Predation of the eagle
Peter Mclean

Vardan IV, Astra Militarum Advance Firebase Theta 82
Three months ago


 	Sergeant Rachain read the names of the Missing in Action to the platoon every morning. 
 	Every morning, the list was longer than it had been the day before. 
 	‘Emperor’s grace,’ Corporal Cully muttered to himself as the reeking, poisonous rain beat down hot around him, pounding on the canvas covering of the muster tent overhead. ‘There won’t be any of us left before we get out of here at this rate.’
 	‘What say, corporal?’
 	That was Moonface, from Three Section. Cully looked at the boy’s fat, sweating face, and he could see the fear written there in the premature lines around his young eyes. 
 	‘Nothing, trooper,’ he said. ‘Old Cully’s just muttering to himself, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.’
 	Cully had no idea what Moonface’s real name was, but it didn’t really matter. On Vardan IV it didn’t really matter what anyone’s name was, at least not until they had survived their first firefight. Most of them didn’t, after all. 
 	The steaming jungles were infested with orks, and the Reslian 45th were chewing through new recruits as fast as the troop ships could deliver them. Cully, though, he’d been deployed there for the last two years. So had Rachain, of course. 
 	They were tight, the pair of them, and Sergeant Drachan and Corporal Gesht and the others from Two Section. They were the old guard, the backbone of Alpha Platoon, D Company. The hardened veterans. 
 	The survivors. 
 	Corporal Rikkards and his mob were all right too, he supposed, especially that huge lad who Cully called Ogryn, but never where he might hear him. Lopata, he thought the man’s name was. Still, they were in Beta Platoon and tended to keep themselves to themselves and didn’t mingle much with the others, so to the warp with them. 
 	No, it was the old guard who mattered. Rachain and Cully, Drachan and Gesht. Veteran sergeants and their top corporals, that was what made a platoon. Rachain was lead sergeant of Alpha Platoon. He was top canid in D Company, and Cully was his right hand man and his best friend. 
 	That was how you ran an army, Cully thought. Lieutenants were only there to do paperwork and take the blame if the wheels fell off an operation, and who even knew what captains did. Anyone higher up than that might as well not exist, in Cully’s opinion. It was boots in the mud that won wars, not generals polishing chairs with their arses. 
 	‘It’s a lot of names, corporal,’ Moonface said.
 	Cully had forgotten the boy was there. He blinked and looked at him. 
 	‘This is war, Moonface,’ he said. ‘People go missing, in the jungle. People die. That’s what we’re here for, in case it had escaped the memory capacity of the tiny brain that hides behind that enormous face of yours. We’re the Imperial Guard. Dying is what we’re for.’
 	‘Yes, corporal,’ Moonface said, and that really was the only right answer he could have given. 
 	Cully headed up One Section, Alpha Platoon, and that made him Rachain’s top canid. No recruit boot from a lower section was going to answer him back, not if they knew what was good for them. 
 	‘Corporal,’ a voice rasped behind him, sounding like it was coming straight out of an open grave. 
 	That was Steeleye, Cully knew. He turned and looked at the veteran sniper. Steeleye had been in One Section since even before Cully’s time, and ever since she got her naming wound she had refused to answer to her real name anymore. Cully respected her capability enormously, but that didn’t make her any easier to look at. 
 	‘What is it?’ he asked, feigning nonchalance as his eyes took in the ruin of the woman’s face.
 	Steeleye had met an ork up close, once. Very close indeed. 
 	It had bitten her face off.
 	Her left eye socket had been crushed too badly for the medicae to be able to do anything except seal over the collapsed mess of broken skull with hideously shiny synthetic skin, giving her whole head a disturbingly lopsided appearance. Her right eye had been replaced with the bulbous metallic augmetic from which she took her name. She had no nose, just a ragged open snout from which thick green snot ran almost constantly, and the bone was exposed along the length of the left side of her jaw where the synth-skin had refused to take. 
 	She carried a specially customised long-las over her shoulder, topped with a scope that interfaced so perfectly with her augmetic eye that the entire weapon became part of her body. She had recorded eight hundred and thirty seven confirmed kills on Vardan IV. 
 	‘Stop winding the poor brat up,’ Steeleye said, nodding sideways at Moonface. ‘You ain’t been listening to the list.’
 	Cully shrugged. He hadn’t been listening to the morning list for the last eighteen months.
 	‘So?’
 	‘Drachan made it.’
 	Cully blinked. Sergeant Drachan had been the platoon’s top scout.
 	Making the list, that was what they called it when you went out into the green and didn’t come back. Sometimes a trooper might be confirmed Killed in Action, if they were shot down right in front of their comrades and someone managed to bring their ident-tags back for the Munitorum to log the death and send The Letter to their next of kin, but it was rare. In the impenetrable, greenskin-infested jungles of Vardan IV, ninety per cent of casualties were officially listed as MIA for the simple reason that no one could find what was left of them after an engagement. 
