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More tales of the Astra Militarum from Black Library

CADIA STANDS
A novel by Justin D Hill

CADIAN HONOUR
A novel by Justin D Hill

HONOURBOUND
A novel by Rachel Harrison

STEEL DAEMON
A novella by Ian St. Martin

SHIELD OF THE EMPEROR
An omnibus edition of the novels Fifteen Hours by Mitchel Scanlon, Death World by Steve Lyons and Rebel Winter by Steve Parker

SHADOWSWORD
A novel by Guy Haley

BANEBLADE
A novel by Guy Haley

YARRICK
An omnibus edition of the novels Imperial Creed, The Pyres of Armageddon, the novella Chains of Golgotha and several short stories by David Annandale

THE MACHARIAN CRUSADE
An omnibus edition of the novels Angels of Fire, Fist of Demetrius and
Fall of Macharius by William King

• GAUNT’S GHOSTS •
By Dan Abnett

THE FOUNDING
An omnibus edition containing books 1–3:
First and Only, Ghostmaker and Necropolis

THE SAINT
An omnibus edition containing books 4–7:
Honour Guard, The Guns of Tanith, Straight Silver and Sabbat Martyr

THE LOST
An omnibus edition containing books 8–11:
Traitor General, His Last Command, The Armour of Contempt
and Only in Death

THE VICTORY

Book 12: BLOOD PACT

Book 13: SALVATION’S REACH

Book 14: THE WARMASTER

Book 15: ANARCH

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

0700

1000

1100

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1300

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1600

1700

1900

2000

2200

2300

0100

0200

0300

0600

Another Dawn

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Cadian Honour’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.

Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

0700

Guardsman Myer was bleeding again.

He had only closed his eyes for a second. Somehow, however, his mind had drifted elsewhere. He came back to his senses with a jolt. The Chimera in which he was travelling was a relic, its suspension shot. It was only through the press of bodies around him that he had not been juddered right out of his seat.

A dark stain spread across his brand new uniform jacket.

‘I told you to keep pressure on that dressing.’ Scornful eyes blazed at the young trooper from the shadow of a cap peak.

‘Yes, sergeant. Sorry, sergeant.’ Myer stiffened his posture. He pressed his hand into the sticky wetness of his right side. Pain lanced through his body. He clenched his teeth to keep a groan from escaping. He took a deep, shuddering breath.

He tried not to think about how much blood he had lost.

He wanted to ask how far they had to go, but that would have looked weak. What was the point in knowing, anyway? They would reach help before Myer died or else they wouldn’t. His fate was in the Emperor’s hands.

The trooper beside him doubled up in another coughing fit. The sergeant, leaning across the narrow space between them, pushed him upright and ordered him to breathe. The trooper complied, sweat drenching his face. A crimson rash extruded tendrils from beneath his stiff blue collar, cradling his chin. Skin flaked from his cheeks. He couldn’t last much longer either. Not if the infection had reached his lungs.

Myer’s instinct was to shrink away from him, but this would have meant leaning closer to one of the others. Of the four other patients jammed into the crew compartment, three were victims of the same blight.

His heart soared hopefully as the Chimera juddered to a reluctant halt. A moment later, the roar of its engine ceased. Silence rushed into Guardsman Myer’s ears. The sergeant unlatched the rear hatch and shouldered it open.

Myer flinched as bright light flooded the gloomy compartment. Having only left Mordian – the world of his birth, the World of Eternal Night – four weeks ago, he was quite unused to sunlight. It had been night when he had clambered aboard the Chimera. Now, blinding rays streamed through the tangled structures of an alien forest.

‘Those who can walk, disembark,’ the sergeant ordered. Myer didn’t think that included him, but he didn’t dare say so. It was easier to try.

His wound flared white-hot again as he levered himself up. He steadied himself with his free hand against the Chimera’s chassis. He saw blurred figures through the blinding light, hurrying to meet him. Just three or four steps, he told himself.

He managed two – two faltering, agonising, hunched-over steps – then tumbled forwards out of the back of the vehicle.

He watched the forest floor rushing up towards him. Then a pair of strong arms caught him. He didn’t know whose arms they were. His hand fell away from the wound between his ribs, letting blood flow freely from it. It no longer mattered. The stale, recycled air of the troop compartment had been replaced by a warm, fresh, floral-scented breeze. He felt his mind drifting from his body again, and this time he was relieved to let it go.

He had made it, he thought. He was at the command post, far from the carnage of battle.

He was finally safe.

1000

Guardsman Myer was going to die.

The news hadn’t sunk in yet, hence his outward reaction to it was suitably measured. He sat to attention, his arms like ramrods by his sides. He felt self-conscious in his flimsy white surgical gown. It rubbed against the knot of stitches and synth-skin holding his side together.

Lieutenant Veimer sat across a cluttered desk from him. ‘Anything to say?’

‘No, sir,’ said Myer. ‘I mean, no, sir, I didn’t. I wouldn’t.’

Veimer didn’t look at him. He was tapping at a data-slate, head down, presenting Myer with a view of his balding crown. He had glanced at the young trooper only once, when inviting him to enter the small room and sit down.

Myer feared he should have insisted on standing. He felt like he had walked into a trap. He had let his defences down, feeling grateful to the man whose surgical skills had saved his life. Veimer wasn’t just a medic, however. He was an officer in the Mordian Iron Guard. He had rescued Myer only to condemn him anew with the flick of a stylus.

‘Name?’ Veimer rumbled.

‘Lucius Myer,’ said Myer, and he reeled off his serial number.

Veimer nodded. The information matched that on his slate. He confirmed Myer’s date of birth and age, which was sixteen. ‘First tour of duty?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘We set up camp in the Dirkr Forest, sir. We were told that an ork ship crashed on Kallash some years ago. A feudal world. The survivors were dealt with by the local militia, but–’

‘I am aware of the mission specs, Guardsman. Tell me what happened last night.’

‘Last night, my squad was clearing a section of the forest. We hadn’t seen a xenos in over two days. We thought they must have fled from this–’

‘Don’t tell me what you thought.’

‘No, sir. They had set an ambush for us. It was Guardsman Steinvorst who saw them. Or heard them or smelled them, I’m not sure which. If he hadn’t… He shouted a warning. Sergeant Ven Coers voxed for assistance, but the orks were already–’

‘Feral orks,’ the lieutenant corrected him.

Myer took a breath. He willed himself to remain composed, dispassionate. ‘They burst out of the trees ahead of us. They were wielding clubs, and a few had axes too. They came at us, howling and slobbering for our blood. We shot some of them – I think two or three of them – down, but the rest…’

‘According to the report, your squad acquitted itself with honour.’

‘Yes, sir. We lost one Guardsman. But we held off the orks – the feral orks – until reinforcements reached us. We purged this world of twenty xenos, at least.’

‘You must have been afraid. A fresh young recruit like you.’

‘Not for a moment, sir,’ insisted Myer.

‘Concerned for your life?’

‘I did my duty,’ he restated, with as much conviction as he could muster.

‘Sustaining a near-fatal wound in the process.’

‘Apparently so, sir.’

Lieutenant Veimer met Myer’s eyes for the first time. The officer’s own eyes were red-rimmed, slightly distended. He was obviously tired, although he showed no other sign of it. ‘Of course, you reported this wound to your sergeant at once?’

‘I was unaware of it, sir. At the time. The xenos swarmed us, clawing, biting, slashing, spitting. I was trying to keep them at bay with my bayonet. I don’t remember feeling the knife blow to my side. It was only later that I discovered the bleeding.’

‘Knife blow?’ Veimer raised a sceptical eyebrow.

‘I assumed so, sir. It looked like a knife wound to me. The blade, or whatever it was, had sliced through my uniform.’

‘And yet, you didn’t start to bleed until later?’

‘Only minutes later,’ said Myer. ‘I didn’t realise how serious it was, to begin with. I thought I could staunch the bleeding myself. I emptied the synth-skin canister in my medi-pack.’

Veimer made more notes on the data-slate. An agonising minute passed before he spoke again. Myer’s side ached and his throat felt dry. He clenched his fists against his hips, his fingernails cutting his palms. He had to keep himself from shaking.

‘I have been a field medicae for almost twenty years,’ said Veimer, finally. ‘I have dealt with numerous troopers – young men, usually – who thought they could escape military service by injuring themselves.’

‘Surely no man of Mordian would ever–?’

Veimer spoke over Myer without raising his voice. ‘The preferred method used to be to shoot oneself in the foot. Since that became a cliché, cases like your own are more common. You were cut by a xenos blade, I don’t doubt it. I have learned to tell the difference, however, between a wound sustained in battle, with the full strength of a feral ork behind it, and one crafted rather more slowly and carefully in the victim’s own tent.’

Myer found he couldn’t speak.

‘My report will state that, in my expert opinion, your wound was self-inflicted,’ the officer pronounced. ‘You will have an opportunity to defend yourself in front of the Commissariat. For your sake, I hope you are more convincing than you have been today. Dismissed.’

Myer pushed himself to his feet. His head swam. For a moment, he thought he might pass out again. He wanted to argue, to shout, to plead, to lodge a desperate appeal against his fate. Such behaviour would have been indecorous, however, inviting only further scorn; anyway, he still had no words.

‘Do you need an orderly to help you back to your bed?’ asked Veimer, without looking up.

‘No. Thank you, sir. I can manage,’ Myer croaked.

The young trooper made his way out of the office, determined to hold himself tall.

Only after the door had closed behind him did Veimer set aside his data-slate and allow himself a disappointed sigh.

As if he weren’t busy enough, he thought. It had never been intended that his understaffed, makeshift facility in the forest should cope with a full-scale plague. How much time had he wasted saving Myer’s life this morning – and for what? So that he could be hauled before a military court and almost certainly convicted and shot?

He had done his duty, he told himself. It was not for him to question. Still, he found his thoughts veering towards a familiar gloomy place. How many young soldiers like Myer had he tended to in his time? How many of them were alive now?

Those who passed through Veimer’s hands were, in many ways, the luckier ones. They had stared death in the face and, one way or another, had survived. He had patched them up and sent them back out to fight. Most, he had never seen or heard of again. How many could have been so lucky a second time?

It might have been better for all concerned had he left Myer to bleed to death.

It would surely have been kinder.

The Dirkr Forest command post squatted in a circular clearing, created by the fire of the Emperor’s holy infantry. The largest of its four prefabricated huts had been pressed into service as a medicae ward. Fourteen beds lined its long walls, each of them occupied. As many patients again lay on the floor on mattresses, squeezed between the beds.

Myer had to walk past all of them. His trembling legs would have made this difficult enough. He was quickly aware, however, that every head in the room – save for those of the very sickest patients – had turned to greet his return. Conversations had abruptly ceased.

They knew. Somehow, every one of them knew. Myer tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed. He kept his chin up. He stared ahead as if blinkered, avoiding their accusing eyes. The walk to his corner bed felt like a five-mile march.

He lowered himself onto it, at last, with relief. He kept his back firmly to the rest of the room. His mind raced, composing the report he intended to write to set the record straight. He had felt so tongue-tied in front of Veimer, and after all, he had just had major surgery. He could do much better, say so much more, in writing.

Mordian officers loved a good report. When they read his report, they would know he couldn’t possibly be guilty of the charges levelled against him.

‘Coward!’

Myer thought – or hoped – he had imagined the voice. It had been kept low, a surreptitious hiss. A spit. The background drone of the command post’s generatorum outside, behind a thin plasteel wall, had almost drowned it out. He couldn’t mistake the spiteful murmur of agreement that rippled along the ward, however.

‘It isn’t true,’ he blurted out, without looking around. ‘I didn’t do it.’

He hugged his pillow, burying his head in it. He was deeply, overwhelmingly tired. His body demanded sleep after its series of ordeals, but his mind was keeping it awake.

The room was gloomy, windows shuttered against Kallash’s harsh daylight. Myer welcomed the darkness. He focused on the steady hum of the generatorum, letting it fill his head. Everything would look better after sleep, he told himself. He would write that report and show everyone how wrong they were about him.

He just needed not to think for a while.

Patterns danced behind his eyelids. He left the ward, with its counterseptic tang, behind him. Instead of going somewhere better, however, he found himself back in the forest. The patterns resolved into the shapes of trees and bushes. Myer was back in his pristine uniform, back with his squad… his old squad, of which he had been a member for so short a time. Back in the darkest moment of his young life.

He knew what was about to happen, but he was helpless to stop it. It was Guardsman Steinvorst – solid, reliable Steinvorst, twice Myer’s age but the colleague to whom he felt closest, the one who had been kindest to him – who shouted the warning.

A jolt of terror, as strong as it had been the first time, shocked him awake.

Myer had cried out – only in the dream, or in reality too? He couldn’t tell. He prayed he hadn’t disgraced himself. He lay still until his breathing slowed to its normal pace. Only then did he dare close his eyes again, but it was no use. As soon as he did, the dreadful image returned: a snarling, savage monster, thundering towards him.

1100

The first time Myer had set eyes upon a xenos, it had been dead.

A distress call had come in from another squad. They had stumbled into a trap – one of the spiked pits of which their foes were so fond – and been surrounded. Sergeant Ven Coers had led her nine Guardsmen through the forest at a run.

Myer had heard gunshots, guttural grunts and screams. He had prayed for the battle to be over before they reached it – and the Emperor had been with him that day, granting his unworthy plea.

Other squads had been closer than theirs. The feral orks had been few, relying on their trap for advantage, and were swiftly outgunned. Ven Coers had prodded a carcass with her toe, nodding with grim satisfaction.

Myer had been on Kallash for only three days, after several weeks spent in the limbo of transit. For three days, he had been seeing threats in every shadow, hearing them on every breeze. The reality was every bit as horrific as he had imagined.

Huge, vicious tusks sprouted from the xenos’ jaw. Oversized ears jutted from a misshapen head, amid haphazard tufts of wiry hair. Its eyes, recessed beneath a prominent brow, were open and, even in death, blazed with barbaric fury. Spikes of bone and metal pierced its ears and squat nose, some hung with tiny rodent skulls. The xenos’ skin had a sickly green tint, and stinking blood trickled from its wounds like plant sap.

It had taken all of Myer’s willpower not to retch.

These creatures were backward, lacking in strategy, no match for the Iron Guard’s massed ranks. So comrades and officers alike had assured him. Scant comfort, he had thought, for those Guardsmen impaled upon their spikes. Guardsmen like him.

‘The Emperor must like you, Guardsman Myer.’

He recalled Ven Coers’ first words to him. Myer had just stepped off a drop-ship, clutching his kitbag. His new squad leader looked him up and down appraisingly, with dark eyes sunk into a shaven granite head. ‘Either that or He thinks you need coddling. Do you need coddling, Guardsman Myer?’

‘No, sergeant, I do not.’

‘You should find these feral orks no challenge, then. It would dignify that rabble to call them enemies. They are but vermin, infesting this forest, requiring us to stamp them out. This mission, Myer, is hardly a mission at all, more like a training session. Your biggest worry on Kallash will be finding ways to keep busy, so that you do not go soft.’

Myer had felt doubtful, but had kept this to himself. He had already picked up a few salient points from briefings and from other troopers’ mutterings. He knew that, by all accounts, the xenos’ numbers were increasing and that nobody really knew why. How could this be, if everything was going so well? How was it, indeed, that the XVII Mordian Regiment had been mired in this alien forest for months?

And why did the sight of a single feral ork, even dead, fill Myer with fear?

It wasn’t that he was a bad soldier.

In some ways, he excelled at it. He had grown up in a military academy. He had mastered the fundamentals of drill by the age of five. His uniform was always crisply pressed, his boots shining like stars. He had done well, if not spectacularly so, in combat exercises and was graded a better-than-average marksman.

His instructors had commended him to the Astra Militarum, as sure as they could be that he would do nothing to shame them.

Had they been able to see into Myer’s heart – past the dutiful, disciplined façade he had developed to avoid their undue attention – they might have thought again.

Myer had liked the routine of the academy. He had liked knowing what was expected of him. Whenever he had looked ahead, however, whenever he had thought about the day of his actual deployment, a sense of dread had gripped him.

He had learned about the horrors that awaited him outside the academy walls. He had seen those horrors, night after night, in vivid dreams. He knew this wasn’t normal. Duty, discipline, courage – these were the qualities for which his world was renowned, which its armed forces exemplified. The Mordian Iron Guard was respected throughout the galaxy, and they counted Lucius Myer among their number.

He only wished he could be like everyone else.

‘Xenos,’ yelled Guardsman Steinvorst. ‘Eleven o’clock!’

Ven Coers reacted immediately: ‘Form up, ready to fire on my command!’

It wasn’t the Mordians’ way to hide from their enemies. They took to the battlefield in bright blue, embroidered dress uniforms, proud to announce their presence. These ten troopers quickly snapped into two rigid lines, five kneeling, five standing behind them, guns trained on the twitching foliage ahead of them.

Myer scanned the trees from the second rank, standing, his palm sweating into his lasgun’s grip. Having not yet seen the threat himself, he hoped his comrade might have been mistaken. He was rudely disappointed. Two days ago, he had seen his first xenos. A dead xenos.

Right now came the moment he had spent his entire life dreading.

The first feral ork burst out of hiding, barely fifty yards from him. The howl that emerged from its throat chilled Myer’s blood as it tore through the clinging overgrowth to reach him. Ven Coers gave the order, and las-beams stabbed into the creature’s muscular green hide. It reacted as if assailed by stinging insects, attempting to swat them away. It stumbled but recovered itself, its advance barely slowed. Myer squeezed his trigger again and again as the xenos relentlessly closed the gap between them.

It toppled, at last, with an indignant splutter as it hit the ground face first. Already, more of its kind – so many more – had followed its impatient lead. A stampede swept towards Myer, a dozen pairs of eyes blazing, slobber dribbling from a dozen pairs of gnarled tusks. Gaping slack-jawed at them, he gave an involuntary step.

‘Back into line, Guardsman,’ his sergeant snapped.

Obedience had been drilled into Myer until it was second nature to him. Otherwise, he would have turned and run by now – and the feral orks, with their powerful leg muscles, would no doubt have run him down.

‘Switch to automatic fire.’ The squad complied with the order, laying down a barrage of sizzling laser light from which even the xenos recoiled. ‘I have called for reinforcements. We only need hold off these vermin a minute or two.’

Through the dazzling curtain, another feral ork crumpled. The others continually ventured forward, however, seeking a gap in the Mordians’ defences. Already, it seemed to Myer that his lasgun’s discharge was weakening. On the full-auto setting, its power pack wouldn’t last long. Two minutes had never crawled by so slowly.

‘Fall back,’ bellowed Ven Coers at last, ‘maintaining formation.’ Her troopers fell back, one step at a time, in unison.

Then one feral ork pushed its way through their faltering las-beams, and suddenly a stone axe whistled through the air between them. Guardsman Hagvitz ducked under a blow that would have severed his neck – and, though his attacker then succumbed to its considerable wounds, the damage was done. The bright blue line was broken.

The next few seconds were a blur to Myer. All he knew was that the feral orks were on top of him, and he fired his lasgun wildly and lashed out with his bayonet, but their putrid green bodies and blood-encrusted blades were everywhere.

He saw Steinvorst going down and, instinctively, leapt at the xenos that had felled him. It flexed its shoulder muscles and swiped him off his feet with insulting ease. Its axe followed Myer to the ground. He threw up the only thing he was holding to block it. The blow’s force jarred the bones in his hands and splintered his lasgun’s stock.

His attacker, distracted by a shot to its back, turned its attention from him. He scrambled away from it, but stumbled over Steinvorst’s body. His fellow trooper’s stomach, he saw, had been slashed open. He was bleeding out, pawing at the air as if for mercy. He was dead, without a doubt, and Myer was about to join him.

Trapped in that hopeless moment, his mind did the only thing it could to spare him.

It woke him up. Again.

Myer didn’t know how long he had slept.

It didn’t feel like long. Food had been placed at his bedside, however – the usual carton of thin gruel, almost tasteless but nutritious – and had cooled. His clothing and weapon had also been returned, laid out across his sheets. Both had been neatly repaired. He inspected his jacket, impressed by some orderly’s work in scrubbing the fabric clean of blood and stitching up the tear.

