never been known to behave with such proactive hostility before.’

The magos thought about this.

‘They remind me of rats,’ he said. ‘Rad-rats. I remember there was a terrible plague of them down in the basements and sub-basements under the archive block of the Biologis Sanctum at Numis. They were destroying valuable specimens and records, but they were not, individually, in any way harmful or dangerous. We sent in environmental purge teams with flame guns and toxin sprays. We began to exterminate them. They swarmed. Fear, I suppose. They came flooding out of the place and we lost three men and a dozen servitors in the deluge. Unstoppable. Like the sub-hive rats, the Chromes have never behaved this way before.’

‘And they won’t again,’ said Koorland, ‘because when we’re finished here they’ll all be dead.’

‘This is just one of a possible nineteen primary family groups,’ said the magos biologis. He paused. Koorland knew that the magos intended to address him by name, but, like so many humans, he found it difficult to differentiate between the giant, transhuman warriors in their yellow armour. He had to rely on rank pins, insignia and the unit markings on shoulderplates, and that information always took a moment to process.

The magos biologis nodded slightly, as if to apologise for the hesitation.

‘–Captain Koorland of the Second Daylight Wall–’

‘I’m second captain of the Daylight Wall Company,’ Koorland corrected.

‘Ah, of course.’

‘Forget about rank, just try to remember us by our wall-names.’

‘Your what?’

Koorland sighed. This man knew more than seemed healthy about xenosbreeds, but he knew nothing about the warriors built to guard against them.

‘Our wall-names,’ he said. ‘When we are inducted, we forget our given names, our pre-breed names. Our brothers bestow upon each of us a name that suits our bearing or character: a wall-name.’

The magos nodded, politely interested.

Koorland gestured to a Space Marine trudging past them.

‘That’s Firefight,’ he said. ‘That brother over there? He’s Dolorous. Him there? Killshot.’

‘I see,’ said the magos biologis. ‘These are earned names, names within the brotherhood.’

Koorland nodded. He knew that, at some point, he’d been told the magos biologis’ name. He hadn’t forgotten because it was complicated, he just hadn’t cared enough about the human to remember it.

‘What is your name, captain?’ the magos asked brightly. ‘Your wall-name?’

‘My name?’ Koorland replied. ‘I am Slaughter.’

Click here to buy The Beast Arises: Volume 1.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Inferno! Volume 1 in Great Britain in 2018.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Leo Lesfargue.

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