 	‘You sure?’
 	Steeleye nodded, and paused to wipe her oozing snout with the back of her already crusty uniform sleeve. 
 	‘Emperor’s word,’ she said. ‘He went out with Two Section yesterday, didn’t come back. Gesht’s in pieces.’
 	Cully nodded slowly. He knew Drachan and his corporal had been close. Maybe too close, if you cared what the regulations said. 
 	Cully didn’t care one little bit. 
 	‘I’ve got some sacra in my tent,’ he said. ‘I’ll go see her. Thanks, Steeleye.’
 	The old veteran nodded her ruined head at the corporal, and no more words needed to be said between them. Moonface just looked on in simple, naive bewilderment as the day to day business of the Astra Militarum went on around him. 
 	Death, loss, grief. 
 	It was just another day in the glorious Imperial Guard.
 	Vardan IV
Now 


 	Cully squeezed down on the trigger of his lasgun and blew the ork apart with a sustained burst of full auto. 
 	‘Emperor’s teeth, but there’s a lot of them,’ Gesht’s voice growled in his vox-bead.
 	The other corporal was five, maybe six hundred yards to ­Cully’s left, away through the curtain of suffocating rain with her own section spread out around her. 
 	Alpha Platoon were deep into greenskin country, on an advance recon mission. 
 	‘I hear you,’ Cully replied. ‘Concentrate on the big ones, they’re the bosses.’
 	‘You think I’m some new boot?’ Gesht snapped. ‘I know that, Cully.’
 	Cully shrugged, for all that he knew the woman couldn’t see him.
 	‘Sure, Gesht,’ he said. ‘Just watch your arse, and watch your section’s arses even harder.’
 	‘Teach me to suck a bleedin’ egg,’ Gesht started, then her inevitable obscenities were cut short by a crackling barrage of automatic lasgun fire through Cully’s vox-bead.
 	‘Say again?’
 	‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I was just doing my job. What are you doing?’
 	Cully bit back a reply and pulled himself forward on his elbows and knees through the stinking mud and rotting vegetation. The light was greenish yellow in the rain, filtered through the high jungle canopy above them. Everything in Cully’s world was made of sweat and mud and filth. 
 	His webbing chafed at his shoulders through his flak armour, rubbing his sodden undershirt against the constant friction sores that were a simple part of life on Vardan IV. Enormous insects swarmed around him, biting at his exposed skin, and more than once he’d had to stop and brush hideous, translucent arachnids off his sleeve.
 	‘Status report,’ he said, after a moment. 
 	‘About five hundred on your nine,’ Gesht said. ‘No more contacts. Closing on the boss.’
 	‘Acknowledged,’ Cully said. His section were finally out of orks to kill, too. 
 	They were both closing on Rachain, bringing their sections forward to the sergeant’s position. He was in the command squad, of course, with Lieutenant Makkron who was at least nominally in charge of Alpha Platoon’s deep recon patrol. 
 	If Makkron had even half a brain, Cully thought, he would be doing what Rachain told him. The officer was fresh out of the cadet scholam back on Reslia itself. They still did things the old-fashioned way on Reslia; sent anyone with good breeding straight to officer school. That meant anyone with money, obviously. He was maybe twenty Terran-standard years old at the most. Rachain was almost twice his age, and had spent all those extra years in the Guard. He knew what he was doing. 
 	A newly commissioned lieutenant outranked a platoon sergeant, of course, but he would have to be a special kind of stupid to try to enforce it. Cully really didn’t want to have anyone that stupid in command of him and his men. 
 	‘Hey, Gesht,’ Cully said, flicking his vox-bead over to their private channel. ‘What do you make of the lieutenant?’
 	Gesht snorted in his ear. ‘Wetter behind the ears than the last one was,’ she said. ‘The next one will still be in nappies, at this rate.’
 	‘I hear you,’ Cully said. ‘You reckon he’s listening to Rachain?’
 	‘He’d better be, or he might get shot in the back by an ork,’ Gesht said.
 	‘Like the last one did, you mean?’ 
 	Their last lieutenant had been the special kind of stupid that had almost got thirty of them killed when she marched them straight into an ork ambush despite Sergeant Drachan’s insistence that it was a trap. It had only been the honed reactions of the veterans, and Steeleye’s stone cold sniping, that had got them out of it alive. The lieutenant had been gunned down from behind by a lone ork on their way back to the base. No one ever found that ork, and platoon lore had it that perhaps its name had been Gesht, but of course no one could prove anything and in honesty no one much cared. As far as Cully was concerned that was all well and good. 
 	The jungle did strange things to a man’s sense of right and wrong, and he had long since come to accept that.
 	‘Don’t know what you mean,’ Gesht said, and her voice was flat and emotionless. 
 	Cully could have kicked himself for a fool for bringing it up. That had been before.
 	Before Drachan made the list. 
 	Before Gesht lost her mind to grief. 