The ward’s other patients were asleep or unconscious, or ignoring him. The trooper in the next bed sat up, polishing his gleaming boots, although his arms were mottled by the fungal infection and his chest rattled with every laborious breath.

Myer chewed on his unedifying meal and forced himself to swallow it. It was his duty to look after himself, after all. He thought about his crisp blue uniform and what its return represented. Soon – too soon, within a couple of days, perhaps – he would wear it again, most likely to be marched away from this place by a commissar.

He needed to write that report.

But what then, he asked himself? What if he could convince a court of his innocence? So what if they wiped Veimer’s terrible libel from his record? What else would they do then, but return Guardsman Myer to active duty? Send him back out into the alien forest?

The cold food turned to ash on his tongue. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t walk out there and face his nightmares again. Every nerve in his body revolted against the idea.

He would rather face a firing squad.

Myer gave in to his body’s demands and slept again.

His dreams returned him to the aftermath of the battle, this time.

Salvation had come in the form of three more squads, responding to Ven Coers’ call. He had barely been aware of them at first, only knowing that the whine of lasgun fire around him had intensified and that the xenos were scattering.

He had clambered to his feet and, holding his broken weapon together, pumped two feeble shots into a feral ork’s back. It had fallen, like its fellows, likely in spite of his efforts. He had shot it again as it lay twitching.

Myer felt a heady rush of relief. He’d had his first real taste of combat and emerged from it relatively unscathed. A few bruises, no more. His fellows were in good spirits too. They counted fourteen dead xenos, while the only casualty on their side had been the luckless Guardsman Steinvorst. This amounted to a palpable victory.

Minutes later, that sense of relief had drained away. Myer scrabbled in the dirt with an entrenching tool, digging a grave for a friend. It had been Steinvorst this time. Next time, it could be Sergeant Ven Coers or Guardsman Hagvitz or Myer himself.

The only sure thing was that there would be a next time.

Myer felt cold, but he was sweating. He shifted his position, and his hand recoiled from something unexpectedly hard and sharp beside him. Sifting through the undergrowth, he discovered a vicious-looking knife with a blade carved out of yellowing bone, embedded in a half-rotten wooden handle. The blade was stained with old blood. It could only have been knocked out of a feral ork’s hand.

He picked up the knife. Had he been challenged at that moment, he wouldn’t have known what to say. He couldn’t explain – or didn’t want to acknowledge to himself – what was going through his mind. As it happened, his squad mates were too busy digging, and perhaps too wrapped up in their own introspections, to notice him.

Reaching under his bright blue jacket, he slipped the knife into his pocket.

1200

The xenos should have died by now.

Its green hide was pockmarked with livid red burns. One hand had been sheared off, still clutching its stone axe. Belligerence alone kept it on its feet, howling defiance of its Emperor-ordained fate. Sergeant Katryne Ven Coers vowed to put an end to that.

She let out no battle cry as she charged with bayonet levelled. Her jaw was clenched in grim determination. The xenos lashed at her with the stump of its right wrist, perhaps forgetting that its hand and weapon were gone. Thick gobbets of dark, malodorous blood spattered her bright blue uniform.

She thrust her blade between the feral ork’s ribs, up to where the heart of a human opponent would have been. The Emperor only knew how a xenos’ organs were arranged, if it had them at all. All the same, her blow had the desired effect.

The creature’s eyes dimmed and rolled back into its head. Its body struggled on as if it hadn’t got the message. Ven Coers toppled it with a well-placed polished boot. At the same time, she yanked her blade out of its flesh, spraying herself with its blood again.

Silence fell upon that part of the forest.

The Mordians tallied the dead. Eleven feral orks in all, but they had lost three of their own. That might have been acceptable for another regiment, but they ought to have done better and they knew it. They were getting tired.

Even Ven Coers’ muscles ached, though she would never have shown it. Her exertions had left her out of breath. She straightened her back, dabbed feral ork blood from her face with a clean white handkerchief and ordered her squad to form up on her. She berated Guardsman Hagvitz for being the last to respond.

They were nine strong now. A fresh-faced rookie had replaced the late veteran Guardsman Steinvorst. Until Guardsman Myer was fit to return to duty, however, they would remain shorthanded. Had it really been less than a week since the latest recruits from the home world had filled their ranks?

None of them had fallen today, though, and that was what counted.

She grunted a few words of condolence to the other squads. Then she left them to bury their comrades, as she led her own Guardsmen back to their assigned sector.

Ven Coers had come to Kallash a little over four months ago.

Initially, she had expected to be done here within a few weeks.

The feral orks were more numerous, more persistent, than anyone imagined. No matter how many were uprooted from their hiding places in the sprawling forest, how many the Iron Guard crushed, still more of them seemed to sprout up daily like poisonous weeds. They had recolonised whole sectors from which they had been declared eradicated.

At first, this had been merely frustrating.

Ven Coers had responded to two emergency calls today. These, added to the previous evening’s ambush, made three in less than twenty-four hours. She had heard reports of other battles, further afield. The feral orks were gathering into larger mobs, growing bolder by the day – while her own regiment was becoming inexorably depleted.

The fungal infection that had taken hold among them was especially concerning – though, by the Emperor’s grace, it hadn’t yet touched Ven Coers’ squad.

No longer did this assignment feel like a ‘training session’.

‘Assistance required,’ the voice buzzed in Ven Coers’ earpiece, then reeled off a set of coordinates. She calculated that they were over a mile and a half away.

Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have responded to the call; others were closer. She had a feeling, however, that this time she should. She led her Guardsmen off at double-time. Barely had they taken twenty steps than Ven Coers’ instincts were proven correct.

‘This is Sergeant Venig, calling anyone in range of my signal.’ The same voice again, but strained to breaking point. ‘The xenos have a… I don’t know what to call it. Three of my Guardsmen are–’ The next words were lost as the vox-channel was flooded by noise, making Ven Coers wince.

For the next twenty seconds, she could make out very little. Gunshots, a metallic grinding noise that was likely interference and a dreadful keening human scream. An officer’s voice cut over the clamour, demanding an urgent update, but nobody answered.

Ven Coers ordered her squad to halt. They faced her, unable to disguise the hope in their eyes. The message had come in over a command channel, unheard by them. Ven Coers raised a hand to forestall any questions. The short run had left her out of breath again, and speaking would have betrayed her weakness to them. Her lungs felt raw.

Another sergeant soon reported in. ‘We’ve found them. Sergeant Venig’s squad, or what remains of them. Just a few… a few body parts and pulverised pieces of equipment. We cannot yet confirm how many casualties – but we have located no survivors.’

At an officer’s prompting, the sergeant gave his exact location. Ven Coers took out her hand-drawn tactical map of the area and consulted her chrono-compass.

‘Sir… The xenos couldn’t have done this with their usual primitive weapons. It looks like a tank, or something even bigger, ploughed through here. Trees have been uprooted. Fires are still burning in the undergrowth, and there… may not be enough left of our people for a burial. No sign of the xenos themselves, but it’s plain to see which way they went.’

Ven Coers had heard enough. She cleared her throat and relayed the bad news to her squad, who took it with the stoicism required of them. ‘This craven attack, this affront to the Emperor and everything He stands for, will not go unanswered,’ the sergeant swore.

A few minutes later came the order she had fully expected.

Her company and one other – ten platoons, five hundred Guardsmen in all – were to abandon their searches of the forest. They were to converge upon a given set of coordinates, which would be updated as they marched. They were to hunt down the xenos that had slaughtered their fellows, and slaughter them in turn. Most crucially, they were to destroy any weapons that had fallen into feral ork hands.

Sergeant Ven Coers’ squad was already en route.

They knew what was waiting for them. They knew that, in the forthcoming battle, some of them would probably die. Any qualms they may have had about this, they kept to themselves. They had surrendered their fates to the Emperor upon joining the Mordian Iron Guard. They had their duty and they were not afraid.

An explosion shook the ground beneath their feet. It was followed by the cracks of weapons fire and xenos howls from dead ahead of them.

‘Advance and engage the enemy at will!’ Ven Coers yelled.

She didn’t look to see if her squad was behind her. She knew they were. She burst upon this latest battlefield, her lasgun blazing on full-auto. The feral orks were taken by surprise, and two were shot down before they could even react.

A third – a hulking brute with quivering armour plates lashed to its torso by ropes – came charging right at her. She dived and rolled beneath the arc of its crude axe, its stone blade twice the size of Ven Coers’ head. She ended the manoeuvre on one knee, rifle shouldered, and strafed the creature’s sneering face at point-blank range. It bellowed as its right eye bubbled and burst but took another heavy, shuddering step towards her.

Her Guardsmen didn’t let her down.

Three more head shots from behind and her opponent toppled, landing face down in a simmering mass of blood and brain tissue. The remaining xenos – she counted seven of them – were pinned between her newly arrived squad and one other, making them easy prey. They appeared no better armed than any other feral ork she had encountered. The explosion she had heard had probably been a Mordian frag grenade, smoking their enemies out.

She reported her status tersely into her vox-bead, advising that all was in hand. As feral orks roared and thrashed and died in a deadly grid of las-beams, Ven Coers kept one ear tuned to similar reports from other squad leaders.

‘It’s here!’ She recognised the voice of Sergeant Graf, a member of her own platoon. ‘Urgent assistance required. Repeat, urgent assistance required. It’s–’

Another explosion, five times more thunderous than the last one, ripped through the forest. Ven Coers bit her lip. She couldn’t let it distract her from the imminent threat. The feral orks in front of her persevered against all odds, one even reaching a Guardsman from the other squad and dealing her a glancing blow from its massive club. It seemed to take an age before the last of them finally succumbed.

She saw the flashes of more detonations through the trees. She smacked a fresh power pack into her lasgun, adjusted her peaked cap and led her squad forward again.

A cloud of dark smoke rolled in around them. It caught the back of Ven Coers’ throat and made her cough. Fraught chatter filled her ear. Casualty reports were mounting by the second, but more disturbing were the voices that simply fell silent. ‘It’s shrugging off our las-beams,’ one sergeant spluttered, in what turned out to be his last communication. ‘We need heavy ordnance in here.’

‘Prepare to employ grenades,’ Ven Coers cautioned. ‘We may be facing some kind of… armoured vehicle.’ Even as she spoke the words, they sounded false. A simple tank could not have caused the confusion and carnage she had heard.

A feral ork reared up in front of her, suddenly. She hadn’t seen it through the smoke until it was almost too late. Forced onto her back foot, she shot it in the throat, and the creature fell obligingly onto her waiting bayonet. She recoiled from its final, foetid breath as it slid to the ground between her boots.

‘Sergeant,’ spoke up Guardsman Kramer, beside her, ‘do you hear that?’

She tuned out vox-chatter and the dull crumps of further explosions. She became aware of a harsh, mechanical sound, like rusted cogwheels grinding into each other. A familiar sound. It took Ven Coers a long moment to remember where she had recently heard it.

A shadow loomed ahead of her. It seemed to gather smoke about itself. Wreathed in misty tendrils, its shape was impossible to make out. She had the impression of four powerful arms and a squat head perched upon a body many times her height and girth. The forest itself groaned with the creature’s passage; and then its head turned ponderously towards her, a pair of fiery eyes blazing at her through the haze, and the monster let out a malevolent hiss.

‘Fall back!’ yelled Ven Coers to her squad. ‘Fall back!’

She pulled the pin of a frag grenade. She was taking a terrible chance. If it hit the monster at this range and rebounded, the backwash would likely kill her. She threw the grenade, then ran for all she was worth. She heard it burst behind her, and a wave of heat and shrapnel washed over her, the latter mostly clattering off her uniform’s armoured fibres.

Barely a second later came another, louder, hotter blast, its force lifting Ven Coers off her feet and smashing her into the unyielding ground.

She knew it was her duty to pick herself up and run again, but her head was swimming and she had no strength in her arms. She had to report what she had seen to the rest of the companies, warn them, but she found she couldn’t speak. She had to know where her troopers were, if any had been hurt, but she couldn’t even lift her head to see.

One by one, her senses slipped away from her, until all she knew was the staccato throb of an engine grumbling towards her and, somehow making itself heard even over this, the relentless percussive drone of metal grinding against metal.

1300

Guardsman Myer woke with a start again.

The sound of gunshots had invaded his nightmares, but this was nothing unusual. Only when he heard them again did he realise that, this time, the gunshots were real.

They were coming from outside. He pulled himself up into a sitting position with his elbows, grimacing at the pain from his injury. His eyes met those of another patient, across the ward and one bed up from his, who was doing the same.

‘Want to grab your uniform and gun and get out there?’ the trooper sneered at him. He wasn’t much older than Myer, but his eyes were colder, harder.

‘Maybe,’ said Myer. ‘If I’m needed. If I’m able.’

The other trooper snorted his contempt. ‘You hear that, Sergeant Hartman? Suddenly, the coward wants to leap off his deathbed and defend us from the xenos single-handed. Or he’s looking for a chance to run away. Which do you think it is?’

A lethargic figure shifted beneath sheets on a mattress beside the trooper’s bed. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ the figure croaked with an audible effort. ‘They’d have sounded an alarm if it were something serious. This is probably just… probably just another…’

He choked on the words and his neighbour yelled for assistance, but nobody came.

Hartman settled down after a moment or two, having kicked his sheets into a tangled mess. Myer could see his drawn face now, shiny with sweat, hair plastered to his brow. He hadn’t realised there was an NCO in here. He felt guilty, all of a sudden, about occupying a bed. He felt he should offer to swap – but as the sergeant was clearly infected, he knew that would not have been wise.

At least no one was paying attention to him now.

Hartman had been right too. The gunfire had already stopped. Whatever had happened outside, it was over. Still, Myer suppressed a shudder at the thought that the horrors of the forest could reach so close to him, even now, even here.

‘What happened?’ Lieutenant Veimer demanded. ‘Report.’

Just one squad, ten men, had been left behind to keep the command post secure. Their sergeant snapped to attention as the officer bore down upon him.

‘Feral orks, sir.’ Veimer couldn’t recall the sergeant’s name. He had only taken up his post four days ago, one more in a very long line. ‘Just three of them, we think.’

‘You think?’

‘I have Guardsmen checking the perimeter now.’ The sergeant nodded towards the nearby treeline, past a single stationary Chimera. Veimer saw a pair of troopers stabbing at the bushes with bayonets. He also saw three feral ork corpses slumped against the officers’ mess hut. ‘This had none of the hallmarks of a planned attack, sir. I believe the xenos simply stumbled upon this facility and thought they might catch us with our guard down.’

‘Even so,’ Veimer grumbled, ‘someone has been remiss in their duty.’

‘Sir?’

‘Is there not meant to be a ring of iron around us? Explain to me how a single creature – let alone three hulking brutes like these, hardly known for their stealth – could have slipped past our highly trained troopers unnoticed.’

The sergeant couldn’t, of course. ‘That’s why my squad is here, sir.’

Veimer sighed and accepted the point. ‘Be sure to burn those bodies when you’re done,’ he instructed. ‘Downwind of my office, if you please.’

He turned on the spot, surveying his surroundings. His eyes probed the shadows of the forest, half-expecting to find eyes glaring back at him. The command post had no perimeter wall or fence. Its borders were delineated by the parallel walls of its four huts.

To one side, behind the medicae and supply huts, was an almost sheer drop of several hundred yards, a natural defence. Around the three other sides, the alien forest lurked. Veimer shook off the irrational notion that it was closer today than it had been yesterday. Recent reports from the front had given him cause to worry, however.

‘There may be more xenos than we imagined, sergeant. I would not be surprised if there were more attacks. Tell your men to be on the alert.’

The sergeant nodded, stiffly. ‘Naturally, sir.’

Veimer lingered in the cool, fresh air a moment longer. It assuaged his tiredness a little. He couldn’t remember when last he had slept more than an hour without interruption. He had his duty, however. He took a deep, fortifying breath and turned towards the medicae hut.

Its door burst open at that moment and an orderly emerged. ‘Lieutenant Veimer,’ the young Guardsman panted. ‘We’ve been looking for you, sir. We need you.’

The patient was dead.

Veimer had done all he possibly could. He had performed chest compressions for several minutes, kneeling in the centre of a zone of deadly silence. He had even got his subject breathing again, barely and for too short a time.

He drew the patient’s sheets up over his face. He rose to his feet and, in a quiet voice, told the watching orderlies to take the body away. The air of punctured hopes around him was almost tangible. Veimer looked for the dead man’s name on his data-slate. He made a note beside it and archived a file.

‘We’ll hold a service for Sergeant, uh, Hartman outside at sixteen thirty hours,’ he announced.

He made a quick tour of the ward. He checked that Guardsman Myer’s stitches were holding, took his temperature and asked him how he was feeling. ‘Much better, thank you, sir,’ the youth replied, a little too eagerly. ‘Looking forward to returning to active duty. The way I see it, the Emperor has given me a chance to…’

Veimer was no longer listening. He had no interest in Myer beyond his duty of care to him. His only concern was that the infection that had killed Hartman – and with which the majority of his other patients suffered – had spread no further. The evidence so far suggested it wasn’t contagious, but this could change in a heartbeat.

Four other troopers’ symptoms had worsened. The face of one glowered with a prickly rash, while another’s skin had begun to slough. Veimer upped their drug dosages. He amended the file of each patient with a flick of his thumb, and never met their eyes.

He understood so little about their condition. His investigations thus far had uncovered almost nothing. All he could do was treat them with a standard antiviral, antibiotic cocktail and pray for the best. Some patients recovered, especially those whose symptoms were detected early. Others did not.

He had issued a general warning a fortnight ago. He had decreed that no native flora or fauna should be ingested, nor touched without good reason. Drinking water was always to be purified, even when every test pronounced it clean. Troopers were to protect themselves against insect bites. The tide of new infections had not been stemmed in the slightest.

The latest rumour on the ward was that the feral orks themselves were poisonous, and Veimer had no evidence to gainsay this.

‘Sir.’ He chafed at yet another interruption. This one, however, came from Corporal Elherdt, his acting adjutant. She had been monitoring vox communications and wouldn’t have left her post for any trivial reason. Veimer reeled off a few more instructions to his attendant orderlies. He gestured to the corporal to follow him into his office.

This news, he sensed, would not be for general consumption.

‘How many?’ asked Veimer, feeling numb.

‘That is unclear, sir,’ said Corporal Elherdt, ‘but in the hundreds certainly.’

‘Perhaps even higher?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He perched on the edge of his desk, sucking air between his teeth. ‘Hundreds, perhaps a thousand feral orks, headed this way. Along with this… this weapon of theirs, which has killed a hundred Iron Guard already. What do we know about that?’

‘Not a great deal, sir. No one has seen the weapon up close and survived to make a report. Also, with respect, we can’t be sure where the feral orks are headed.’

‘We don’t seem to know much, do we?’

‘Captain Blukher thought it best to put us on alert in case–’

‘In case the xenos horde, having put his company to rout, decides to follow the most-trodden paths through the Dirkr Forest. Paths made by our troopers as they fanned out from this very command post. Paths that will lead them straight back here. To us.’

‘That isn’t quite how the captain phrased it, sir, but essentially, yes.’

Veimer held out a hand. The corporal passed a data-slate to him. He glanced over her record of Blukher’s vox-message. She had already outlined the salient points to him.

‘The captain, of course, appreciates that we have more sick men here than healthy,’ Veimer grumbled, tapping out a brusque reply. ‘We are also guarding the only food and drug reserves on Kallash. I’m sure he intends to make our defence his highest priority.’

Elherdt told him what he already knew, what he had read for himself. ‘He is pulling back as many troops as he can from the front, sir.’

Veimer handed the data-slate back to her. ‘Relay that message to Captain Blukher, corporal. Has there been any news of that supply ship?’

The corporal blinked. If she was surprised by the sudden change of subject, however, she showed no other sign of it.

‘What date did we send the requisition form?’ asked Veimer.

Elherdt checked and told him. ‘The amounts were queried on the twelfth, as we expected they would be, but no further word since then.’

Veimer clicked his tongue. ‘Do they think I’d be asking for more drugs so soon without reason? Do they think we fill out their forms for the fun of it?’

‘I’ll chase them up again, sir.’

‘Do so, and contact the Officio Medicae too. Remind them that we are waiting very patiently for their advice and instructions.’ He doubted it would do much good. The Administratum was a bloated, lumbering bureaucracy, and its medical arm was inefficient even by its dismal standards. Veimer’s dealings with them were a constant source of exasperation to him, as they would have been to any Mordian officer.

What he needed from them was a fully resourced facility, staffed with better-trained physicians than himself. That was what he needed…

Corporal Elherdt saluted, performed a smart about-turn and marched out of the room, closing the door behind her. Lieutenant Veimer sank into his seat, alone and weary.

Hundreds, perhaps a thousand feral orks, headed this way… The approaching army was not his problem, however. His duty was to his patients, and this would still be the case long after this present crisis had passed, this latest battle fought and won or lost.

That was, if he or any of his patients were left alive by then.

1400

Sergeant Ven Coers ran for her life.

Her heartbeat threatened to burst the veins in her neck. The undergrowth tore at her feet as if trying to drag her down. Her every breath hurt. More explosions and cries of horror and pain swamped the vox-net. She had ordered her squad to report in over their channel, but no one had responded. Either they were out of range or they were dead.

Ven Coers should have been dead herself.

She had recovered her senses, sprawled in a prickly bush. She had picked herself up out of it, thorns snagging and tearing her uniform. She had found herself alone. The great engine that had felled her was gone, leaving behind a trail of devastation. It had passed within feet of where she lay, but it mustn’t have seen her.

The smoke had almost cleared, but an acrid smell had clung to Ven Coers’ nostrils. Ashes had crunched beneath her boots. She had come across three humanoid bodies, turned to ash too. She hadn’t been able to identify them, and hadn’t had time to search for more.

Footsteps had scampered through the forest around her. She had heard xenos grunts and, a little more distantly, howls. A terrible truth was beginning to dawn on her. Snatches of vox-chatter, once she had found and reinserted her vox-bead, had confirmed her greatest worry.

For the first time in Ven Coers’ career, the Iron Guard was in retreat.

And she had been stranded alone behind enemy lines.

She was in an uncharted, uncleared sector of the forest.

There could have been pit traps here or any number of natural hazards. A footfall on the wrong spot could mean a sudden, painful death; but Ven Coers could not afford to be cautious. An army – an army and something far worse – lay between her and her allies. The only hope she had was to find a way around them, and quickly.

She had been running for an hour. She really thought she was going to make it.

She could almost have screamed with frustration as fleshy shapes erupted from the foliage around her. Instead, she dropped into a firing stance as half a dozen squigs came bounding and gibbering towards her.

She had encountered these vicious beasts before. They were squat and repulsive, no more than two feet tall, more head than body, a jumbled assemblage of orkoid limbs and facial features. It was unclear if they were the runts of feral ork litters or a life form in their own right. Ven Coers had come to think of them as a distraction, a nuisance at worst – but that was when she’d had a squad around her.

Squigs were, above all other things, tenacious. She shot one down before it reached her, but the others pounced on her in a flurry of teeth and claws.

She drove her bayonet into the eye of one, cracked the skull of another with her handgrip, but she couldn’t shake them off her. It was all she could do to protect her face with her arms. They were tearing her reinforced uniform to shreds, and her flesh would be next.

Her lasgun was prised from her hands. Ven Coers felt for her belt, for a grenade. The last thing she could do was immolate herself and take these foetid aberrations with her, before their touch defiled her further. Her fingers closed around the metal egg.

She heard the blessed cracks and whines of Imperial lasguns.

One by one, the squigs fell away from her, screeching with resentment. Blue-uniformed troopers burst from the trees around her, like the dawn sky banishing the night.

Ven Coers staggered to her feet and kicked the last of her diminutive attackers away from her. The creature rolled, skipped, bounced and landed in a heap. She advanced upon it, ready to throttle it with her gloved hands if she had to. The squig’s jaws parted and it vomited out a stream of thick brown liquid, spattering her chest and stomach. The liquid hissed and bubbled and stank as it ate into what remained of her uniform.

Several las-beams skewered the creature at once – and the Emperor knew what gases its stomach secreted, because it burst like a miniature bomb. Ven Coers threw off her jacket and rubbed it in the undergrowth, trying to scrape off the squig’s acidic bile and its disgusting guts. Too late to save the garment. She stood in her shirtsleeves, holding the tattered symbol of everything she had ever believed in.

Around her, a Mordian squad was ensuring that the squigs were indeed all dead. Ven Coers nodded her gratitude to their sergeant. She felt ashamed of her dishevelled, defeated appearance. She tried to explain, but instead coughed up flecks of blood. She wasn’t sure if the blood was her own or if, worse, she had swallowed some from the bursting squig.

‘Your squad?’ the other sergeant asked.

Ven Coers shook her head.

‘We’re trying to make it back to the command post – captain’s orders – but these vermin have been nipping at our heels the whole way. Can you walk?’

Ven Coers found her voice. ‘I’m not dead yet.’

‘The feral orks have… something. Some kind of–’

‘I know all about it, believe me.’

‘It’s out there somewhere,’ the other sergeant said, ‘running us down one squad at a time. By the time you see it…’ He left the thought unfinished. He turned to his Guardsmen and told them to take three minutes to tend to any wounds they had and adjust their dress.

Ven Coers was secretly glad of the respite. She rummaged her medi-pack out of her field rucksack. She dabbed sterilising fluid on her bruises and scratches. Her right forearm itched, and she feared a squig’s claw might have nicked her there. She rolled up her sleeve.

What she saw made her heart freeze. A red rash mottled her skin. Squatting in its centre was a livid red blood blister. It seemed to glare up at her, balefully, like some evil eye.

It must have been the squig, she told herself and tried to believe it, some side effect of its acid spit. All the same, she checked that nobody was watching her before she sloshed fluid over the blister too, then quickly lowered her shirtsleeve to conceal it.

She tied her jacket around her waist. It might be ruined, but she would be flogged for leaving valuable kit behind, and rightly so. She took a dose of combat stimms from the medi-pack and swallowed it. It would help her focus, steady her still-ragged breathing and refresh her tortured muscles. She had a long and gruelling march ahead of her.

They had been underway – Ven Coers and the new squad to which she had attached herself – for a little under forty-five minutes. They had been harried by several more squigs, but had slain them with creditable ease.

The best news was that the vox-net had quietened down. The withdrawing Iron Guard troopers were outpacing their pursuers. There had been no strained reports of mechanical monsters for some time. The squad leader, Kulm, had even contacted other sergeants, and arranged for their paths to converge.

Their caravan numbered over forty now, and the squigs were keeping a respectful distance from them. They trudged through the forest, beneath a despondent shroud that their proud uniforms and well-drilled formations couldn’t entirely disguise.

For Ven Coers, stimms coursing through her veins like lightning, time seemed to have slowed. She was alert to every sight, every sound, every scent upon the cooling afternoon air. Hence, she was first to hear the engines approaching, the first to call out a warning.

Kulm, as the senior sergeant present, brought the others to a halt and ordered them to ready their weapons. He turned to Ven Coers, worried. ‘If this is the monster…’

‘I’ve heard enough, seen enough, to know that las-beams won’t scratch it.’

‘Any recommendations?’

‘Only that we stay as still and silent as possible and hope it passes us by,’ she answered gravely. ‘Failing that, we scatter and pray to the Emperor for our lives.’

The engines were growing steadily closer, however Ven Coers listened for the sound of grinding metal, but heard nothing. The engines, in fact, sounded reassuringly familiar. She almost smiled. ‘I think the Emperor may have answered our prayers already.’

The solid, reliable shape of a Chimera came grumbling towards them. Through its billowing exhaust smoke, Ven Coers traced the silhouette of a second vehicle.

As both shuddered to a noisy halt, Kulm stood his relieved troopers down. He marched up to salute the tall, rakish figure who emerged from the tank commander’s seat. Ven Coers recognised her own company’s Lieutenant Gunderson. He was still a young man, younger than Ven Coers herself, but well respected.

‘I can take twenty bodies on this trip,’ said the officer in clipped tones, ‘including one experienced gunner, if you have one.’

‘Understood, sir,’ said Kulm, and he set about selecting the Guardsmen to be rescued. Most raised a token protest, of course. Someone else should go in their place, they said. Few of them sounded sincere enough for Ven Coers’ liking. She felt her top lip curling in disdain. Had they been in her charge, there would have been the warp to pay.

Then Kulm turned to her and spoke her name.

She reeled from the words, insulted. ‘No. No, thank you, sergeant, but I feel I would be best-placed out here, helping to guide these men back to–’

‘Sergeant Ven Coers lost her squad, sir,’ Kulm interrupted her, ‘to that feral ork contraption, whatever it is. It knocked her cold.’

‘I feel fine, sir,’ Ven Coers pleaded with the officer. ‘Fit for duty.’

Gunderson frowned. He bent his knees to bring him eye to eye with Ven Coers. She tried to meet his probing gaze but felt her eyes betraying her, twitching. ‘How long ago did you take the stimms, sergeant?’ Gunderson asked her.

‘Not long, sir. Less than an hour.’

‘Let’s get you back to base before they wear off, shall we? And get you kitted out with a new uniform jacket while we’re at it.’

She bowed her head, defeated. She stepped up into the Chimera and perched on the end of a bench. Someone closed the rear hatch behind her with an emphatic clang. Ven Coers was cut off from the rest of the world, cocooned in metal. She snarled at a Guardsman across from her and ordered him to sit up straighter.

She heard Gunderson clambering into the cockpit cabin and, a moment later, the engine started up again. The Chimera juddered forwards, every hull plate straining as it doggedly inched its way around a tight U-turn. Sergeant Ven Coers voxed a final appeal to her squad, but static was the only response. She had failed in her duty, to them and to the Emperor.

Her cheeks burned with shame.

And that damn itch was flaring up again, engulfing her whole arm in prickly heat.

1600

Lieutenant Veimer heard the engines approaching.

He marched out of his office, through the adjacent ward. His patients had heard the racket too. A few made the effort to sit up, but he ignored their questioning glances.

A pair of Chimeras nudged their way between the command post’s huts. They pulled up in the rectangular space that Veimer still thought of as the parade ground, though it hadn’t been used as such in many months. Their hatches clunked open, disgorging two streams of brightly clad passengers.

Another Chimera hauled its bulk across the treeline, joining its fellows. A fourth grumbled to a halt alongside the administration and communications hut. Veimer’s eyes scoured the forest for more, but he was disappointed. As the Mordian troops formed up, he identified the young lieutenant in charge of them and introduced himself.

‘Gunderson, Third Company,’ the officer responded, shaking Veimer’s hand.

‘Are these all the troopers we have?’

‘For now. More are on their way.’

‘Some of them look exhausted.’

‘I prioritised the wounded, those who might not have made the journey under their own steam and were slowing up the rest.’

‘The last thing we need is more patients,’ said Veimer, pointedly. ‘We need able bodies, equipped and ready to fight. We need defenders.’

‘Quite.’ Gunderson drew his fellow officer to one side, almost furtively. ‘The xenos tore through us pretty badly, I’m afraid. They scattered the Third and Fourth Companies to the winds. I’ll send the Chimeras back to find as many as they can, but we don’t have nearly enough of them. Nor as much time as we thought.’

Veimer raised an eyebrow.

‘You haven’t heard the latest reports?’

‘They don’t always reach us here.’

‘You’re aware that a horde of feral orks–’

‘That much, I had heard. I assume they haven’t turned from their path?’

Gunderson shook his head. ‘In fact, they are moving faster than we expected they would. As if they know exactly where they are going. They also appear – impossible as this might seem – to have swelled their ranks in the process.’

‘I was told they numbered in the hundreds,’ said Veimer.

‘At least twelve hundred, and that’s a conservative estimate.’

‘Against how many? Fifteen men stationed here, and what have you brought us? About forty? How many more can we expect? Best-case scenario?’

A brawny sergeant marched up to them, snapped to attention and saluted. She addressed Lieutenant Gunderson: ‘Parade ready for your inspection, sir.’ She couldn’t have looked less ready for inspection herself. She was scratched and bruised, her ruined jacket tied around her waist. Her back was as rigid as a plasteel rod, nevertheless.

‘Thank you, sergeant. We’ll skip the inspection. Have the troops fall out but remain on standby.’ Gunderson turned to Veimer. ‘Where can they rest for an hour or two?’

‘I was forced to repurpose the Guardsmen’s billets,’ Veimer told him. ‘Every bed, every mattress, every inch of floor is taken, thanks to this damn infection. My orderlies and security squad sleep in shifts in the officers’ quarters. We could clear space for twenty or so around the edges of the comms and supply huts.’

‘With your leave, sir,’ the bedraggled sergeant spoke up, ‘we could build a shelter in the lee of the longer structure there.’ She nodded towards the shuttered windows of the medicae hut.

Veimer nodded his assent.

‘See to it, Sergeant Ven Coers,’ Gunderson agreed.

He returned Ven Coers’ crisp salute. Then, turning back to Veimer, he asked where they could talk in private. The best place, since Veimer had been forced to share his quarters, was in his little office at the far end of the medicae hut. He led the way.

The first of the four Chimeras revved its engine. It juddered back and forth like a penned bull, seeking a route between the huts back into the forest.

Sergeant Ven Coers’ voice competed splendidly with the vehicle’s clamour. She was bellowing orders at the regimented ranks of Guardsmen on the parade ground. Few of them would get much rest today, if Veimer was any judge. Any free time they had, they would likely spend polishing their shoes or bulling their belts.

‘Let me be frank with you, Veimer.’

‘By all means, do.’

The officers faced each other across Veimer’s hastily tidied desk. Gunderson swallowed his last drop of amasec and pushed the glass aside. ‘I have been charged with the defence of this command post. Captain Blukher is determined that it should not fall to the xenos. It would be a terrible blow to morale.’

‘However?’

Gunderson took a breath. ‘My initial assessment of our circumstances is not favourable.’

‘On that, we certainly concur.’

‘I have requested, and been granted, reinforcements from the First and Second Companies.’

‘Good to hear,’ said Veimer with caution, suspecting a catch.

‘A force has been despatched and should reach us by twenty-three hundred hours.’

‘I see. And how soon will the feral orks reach us?’

‘According to our most up-to-date projections, allowing for a margin of–’

‘How soon?’ Veimer asked again, impatiently.

‘The horde will almost certainly be upon us by sunset. Nineteen hundred hours.’

He felt his stomach tighten, though the answer had not been unexpected.

‘This post has little in the way of defences,’ observed Gunderson.

‘It was never expected to need them,’ countered Veimer.

‘If only we had stout walls around us…’ Gunderson let the thought trail off. He knew as well as Veimer did that such wishful thinking was futile.

‘Four hours,’ breathed Veimer. ‘Give me your honest assessment, Gunderson. Do we have the resources to hold off that feral ork horde for four hours?’

‘At present,’ the other officer confessed, ‘we do not. By nineteen hundred hours? Perhaps, if the Emperor wills it.’ He paused a moment before asking, ‘Do you have another suggestion?’

‘I think we must consider a withdrawal. Yes, morale will suffer if this facility burns. I suggest it would suffer all the more were all hands to burn with it. We have a fair stock of explosives. We could mine the huts before we leave.’

Gunderson nodded thoughtfully. ‘Let the feral orks take the command post, then raze it to the ground. We could kill a few dozen, at least.’

‘But the rest would pursue us,’ Veimer sighed. ‘Through the forest. At night.’

‘Could your patients make that journey?’

‘On foot? Not a chance. In a vehicle? A few might survive.’

They were silent for a moment, each pondering the obvious conclusion to that line of thought, neither choosing to voice it. A few lives for many, thought Veimer. As an officer, his duty was to make that call. It wasn’t as if he could have saved them, anyway. Not the majority of them. Not for very long.

‘We would also need to act quickly,’ said Gunderson, ‘to keep ahead of the horde. I’d suggest setting out within the hour.’

‘Which doesn’t leave much time for the search and rescue mission.’

Gunderson nodded, gravely. ‘Nor for any of our people who might outpace the xenos to reach this facility before they do. We’d be leaving them behind too.’

Another short, reflective silence followed. Veimer broke it with a sigh. ‘There are too few of us. Our enemies would run us down and slaughter us. That’s assuming we could stave off the forest’s natural predators long enough to give them the chance.’

‘I concur. We stand and fight, then?’

He nodded, relieved that at least the decision was made. It felt like the right decision too – instinctively, not only logically. It was likely that Olius Veimer would die tonight. A small part of him quailed at this prospect, but he fiercely denied it. He had been away from the front lines too long. He had lived a long life compared to most, but a brutal end had always lurked in wait for him. Far better, he felt, to die fighting rather than running.

He must have voiced the thought without meaning to, because Gunderson agreed: ‘That is the most any of us can ask of Him.’

Veimer’s wrist chrono chirruped. He checked the time, pushed back his chair and stood. ‘I have another duty to attend to.’ He straightened his jacket and donned his peaked cap.

Several patients had struggled out of their sickbeds and into their uniforms.

For one, pale and haggard from the infection, the effort had proven too much. As he tried to lace his boots, he was seized by wracking coughs. The youngster, Myer, limped over and offered to help him, but was batted away with contempt. Veimer stepped in. He hauled the Guardsman’s feet back onto his mattress and ordered him to rest.

Eight patients in all preceded Veimer out of the hut. He found himself appraising each of them in turn. If they could walk, perhaps they could also fight.

They followed the sound of entrenching tools striking dirt. Behind the latrines, two orderlies were filling a fresh grave. Gunderson’s new arrivals had got wind of what was happening, and they too gathered around. They removed their caps, clasped their gloved hands, bowed their heads. Their buttons, boots and belt buckles gleamed. Few of them could have known Sergeant Hartman, but they respected a comrade. He would have been proud.

With the burial complete, Lieutenant Veimer said a few words. He recounted the salient details of a career, including campaigns fought in and decorations received. He didn’t refer to his data-slate. He concluded with a brief prayer to the Emperor, expressing the hope and belief that Hartman’s service had earned His approval.

Then the Mordian soldiers stood in silence. Veimer wondered who would pray for them – and him – were they to be slain tonight. Who would be left to bury their bodies?

That was why this ritual was so important, of course. It wasn’t just for Hartman. It could have been anyone, any body, lying three feet down in the dirt. The facts that Veimer had memorised about this particular body, he would forget by dawn. By the time the week was done, if he survived, he would probably forget its name too.

The gathering was on the verge of breaking up when Gunderson cleared his throat and stepped forward. Veimer knew what he was about to say, and felt a fleeting irritation that he hadn’t been consulted first. His fellow officer was right, though. It was time the troops knew what they were facing. They had preparations to make.

‘We have,’ announced Gunderson with classic understatement, ‘a situation.’

1700

Myer stood at the foot of his bed. He felt cold. He felt alone, despite the buzz of urgent conversation around him. The ward seemed hardly to exist. In his mind, he was back in his tent in the forest, locked in his life’s most desperate moment.

A hand clapped him on the shoulder, startling him back to reality. The young trooper from across the ward leered in his face. ‘Look on the bright side, Myer. Chances are you’ll never face the Commissariat now.’

They had both been at the service and at Gunderson’s briefing thereafter, and so wore their uniforms. The other trooper, in fact, seemed perfectly healthy. Whatever malady had brought him here, either he had recovered or he was hiding it well. ‘You get another chance to die with honour. It’s more than you deserve.’

‘That is,’ another man put in from his bed, ‘if you can resist the urge to run.’

‘Try it and I’ll shoot you in the back.’ Myer’s heart sank at the familiar bark, but he made himself turn to face the last person in the world he wanted to see.

Filling the doorway to the hut was the granite form of Sergeant Ven Coers. Myer had spied her outside, but thought he had avoided her gaze. No such luck.

Ven Coers took a menacing step towards him. Her fists clenched at her sides, spasmodically. ‘I heard a nasty rumour about you, Myer,’ she growled, dangerously, ‘but I knew it couldn’t be true. I know no Guardsman of mine would ever dare disgrace his uniform, dare to disgrace me, by–’

‘It isn’t true, sergeant,’ Myer half-shouted in frustration.

‘I see. A big misunderstanding, then?’

‘Yes, sergeant.’

‘I hope so, Myer. I hope so for your sake – because, this afternoon, I led my squad into battle short-handed. Do you know what happened next?’