 	‘Don’t mean anything,’ he assured her. ‘We’re good.’
 	‘We’re good,’ Gesht agreed, and the moment passed.
 	Cully remembered the day Steeleye had come and told him Drachan had made the list. He remembered going to Gesht’s tent with his illicit flask of sacra, to see how she was. 
 	Deranged, that was how she had been. He had found her field-stripping her lasgun and anointing its few moving parts with her own blood as she recited the Emperor’s Litany of Vengeance over and over again. She’d had plenty of blood to work with, what with the mess she had made of her left arm. 
 	The scars were still plain to see even now, hard ridges of white tissue against her tanned skin where she had half-flensed her own forearm with her combat knife in a furious outpouring of grief and rage. Cully had had to restrain her, he remembered, pin her down before she bled to death, and call in a very private favour from their squad medic to keep it quiet. He had drunk the sacra himself, afterwards. 
 	He had kept her secrets, for all that he should have made a report, and he honestly thought that was the only thing that had stopped her from killing him in his sleep when she was nominally recovered. He had seen her in her weakness, in her shame and her torment, and he knew that didn’t sit easy with her. 
 	She had never been quite right in the head since, all the same. 
 	He keyed the vox to the platoon channel.
 	‘Cully to Rachain,’ he said. ‘One Section, coming up on your eight.’
 	‘Two Section,’ Gesht said. ‘Five hundred to the nine, closing.’
 	‘Three Section,’ Corporal Dannecker chimed in. ‘Closing on the four, eight hundred.’
 	‘Acknowledged,’ Rachain said. ‘Form up on the command squad.’
 	The patrol fan began to close in on the command position, the veterans moving silent as ghosts through the crushing humidity of the jungle. The fresh recruits in each unit, the raw boots who had yet to earn their names, made enough noise for everyone. 
 	Cully winced as he heard Webfoot from his own section trip over an exposed root and land in a stinking pool with a splash. He turned with an angry gesture, but Steeleye already had the stupid boot back up on his feet with her iron-hard arm around his throat. She jabbed him hard in the ribs, doubling him over, and met the corporal’s eyes over the boy’s back. There was no emotion on her ruined face, but Cully caught her meaning all the same. 
 	Emperor’s sake! that look said, and Cully had to agree with her. 
 	Webfoot eventually stopped gagging, and they moved on. 
 	He didn’t trip again. 
 	The whole patrol platoon made camp together that night, on a relatively dry knoll that rose above the endless mud and filth of the jungle floor. Rachain had ordered a double watch, and Cully supposed that was sensible even if it meant no one got anywhere near enough sleep that night. 
 	Double watch or not, though, come the dawn Webfoot was dead all the same. 
 	Cully was roused from his bedroll by Hangnail screaming. 
 	She was a boot from Two Section, one of Gesht’s, and she was the one who found him. 
 	You poor bitch, Cully thought. Welcome to the sodding Guard.
 	Cully himself was a hardened veteran and he had seen worse, but not by much. Hangnail wasn’t, and she hadn’t, and she was on her knees puking even as the platoon came to full alert all around her. 
 	Webfoot had been disembowelled. 
 	He was hanging from a great tree, maybe a hundred yards from the camp, with his intestines dangling from his open belly in great stinking purple ropes. His hands had been bound in front of his chest with the stiffening fingers spread in an awful travesty of the sign of the Aquila. 
 	They had set a double guard, and still no one had heard a thing. 
 	‘Orks ain’t quiet like that,’ Corporal Dannecker said softly to Cully, when there was no one else close enough to hear. ‘No ork did that.’
 	Cully just nodded slowly. He had been thinking much the same thing, and he would have bet a month’s pay that Rachain was thinking it too. 
 	‘Don’t be saying things like that in front of the boots,’ he cautioned the junior corporal. ‘They’re spooked enough as it is. The first person I hear so much as whisper eldar is getting my bayonet up his arse, you understand me?’
 	‘So what are we saying it was, then?’ Rachain asked from behind them. 
 	Cully managed not to jump. Dannecker didn’t. 
 	Rachain could move quiet as the night, when he wanted to. 
 	‘Don’t know, sergeant,’ Dannecker said, too quickly. 
 	Cully winced. That wasn’t the right answer.
 	Rachain belted Dannecker in the guts almost too fast to see, knocking the younger man to his knees in the mud. 
 	‘Orks, you bloody idiot,’ he said. ‘What else could it be? It was orks. We’re here fighting orks, scouting orks, so it was orks. Is that abundantly clear, you stupid bastard?’
 	‘Yes, sergeant,’ Dannecker wheezed, trying to get his breath back. 
 	Cully nodded. ‘Orks,’ he said. ‘Course it was. Really quiet ones.’
 	He exchanged a long look with Rachain, and the sergeant nodded. 
 	‘I’ll explain it to the lieutenant,’ he said. ‘You go and take a proper look.’ 