Myer didn’t know, he hadn’t heard, but a tingling dread crept over him.

‘We lost them, Myer. My squad. Your comrades. Three confirmed dead. Five missing, presumed dead too. An extra gun could have made a difference. Yes, even one wielded by you. Look me in the eye, Myer. Swear to me that eight brave, loyal Mordian soldiers didn’t die today because of your cowardice.’

Myer opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. He was paralysed by Ven Coers’ thunderous glare, as much as by the horror of what he had just learned. He was painfully aware that, once again, all eyes in the ward were upon him.

‘I… I didn’t cut myself, sergeant,’ he managed to stammer, finally.

‘Then Lieutenant Veimer is a liar?’

‘No, sergeant. He… I didn’t cut myself. It’s a misunderstanding, like you said, and I’m sure that, at my trial–’

Ven Coers cut him off. ‘Your trial, Guardsman Myer, already began. You are looking at your judge, your jury and, if given the slightest excuse, your executioner. Officially, you are still unfit for duty. You heard Lieutenant Gunderson, however.’ She raised her voice a fraction to address the whole of the ward. ‘He requests volunteers – any patient, regardless of condition, who feels able – to assist in the defence of this facility.’

A spirited murmur made it clear that there were volunteers aplenty. Ven Coers returned her attention to Myer, who hadn’t spoken up. ‘You look able to me. You can stand and walk and wear that uniform. I’m sure you can hold a lasgun.’

The only thing Myer wanted to do was climb back into bed. He wanted to draw the covers up over his head and blot out everything else. He wanted to sleep, to heal, and to know that he was being protected. Ven Coers had backed him into a corner, however. He took a deep breath and, in a loud, clear voice he said, ‘I wish to volunteer for duty, sergeant.’

The hint of a cruel smile tugged at Ven Coers’ lips.

Another Chimera pulled up outside the command post.

A ragged cheer greeted the ten troopers who emerged from it, blinking in the fading evening light, looking slightly bemused. Sergeant Ven Coers immediately took charge of the new arrivals. Within minutes, they were hard at work alongside the others.

Myer lugged a heavy sack of grain from the supply hut. Most troopers carried two or three at once, but he was wary of reopening his wound. They were wedging sacks together between the huts, binding them with rolls of barbed wire. They were building walls of grain and canvas, as if they could keep out a determined attacker for long.

‘Remember,’ Lieutenant Gunderson encouraged them, breezing across the parade ground, ‘we don’t have to win this battle, only prolong it enough. Reinforcements are coming from the north to give the xenos a nasty surprise. One of these sacks might only gain us a second or two, but that could make all the difference.’

Myer dropped his sack into place atop a growing barricade, and turned to fetch another. He passed Ven Coers and felt dark eyes boring into his back. He half-expected the sergeant’s bark to bring him up short, but it did not. She could have found no fault with Myer’s performance – and why would she? Myer had no fear of hard work.

Troopers were drilling holes through the supply hut’s exterior walls, so they could crouch beneath its tightly shuttered windows and fire out of them. Gunderson stood with a data-slate, fastidiously checking off grenades as they were distributed around the command post’s four structures. A Guardsman, a stranger to Myer, commented loudly behind his back: ‘Don’t let him get his hands on one of these. He’ll pull the pin.’

He ignored the jibe, although it made him burn inside. So, news of his disgrace had spread. He was hardly surprised. In a couple of hours, it wouldn’t matter anyway. He pictured a horde of feral orks tearing through the command post’s flimsy fortifications. He swallowed hard and willed the image away.

Instead, he remembered a tent. A tent shared with two other Guardsmen. One of whom had just died in front of his eyes. The other, Kramer, was alive in the memory, almost certainly dead in the present. Myer felt a pang of guilt over this, but angrily suppressed it. He didn’t subscribe to Ven Coers’ theory that he could have helped, could have saved them. What help had he been to Steinvorst, after all?

He recalled the feel of the xenos knife under his jacket. He had been acutely aware of it, its rough shape pressed against his hip, since he had placed it there.

In the memory, he teased the knife out of his pocket. He turned it over in the dim light of a flickering lumoglobe. He remembered thinking, if only the knife – or another knife like it – had pierced him in the battle. Not a fatal wound, of course, but deep enough. Enough to give him a reason not to fight. An honourable reason.

‘Get a move on!’

Someone nudged him from behind. Myer blinked and focused on the sacks of grain in front of him. There were few left now. It was just as well, he thought darkly, that there would soon be fewer mouths to feed. He bent his knees, picked up a sack and hefted it onto his shoulder. He hesitated for a moment, then stooped and picked up another.

Myer sagged to his knees halfway across the parade ground. The pain between his ribs was even sharper than he remembered, making him gasp. His grain sacks landed with a thud, and one burst open. Other troopers turned to look at him, but only one took a step towards him before thinking better of it.

‘On your feet, Myer. That’s an order!’ Sergeant Ven Coers barged through the desultory ring of onlookers. Her polished boots clicked together under Myer’s nose. Myer tried his best to obey, to lever himself up, but the effort was agony to him. In helpless appeal, he squinted up at Ven Coers’ glowering features.

To his relief, suddenly, Lieutenant Veimer was there. He crouched and tore open Myer’s jacket. The shirt beneath was bloody again. Veimer glanced at the spilled grain around them. ‘What did you think you were doing?’ he demanded.

‘Sorry, sir. I just wanted to help.’

Ven Coers’ nostrils flared. ‘Sir, this is clearly another attempt to–’

Veimer cut him off. ‘He’s bleeding, sergeant.’

‘Of course he is, and how very convenient for him.’

‘A court will make that judgement.’ With a sharp look at Myer, Veimer added, ‘For now, my duty is to a patient in need.’

He clicked his fingers at the two nearest watchers, beckoning them over. Under his direction, they made a seat with their arms and hoisted Myer onto it. He felt ridiculous, like a helpless child.

An orderly rushed up to Veimer with a data-slate. Taking advantage of the officer’s distraction, Ven Coers growled in Myer’s ear: ‘Don’t think for a second this gets you off the hook. When the fighting starts, you will be front and centre with the rest of us. I’ll see to that myself. I’ll prop you up against a sandbag, wrap your hands around a gun and tell you where to point it. I’ll nail your damn feet to the ground if I have to.’

Myer clung to his carriers’ shoulders as they followed Veimer into the medicae hut. The ward seemed as busy as ever. Though most of its occupants had volunteered to help, in the pinch few of them had been capable. It seemed unjust, then, that they greeted his return with scornful sighs and shakes of the head, when at least he had tried.

He was bundled, not gently, onto his old bed. Veimer rolled up Myer’s sodden shirt, tutted to himself and called for a medi-kit. ‘You’ve torn a couple of stitches. Nothing vital. I can have you fixed up in a couple of minutes. In future, I’d advise you to take more care when…’ Myer didn’t hear the rest.

His eyes had closed and his mind had drifted back to the tent.

He could feel the point of the chipped bone blade, poised against his flesh. He had pressed a little harder, let it break the skin, breathing through the pain.

He had welcomed the pain. It had felt like blessed release. At the same time, it felt like all he deserved. Duty, discipline and courage. Guardsman Lucius Myer had lived his life by those values. He was a man of Mordian, after all. More, he was a member of the Mordian Iron Guard, about to betray everything his uniform stood for.

The pain was his punishment, and he had welcomed it gladly.

He had pushed down on the xenos blade, a little bit harder.

1900

Ven Coers was ready.

She lay on her stomach, propped up on her elbows. Her lasgun was braced against her shoulder, a solid, reassuring pressure. Guardsmen stretched across the roof to each side of her. She peered through her sights, down into the circular clearing.

The last light of the day was dying, the surrounding trees fading into shadow. A heavy silence lay upon the Dirkr Forest command post. The generatorum beside the medicae hut was stilled. All four huts were shuttered, all lights within them extinguished.

The scouts in the forest each voxed in every three minutes. They had yet to sight the approaching xenos horde. Perhaps it had changed direction, after all, and would bypass the command post without ever knowing it was there. Perhaps.

Ven Coers hated waiting. The trials of the day had left her sore and tired, and the plasteel surface beneath her was hard and uncomfortable. Once the fighting started, adrenaline would surely see her through. Right now, her body only wanted to sleep.

She didn’t often feel the cold, but the descending night chill made her bones ache deeply. That damn itch had worsened, spreading into her shoulder and neck. She wanted to throw off her new uniform jacket and scrape away the soiled skin beneath.

She tightened her grip on her gun, tightened her jaw too.

Her right hand strayed to a small pouch attached to her belt. Her fingers teased out a bullet-shaped capsule, which she had placed there earlier. She had hoped to save it till later. It would be her third dose of stimms today, and the medicaes warned against taking too much. Her need for the drug was a weakness. She hesitated with the capsule poised over her tongue.

A scout’s voice crackled in Ven Coers’ ear: ‘They’re here.’

She swallowed the capsule and renewed her grip on her lasgun.

The scout gave coordinates for the head of the approaching force. They were almost due east of the command post in its clearing, and barely a mile away.

Lieutenant Gunderson broadcast over all vox-channels. He reminded his troopers of their orders. Ven Coers had heard the speech or variations of it many times before, but still she drank in every word, swelling with pride. ‘Remember,’ said Gunderson, ‘we fight for a higher cause than any individual life. We are fighting for the honour of the Mordian Iron Guard.’

An explosion shattered the darkness, followed by two more in short order. The scouts had, as planned, hurled frag grenades into the feral orks’ midst. The intent was to claim a few early kills, but more to rile the enemy into precipitate action. Where such savage creatures were concerned, this didn’t take much. They were only too predictable.

As the echoes of the blasts died away, Ven Coers heard bestial howls of outrage.

The howls drew closer – slowly, inexorably closer – until at last three figures, too slight to be the enemy, burst across the dark treeline. The Mordian scouts. They raced into a gap between two huts, leaving Ven Coers’ line of sight. She heard troopers scrambling to rebuild a barricade behind them. Her index finger tightened around her trigger.

The waiting was over.

The xenos horde crashed into the clearing, in another explosion of noise. Las-beams lit the night sky in response. A dozen snipers, including Ven Coers, lay on the comms hut roof. Two dozen were stationed atop the neighbouring officers’ mess hut. More barrels protruded through the firing holes in the huts’ walls. A dazzling fusillade greeted the unruly mass, and cut down a dozen of their number in seconds.

It was nowhere near enough. Many more just howled and raged, shrugged off their wounds and kept on coming; and, for each that fell, another ten poured out of the forest behind them. The feral orks formed a solid phalanx of heaving green sinew – which at least meant that Ven Coers didn’t have to aim her weapon. She switched to automatic, loosing off ten beams at a time, confident that almost all would find a mark.

‘Hold the line. Show them that iron does not bend.’

Gunderson’s homilies aside, the first feral orks had reached the huts and were pounding at their walls with stone axes. The comms hut shuddered and creaked beneath Ven Coers’ stomach. She hauled herself forwards on her elbows, pointed her gun down over the edge of the parapet and pumped beams into a xenos’ scalp. She snatched the weapon back as a second xenos took a flying leap at it, trying to grab it from her.

‘Deploy explosives on my mark… Now!’

Frag grenades hurtled over the grain sacks stacked between the huts. They showered upon the clearing like hailstones. They plopped into the writhing green mass and there they burst, a hundred fiery blossoms thrusting their way to the surface. The horde was sapped of much of its momentum as some of its constituents were gloriously torn apart, others burnt or blinded, shrapnel tearing scars across green flesh.

A cluster of small bodies extricated themselves from the melee – squigs, Ven Coers apprehended – and sprang towards the far corner of the officers’ hut. They had noticed the lack of a barricade there, but lacked the wit to suspect an obvious trap.

Two engines roared to life, amid a sudden blaze of floodlights. Ven Coers made out the rounded prows of a pair of Chimeras, straining eagerly forwards. A quartet of heavy bolters chattered fiercely, and the squigs caught in their arc of fire were shredded. The remaining few had no time to appreciate their fortune before a heavy flamer blast cremated them.

The Chimeras shot a second volley into the green-skinned mass. Two more appeared from around the side of the comms hut, turning the bombardment into a deadly crossfire. Some xenos, realising that they couldn’t reach their tormentors, tried to withdraw to the shelter of the trees. They clashed with others still mindlessly trying to join the battle.

‘That’s it. We have them on the ropes. Keep up the pressure!’

The feral orks, even those unhurt as yet, were struggling to keep their footing. Some of the survivors had actually turned on each other, fighting with claws and teeth and knives to escape the areas where flames had taken hold. Many were dragged under, to flounder upon the growing heaps of the dead and the soon to be. Their howls of rage had turned to howls of anguish – and never more so than when the xenos looked to the sky to find it dotted with a second deluge of grenades.

Ven Coers began to choose her targets. She aimed for those not bloodied, still straining forwards, those festooned with crude bone jewellery and wielding the biggest, most brutal-looking weapons because these were likely the leaders. As more explosions ravaged the xenos ranks, as more flames licked at their feet and thick smoke rose to obscure the scene, she fired at the bulkiest, most active shapes she could discern.

Her heart pounded loudly in her ears, its drumbeat spurring her to greater efforts. Adrenaline mixed with the drugs awash in her system to form a heady cocktail. She ached no longer, and couldn’t have slept if she had tried. She exhausted one power pack, then a second; and, though it was impossible to count kills in the confusion, she never once doubted that she was acquitting herself well.

She was never more alive than at moments like these, she reflected. Her life had purpose.

‘Hold your fire.’

The order came as a surprise. Hadn’t they been fighting for only a minute or two? Ven Coers’ second power pack was near-drained, however, telling a different story. The Iron Guard’s weapons fell silent, and the four Chimeras killed their lights. Most of the fires in the clearing had burned themselves out and their smoke was beginning to disperse.

The first cheers were raised from behind the barricades below. More voices soon joined them from across the rooftops. As Ven Coers’ eyes readjusted to the gloom, she looked down upon a mass of steaming, green-skinned carcasses. A few of them, but only a few, were twitching, even struggling to rise.

‘A commendable performance,’ Gunderson voxed in his usual clipped tones. ‘We have repelled the spearhead of the enemy force and shown the rest our strength. We must remain alert, however. The xenos will not lick their wounds for long.’

The Guardsman to Ven Coers’ left snorted. ‘If the rest fall as easily as their fellows did, bring them on now.’

‘Complacency will get us all killed,’ the sergeant snapped at him. She voxed Gunderson over the command channel. ‘Sir, may I ask if the location of the xenos engine is known?’

‘No sightings yet, sergeant.’

‘As you know, sir, I had a close encounter with it earlier today. I recommend we keep a supply of explosives in reserve for if and when–’

‘Already in hand, Sergeant Ven Coers,’ the officer interrupted her.

Ven Coers didn’t argue. She had seen the stockpiles of grenades in the supply hut, however. In her rough estimation, half had been used up already. A show of strength, as Gunderson had said – and she couldn’t deny that an early taste of victory had lifted morale. Dozens, perhaps two hundred, of the feral ork vermin were dead, with not a single Mordian casualty.

From what she had heard, at least six times as many were to come.

The command post was defended by one hundred and thirteen troopers. Most had been found and brought back here by the Chimeras, of which they had four, the whereabouts of the others unknown. A tenacious few had stumbled out of the forest on foot, late in the evening. Still, they were massively outnumbered. Their guns and bombs gave them an advantage over their attackers, but only as long as they lasted; and somewhere out there was that smoke-wreathed mechanical monster, with guns of its own.

A xenos dug its way out from beneath the charnel heap. Its flesh had been roasted and it dragged a mangled foot behind it. If it’d had a weapon, it had lost it. With a howl that was half-pain, half-defiance, it lurched towards the command post’s huddled huts. Had it only been human, Ven Coers might have admired its hopeless courage.

The feral ork crossed the Chimeras’ lines of fire, but they sat and watched it in disdainful silence. At last came the order: ‘Troopers inside the comms hut only, each take a single shot.’ Gunderson was conserving resources. A single shot from each of twelve snipers, however, was more than sufficient. The xenos fell, but crawled an agonising few feet more upon its stomach before it finally, once and for all, expired.

At that same moment, a noise like no other rose from beyond the treeline. It seemed to expand to fill the night: a horrible, discordant, keening wail, almost bypassing Ven Coers’ ears to drill directly into her skull. It was the howling of a thousand xenos voices: a lament for their recently slain and a vow of bloody avengement.

They were letting their enemies know that they were still out there.

2000

‘Assistance over here,’ Lieutenant Veimer demanded.

He was stooped by a patient, halfway along the ward, in a pool of dim yellow light cast by a portable lumoglobe. The patient convulsed on her mattress, moaning with pain. Veimer was trying to hold her still to inject her. ‘Guardsman Myer,’ he prompted, sternly.

‘On my way, sir.’ In fact, Myer was already struggling out of bed. There was no one else available. The orderlies had gone out to fight, alongside every patient who could manage to stand. Every patient other than Myer. He gritted his teeth and clutched his injured side, only partially for show, as he shuffled to answer the summons.

He followed instructions, holding the patient down until Veimer found a vein. He must have administered a sedative, because Myer felt the strength leaving the patient’s body; an instant later, she lapsed into a fitful doze.

It was at this moment that the dreadful howl sounded, outside.

There had been relative silence for some minutes, prior to this. Myer had dared hope, against reason, that the xenos had been driven off for good. Then he had begun to suspect the silence, to miss the comforting cracks and whines of friendly fire. What if there was silence, he had asked himself, because there was nobody left?

He would have given anything to have the silence back now.

He met Veimer’s tired eyes across the slumbering patient. The colour had drained from the officer’s cheeks, making Myer feel even more nervous yet somehow less alone. Or was it just a trick of the yellow light? ‘What do you think it is, sir?’ he asked in a whisper.

Veimer regained his composure, broke eye contact and stood up. ‘If you want to know, Myer, I suggest you try looking outside.’

‘I thought you said…’ Myer’s voice trailed off. He didn’t mean to question his superior. When Sergeant Ven Coers had tried to keep her promise, however – when she had tried to drag Myer outside to fight – Veimer had stood up for him. ‘I will not have a patient in my charge bullied,’ he had said. ‘Guardsman Myer is recovering from a very serious injury. No matter how he may or may not have sustained it.’

‘As you are on your feet,’ Veimer said now, ‘you can help me out with a few other tasks. If you feel up to it?’

‘Whatever I can do to help out, sir.’

‘Between us, we might even keep a few of these people alive until–’

‘Sir!’ Myer hissed. Veimer frowned at him. ‘I heard… I thought I heard…’

The two men stood for a moment, listening. ‘Heard what?’ the officer prompted.

‘It sounded like a growl. A xenos growl. It came from the end of the ward there, close to my bed. Just inside the door.’ The disbelief in Veimer’s expression made Myer doubt himself. But there had been something. There was nothing wrong with his hearing.

The lumoglobe’s pool of light had shrunk around him. Beyond it was a world of shadows, barely kept at bay. And from those shadows came a snuffling, scraping sound.

‘Who’s there?’ demanded Veimer. ‘Is somebody out of bed?’ His only answer was a rasp of laboured breathing and, from one of the mattresses, a very human groan.

Then came a fresh volley of lasgun fire from without, making Myer start. Veimer relaxed. ‘Lack of sleep can play tricks on the senses,’ he mumbled.

‘But, sir–’

‘The doors at each end of this ward are closed,’ said Veimer firmly, ‘and I know I brought no xenos in with me.’ He holstered a pistol, which Myer had not seen him drawing. He wished he had a weapon himself. His lasgun lay upon his bed, atop his uniform. He felt defenceless in his surgical gown. And there was something in the shadows, he knew it.

What if it had snuck in earlier in the day and hidden itself? What if it had somehow gnawed its way into the building, through plasteel, unnoticed amid all the day’s activity?

Veimer was moving away from Myer, taking his light with him. ‘Guardsman Ven Roy has a fractured skull. I need to change his dressing. You can help by… Myer?’

Myer’s eyes had alighted upon another lasgun, belonging to a patient. He took a step towards it, reached for it – and, at that moment, a small creature hurtled out of the darkness, slavering and screeching. It flew at Veimer with claws extended. He sidestepped it with admirable reflexes for a man his age, at the same time swinging the one object he happened to be carrying. The lumoglobe shattered against the creature’s hide. Its light flared violently and died, scarring a yellow after-image into Myer’s retinas.