 	‘Sir,’ Cully said. 
 	He gave Dannecker a pitying look, down in the mud and the filth, and made himself go and inspect the corpse. 
 	Webfoot had been hanged with a rope made of twisted jungle creepers, plaited thick and strong. Someone had taken their time to make that rope properly, Cully thought. The man’s hands had been bound with a finer version of the same stuff, and thin cords of it had been used to pull his fingers out into the distinctive spread and to hold his thumbs twisted together like the double heads of the sacred eagle. 
 	Someone, Cully thought, had gone to a lot of trouble with that. Someone was making a point, and they had made it far too bloody quietly for his liking.
 	Cully sighed and took his helmet off for a moment, pushed a hand back through his sweat-sodden hair. He bowed his head and spoke the Emperor’s Benediction over Webfoot, then turned away. There was nothing there to tell him anything. The man had been murdered, silently and expertly, and then someone had strung him up and bound his hands in that symbolic way. Cully was about to return and report to the sergeant when he paused for a moment. 
 	He never did know what made him do it – perhaps it was just instinct, or perhaps the Emperor responded to his prayer. Whatever it was, he paused and walked around the hanging body to look at it from the rear.
 	What he saw there made him vomit violently on the ground in front of him.
 	The back of Webfoot’s combat trousers were drenched with blood. Both of his buttocks had been hacked off with some sort of heavy blade, the sort that the orks carried. Whatever had killed him, they had cut themselves a couple of good steaks afterwards. 
 	‘No,’ Rachain said, when Cully told him. ‘No way is that going in the official report.’
 	‘But sergeant,’ Lieutenant Makkron said, in the sweaty darkness of the command tent, ‘surely we have a duty to–’
 	‘No!’ Rachain snapped. ‘Sir.’
 	‘I know, I know,’ Cully said. ‘The Officio Prefectus…’
 	‘Yes, exactly,’ Rachain said.
 	The lieutenant looked from one man to the other in obvious confusion. Cully idly wondered whether the boy had actually started shaving yet. 
 	‘Will one of you please explain what you’re talking about?’ Makkron said.
 	He was trying to sound commanding, Cully realised, but all that he could hear was a plaintive, childish whine.
 	Rachain sighed. 
 	‘Sir,’ he said, ‘do you have any idea how many men the Astra Militarum have lost on this miserable bloody planet in the last two years?’
 	‘No,’ Makkron confessed.
 	Two years ago your balls hadn’t even dropped yet, Cully thought. You wouldn’t have so much as heard of Vardan IV. 
 	He envied the lad that, if little enough else. 
 	Rachain fixed the lieutenant with one of his famous glares, and dropped his voice to a flat tone that even the junior officer could tell meant he was in no mood to be messed with. 
 	‘Almost two million,’ he said.
 	Makkron swallowed, and he paled under his new boot’s sunburn.
 	‘How… how many?’
 	‘Two. Bloody. Million,’ Rachain said. ‘Give or take. No one knows, don’t you understand that? That’s the whole problem, sir. People go out into the green, and they just… don’t come back. Over and over and over again. And now it’s us. Now it’s us sent out of our nice strong firebase and into this hell!’
 	‘But I still don’t see…’
 	Rachain slammed a hand down on the camp table in the command tent and got to his feet. 
 	‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m in no mood for this level of stupid. It’s your turn to babysit, Cully. I’m going to walk the line, talk to the troops. Do my sodding job.’
 	He stormed out and let the tent flap fall closed behind him, leaving Cully alone with the lieutenant. 
 	‘The sergeant… well, he cares about the troops, sir,’ Cully said awkwardly. ‘He’s under a lot of pressure just at the moment.’
 	‘I understand, corporal,’ Makkron said. ‘I’m not as naive as Rachain thinks I am. Well, perhaps I am about this particular theatre of war, but I do understand all the same. Morale, and all that.’
 	This particular theatre of war, Cully thought with disgust. Like you’ve ever seen any other theatre of war, you utter oilrag.
 	‘The point is, sir,’ Cully said, ‘that this war is utter and total grinding hell and it has been for years. The orks are bloody unstoppable. There are millions of them, and this is their terrain, not ours. And we’re not winning. You do grasp that, right, sir? We are not winning this war, not even a little bit. But now? Now there’s something else out there! You saw Webfoot, right?’
 	‘I saw what?’
 	‘Webfoot,’ Cully said. ‘The body?’
 	Dear Emperor, how slow is he?
 	‘Ah, you mean Trooper Verlhan? Yes, yes I… I saw the body.’
 	Verlhan, was that his name? Cully supposed it must have been, not that it mattered any more. 