His fumbling fingers closed around the gun. He snatched it up. He squinted through its sights, but he was blind. Then Veimer’s pistol barked; and, in its muzzle flash, Myer glimpsed a leering, inhuman shape perched on a bed frame, tensed to pounce again.

Veimer was still trying to relocate his attacker. His second shot destroyed a laundry basket, bulging with soiled bedding. It was up to Myer alone.

His years of training took over. He couldn’t shoot for fear of hitting the officer. Instead, he propelled himself across the ward. Another primal, vengeful howl struck up in that same moment; to his surprise, the sound came from his own throat.

He thrust his bayonet into the darkness, letting instinct guide his aim.

The squig cannoned into him, in the process impaling itself. Its sudden weight almost jarred the gun out of his hands. Myer drove the squealing, thrashing creature into the floor. He felt the spray of its frustrated spittle on his face. He gritted his teeth and, with all his strength, he twisted the blade inside it, one way and then the other. Its gargling, choking whines reassured him that he had found a vital organ.

He pumped three las-beams into the squig’s innards, and its struggles ceased at last. He stood over the body for another minute, to be sure. He was out of breath, prickling with cold sweat. He was barely aware of his surroundings – until they were flooded with fresh light.

Lieutenant Veimer had found another lumoglobe. He held it up, surveying the scene. ‘Well done,’ he said, dryly.

The sight of the dead squig at his feet revolted Myer. He inched away from it. His bayonet emerged from its guts with a sucking, squelching sound. The creature’s blood and offal had stained his white gown. He felt elated too, however.

He had faced a xenos – admittedly a small one – and slain it. Best of all, in the heat of the moment, he hadn’t felt afraid. Guardsman Lucius Myer had seen his duty and done it. Or was it what he hadn’t seen that had made all the difference?

In the darkness, the squig had no longer been a monster. It had just been a target. It could as easily have been a practice dummy.

‘I hear you.’ Myer wasn’t sure who Veimer was addressing. Then he saw that the officer was speaking into the vox-bead sewn into his stiff uniform collar.

‘I see. Many casualties?’

Veimer listened for what felt like many seconds, and a deep frown etched itself into his features. Then, quietly, he said, ‘I think that is probably wise.’ His gaze shifted suddenly back to Myer, who realised he had been staring and quickly looked away.

‘Burst any more stitches?’ asked Veimer in a mild tone.

Myer felt his tender side. ‘Not this time, sir.’

‘Then get that stinking carcass out of here, Guardsman. Throw it behind the latrines. We’ll burn it with the others tomorrow.’

Tomorrow…

Outside, the sounds of gunfire continued sporadically. It made Myer realise that his personal victory meant little. He was no more likely than he had been to live through the night. The walls of the medicae hut would not protect him were the feral orks to overrun the command post: the squig had shattered any illusions he might have had about that.

Myer had been trying not to think too hard about tomorrow.

‘Sir,’ he ventured.

Veimer turned back to him, an eyebrow raised.

‘You told Sergeant Ven Coers you wouldn’t let me fight.’

‘I said I wouldn’t force you to fight. There is a difference.’

‘If you need my assistance, sir, I will gladly provide it. If you can spare me, however, I… think I would like to…’

‘Guardsman Myer. I can safely say that, right now, these patients need you outside with a lasgun in your hands more than they need you in here mopping their brows.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Myer. ‘Thank you, sir.’

Veimer finished making notes on his data-slate and looked up.

Guardsman Myer was struggling with his armour-fibred jacket, wincing every time he reached for the sleeve with his right hand.

The officer felt an unexpected wave of sympathy towards him. With a sigh, he strode along the ward to him and offered assistance. Soon enough, Myer stood in his pristine uniform. The very act of donning it appeared to have made him grow taller – but Veimer had felt his shoulders trembling with fear. To him, Myer looked like a boy dressed in a man’s clothing. A boy who hardly knew what horrors awaited him.

Lieutenant Gunderson had first voxed him a second before the squig’s attack. Veimer had tuned out his voice, having other concerns, until after. He had taken a moment to steady his breathing, then answered, ‘I hear you.’

‘Thank the Emperor. I thought we’d lost you too. Listen, Veimer. We just heard from Renvard of the First Company. The troops she is bringing us ran into an ambush.’

‘I see.’ He had almost surprised himself with his calmness. ‘Many casualties?’

‘Not as far as I’m aware. Trouble is, there are signs of more xenos in that sector. Spike pits and the like – and somehow the savages have acquired explosive charges and mined the ground with them. What this means is that–’

Veimer knew full well what it meant.

‘–progress has been slower than expected, especially now that night has fallen. We can’t expect them to reach us before sunrise at the earliest. That’s oh seven hundred hours. We’re on our own until then. I… don’t intend to share this information with the troops.’

Veimer had agreed, ‘I think that is probably wise.’

He had found Guardsman Myer staring at him in pale-faced apprehension, and lied to him because it was his duty to do so.

Now, Myer took a pair of scorched bed sheets – from the pile that Veimer had shot at – and stooped to wrap the squig’s deformed corpse in them. ‘On second thoughts,’ said Veimer, ‘I’ll find someone else to see to that.’ He waved away Myer’s objection. ‘We don’t want you lifting more heavy loads, do we?’

‘I suppose not, sir.’

‘I have better things to do than stitch up your side a third time.’

‘I’ll be careful. As careful as I can be. I’ll prop myself up against a sandbag and just point my lasgun where I’m told to. An extra gun could make the difference, right, sir?’

Veimer nodded. He returned Myer’s crisp salute, then watched as the young Guardsman marched out of the hut, thrusting his chin forwards determinedly. As the door swung shut behind him, the officer reflected that he was unlikely to see Guardsman Lucius Myer again. For once, however, he felt he might remember his name.

Then a patient screamed and, thrashing against imaginary daemons, tumbled out of bed. Snatching up a medi-kit, Veimer rushed to his side. He blotted out the renewed sounds of fighting from beyond the medicae hut’s shutters.

He could only try to blot out the treacherous thought that he was wasting his time, prolonging his charges’ lives for just a few pointless hours longer. Hadn’t it always been that way? he thought bleakly. Tonight was no different to any other night.

He had his duty to do.

2200

There had been no let-up for an hour.

The xenos appeared from the forest, usually a handful at a time but sometimes mustering into larger groups. They charged the command post, slobbering and howling. They fell to the guns of its defenders, but some fell harder than others.

Myer crouched between the officers’ and comms huts, behind a canvas barricade six sacks high. It came up to his neck when he stood, so he kept his head down. His knees and ankles ached and he longed to stretch his legs.

‘Thank the Emperor for these xenos’ stupidity,’ a Guardsman muttered. ‘If they only had the patience to coordinate their runs…’

‘If they did, the Chimeras could take them out twenty at a time.’

The speaker was Myer’s new sergeant; he didn’t know his name. After he had left the medicae hut – as he had willed his leaden legs to carry him across the parade ground and while his nerve held – he had made for the nearest set of stripes. The sergeant had welcomed another pair of hands and, thankfully, had not seemed to know him.

Myer had prised his gun barrel into a gap between sacks. His view along its sights was restricted to a narrow tunnel, stretching to the trees two hundred yards away. Whenever the shape of a xenos appeared in that tunnel, he squeezed his trigger.

It was like being on the academy target range. If he half-closed his eyes, he could almost believe he was back there. Sometimes he took his shot, took several shots, but his target failed to drop. It kept on coming, growing larger and larger until it filled the tunnel, until it was all he could see. Then Myer felt his breath growing short and his heart freezing with a familiar terror.

For the sixth time – or seventh or eighth, he had lost count – a hurtling body slammed into the sacks beside his head. For the sixth or seventh or eighth time, the impact knocked him off balance. A dislodged sack tumbled towards Myer, but was caught in a tangled loop of barbed wire, suspended above him.

‘It has my lasgun!’

The cry went up from the Guardsman to his right. His weapon was being pulled between the sacks, dragging his arm with it. Myer and several others rushed to balance the sides of the unequal struggle. Myer grabbed his comrade’s shoulder, pulling for all he was worth.

The feral ork surrendered its prize, suddenly, and half a dozen men sprawled in the dirt. As they fought to disentangle themselves, a meaty green fist burst through the barricade. Its fingers jerked open and closed, grasping for a victim. Myer’s sergeant leapt forward. With a hate-filled roar, he speared the feral ork’s palm with his bayonet. Myer heard its animal yelp as it snatched its hand away.

The barricade shuddered with two more powerful blows.

Another two xenos had made it across the clearing, and were employing their axes. Two more sacks fell, while several more were slashed open. Grain showered the Mordian defenders. Myer fumbled for his gun as the barricade bulged and threatened to burst. The xenos’ blades sliced through the wire binding it together, strand by inexorable strand.

It was just like the last time – his first time – out in the forest. No longer were the xenos held at a comforting distance. They were here, right here, with only the flimsiest of barriers to keep them from his quailing form. A barrier they were swiftly demolishing.

He was helpless to stop them.

He was distantly aware of his sergeant, calling for urgent assistance.

Myer heard the wheeze of a venerable engine approaching, then the chatter of bolters. ‘Heads down!’ yelled the sergeant, as stray bolts ripped through the grain sacks to whistle past the Mordians’ ears.

The sergeant listened to a vox report and grinned. ‘One down. The others are actually trying to fight the Chimera… One just brought its axe down on the prow and shattered its head.’ A renewed burst of bolter fire followed, then a feral howl, abruptly truncated. ‘Now it’s lost its own head to match… and that’s the third. We’re clear.’

He was already climbing to his feet. Myer followed his lead but ducked when, from beyond the teetering barricade, the bolters sounded again. ‘The Chimera is staying in place,’ the sergeant explained, ‘to cover us while we rebuild. So, let’s get to it.’

Myer spent the next few minutes hefting sacks and tying wire around them, under the sergeant’s direction. He felt the stitches in his side straining, but said nothing. He was careful, however, not to lift too much at once.

Several more times, the Chimera’s bolters flared – and twice, its flamer lit the night for an instant. ‘See, this is what I meant,’ the sergeant grumbled. ‘Heavy weapons against two or three xenos at a time is overkill, but they’re leaving us no choice. They might not be smart enough to know it, but they’re slowly depleting our resources.’

‘So what?’ a Guardsman scoffed. ‘I make it less than half an hour until twenty-three hundred.’

‘That’s when our reinforcements are due, right, sergeant?’ another spoke up.

‘So, who needs to count ammunition?’ the first continued. ‘I say we hit these vermin with everything we have. Kill most of them before the First and Second Companies get here, leave them to do the mopping up.’

The suggestion was met by a general murmur of agreement, but the sergeant said nothing. The barricade was swiftly reassembled – albeit now five sacks high – and Myer retook his position behind it. He had to dig out a new hole for his lasgun.

He heard the sergeant voxing the tank commander. ‘Thank you for your protection, sir. We can take it from here.’ He was sorry to hear the Chimera grumbling away. Its silhouette left his tunnel of vision and he focused on the treeline, waiting for fresh targets to emerge. His heartbeat was slowly returning to normal.

Was it possible? he wondered. Lieutenant Gunderson had promised reinforcements. Myer had been there, at the briefing after Sergeant Hartman’s burial. He hadn’t realised how much time had passed since then – despite each minute of this terrible night seeming to last forever. Was it possible that this nightmare was almost over? Was salvation finally at hand?

He prayed it might be so.

‘Does anyone else hear that?’

The sergeant interrupted Myer’s whispered supplications. For a second, he thought his prayer had been granted already. Was that not an engine he could hear? It was approaching from the east, however, from behind the xenos horde, rather than from the north where the other Iron Guard companies were stationed.

Nor did it sound like any engine he had heard before.

It sounded almost broken. It sounded like rusted metal surfaces grinding together.

‘Lieutenant Gunderson. Sir. I hear it. The…’

Ven Coers stopped herself from saying ‘monster’. ‘The engine, sir. The xenos engine.’

‘Are you positive, sergeant?’

‘As long as I live, I will never forget that grinding sound.’

In contrast, the clearing below had fallen silent, as if the xenos had tired of charging into hails of gunfire. More likely, they had finally found a reason to be patient. They were waiting for the weapon that would ensure their victory.

The stillness was shattered by the Mordian Chimeras. They emerged from their vantage points beside the huts. They took up positions in a row before the command post, defying any enemy to pass. Gunderson was taking Ven Coers’ warning seriously.

The troopers beside her had also sensed something amiss. They had all heard reports of the monster and the many lives claimed by it. They exchanged nervous glances, finding no comfort in each other’s eyes. They inserted fresh power packs into their weapons and steeled themselves; and they too waited.

‘The Emperor be with us,’ someone breathed over an open vox-channel.

Another howl went up from the forest, and the trees at the clearing’s edge trembled. Ven Coers swallowed dryly and wished she had time to take more stimms.

The squigs came first, dozens of them, leaping out of cover – in some cases, literally flying as if scooped up and thrown. Another wave of feral orks came hard on their heels; and for all the hours that the Mordian forces had fought them, for all they had slain, the xenos seemed more numerous than ever and twice as ferocious.

Ven Coers and the rest of the rooftop snipers fired into the pack. With no grenades to support them this time, she knew it would not be enough. The Chimeras were almost overrun; they employed their flamers to keep the horde at bay, and yet some slipped through with blistered flesh and smouldering hair and attempted to wrench open the passenger doors, to get at their enemies inside.

And then, in a flash of deadly fire, the monster was there.

When Ven Coers had glimpsed it in the forest, through a smoke haze, it had seemed impossibly massive. It had grown in her imagination since, and yet still she hadn’t done the thing justice. It was almost as tall as the trees. It towered over the command post’s huddled huts, dwarfing the tiny, fragile figures atop them.

It was mechanical, certainly. It looked as if it had been built from a hundred tanks, haphazardly welded together; and yet, as she had noticed earlier, it was vaguely humanoid too. No, orkoid was the word. Its crudely carved, square head was clearly meant to resemble an ork, with its low brow, jutting tusks and those blazing red eyes that had burned into Ven Coers’ soul once already today.

The Chimeras had been holding back for this moment all night. They made up for their reticence now, spitting out a double broadside of white-hot bolts. At the same time, Gunderson employed the last of the explosives. Most were armour-shattering krak grenades, which made the ground shake as they fractured against their target. Some brave troopers even ventured out from behind their barricades to get a better shot.

Ven Coers’ snipers, too, fired at the monster on full-auto. ‘Forget it,’ she roared at them. ‘You may as well shine flashlights at that thing. Leave it to the artillery. Your targets are the xenos, as always.’

Her gaze couldn’t help but be drawn to the monster, however.

It was visibly reeling from the concerted assault upon it. Great jets of steam burst from its ragged seams, gathering around it. It sounded as if it were hissing in resentment. Still, its grinding advance across the clearing had hardly been slowed.

In place of feet, the monster had thick caterpillar tracks. It juddered over mounds of feral ork corpses, pulverising them beneath its incredible weight. Four jointed, mechanical arms unfolded, each ending in a black mechanical maw. Each of these four muzzles flared in quick succession, pumping out explosive shells in different directions.

To Ven Coers’ horror, one struck a Chimera head-on, with force enough to blast it off the ground and hurl it backwards. It slammed back to earth, its ceramite frame groaning; and when its weapons tried to fire again, they coughed up black smoke instead.

She had no time to worry about it. A second shell cannoned into the hut beneath her, smashing through its outer wall. Flames billowed out of the hole, a few feet below her chin, and more smoke spiralled up towards her.

‘Fall back!’ she yelled, scrambling to stand. ‘Fall back! Get down from here before–’

She never completed the order.

The plasteel roof caved in under Ven Coers’ feet.

2300

‘Fall back! Fall back! Position B!’

Myer didn’t need to hear the order twice.

Crude axes tore through the stacked grain sacks, destroying the work of hours in mere seconds. Feral orks jostled to be first between the huts, which at least slowed them a little. Myer loosed off a full-auto burst in their direction, but didn’t stop to judge its efficacy.

He didn’t have to feel guilty for running when everyone else was running too. Had he not been aware of the cliff edge to the west, he might never have stopped.

The parade ground was criss-crossed with more sacks and wire, swarming with displaced troopers. The administration and communications hut was lost. It was burning, beginning to fold in on itself. An hour earlier, he had envied the snipers stationed in there, protected by a solid wall. He wondered how many had made it out.

The sky behind the hut was filled with smoke. He thought he saw a shape shifting inside it, but averted his gaze. Whatever had torn through the Iron Guard’s defences, he hadn’t seen it yet and was fairly sure he wanted to keep it that way.

Perhaps two dozen xenos and numerous nauseating squigs had invaded the parade ground. Some Mordians rallied against them, with bayonet charges. These brave souls, invariably, were hacked down, but they bought their fellows time.

A moment ago, everything had been confusion, so it had seemed to Myer. He realised now that, while he had lain in bed, preparations had been made for this contingency. His fellows were disappearing behind fresh canvas barricades. They pushed the barrels of their guns between the sacks and fired upon their attackers anew.

The Iron Guard’s defensive line had been comprehensively broken, but they had swiftly drawn a new one. A shorter line, for sure, and one that left two huts exposed. The officers’ quarters were burning now too, undergoing a swift evacuation.

With a start, Myer realised that he didn’t know where he was meant to be.

‘Where’s Position B?’ he yelled at a pair of Guardsmen he thought he recognised. They didn’t seem to hear him. He sprinted after them regardless, and hunkered down with them beside the silent generatorum.

Four troopers had hauled themselves up onto the metal cylinder. Myer stayed below, squeezing himself behind a still-warm steam pipe that emerged from the cylinder’s flat end and plunged into the ground. He looked for a target and started firing.

For a second, Ven Coers was in free fall.

Then she landed, with a bone-jarring impact, in the clearing.

Immediately, she dropped to one knee and snapped up her lasgun. Flames seared her back from the comms hut behind her. Had she not pushed herself away from its collapsing roof when she did, she would have been dragged into that inferno.

The position she had landed in, however, was hardly safer. Nothing stood between her and the xenos hordes. Her only protection was the smoke that billowed around her, concealing her from them. And the mechanical monster was out there, mere yards away from her. She could hear its mechanical grinding, louder than ever.

A shape erupted from the haze. She was almost relieved that it was just a feral ork. Five las-beams, not all of them her own, struck the creature as it charged her. It managed to reach Ven Coers, but its knife slipped from its hand and it collapsed against her, dead.

Another two former roof snipers found their way to her. One was limping, presumably injured in the jump. She communicated to them with urgent gestures. Maintaining a defensive formation – each facing a different way – they inched along the front of the burning hut, as close to the flames as they could bear. The howls of the xenos, their timbre now triumphant, filled their ears between the blasts of powerful weapons. Any of those shells, falling a fraction closer, could have wiped them out before they even knew it.

Ven Coers made out the silhouette of a Chimera, still pumping out lethal bolts. The sight of it gladdened her heart, but being this close to it was perilous. She found the gap between the comms and officers’ huts – rather, between the burning shells of both – and whispered her gratitude to the Emperor as she plunged into it.

The barricade here had been destroyed, as she had expected. She signalled her Guardsmen to advance with caution. Feral orks had been this way; therefore, the three Mordians were coming up behind them. If more of the creatures came up behind them in turn, they would be trapped. What choice did they have, though?

Barbed wire snagged on Ven Coers’ uniform trousers. She trod on sundered grain sacks – and, reassuringly, on several xenos corpses. Sifting through vox-chatter – the vox-caster had been saved from the flames, at least, as had Lieutenant Gunderson – she tried to build up a picture of what awaited her at the passageway’s end.

A desperate battle raged between the huts. The feral orks, stranded in the open while their enemies crouched behind their barricades, were already losing. Ven Coers and the others were still glad to lend their guns to the effort.

One by one, the xenos were cut down by a lethal crossfire. A few, becoming aware of the new arrivals behind them, rounded on them but never had a chance to reach them. One badly wounded, dying feral ork hurled its axe as a last resort. Ven Coers barely managed to duck under it as it came spinning past her head.

As soon as she saw an opening, and mindful of the continuing battle behind her, she led her team forward, warning them to keep their heads down. Apart from anything else, coming from the direction they were and out of the smoke, there was a risk of friendly fire. She looked for an unmanned position behind a barricade.

There came a monumental crash from behind her. She whirled to see a Chimera smashing through the remains of the comms hut. It was sliding on its side, with a tortured screech that set her teeth on edge. She threw up both hands to protect her face from splinters.

The vehicle ploughed through a row of sacks, scattering the troopers behind them. It came to rest at last, a creaking ruin, its underside facing Ven Coers. Had there been any hope of saving either the vehicle or its crew, it was swiftly, cruelly dashed. Flames erupted from the Chimera’s engine housing and out of its turret.

Ven Coers’ attention had already been dragged elsewhere.

A familiar sound, a nightmare sound that made her spine tingle, crept up on her – and she knew only too well what was coming in the destroyed Chimera’s wake.

All that remained of the comms hut now was a skeleton, crumbling to ashes. The massive xenos engine rolled through it as if it were nothing. High up in the sky, its huge head jerked from side to side. Its scarlet gaze swept over the parade ground, which was strewn with burning canvas sacks. It took in the command post’s remaining huts beyond this, and the tiny blue figures racing and leaping for cover.

Ven Coers heard the solid, heavy clunks of the monster’s guns cycling.

‘Fire! Keep firing! Throw everything you have at that abomination!’

Myer screwed his eyes shut and obeyed.

It wasn’t as if he could miss a target so large, at so short a range. It wasn’t as if his beams were likely to cause it even the slightest harm. It was just that the Mordian Iron Guard had nothing else left. Even Gunderson’s voice began to crack as he yelled over the general vox-channel: ‘Don’t give it a second to fire its weapons again.’

Myer expected death to strike him at any moment. On some level, he would almost have been glad of it. He had no wish to see his fate coming, however.

‘We’re going to try breaking into that thing. Are you with us?’

He opened his eyes in surprise. He met the questioning gaze of the Guardsman beside him, but didn’t know what to say. He looked past her instead. The xenos engine still loomed over them, as he had known from its terrible racket. Looking directly at it for the first time, he realised that its metal hide was beaten and scorched. He wondered if its movements had always been so clumsy and spasmodic. One of its gun arms was a smouldering stump, while another coughed and sparked uselessly. So, it wasn’t invincible, after all.

Myer noticed another detail too: a hatch in the monster’s side, close to ground level. ‘It’s a vehicle,’ he breathed. ‘An armoured vehicle. There are xenos inside it…’

And suddenly, his comrades’ plan made dreadful sense. If they could reach that hatch and prise it open… If they could take the fight inside the mechanical monster, to the flesh-and-blood creatures that steered it and aimed and fired its weapons…

It was a suicide mission.

‘I… I…’ he stammered. His two fellow Guardsmen were already starting forward. At that moment, however, with a sweep of an undamaged arm and a smug hiss of escaping steam, the monster threw up a curtain of flames between them, forcing them back.

Myer didn’t know whether to feel dismayed or relieved.

Then, emerging from the smoke behind the monster – through the burning huts – came the squat shape of the Iron Guard’s final Chimera. Vox-chatter had suggested that it had been disabled like the others; nor had this been far wrong.

The vehicle looked in even worse shape than the monster, as if it could fall apart at any moment. Its engine whined and spluttered. Three feral orks clung to its back. They had torn its heavy flamer from its mounting and were hammering dents into its armoured hull.

It remained the most glorious sight of Myer’s young life.

Bolters strafed the xenos engine’s back. It jerked and thrashed and sparked and stumbled. Only one of its four gun arms could reach behind it, and this was one of the defunct ones. Its cumbersome size became a disadvantage to it as it struggled to round upon its attacker. It fired an explosive shell at a barricade ahead of it, attempting to clear itself a path. Another ten blue troopers ran for cover, but the monster – or rather, the creatures inside it, controlling it – had more immediate concerns.

Reeling beneath the Chimera’s vicious onslaught, churning up soil as it fought to regain some purchase, the monster jerked in fits and starts across the clearing. ‘That’s it!’ roared Gunderson’s voice in Myer’s ear. ‘Just a few yards further, and drive it over the cliff edge!’

Its pilot saw the sheer drop awaiting it in time. The monster ground and hissed to a tentative halt, poised on the brink. Myer worked his trigger finger with gusto, aiming beams at the monster’s massive head. Even if all they did was confuse and blind its crew, there was a chance it might just help.

The monster completed its turn and steadied itself. It snapped up its two working guns, fire flaring in their muzzles. The Chimera, swamped by the monster’s huge, black shadow, looked very small indeed – until it roared like a Catachan Devil and surged forwards.

Its prow smacked into the xenos engine and crumpled. Its tracks continued to spin, its engine screaming in defiance. Myer gaped at the scene, too breathless even to pray. The small vehicle strained against the monster for a seeming eternity, the sound of grinding, rusted metal rising to a cacophonous pitch.

Then the xenos engine disappeared over the edge.

The Chimera, unable to stop itself, followed it over, the clinging feral orks leaping from it too late to save themselves. There were few cheers from the Mordian defenders this time; most of them reacted with stunned and exhausted silence. It felt as if everyone present were holding their breath, until they saw smoke rising from beyond the cliff; and only then did the silence diffuse into a collective sigh of abject relief.

‘Well done!’ Gunderson enthused, from wherever he was currently stationed. ‘We have won a spectacular victory today. We have made the home world proud.’ Myer felt proud too, of his own tiny part in the battle. It was a new and very welcome feeling for him – and it was crushed, a moment later, by the officer’s next words:

‘We ought to have no trouble now, keeping this up until dawn.’

0100

Veimer stood in the darkness of the medicae hut.

He listened to the wheezing breaths of soldiers sleeping and dying around him. He listened to the bestial howls outside and the answering cracks of las-fire.

He pondered on how much closer those sounds seemed than they had before.

The doors at the end of the hut burst open. Sergeant – what was her name? – Ven Coers marched in. She saw the waiting officer and threw up a salute.

‘Your pardon, sir. I have orders to–’

‘I am aware of your orders,’ Veimer interrupted her, quietly.

Ven Coers’ eyes twitched. Her nostrils flared as she breathed. She was clearly on stimms; but then, so were two of the four Guardsmen behind her. Veimer might have taken a dose himself, to ease his tiredness, had he been less aware of the side effects.

‘I have sixteen patients in here,’ he said. ‘Two, maybe three, should be able to walk with assistance. We’ll take them out first, and the rest in order of how likely they are to survive the journey.’ It was a cold but necessary calculation.

Ven Coers detailed two men to guard the doors.

Veimer frowned. ‘Is that necessary? Is the enemy really so close?’

‘In my opinion, sir. They’re bearing down hard on our northern flank.’

He wondered if he had made a mistake. Gunderson had wanted to sacrifice the medicae hut almost an hour ago. ‘We’re stretched too thinly,’ he had insisted. ‘Taken too many casualties, with too few resources remaining. Something has to give.’

Had Veimer only been resisting the inevitable?

He shook a groaning patient awake and tried to get him on his feet. The patient had some strength left, but was delirious. He kept reaching for his folded uniform and asking where the fight was. A young Guardsman hurried to answer Veimer’s call for assistance. They draped the patient’s arms about their shoulders and lifted him between them.

They walked him steadily along the ward, into Veimer’s office. A side door there let out at the edge of the cliff. It had never been used – he’d had to clear a stack of chairs from in front of it – but it was the most direct route to their destination.

The young Guardsman stumbled on the steps outside, the patient almost slipping out of his grasp. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s been a long night.’

‘For us all,’ sighed Veimer. ‘All the same, be more careful in future…’ A moon slid out from behind cloud cover at that moment, and he looked at the youngster’s face for the first time and was surprised to recognise him. ‘…Guardsman Myer.’

A fire blazed behind the supply hut, at the cliff edge.

A Guardsman was feeding spent power packs into it. It was the least efficient, most dangerous way of recharging them – something Myer had been taught not to do in any circumstances – but also the fastest and the only way available at present.

Myer felt he had passed beyond tiredness.

For a short time following the xenos engine’s destruction, the Iron Guard’s morale had been buoyed. So, who cared if their reinforcements were delayed; who needed them, anyway? The xenos’ attacks had continued unabated, but they had felt desultory and been repulsed with relative ease. Victory had been theirs for the taking.

Now, as the night crawled past its midpoint – its darkest hour – the xenos were growing in numbers and confidence again. Maybe they had never truly lost either. The spirits of the command post’s defenders, in contrast, were slowly deflating.

Myer and Veimer hauled their semi-conscious charge towards the supply hut.

They passed behind a barricade, manned by a dozen troopers. From the sound of full-auto discharges and a sergeant’s bellowing and cursing, they were clearly under pressure. Myer wasn’t sorry to be away from the battle’s front lines. He only rued the fact that he was once again under Sergeant Ven Coers’ supervision.

Ven Coers came up behind him now, a patient slung across her shoulders, handling the squirming weight with ease. ‘Pick up your feet, Myer,’ she growled, although Myer was keeping pace with Veimer. ‘Lives are depending on you – God-Emperor help them.’

They deposited both patients in one corner of a picked-clean storeroom. One had passed out, while the other curled up on the hard floor, gasping for breath.

‘We’ll grab some sheets on our next run,’ Veimer grunted. ‘I doubt we’ll have time to fetch pillows or mattresses for them.’ He turned and followed Ven Coers out of the hut.

Myer cast a glance back at the wheezing patient. Unlike most others, he didn’t have the mysterious infection. He had been brought in late that afternoon, with crushed ribs from a glancing axe blow. He would have recovered, given time. He still could, if moving him hadn’t caused a broken bone to puncture his lungs. If the xenos didn’t kill him.

It could have been Myer…

Had the feral orks attacked just one night earlier, he could have been the one lying in the dust, helpless, waiting to die. He shuddered at the thought.

Myer helped to transfer two more patients to the supply hut.

As he and Veimer returned to the ward for another, the sound of las-fire greeted them. In a series of staccato flashes, Myer saw the sentries at the doors fighting off a belligerent, club-wielding feral ork. One of the Guardsmen planted a foot in its stomach and managed to send it sprawling. As he did so, a pair of squigs forced their way past him.

They scampered towards the new arrivals. Myer drew his gun, but Veimer beat him to the trigger. He slew both creatures with two precise shots from his pistol.

The sentries slammed the main doors shut and bolted them. ‘They’ve broken through our northern perimeter, sir,’ one explained to the officer, breathlessly. ‘They–’ He broke off as something slammed into the doors from outside, making the whole hut tremble.

Veimer motioned towards two empty beds. ‘Give us as much time as you can.’ The Guardsmen nodded and set about pushing the heavy beds up to the doors.

Veimer snatched up a lumoglobe and held it above his head. He turned on the spot, surveying the beds and mattresses around him. Some patients were stirring as the feral orks hammered at the doors again and again. Others, unmoving lumps beneath their sheets, might as well have been dead already. It was up to Veimer to choose which ones to save and which to abandon. Myer didn’t envy him that impossible decision.

The officer chose a gaunt-looking older patient, who was gamely trying to haul himself upright. As Myer attempted to lift him, however, the man pushed him away. ‘Don’t… waste your effort,’ he gasped. ‘I won’t see another sunrise. All I want now is… to die fighting. Let me… die…’

Myer looked across the bed at Veimer, helplessly.

A shadow passed across the officer’s eyes. Then he nodded, grimly. ‘You heard the man, Myer. Prop him up and find him a weapon.’ To the patient, he added in a kinder tone, ‘May the Emperor be with you.’

Myer located the patient’s lasgun and did as was bade. He placed it in the man’s hands, which closed around it with surprising strength.

From across the ward, two more cracked voices called for their weapons too. Veimer attended to one, leaving the other to Myer. This patient’s eyelids were already fluttering and his gun slipped through his fingers, bouncing off the floor. Myer settled for laying it on the mattress alongside him.

Ven Coers and the final Guardsman returned at that moment. Framed in the office doorway, the sergeant demanded, ‘What in the Emperor’s name is–?’ The rest was drowned out by a shriek of tortured metal, as the main doors of the hut were rent from their hinges. Muscular green arms forced their way through the gaps, pushing heavy beds aside.

‘Fire at will!’ Ven Coers bellowed. ‘Don’t let those vermin get past you.’

‘Belay that,’ Veimer snapped. ‘We have done all we can here. Let the xenos have this building, for all the good it might do them. Fall back! Fall back! Get out of here!’

Ven Coers looked as if she might argue. Instead, she ushered the rest of the troopers past her, through Veimer’s office, out of the back of the hut.

Myer was the last of them. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Veimer opening a bottle of amasec and emptying it over his desk. Then he dashed his lumoglobe into the desktop. It shattered, starting a small fire, which spread hungrily. The desk was quickly engulfed, and the office – along with the rest of the hut – would no doubt follow.

Myer was horrified, thinking of the patients who would burn in their beds.

Then he heard a tremendous crash, louder than the others, from out in the ward; and, following hard upon this, triumphant xenos howls. He vaulted the steps out into the night, Ven Coers and Veimer behind him. He hit the ground running but faltered after a few strides, turning back. From inside the hut, he heard the familiar sound of las-fire, swiftly silenced.

He had been wrong. He knew now, with dreadful certainty, that the fire would take no Mordian life. Veimer had seen this – to be more precise, he had accepted it – before Myer had. He had done what he had to do.

The feral orks would have their victory, claim a few kills, but they would get no further. Smoke was already seeping around the edges of the hut’s closed shutters. They would be unable to follow their prey through the inferno. They would have to turn back – or better yet, thought Myer, clenching his fists as a powerful anger rose in him, die trying.

A strong hand clapped him on his shoulder. Myer knew before he turned that he would find Ven Coers behind him. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed,’ the sergeant sneered, ‘the rest of your company are fighting a war here, while you stand staring into space.’

‘I know that, sergeant.’ Unexpectedly, Myer’s anger bubbled up and spilled out of him. ‘I’ve been fighting all night, the same as you have. I’ve drained every power pack I had and then some. I don’t know how many xenos I’ve killed, I’ve lost count, but I’ll happily kill another hundred or a thousand or more if I can.’

He hefted his lasgun to underscore his point. As his right hand closed about its stock, something felt wrong. The gun felt sticky. Myer looked at his palm. It was red. He looked down at his side. He already knew what he would see – he could already feel the biting pain between his ribs – and his anger drained away as he filled up with dismay instead.

He was bleeding again.

0200

The medicae hut was well and truly ablaze.

A chill western breeze blew smoke and ashes across the former parade ground, filling the forest clearing. This was good news for the Mordians, as it left the xenos groping and choking in the dark. It eased the pressure on them as they rebuilt their barricades and regrouped around the command post’s sole remaining structure: its former supply hut.

It also reduced their visibility, however.

Often, the first they saw of a feral ork was when it half-stumbled, half-charged out of the smog, just yards from one of their emplacements.

‘Conserve your ammunition,’ Lieutenant Gunderson cautioned. ‘We can’t afford to waste it jumping at shadows. Don’t shoot until you see the reds of their–’ He let out a sudden curse, and fired his laspistol twice before breaking the connection.

Guardsman Myer sat behind the supply hut, his back to its wall, breathing through his teeth. Sergeant Ven Coers crouched beside him. ‘I swear, if you’re faking this…’ she growled, but in a softer tone than usual. She could see the blood on Myer’s uniform.

Myer rolled up his shirt. ‘It doesn’t hurt as much as before,’ he lied. ‘I think the stitches are more or less intact. A fresh layer of synth-skin ought to solve the problem, but I used all mine up when I… when I was first…’

The sergeant grunted and produced a canister from her medi-pack. Myer expected her to hand it over, but instead she set about treating the leaking wound herself. ‘Sergeant, I can do that,’ he protested.

Other wounded soldiers had been dragged back here, to the only shelter left for them. Some were dressing minor cuts and bruises; others had been seriously hurt by knives or claws or flames or shrapnel. None of them were complaining. They could be proud of their scars, received while facing down the galaxy’s very worst horrors. Myer couldn’t say the same.

He hadn’t just hurt himself with that knife, he thought. Now he was keeping a veteran sergeant away from the front lines, from doing the Emperor’s bidding. He didn’t belong here, with these others. They put him to shame.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ Ven Coers hissed.

Myer started. ‘I wasn’t. I… About what?’

‘About climbing down the cliff. I saw you looking.’

‘I wasn’t, sergeant.’

‘You’d likely break your neck trying, in the dark.’

‘I wasn’t planning to–’

‘I can read your mind, Myer. We’ve lost three-quarters of the area we were trying to hold, and dawn is more than five hours away. We’re surrounded on three sides by what feels like an inexhaustible army. What options does that leave you?’

‘I won’t run,’ insisted Myer. ‘I haven’t even thought about it.’

‘Then you’re the only trooper here who hasn’t.’

Myer didn’t know what to say to that.

‘How does that feel?’ Ven Coers’ dark eyes flashed up at him. Myer noticed that she was sweating profusely. ‘I think I’ve stopped the bleeding. Can you stand? Here, take my hand.’ She held her right hand out to the youngster.

Myer looked at it, and saw a red rash mottling the sergeant’s wrist. He tried but failed to hide his shocked reaction. Ven Coers followed Myer’s gaze, and hastily tugged the cuff of her jacket sleeve down. ‘You said you’d used up your power packs,’ she grunted.

‘I did,’ said Myer. ‘Sergeant, I–’

‘That’s good,’ Ven Coers interrupted him. ‘That you’ve been making good use of your armaments, I mean.’

‘How long have you–?’

‘I see no las-beam burns on you.’

‘Does Lieutenant Veimer know? Does anyone?’

‘So, you managed to point your weapon at the enemy this time. Even better. Have you been to see Guardsman Ven Roy?’

Myer nodded. He had been coming from the recharging fire when Ven Coers had collared him. He had handed four cold power packs to its bandaged custodian, taking two warm ones in exchange. He had pushed one of them into place, but hadn’t fired his lasgun since. There was a chance that, when he did, it would explode.

‘Ven Roy’s brain is leaking out of his skull,’ said Ven Coers, eyes darting to her wrist. ‘He can’t stand without passing out – and yet he’s out here, making himself useful, because that is the Mordian way.’

Myer didn’t know what else to say. His wordless, horrified gaze was sufficient, however. ‘Tomorrow,’ Ven Coers conceded, gruffly. ‘Tomorrow, I will report my… symptoms. Tonight, I have – we all have – more pressing concerns.’

‘Yes, sergeant,’ said Myer.

‘Only you and I know about this, Myer, and that is the way it will stay.’

‘Yes, sergeant. Only…’

‘I know I can count on you to keep a secret.’

‘Only… what if tomorrow is too late? I’ve seen what this thing, this infection, does. Especially left untreated. You’ve seen it too. And… and isn’t it our duty to report any sickness in our ranks? Not just for the trooper’s own sake, for the rest of us too.’

Ven Coers scowled and looked away. She didn’t speak again for long seconds. Myer began to regret his outburst. He didn’t know where it had come from, where he had found the courage to stand up to his fearsome sergeant. Perhaps it was because his sergeant no longer looked so fearsome. She looked pale and somehow smaller.

‘You’re right,’ said Ven Coers in a hoarse whisper. ‘It’s what I’d tell any soldier under my command to do. But suppose I went to our senior medicae right now? What exactly do you think he could do for me, Myer? We just watched him torch the medicae hut.’

‘I guess we did.’

Myer could almost have laughed at the bleak humour of the situation.

Perhaps it was blood loss, he thought, making him light-headed. Either way, he felt an unexpected kinship with Ven Coers at that moment. Before he could stop himself, he blurted out a question he had never asked before: ‘But aren’t you afraid?’

‘Every day of my life,’ came the unexpected answer.

Myer gaped.

‘You thought my heart was made of stone? You think I feel this filthy disease eating through me and don’t care what it might do to me? You think, when an army of xenos is bearing down on me – and I’ve faced dozens of xenos armies in my time – that I don’t wonder what it will feel like to die?’

‘I…’

‘This morning, I faced that mechanical monster in the forest. I still don’t know why I alone survived, when the rest of my squad…’

‘I should have been there,’ Myer mumbled. ‘I’m sorry, sergeant.’