 	‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, him. Well, listen, sir. He was killed in the middle of the night, when we had a double watch set. Not everyone in this platoon is a recruit boot, you know. Emperor’s sake, Steeleye had watch last night, and still no one heard a thing, not even her. Orks are about as stealthy as a grenade in a promethium plant. It wasn’t an ork who did Webfoot, and it wasn’t an ork who cut his arse off for its dinner, either. There’s something else out there. Something even sodding worse than orks, as if this war wasn’t going badly enough as it is. Something that looks an awful lot like a drukhari. Do you really think the Officio Prefectus want to hear that? Even more, do you think they want anyone else to hear that? You put that in the official report and there will be a commissar’s bolter up your arsehole before you can say Ave Imperator, do you understand me, sir?’
 	Makkron just sat and stared at Cully, blinking like a newly landed fish as sweat rolled down his smooth face in thick rivers. 
 	‘I…’ he started, and fell silent. 
 	The Officer Cadet Scholam probably didn’t prepare Command Lieutenants for being soundly and loudly sworn at by corporals, Cully realised, for all that it really should do. 
 	Lieutenant Makkron looked down at the reeking black mud that encrusted his new Munitorum-issue boots for a long moment, then back up at Cully.
 	‘Drukhari? Do you really think so?’
 	Cully nodded slowly. That was what it was, he was sure of it. It had to be. 
 	He refused to think about the alternative. 
 	They buried Webfoot that day, and broke camp the next morning. When Rachain called the roll there was a name missing. 
 	‘Where the hell is Hangnail?’ he demanded.
 	Cully led the search of the camp and the surrounding jungle, but in his heart he already knew what he would find. No one would desert in the deep jungle, after all.
 	He was right. 
 	Hangnail had gone the way of Webfoot. They found her dangling from a tree five hundred yards from camp with her guts hanging in tangled loops around her feet. There were rough tracks where she had been dragged, alive or dead, from her sentry position to the place she had been hanged. Again, her hands were bound in front of her in the sign of the Aquila. 
 	‘Imperator nos defendat,’ Cully whispered, one of the few phrases of High Gothic he knew. 
 	Emperor protect us.
 	Cully was a man of devout faith, but as he looked at Hangnail’s corpse swinging from the tree he wondered if perhaps the Emperor’s gaze had turned away from Vardan IV. Hangnail’s left arm had been taken off at the elbow, the gristle of the joint neatly butchered and showing white against the ragged red of the surrounding meat. There was no sign of the missing limb. 
 	Someone’s taken themselves a shank, he thought, and swallowed bile. 
 	‘Oi,’ he said quietly to Rachain, when he could be absolutely sure there was no one else around who could hear them. ‘We need to talk.’
 	‘No, we don’t,’ Rachain said. ‘It’s the drukhari. I know that, you know that. What’s to talk about, other than how to kill it?’
 	‘What if it isn’t?’
 	‘It is.’
 	‘Are you sure about that, Rachain?’ Cully asked, putting a hand on his old friend’s arm to stay him as he tried to turn away. ‘Because what if it isn’t?’
 	Rachain turned and looked at his corporal. 
 	‘I know what you’re trying to say, Cully,’ he said, ‘and I’d like it a lot more if you stopped right now. It’s drukhari, you hear me?’
 	That sounded to Cully a lot like the way Rachain had told Dannecker that it was an ork, even though they all knew it wasn’t. He swallowed. Him and Rachain had been friends for years, and not too many Guardsmen lived long enough to get to say that. He trusted the older man, and could only pray to the Emperor that he was right. 
 	But he didn’t believe it. 
 	‘So let’s talk about how to kill it,’ he said. 
 	Whatever it is, he thought. Because it’s not a drukhari, Rachain, and you know it isn’t every bit as well as I do. 
 	Cully thought that, but he didn’t say it. Rachain was his friend and his boss, and, if Cully was utterly and totally honest with himself about it, he had always been a little bit afraid of the veteran sergeant. 
 	‘Anything that lives can die,’ Rachain growled. ‘We find it, corner it, kill it. We’ve got Steeleye in our platoon, for the Emperor’s sake. There’s nothing alive within half a mile she can’t drop with a clean headshot. We just need to give her that shot.’
 	Cully nodded. At least Rachain was prepared to do what needed to be done, that was the main thing. They could argue about how to cover it up later. 
 	They lost Booger Boy and Twitchy and Pretty Girl the next night. 
 	All three of them were found hanged, the same as Webfoot and Hangnail had been. All three of them disembowelled. Booger Boy’s left leg had been taken off at the hip, neat as neat. 
 	There was a lot of meat on Booger Boy, Cully couldn’t help but think. How the lad had ever passed basic training carrying that much weight was a mystery, but one that he supposed was largely irrelevant now. 
 	He was dead, after all. 
 	So was Twitchy, who had been Steeleye’s spotter and the platoon’s up and coming apprentice sniper. So was Pretty Girl, who had been one of the best scouts they’d had. 
 	It took Pretty Girl, Cully thought, and his blood ran cold. She was young but her scout skills were extraordinary. Had been extraordinary, he corrected himself as he dragged his eyes away from the gaping wound in her abdomen. Something had crept up on Pretty Girl. Something even quieter and scarier than she had been. 
 	Cully swallowed. 
 	He was right, he knew he was. Whether Rachain wanted to hear it or not. 
 	Of course he didn’t want to hear it. Cully didn’t want to hear it himself, and it was him thinking it.
 	I’m wrong, he told himself. I must be. 
 	But he knew he wasn’t.
 	They were deep in the jungle now, perhaps a hundred miles from where they had started at Advance Firebase Theta 82. They fought orks on a daily basis as their recon patrol cut deep into enemy territory, but to Cully that was almost secondary now. He had been fighting orks in the steaming jungles of Vardan IV for two years and more. He understood orks, he respected orks, but he no longer truly feared them. 
 	Cully feared the other thing. 
 	Voxjockey was gone now, and Wanna-be-a-pilot, and Lickspittle. 
 	Voxjockey had died in combat like a normal person, shredded by an ork’s heavy stubber, and Cully had managed to gather the boy’s ident-tags as they fled the ambush zone. His family at least would get The Letter. Well, they would if Cully made it back himself, he supposed. If not, what the hell did he care?
 	Wanna-be-a-pilot, though, and Lickspittle, they had gone the way of Webfoot and the others. Hanged from the trees in the dead of night, disembowelled and their hands bound in the pious sign of the aquila. Lickspittle had been cut for steaks too, where Wanna-be-a-pilot had been left alone. There was no meat on her skinny body anyway, Cully thought, and he had to rest his forehead against a tree until the nausea receded. 
 	It’s a drukhari, he told himself. The sergeant said so. It’s a filthy bloody drukhari. 
 	It wasn’t a drukhari, and he knew it and Rachain knew it and he was starting to suspect that Steeleye did as well. He wondered whether Gesht did, too. 
 	No, no, no. Oh Holy God-Emperor of Terra, don’t do this to her. 
 	Please.
 	Please don’t.
 	On the twelfth day of their recon patrol they found an ork encampment. Steeleye had the point, and she voxed her position back on the command channel. She was the only non-command trooper to warrant a personal vox-bead, but she was a near-legendary sniper so Rachain hadn’t had any trouble getting it for her. Even the chair-polishers at the Munitorum had heard of Steeleye, and to be honest no one wanted to piss her off. If she wanted a vox-bead, she got one. 
 	‘Understood,’ Rachain said, and voxed through to Cully. ‘One Section, move up to support.’
 	Cully tapped his vox-bead in acknowledgement and waved his squad forward. 
 	They crept through the perpetual gloom of the green, lasguns at their shoulders as they closed on Steeleye’s position through the constant pissing rain. Rachain himself was bringing Two and Three Sections up on the far flank, Cully knew, the sergeant not entirely trusting Gesht or Dannecker to hold the command all by themselves. 
 	I’m top canid, Cully told himself as he swiped a fang-leach off his shoulder before it could get a hold through his sweat-soaked combat uniform. He trusts me. 
 	Did he, though? Did he really? According to Rachain they were still hunting a renegade drukhari, but Cully knew that was just so much groxshit. He knew exactly what it was. Every night in his tent, twisting in his own rancid sweat in fever dreams of horror, Cully saw the face of their murderous foe.
 	That was the nights, though, when the humidity was trying to drown him alive in his tent. This was now. A Guardsman has to live in the now, or he’ll sure as hell die in it. There was no time for distractions.
 	The ork settlement was rough and crude, as everything the orks built was. 
 	Cully and One Section bellied down in the swampy filth between the trees, their lasguns held tight to their shoulders and the rain beating down on them, and waited for the signal. He had absolutely no idea where Steeleye was. She was like a ghost, in the green. Silent, invisible. Like all the veterans were.
 	Shut up, Cully, he told himself. Don’t think about that. Just don’t.
 	He sighted along his rifle, picking targets, for all that they had been ordered was to wait until the master sniper gave her word that it was time. There were orks out there – cleaning weapons, mending the crude thatch of their huts, cooking meat over open fires that sizzled and smoked in the rain. 
 	Cooking meat. 
 	Could I be wrong? Cully wondered. 
 	So much simpler, this way. Forget about drukhari, and perish the other thought; maybe it was orks. Very, very quiet orks. Orks who knew what the sign of the Aquila was, and what it meant. 
 	Don’t be bloody stupid, he told himself.
 	Obviously, he wanted it to be orks. He understood orks. He hated them, of course he did. They were filthy xenos, the enemies of the blessed holy God-Emperor, but after two years deployed on Vardan IV he understood them all the same. 
 	No. 
 	No, that just wasn’t going to work, was it?
 	It wasn’t orks, however much he wanted it to be.
 	Cully snugged his lasgun to his shoulder and sighted on a big greenskin who was threading an ammunition belt into a heavy stubber with its left hand and vigorously picking its nose with the forefinger of its right. 
 	Still Steeleye waited. 
 	It’s not an ork. 