Ven Coers shook her head. ‘In all my years of service, I have never felt so helpless. I couldn’t have saved them. You couldn’t have saved them either. Perhaps it was the Emperor’s will to send you here instead, where you can make a difference.’

‘Do you really think I can? You think we can win this battle?’

‘Every feral ork we kill is one less to blight the galaxy. You say you’ve lost count of the number you’ve slain tonight. That’s how you know you’ve done your duty.’

Ven Coers stood up and helped Myer do the same. The muscles in his side protested at the move, but not too strongly. ‘Do you have any stimms?’ the sergeant asked.

‘I was always told not to take them,’ said Myer, ‘unless absolutely–’

‘For me.’

‘Oh. Then, yes I do.’ Myer shrugged off his backpack. He rummaged his medi-pack out of it and handed over three capsules.

Ven Coers took them with a grateful nod. She popped one into her mouth and swallowed it with some effort. She squirrelled the rest away in a belt pouch. She clapped a hand on Myer’s shoulder again, but this time it was a more companionable gesture. ‘It’s like I said. There’s nowhere to run. There never is. You stand and fight because it’s the only thing you can do. You, Myer, are as good a fighter as most.’

‘I don’t think I am.’

‘Your problem is, when you aren’t fighting, you think too much.’ Ven Coers leaned a fraction closer to Myer. She fixed him with eyes that were regaining their spark. Her granite jaw hardened, her lips curling into a sneer. Her grip on Myer’s shoulder tightened, almost making him wince. ‘So, get out there,’ the sergeant barked, ‘and fight.’

Another barricade was summarily demolished.

The xenos hacked and tore their way through the grain sacks, as viciously as if they were living opponents. Behind the sacks, however, they faced a very real wall of Iron Guard troopers.

Myer was among them. He had taken one knee in the first of their two rigid ranks. He sighted along his lasgun, waiting as long as he dared. He waited until rippling green flesh filled his vision, almost within his arm’s reach.

Then he fired and fired again; and he could hardly miss his massive target.

His third shot pierced the feral ork’s left eye, killing it instantly. Its great green bulk collapsed an inch in front of Myer, and a thrill of excitement shot through him. He didn’t have time to indulge it. There were plenty more targets. Still, no one – no future defeat – could ever take this victory from him.

He was doing it. He was making a difference.

Another xenos toppled before him, though he couldn’t tell if the killing shot had come from his weapon or not. It hardly mattered. When they buried him, when an officer stood over his grave and summarised his military career, this would be remembered. They would say that Guardsman Lucius Myer had been dutiful, disciplined, courageous – and no one would ever know otherwise. No one but the Emperor Himself…

Or maybe they would. Maybe everyone would know – because Myer’s fellow soldiers weren’t so different from him as he had always imagined. They too had their façades; and if they could appear to live up to the Mordian ideal, so too could he.

Then he remembered his forthcoming trial.

The oncoming xenos tide had been stemmed, for a time, in this small area. Other troopers put the finishing touches to a replacement barricade, the lowest one yet. Myer followed the orders of the nearest sergeant, to pull back and find himself a new defensive emplacement. He lowered himself onto his elbows in the dirt, but his stomach was churning.

‘Look on the bright side, Myer. Chances are you’ll never face the Commissariat now.’ He recalled the words of a fellow trooper in the medicae hut and suddenly appreciated their ironic truth. Myer had just begun to imagine that he might survive this long night, after all. If he did, it would only be to die a less honourable death. No officer ever spoke glowing words over the grave of a coward.

He would be better off if the feral orks killed him.

0300

Ven Coers’ lasgun had run dry again.

She suppressed a frustrated scream. She pumped the trigger with all her strength, as if she might jolt out a few more precious shots. She turned to the trooper manning the barricade beside her and demanded he give up a power pack. ‘I don’t have any to spare,’ the trooper pleaded. Ven Coers spat out an insult and reluctantly abandoned her position.

A Guardsman was bandaging a burnt arm behind the lines, and Ven Coers bellowed at him to stop wasting his time and take her place. She stomped up to the recharging fire and barked at its custodian: ‘Three more packs now, Ven Roy, and make sure they work this time. The last one you gave me barely had enough charge to light a candle.’

She knew she was being unfair. The stimms were stoking a red-hot anger inside her, which she didn’t try to suppress. That fire was the one thing keeping her alert, keeping her alive. Ven Coers embraced the anger, kept it burning.

She barely noticed the itch in her right arm, which had spread to her shoulder and halfway across her chest. She barely noticed the faint rattle in her lungs when she breathed in.

‘What in the name of the Golden Throne are you doing?’

A fair-haired young Guardsman knelt behind the supply hut, decanting promethium from a mangled, rusted flamer into a glass bottle. More bottles surrounded him, already half-filled. Their necks were stuffed with canvas wicks. The Guardsman looked up with a start, and Ven Coers recognised him.

‘I asked you a question, Litmann.’ She gave the youngster no chance to answer, however. ‘Is this how a Mordian fights? You know those things are liable to blow up in your hand. Are you trying to cremate us all?’

‘Sergeant Kulm’s orders, sir, but–’

‘Where is Kulm? I have a few things to say to him.’

‘–with Lieutenant Gunderson’s approval. Any means necessary to buy us more time, is what he said.’

‘Oh,’ grunted Ven Coers, wrong-footed. ‘I see. Well… be careful, Guardsman. If I see flames back here, I’ll have your–’

She choked on the words as a sudden commotion flared out on the parade ground. She heard the explosive bark of a heavy weapon, which then cycled with a mechanical clank. Her heart froze. For an instant, she was back in the forest, blundering through a smoke haze, with the shape of a monster looming over her.

It couldn’t be, she told herself. The xenos engine went over the cliff. I saw it with my own eyes. I looked over the edge. I saw it burn. Unless…

She didn’t dare complete the thought. She snatched a power pack from Ven Roy’s hand and raced back to her post. She hauled her bandaged replacement roughly out of her way and dropped to her knees behind the barricade. ‘What is it?’ she demanded, as the xenos weapon clanked and fired again. The ground churned with the impact of an explosive shell, showering Ven Coers with flaming soil and ashes.

‘One of the xenos,’ a trooper spluttered. ‘It must have found a way to the bottom of the cliff and… and salvaged a gun from…’ He doubled up, wracked with coughing.

‘All troopers, the xenos with the gun is our primary target,’ Gunderson commanded. ‘It must be taken down at all costs. All costs, do you hear me?’

Ven Coers attempted to locate the enemy, but couldn’t. She risked half-standing to get a better view, peering over the barricade’s brim.

She made out the shape of a feral ork, struggling to tame a cannon almost as large as itself. There was no second monster – which didn’t mean there was no threat. The creature aimed its weapon in the general direction of the supply hut. It fired, but a powerful recoil sent it sprawling. The shell streaked over its shoulder to be swallowed by the forest. It was as likely to blow itself up as strike a viable target.

The Mordians couldn’t bank on those odds, however.

Ven Coers fired, along with fifty other troopers, including snipers on the hut’s roof and Gunderson and others inside. The weapon slipped out of the xenos’ grip as it crumpled; but at least a dozen others scrambled keenly to retrieve it. The Mordians immediately turned their fire upon these, and several fell. One of the survivors hefted the weapon in triumph, but was swiftly attacked for its prize by another.

‘We can shoot these vermin down all night,’ grumbled Ven Coers into her vox-bead, ‘but one will eventually get its stinking claws on that weapon again. Our only hope is to take it out of action altogether.’

‘Agreed,’ Gunderson’s voice crackled in her ear. ‘But we’re out of explosives. We’ve a few artillery shells left, but nothing to launch them. I’m open to suggestions, sergeant.’ He switched to the general channel. ‘If anyone is holding back a grenade or two for emergencies, now is the time to use it.’

‘I might have something,’ said Ven Coers.

Others had had the same idea. She had to elbow her way through them to reach the young trooper, Litmann. By the time she did, there were few promethium bottles left.

She snatched one out of a Guardsman’s hands. ‘What do you plan to do with this? You think you can throw it further than that weapon can shoot?’

She swept the others with a scathing glare. It rested on one who had acquired four bottles, tucking three behind her belt. Immediately, she knew what was in this Guardsman’s mind. She favoured her with a grim smile, but took the bottles from her anyway.

‘Sergeant!’ the Guardsman protested.

‘How are you holding up?’ the sergeant growled. ‘In good health?’

‘I’m fit to serve.’

Ven Coers pushed up her right sleeve, displaying the infection. ‘Then I’d say this duty falls to me.’ The Guardsman lowered her gaze. She understood.

She gave up the rest of her stash, and others followed her lead. Ven Coers pushed a bottle into each of her pockets. She used her belt to secure four more to her hips. She clutched four bottles to her chest with one arm, waving the others away. ‘This ought to be enough. Hold on to the rest, in case I fail. How long do I have once I light one of these fuses?’

‘I don’t know, sergeant,’ said Litmann. ‘It’s impossible to say. I’d recommend waiting as long as you possibly can.’

Ven Coers nodded. She searched the debris-strewn ground with twitching eyes. She located a short, stout branch and had a Guardsman fetch it for her. She instructed another to take the last capsule from her pouch and feed it to her. She strode back up to the fire and plunged the branch’s end into it. She held the primitive torch up over her head, keeping its flames as far from her bottles as she could.

She didn’t pause, not for a single breath. For much of the past day, Ven Coers had felt helpless, at the mercy of powers beyond her own. Now, a pair of troopers ran ahead of her, clearing a path for her. She marched along the side of the supply hut, towards the barricade she had so recently manned. The troopers there scrambled aside for her, tearing down sacks to create a narrow opening.

She squeezed through the gap in the barricade and broke into a run. She heard the liquid in her bottles sloshing. Some of it seeped through the wicks and soaked into her uniform jacket, its stinging smell making her nose hairs curl.

Sergeant Katryne Ven Coers had never felt so powerful before.

Her heavy boots pounded the blasted ground. Smoke clawed at her eyes and teased out burning tears. She ran, half-blindly, for the spot where she had seen the xenos weapon. She heard a ferocious blast ahead of her, and a wave of heat struck her like a physical blow. She lowered her head, set herself against the force and ploughed onwards, as breathless vox-chatter piled up in her ears.

Another barricade, she ascertained, had just been blown asunder. Through clenched teeth, Ven Coers swore it would be the last.

She had banked on taking the command post’s attackers by surprise. Only now were they beginning to react to her sudden appearance among them. She could see the hazy shapes of feral orks – more clearly, hear their howls and smell their mossy xenos odour – converging upon her. She couldn’t let them steer her from her course.

Finding a burst of speed, she dived between two lumbering creatures. An axe and a club swung at her, the former becoming embedded in the latter. She left the wielders behind her, wrestling for possession of their conjoined weapons.

The next feral ork lunged at her from the right; she twisted away from its bone knife, at the same time thrusting her burning branch into its eyes.

By her reckoning, she had covered half the distance to her target – when the shifting smoke revealed an obdurate green frame planted in front of her. Too late to avoid it, Ven Coers slammed into the xenos with a bone-jarring impact. She felt two bottles shattering and a sharp pain in her shoulder, swiftly washed away by an adrenaline tide.

More importantly, despite its greater bulk, the xenos gave way to her charge.

It was more surprised than she was, howling in confusion. It snatched at Ven Coers’ arm but she shrugged it off with ease, leaving shreds of blue fibres and raw flesh beneath its claws. She raced on, the xenos on her heels. Its legs were more powerful than hers, but still she outpaced it. Every beat of her heart felt like an explosion in her chest, as if it might burst at any moment. She feared she might have taken one capsule too many, but she pushed the thought aside.

Nothing could stop her now.

A hurled missile, a stone club, glanced off her temple and staggered her.

She expected the feral ork behind her to pounce on her, but she could no longer feel its hot breath on her neck. It must have fallen to a sniper’s beam, she reasoned. She felt a proud thrill that, even here, even now, she wasn’t alone. She belonged to the Mordian Iron Guard.

She blinked away a stream of blood from her eye.

Another xenos rose before her, clutching the weapon. Its face clattered with bone jewellery. It wore a necklace of animal teeth around its neck. It had seen her coming, too late to defend itself. By the time it wrestled its ungainly burden around, Ven Coers would be upon it. Already, she could see that the weapon was broken and leaking. A shallow promethium pool formed around the feral ork’s feet.

Her torch had burned down almost to her knuckles. She opened her hand and let it go.

She heard the great gun’s bark as she tackled its wielder round its midriff; and her whole world erupted into fire.

The feral ork’s wiry hair was alight. Its green skin reddened and peeled as its eyes began to melt. An expression of horror was trapped on its monstrous face. The gun was dropped, forgotten, as hungry flames caressed its fractured casing. A distant part of Ven Coers’ brain wondered if she would live long enough to witness the predictable explosion.

Her fuel-doused uniform was burning too.

For a fraction of a second, she was a human fireball, like a living embodiment of the Emperor’s wrath; and a sound forced its way up through her throat, but it was neither a scream of pain nor a howl of rage against her fate.

The last sound Ven Coers made before she died was a raucous, joyous burst of laughter.

0600

Myer had only closed his eyes for a second. Somehow, however, his mind had drifted elsewhere. He came back to his senses with a jolt.

He looked around guiltily, but no one had noticed his lapse. His comrades were every bit as weary as he was. Their eyelids were drooping, their heads beginning to nod. Even their sergeants’ harsh voices, commanding them to keep alert, had quietened down. The Guardsman beside him had fired a shot at shadows, or possibly at nightmares.

Myer shifted his position on the hard ground. His every muscle ached. He gulped in mouthfuls of smoky air to re-energise himself, but choked on them. He almost wished he hadn’t given away his stimms. He was almost jealous of Guardsman Ven Roy, with his fractured skull, snoring by the embers of the recharging fire.

Shortly after 0400 hours, Gunderson had called it.

‘The battle is won,’ he had declared. ‘The xenos horde has not only been defeated, it has been annihilated. The cost has been just fifty-three lives – less than half of our initial force – in exchange for many hundreds of theirs, a thousand at least.’

It didn’t feel like a victory to Myer. Not yet.

It was true that the xenos were no longer attacking in force. Their siege was relentless, nevertheless. Not a minute had passed without two, three or four creatures – sometimes just one – hurtling out of the forest, slobbering and raging. These sporadic attempts ensured that no trooper, but for the most wounded, had been able to rest.

Some had made it through the gauntlet of weakening las-beams to batter at the few remaining barricades. At one point, one had thrust a fist between the sacks and seized the Guardsman next to Myer by his throat. It had expired before it could tighten its grip. The next one, however, might be more robust, or just more fortunate.

The long night wasn’t over yet.

Another xenos thundered into Myer’s sights. He squeezed his trigger and waited to see if it fell or if he needed to expend more power. The routine was familiar by now, perhaps overly so. It was easy, too easy, to let his concentration falter.

No Mordian had fallen in the past two hours, however. No more xenos had made it through their defences to lay a claw upon them. The most recent casualty, in fact, had been…

It had been Sergeant Ven Coers.

Myer swallowed at the memory. It stiffened his resolve, more than any drug could have. His old sergeant had not just turned the tide of battle, she had lighted the heavens. The explosion of the xenos engine’s weapon had taken out at least two dozen creatures and pelted many more with molten shrapnel.

Myer knew he could never live up to such an example. All the same, since Ven Coers’ death, he was determined at least to survive. He couldn’t bear the thought of the command post falling, of no one remaining to record such noble deeds.

Another four feral orks broke cover. He fired at one, then another, until they dropped. He wondered what went through their tiny minds as they made their suicide runs, as they died one after another. Did they think they were heroes, like Ven Coers?

The question was pointless, he concluded. Xenos didn’t think as men did. Their sole motivation was the spread of Chaos. They deserved nothing from him but his hatred and disgust. They certainly didn’t deserve his fear.

The clearing was strewn with their mouldering green bodies. They stretched past the ashes of the command post’s former huts and the razed shells of burnt-out Chimeras, to the treeline and beyond.

It struck Myer, suddenly, that he hadn’t been able to see to the treeline before.

The sky was beginning to lighten. A peaceful hush descended upon the alien forest like a blanket – or it may have been Myer’s imagination. The sound of his own breathing filled his ears, and his eyelids felt heavy again.

The next time he opened them, some time had clearly passed.

From the east, the first rays of sunrise felt their tentative way through the trees. Somewhere, a bird sent up a cackling call. There were other sounds too, which Myer almost didn’t notice at first, so accustomed had he become to them. Sounds of gunfire.

He felt his throat tightening. Had the xenos come up with some new horrific weapon?

‘Lasguns,’ the Guardsman beside him whispered hoarsely, as if voicing his fragile hope might tempt the fates. ‘Imperial lasguns.’

Gunderson’s voice over the vox-net quickly confirmed it. ‘I’ve received a communication from the First Company commander. Her force is here and has the few remaining xenos surrounded. They will fight to their last breaths, of course, but they haven’t a prayer.’

Myer held his breath, waiting for a but. He didn’t dare believe that the ordeal was finally at an end. He had to hear the words.

‘This battle is over. Praise be to the Emperor.’

A tired cheer went up. Troopers clambered to their feet and shook blood back into their stiff limbs. Myer did the same, uncertainly at first. It felt wrong to be raising his head above the barricades. His eyes kept scanning the surrounding forest, nervously, and he saw others doing the same. Snipers dropped down from the supply hut roof.

‘We can be justly proud of this night’s work,’ Gunderson crowed. ‘This victory was gained in the teeth of impossible odds. This has been the sort of night in which reputations are made, and from which legends are spun. I am proud of every one of you.’

Everyone was congratulating each other. A few Guardsmen clapped Myer on the back and shook his hand. He recognised some of their faces. One was the young trooper who had lain across from him in the medicae hut. He had shown only contempt for Myer yesterday – as had many of the others – but now this was forgotten.

Yesterday seemed a long time ago.

Gunderson mingled with the crowd, taking hands at random and pumping them enthusiastically. Myer saw Lieutenant Veimer too. He was kneeling beside a semi-conscious trooper with his medi-kit. He looked as tired as anyone else, if not more so, but his work was not yet done. Myer wondered if he should offer to help him, but was glad when someone beat him to it.

Gunderson raised his voice above the chatter. ‘Let’s clear some carcasses out of the way, shall we? Dump them over the cliff edge for now. We’ll clear enough space to lay down bedrolls, so we can all get some well-deserved sleep.’

Before Myer knew it, he was holding a dead feral ork by its armpits, its broken head lolling against his stomach, while another Guardsman hoisted its brawny legs.

His body protested at taking yet more punishment, but his mind was glad of some direction. He felt as if he were living in a new world, one he had not expected to see and hardly dared to think about. He wasn’t sure what to do next. It didn’t feel real.

He felt a warning twinge from his side as he helped swing the body over the cliff. He watched as it plummeted into darkness. He could just make out the dark, sullen shape of the wrecked xenos engine down there, and shuddered at the recollection of that horror.

He would do what he had always – almost always – done, he supposed. He would follow his orders, do his duty.

The fighting in the forest had ceased.

Troopers poured into the clearing, a never-ending river of blue. They must have marched most of the night, but they held their backs straight and their chins up. Myer felt a hint of awe at the sight of their immaculate uniforms, such as he had felt as a boy when, for the first time, he had seen the Iron Guard on parade. He was proud to count himself among them.

Their senior officer conversed briefly with Gunderson, then began to issue orders.

Most of the xenos bodies were disposed of in short order. A pit was dug to provide the Mordian dead with a rather more dignified burial. There was nothing left of Sergeant Ven Coers’ body to place in it, nothing identifiable. Plenty would be said about her over the grave, however; Myer would make sure of it, if no one else did.

For now, bedrolls were being laid out across the old parade ground. Gunderson informed the troopers of the Third and Fourth Companies that they had eight hours’ downtime. Myer could sleep for five, he thought gratefully, and still have time to clean and repair his uniform. Sentries had been chosen from among the fresh newcomers, to line the clearing’s perimeter. He could hardly have felt safer.

‘One more over here,’ called Gunderson.

He stood at a corner of the prefabricated supply hut, where it didn’t quite reach the uneven ground and was propped up on wooden chocks. A dead squig had rolled into the gap and been overlooked. The officer prodded it with his toe, lips curling in distaste.