 	Cully really, really needed to kill something, anything, to take his mind off the alternative, even if only for a little while. 
 	The jungle did strange things to a man’s sense of right and wrong, he thought again. The jungle did strange things to a man’s mind in general. What could it do to a man like that?
 	Shut up, Cully. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
 	One of the hut doors was flung open, and a huge ork came stomping down the crude wooden steps in front of it, a big rusty cleaver in its hand. It wore a spiked leather vest and a pair of heavy, ugly boots, and nothing else. It was enormous, even by ork standards, and quite clearly the boss of the whole encampment. 
 	Steeleye put a hotshot through its left eyeball at three hundred yards, blowing its brains out of the vaporised remains of the back of its skull.
 	The vox crackled into life in Cully’s ear. 
 	‘Go,’ she said. 
 	Cully put a three-round burst into the nose-picker without hesitation, blowing the hideous xenos off its arse and onto its back beside the camp fire. Its legs flailed up into the air, and Cully put another deliberately targeted shot into its crotch simply because he could. 
 	Kill! 
 	The horrible thing flailed and howled on its back, and then Strongarm landed a krak grenade right next to it and that was the end of that. 
 	Strongarm was Cully’s top boy in his section, a born thrower who carried most of the squad’s grenades strung from a heavy bandolier that crossed his shoulder and made him walk with a perpetual lean to the left. A sniper like Steeleye was all well and good, Cully reasoned, each shot a personally addressed missive of death, but grenades were addressed to everyone in the vicinity at the time. When you were fighting orks, there was a lot to be said for that. 
 	‘Advance!’ he shouted, rising up from cover and spraying a burst of full auto into the camp as he went. 
 	There was nothing moving there anymore, and it would suit Cully just fine if it stayed that way. 
 	Of course, it didn’t work out like that.
 	Orks came boiling up out of the huts, out of the trees, out of holes in the ground. They always did. 
 	Heavy calibre rounds flew around Cully as he charged them with his squad behind him, his lasgun barking in his hand. Orks were terrible shots but they all had heavy stubbers; big, ugly home-made things daubed with red paint that showered sparks when they were fired but spat out huge explosive rounds at a terrifying rate. Cully ducked behind the massive trunk of an ancient tree and took aim. He chopped one ork in half at the waistline with a scything blast of las-fire. Another’s head exploded as Steeleye dialled in on it and unleashed the killing power of her long-las from wherever the hell she was concealed. 
 	‘One Section, kill!’ Cully bellowed, and his squad ran forward again to do their jobs.
 	Killing and dying, that’s what the Imperial Guard are for. 
 	The air sizzled with las-fire. 
 	‘Kill, kill, kill!’ Cully roared. 
 	This was what he was for. 
 	Death and death and death. 
 	The unofficial mantra of the Astra Militarum. 
 	Kill. Kill. Kill.
 	Afterwards, Cully found he had no real memory of the battle. Steeleye had been up a tree, he discovered later, and she had taken out fifteen orks in that battle alone. The battle that had lasted perhaps ten minutes at the most. 
 	It had felt like an eternity of flying red-hot lead and las-shots and shouting and adrenaline and terror, and yet it had been over in a handful of minutes. Cully slumped against a tree trunk and watched as Steeleye clambered down from her perch in the canopy, her long-las over her shoulder. 
 	She looked at him for a long moment, her single augmetic eye clicking as the bezel adjusted from targeting mode to more rare human interaction. 
 	‘You know it’s not an ork, right?’ she said quietly.
 	Cully sighed and nodded.
 	‘I know,’ he said.
 	‘It’s not drukhari either, is it? They’re no friends of the orks, so why the bleedin’ hell would it be?’
 	‘No,’ Cully admitted. ‘It’s not a drukhari. The sergeant… he said that, but he knows it’s not really.’
 	Steeleye looked at him for a long moment, green snot welling up in the open hole in the middle of her face. 
 	‘Didn’t think so,’ she said at last. 
 	Cully swallowed, then spat on the ground between them.
 	‘I don’t want to…’ he said. 
 	Steeleye shrugged. ‘No one does,’ she said. ‘No one wants to bloody well admit it, do they? I don’t care, Cully. Why the sodding hell should I? So what, a commissar comes after me? So what? I’ll say it like it is, if no one else will.’
 	‘Emperor’s sake, Steeleye, he’s one of us.’
 	‘Was one of us,’ she corrected him. ‘He’s officially MIA anyway, no one will know. He made the list, remember?’
 	Sergeant Drachan wiped the grease off his fingers and kicked dirt over his camp fire. The last one had been delicious. 
 	Emperor but they were hopeless soldiers, in the main, good for nothing but corpses and meat. 
 	Rachain knew the work, and Cully too when he had his mind on the job and not on the card table. Steeleye was an avatar of Imperial Justice, her long-las like lightning from the heavens. He might let her live. This new lieutenant was a child, though. The bloom of Imperial youth, perhaps, but in no way hardened enough for the realities of Vardan IV. He supposed he would have to kill him too. 