The creature came to life and clamped its teeth on to his leg.

An expression of horror crossed Gunderson’s face, but was gone in an instant. He snatched a pistol out of his holster and fired. The weapon let out a plaintive whine, its target hardly flinching from its feeble discharge. Though Myer had seen little of the officer during the battle, he had exhausted his power packs just like everybody else.

Myer had already drawn his lasgun, instinctively.

He took four measured steps towards the creature, firing in time with each of them. His beams punched into the squig’s distended head, the last at point-blank range. It shuddered and squealed and coughed up stinking blood; and Gunderson tore himself away from it, blood streaming from his leg too, calling for Lieutenant Veimer.

The squig was still thrashing its half-formed limbs, so Myer shot it again. He used up the last of his own dwindling power on it, until it was incontrovertibly dead.

By this time, Gunderson had recovered his usual composure. He limped up to Myer, towering over him. ‘Name?’ he demanded, in clipped tones.

Myer hauled himself to attention and told him.

‘That was quick thinking, Guardsman Myer.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I have witnessed many acts of heroism tonight, but yours–’

‘No,’ Myer interrupted before he could stop himself. The officer’s eyebrows knitted into a warning frown. ‘I… No, sir,’ he stammered. ‘I’m no hero. Not like… some of the others. I happened to be in the right place at the right time.’

‘The right place – the right man – to save my life. This will be mentioned in my report to Command HQ.’ Gunderson smiled tightly. ‘Whether you like it or not.’

Myer realised that a hush had fallen around him. Everyone, it seemed, had stopped to turn and look at him. This time, however, their gazes approved of him. Even Veimer, poised to bandage his fellow officer’s leg, favoured Myer with a curt nod.

He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He straightened his back, puffed out his chest and saluted. At the same time, the sun made it over the treetops at last, to bathe the ruins of the Dirkr Forest command post in harsh, white light.

No light had ever been welcomed more by a denizen of the World of Eternal Night.

A brand new day had dawned.

Another Dawn

Lieutenant Olius Veimer stepped into the cool pre-morning air.

He closed his eyes and took deep, cleansing breaths.

He had worked another night, stitching up wounds and cooling down fevers. His patients were all stable now, with most on the road to recovery. The source of the spore infection remained a mystery, but he had finally found time to work on its symptoms. His latest combination of drugs was showing some promising results.

He enjoyed a rare moment of peace, alone with his thoughts.

He surveyed the five gleaming huts of the Dirkr Forest command post. Even the old supply hut had been repaired and scrubbed until it looked almost new. The five prefabricated buildings outlined an even, pentagonal shape, completed by the razor wire fences strung between them. Behind him, nestled in the lee of the brand new medicae hut, the old, reliable generatorum hummed softly to itself.

Of the desperate battle fought here mere weeks ago, no trace remained. No trace, that was, but for a small monument, erected close to the cliff edge: an enduring testament to the courage of the soldiers buried there.

The roar of an engine intruded upon Veimer’s reverie. He sighed to himself, before calling for all available orderlies.

A pair of Chimeras nosed out of the forest, grinding to a halt before him. Their hatches juddered open and the latest contingent of injured troopers clambered out. A sergeant handed Veimer a list of the new arrivals. He scanned the names and accompanying notes, seeing nothing that others couldn’t handle.

Most of the new patients were able to walk. The orderlies were taking stretchers to those who weren’t. He even had sufficient beds for those who needed them.

He began to think about getting some sleep.

The door of the nearby Guardsmen’s billets opened. Five Mordian troopers in dress uniform tramped down a flight of steps. One of them was Guardsman Myer. Veimer had almost forgotten he was leaving this morning. He had certified him fit three days ago, but Myer had had to wait for transport to return him to the distant front.

The troopers reported to the sergeant and, one by one, climbed into the back of a Chimera. Veimer drew Myer to one side. ‘I’ll be sorry to lose you,’ he rumbled. ‘Your assistance these past two weeks has been commendable.’

‘Just doing my duty, sir,’ said Myer, stiffly.

He nodded at the expected response. ‘Ever thought of training to become a field medicae yourself?’

‘Maybe, sir. I never thought I had an aptitude for it before, but helping out here while I’ve been restricted to light duties… I have found the work rewarding. So, maybe once this tour of duty is over…’

Rewarding… Veimer recalled a time, not long ago, when he would have said the opposite. He rolled the thought around his mind for a second. He realised that Myer had trailed off and was looking at him, his round eyes betraying an unspoken plea.

It was past time to put him out of his misery.

‘As for the matter that brought you here,’ said Veimer, ‘I believe I may have been mistaken. There were some indications, as you know, that the stab wound to your side was self-inflicted. Having since seen you in action, I am satisfied that you, Guardsman Myer, would never commit such a cowardly act. Am I correct?’

‘Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. Thank you, sir.’

‘I am duty-bound to report the incident, of course.’

Myer’s mouth twitched in dismay, but all he said was, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘On this occasion, however, I fail to see what purpose that would serve. Especially considering the report already made by Lieutenant Gunderson, commending you for your bravery during and after the battle.’

The young Guardsman couldn’t quite disguise his relief.

‘This isn’t the end of the matter,’ Veimer added, sternly. ‘I expect you to prove to me that my faith in you is justified. I hear the feral orks appear much fewer in number than they were, but of course their belligerence has not been dampened one bit. It will be some weeks yet – maybe even months – before this world is cleared of them completely.’

‘I know that, sir. I am not afraid of them.’

Veimer raised a quizzical eyebrow, inviting Myer to elaborate.

‘What threat could such vermin pose that is worse than what I went through – what all of us did – that night?’

I pray you never have to face the answer to that question, Veimer almost replied, but he chose to hold his tongue.

The waiting Chimera was revving its engine impatiently. He dismissed Myer and they exchanged salutes. Myer scrambled into the back of the armoured vehicle, the sergeant pulling the hatch shut behind him with a final-sounding clang.

Veimer stood watching, long after both vehicles had disappeared into the forest. By then, the new arrivals had been ushered or carried indoors, leaving him alone again.

He thought of the many young troopers he had tended to and sent back out to fight: a faceless army marching through his conscience. Myer was no different to any of them. He had nothing but a lifetime of war to look forward to. Nor could he be lucky forever.

But this didn’t make him unimportant.

Veimer, his hands guided by the Emperor, had saved Myer’s life for a reason. For every xenos he had slain since then or would slay; for the lives he had saved in turn; and much more. Myer had discovered the person he was meant to be, which was a gift indeed. No matter what befell him in the future, whether he was struck down by an axe today or survived to someday command a platoon of his own, Veimer could be certain of one thing.

Guardsman Lucius Myer would make a difference.

About the Author

Steve Lyons’ work in the Warhammer 40,000 universe includes the novellas Engines of War and Angron’s Monolith, the Imperial Guard novels Death World, Ice Guard and Dead Men Walking, and the audio dramas Waiting Death and The Madness Within. He has also written numerous short stories and is currently working on more tales from the grim darkness of the far future.

An extract from Cadian Honour.

One

From the ceiling of the Macharius dining room, situated in Upper D Quadrant of the Imperial Heart, long chains of gilt-framed portraits hung down the walls. They were the faces of Astra Militarum generals with starched uniforms, gold braid and rows of ribboned medals, all meticulously reproduced with oil and brush. Many were cracked with age, or stained a deep yellow by centuries of after-dinner smoke. Cadian generals filled one entire wall, a fact that galled the Praetorian general, Ser Reginald Monstella de Barka.

He brooded as the table conversation focused on the upcoming crusade.

‘Who should lead?’ a voice queried from the end of the table.

‘The Cadians,’ a blunt Catachan voice stated. ‘This was their territory once. Theirs to reclaim.’

There were murmurs of agreement in a dozen accents. Mordian. Aquarian. Saturnine.

Ser Reginald could bear it no longer. He slammed his hand down a little too hard. ‘No, the Cadians should not lead,’ he pronounced. ‘They are not up to it. Not now. Not since the debacle of the Cadian Gate. The Mordians are as good as any Cadian outfit. Any one of your armies. Or, indeed, my own Praetorians!’

The other generals, old even by Astra Militarum standards, turned to his end of the table in surprise.

Ser Reginald felt emboldened. He gesticulated expansively. ‘We’ve given the Cadians everything they wanted since anyone can remember. The best arms. The best supplies. The toughest assignments. But look! The prison-warders were caught napping. Their failure has set the whole Imperium in doubt!

‘Where are the Cadians now? See, none of them are here. They daren’t show their faces!’

As he spoke, an ornately carved and decorated antique dining chair scraped back across the polished walnut. There were a few shocked gasps as the man stood and showed himself. He had the same pale complexion as many of the portraits hanging on the wall, the same drab uniform, and the badge of the Cadian Gate, in black on a field of white. He fixed the Praetorian with pale, violet eyes. ‘If I may say so, general, you don’t know what you are talking about.’

Lord General Reginald de Barka’s cheeks coloured, but he ostentatiously swilled the last of the claret about his mouth. ‘You should address me properly. I am a lord general. And I know exactly what I am talking about.’

A frock-coated attendant saw the danger and came forward with the bottle of amasec. The Cadian put up a hand. ‘No, thank you.’ His jaw was tense, his cheeks flushed red. ‘You may be a lord general,’ the Cadian said, ‘but that does not stop you being a damned fool.’

The silence deepened. Even the servo-waiters stopped in the half-open doorways and stared at each other in slack-jawed confusion, boats of cream and red sorbet held in their unthinking hands.

The Cadian spoke louder this time. ‘I demand that you withdraw your words.’

Ser Reginald paused for a moment, and then slid his own chair back and stood to his full height of six foot five. ‘Tell me your name, sir.’

‘Bendikt.’

‘Well, General Bendikt. You cannot demand anything from me. Those days are over. The Cadians are a dying breed. Failure hangs around your necks. Your defeat is like a brand burned into a criminal’s cheek. As for your behaviour this evening, I shall expect a formal apology from you and your commander.’

Bendikt crossed the space between them in two strides. ‘Here’s my apology!’ he hissed.

His fist caught the lord general under the chin. There was a sharp crack of hind teeth being slammed together, a low grunt of pain and then Bendikt was on the bigger man, hands reaching for his throat.

It took two of the younger generals to haul him back. At last they held his arms out to either side, and he stood dishevelled, breathless, furious as a pit-slave.

Ser Reginald pushed himself to his feet.

He dabbed his lip. There was blood.

A Saturnine Dragoon general stepped forward. There were splatters of blood and wine on his white frock coat. His face was severe. ‘Make peace, men. This will not do. Not at all. We are military officers. We all serve the God-Emperor. Shake hands and we shall all forget this happened.’

‘I would rather die,’ General Bendikt spat.

Ser Reginald put his hand to the worn pommel of his duelling sabre. ‘That can be arranged,’ he said.

Two

‘Don’t record this,’ Lord Militant Warmund said to his scribe as he entered Bendikt’s private chambers. They were on the mid-levels of C Quadrant, and Warmund was chief Cadian on board the Imperial Heart.

He was a slab of a man. Solid, ruthless, deeply loyal to everything that his home world had once been. Behind him trailed an entourage of attendants, savants, scribes and a pair of hovering servo-skulls. The sudden bustle within his private quarters shocked Bendikt.

‘Bendikt,’ Warmund said as he strode inside. ‘I had to take a lighter from A Quadrant and it’s still taken me an hour and a half to get here. You’ve caused me a lot of trouble.’

Bendikt leapt to his feet. ‘Sorry, sir.’ He saluted smartly.

Warmund waved him back to his seat. ‘I said don’t record this,’ he repeated, and the bald-headed savant nodded. His metal claw lifted the stylus from the parchment roll. There was nothing organic about the movement.

Warmund’s voice had been enhanced for battlefield audibility, but he kept it to a low rumble now, like the purr of a giant feline. It made the wood-panelled walls tremble. ‘Bendikt. I’ve been told that you struck Lord General Reginald Monstella de Barka with your fist. Is that true?’

Bendikt paled. He cleared his throat. His voice betrayed him. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good man!’ Warmund’s face broke into a huge grin. ‘We’re all glad you hit that pompous prat. He’s been challenging our leadership since day one!’ He seized Bendikt’s hand and there was power within his handshake that Bendikt had not felt before. Warmund’s hand had been augmented, he realised, and as its grip closed on his own, grinding bone and gristle together painfully, he felt the unspoken threat.

Warmund let go and paced up and down, hands behind his back, head thrust forward on a thick, bull neck. He had a brisk, businesslike manner that was familiar, even though he and Bendikt had never met before. It must be, Bendikt surmised, a Cadian trait. ‘We’ve all been celebrating your punch, General Bendikt, but I’m not beating about the bush here. You’ll have to go to that damned Praetorian fool and apologise.’

Bendikt nodded. He understood.

Warmund went on. ‘You don’t have to do it publicly. I can arrange a private venue. It doesn’t even have to be particularly profuse. Sorry if, all that, you know…’

Bendikt tried to speak, but Warmund kept talking.

‘We’ve allied with the Saturnine Dragoons and together we’re petitioning people with influence. Navigator House Benetek are with us. They tell me that this is going to be the next front line. The new Cadian Gate! El’Phanor is on the shortest route from the Cicatrix Maledictum towards Holy Terra, apparently. It’s going right to the top. The High Lords of Terra.’

Bendikt coughed to clear his throat. ‘I’m afraid I cannot do that, sir.’

‘Do what?’

‘Apologise. In all good conscience.’

Warmund stared at him for a moment. ‘I don’t care about your damned conscience. The position of the Cadians has become precarious. Vultures are circling and they wear the two-headed aquila of the Imperium of Man. De Barka might be the most pompous but he is not alone. There are a number of other lord militants and lord generals who think they deserve command. Our representatives are fighting round the clock to make sure Cadian generals retain control of this front. This is the chance we need, to repair the loss of Cadia. A chance to regain our glory!’

Warmund went on at length. At the end Bendikt nodded. ‘Yes, sir, I understand, but I’m afraid I cannot do as you wish.’

Warmund stopped pacing and fixed an augmented eye on him. ‘Can’t or won’t?’ There was threat in Warmund’s voice now and the water glass on Bendikt’s bedside cabinet rattled. ‘I don’t care about your pride, Bendikt. I’m ordering you to apologise.’

Bendikt’s voice seemed quiet in comparison. ‘I am very sorry, sir. I cannot.’

‘Bendikt–’

Bendikt cut him off. ‘Sorry, sir. If you would excuse me, but someone has to make a stand. It’s not just the ownership of this front that is at stake here. It is the honour and pride of every Cadian who still draws breath.’

Warmund started to laugh. ‘Bendikt. Be serious. You’re a soldier, not a preacher.’

‘I’m a Cadian,’ Bendikt said. ‘And, with respect, this is beneath you.’

Warmund turned his whole body towards Bendikt and his voice was low and deep and made the whole room rattle. ‘What do you mean, exactly?’

Bendikt felt the vibration in his gut. ‘Cadians have nothing to be ashamed of. We held the Cadian Gate since time… for as long as anyone can remember.’

‘Yes. But the Cadian Gate fell.’

‘Not through any fault of the Cadians.’

Warmund waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘Don’t be an idealist. We’ve lost whole sectors of Imperial space. Let’s face facts. Maybe de Barka has a point.’

Bendikt felt his blood rising. ‘Lord militant, were you on Cadia?’

‘No. You know I wasn’t.’

‘Well then. With all due respect, sir, you cannot say the Cadians failed. De Barka is wrong. You are also wrong. I was there. I know. We were winning. Creed was winning.’

Creed was a word that everyone used once. Now his name was passing into memory. But it gave Bendikt strength.

Warmund laughed caustically. ‘If you were winning, how did we lose?’

Bendikt could barely control himself. ‘The Imperial Navy let us down. The Imperium let us down. Throne be damned! Every Cadian who was not there let us down. Lord Militant Warmund, if you were not there, then you let us down!’

Bendikt found that he was shouting into Warmund’s face.

There was a dangerous look in Warmund’s eye as he stepped forward. Bendikt swallowed, but he did not back down. He was done with manners. He was a soldier, and a fighter, and he fought his corner.

‘How dare you accuse me, Bendikt. If anyone failed, it was you and Creed and all the other defenders. Cadia fell on your watch, not mine!’

Warmund was shouting too now. The vibrations were sickening and the bedside lumen cracked. Bendikt had to swallow back his nausea as he returned the lord militant’s stare. He remembered Ursarkar Creed’s words about the dreadful old waxworks who ran the Cadian forces, how hidebound they were, how their warfronts were on Holy Terra, in the infernal politicking of the Administratum.

He started to speak but Warmund put up his hand. ‘I am fighting the war for the survival of our regiments. That is why you must go and apologise. Today.’

Bendikt took in a deep breath and paused for a long moment. ‘I am afraid I cannot, sir.’

All the charm had fallen from Warmund. He bristled. ‘I am giving you an order, Bendikt.’

Bendikt looked to see if there was a commissar in the room. There was. Warmund had planned this all along. Bendikt had been cornered. He took a deep breath. This was now a matter of life and death.

Bendikt spoke deliberately. ‘I understand that, sir. But still, I cannot allow the name of the Cadians to be impugned in this way.’

‘That was a command.’

From the corner of his eye Bendikt could see the commissar put his hand to his bolt pistol. Bendikt nodded. ‘I know that. If it means me dying, then that is what I shall do.’

He watched as the bolt pistol slid from its black leather holster, then looked away.

The commissar stepped forward. Bendikt drew in a long breath. The barrel of the bolt pistol was cold against his skin.

Warmund watched his face almost eagerly.

‘Do it,’ Bendikt hissed, and quoted an ancient song. ‘Weep for those whose faith is weak. I rejoice, for my faith is bottomless.’

He heard the click as the firing pin was brought back. Bendikt closed his eyes. There was a long silence. Lord Militant Warmund paused and turned to the savant. ‘What is General Bendikt’s old unit?’

His savant answered without a moment’s pause. ‘Cadian 101st, tank regiment.’

‘And where are they serving?’

‘The Gallows Cluster.’

‘Bendikt. Consider yourself under house arrest. I shall leave you now in the guard of my men. You have three hours to apologise to Lord General Reginald.’

‘Or what?’

‘Or you will be sent to the penal colonies and your name shall be struck off the Imperial monuments. Your regiment will be disbanded. Their colours will be consigned to the regimental shrine on Ophelia IV, and the companies will be broken up to fill the ranks of other, more reliable regiments. The name, the proud legacy, the existence of the Cadian 101st shall be no more. The whole regiment shall die with you.’

There was a twitch under Bendikt’s left eye. It pulled once, twice, three times. He felt his throat tightening. He felt tears welling up and by sheer force of will he drove them back. He dared not blink. He could not show weakness.

From somewhere he felt stillness within him. He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. ‘I will apologise,’ he said at last, ‘when de Barka does likewise.’

‘That’ll never happen.’

‘Then I leave the fate of the 101st in your hands, sir. There is only one way to resolve this honourably. We leave it for the Emperor to decide who is right.’

‘Don’t think I’m making empty threats, Bendikt.’

Bendikt opened his eyes. ‘Unfortunately, I don’t.’

The lord militant sighed. He had tried threat and bluster, and neither of them had worked. Now he tried a different tack. ‘He’ll kill you, you know.’

‘That is not certain.’

‘Have you seen him fight?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, that’s one thing Praetorians are good at. And de Barka is the best duellist on this quadrant.’

Bendikt nodded. He was strangely calm. ‘The Emperor will decide.’

Bendikt stood at the door as the lord militant and his staff filed out.

Warmund’s handshake was brief. ‘You’re a stubborn fool, Bendikt. It’ll be a shame to lose you.’

Bendikt nodded and said nothing. He did not trust his voice not to betray him.

Warmund gave a curt nod. ‘Goodbye then, General Bendikt. I do not think we shall meet again.’

Bendikt nodded and shut the door, closed his eyes, and tried to swallow back the grief.

But nothing could stem his pain and humiliation.

He was Cadian. The Holy Emperor had entrusted his people with a sacred duty: to defend the Imperium against the enemies of mankind. To do this they had been given the best weapons, the best training, forge worlds devoted to furnishing their every need.

And they had all failed.

Click here to buy Cadian Honour.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Paul Dainton.

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