 	That would be a shame, Drachan had to allow, but the thing had to be done. The platoon had to be strengthened if they were ever going to defeat the enemy. Tempered in the fire like a fine blade. In his fire. 
 	And then there was Gesht. 
 	Gesht had slept with her sergeant, there was no getting away from that. Gesht had loved him. That was disgraceful.
 	That was weakness, right there in itself. 
 	Gesht was part of the problem with Alpha Platoon. 
 	‘You honestly believe that?’ Cully asked.
 	Steeleye nodded. 
 	‘I really do,’ she said. ‘It’s Drachan. You know it. Rachain knows it, and so does Gesht. I’m sorry, I wish she didn’t every bit as much as you do and I know damn well she won’t admit it, but she does, and there we are.’
 	‘What… what do you think she’s going to do?’
 	Steeleye shrugged and looked at Cully.
 	‘What would you do?’
 	What do Guardsmen do?
 	Kill, and kill, and kill. 
 	‘How do we do it?’
 	Steeleye wiped the hole in her face again. 
 	‘I wish I knew,’ she said. 
 	The fools had a triple guard set that night, more of them awake than asleep. Boots, most of them, barely trained and scared out of their minds, utterly and totally useless in the face of the true reality of war. Drachan had been two years on Vardan IV. He knew the jungle. He lived it, every foetid breath of rotting humidity giving him life. 
 	He loved it, loved it in a way that he had never been able to love the artificial environments of barracks and troop-ships and firebases. 
 	Stinking and rotting as it was, the jungle was real. 
 	This is my home, now, he thought as he hung upside down from the tree, his knees locked over the branch that held him. Invisible, his face and the ragged remains of his flak armour smeared black with the charcoal and burned human fat from his camp fires. The noose of tightly woven vines hung from his left fist. The knife, clamped tightly in his right. 
 	Death, and judgement, and natural selection. 
 	The Emperor’s Will. 
 	I’m top sergeant, he thought. Not Rachain, me! You think he could survive what I’ve been through? Two months an ork prisoner, before I fought my way out with my teeth and fingernails? 
 	No. 
 	No, Rachain couldn’t have done that. I’m top canid in Alpha Platoon. 
 	He was top canid, and they would all come to see that. 
 	In time, they would. The survivors, anyway. The few who he would allow to live. 
 	The worthy ones. 
 	Navylover from Three Section died that night, the boy who had been oh-so fond of the female Valkyrie pilots stationed at Advance Firebase Theta 82.
 	Triple guard, and still no one had heard anything. 
 	‘It’s like a ghost,’ Rachain said, when they found the young trooper hanging from a tree with his entrails dangling in great, reeking purple ropes. ‘Nothing’s that quiet.’ 
 	‘Someone is,’ Cully said, and he exchanged a long look with Steeleye as he said it. ‘Someone we know.’
 	Rachain turned on Cully with his fist raised in preparation for a punch that would have floored him, but Cully met his old friend’s eye and faced him down. 
 	‘Come on, Rachain,’ Steeleye said, and spat snot onto the ground out of the hole in the middle of her ruined face. ‘Who was your top scout? Who did you send out into the green when you needed ork advance parties murdered nice and quiet in the dark? It was Drachan, every time.’
 	‘Be quiet!’ Rachain growled. ‘It’s not…’
 	‘Isn’t it?’ Cully snapped. ‘Isn’t it, Rachain? Who else? It’s no ork, and we all know there aren’t any drukhari on this planet. Who the hell else could it be? Who else is this good?’
 	‘No one,’ Rachain admitted with a sigh. ‘You’re right. Oh Emperor’s love, you’re right. It’s him, I know it is. I’ve known for days. I just… I didn’t want to be right, you know what I mean?’
 	Cully turned and looked at his friend, recoiled from the expression in his eyes. 
 	Betrayal, and murder, and despair.
 	‘Yeah,’ he said at last.
 	Rachain’s jaw set in a hard line. 
 	‘Then we end this,’ he said. ‘We end this now.’
 	They were busy for the rest of the day. There were pits to be dug, deadfall traps to be rigged and wooden stakes to be cut and sharpened and set. The jungle steamed around them, making combat uniforms and flak armour stick to them disgustingly even as hideous insects crawled through their hair.
 	Vardan IV was hell. 
 	The Emperor created Vardan IV to train the faithful, Cully thought to himself; the old joke, bitter with irony. No, no He did not. 
 	Vardan IV was created by monsters. Vardan IV was, in Cully’s experience, the very worst place in a galaxy pretty much made of bad places. And now they faced one of the very worst monsters it had to offer. 
 	One of their own. 
 	The jungle did strange things to a man’s mind.
 	Drachan had lost his mind altogether. Cully had no idea where he’d been in the three months since he made the list, and Emperor’s truth be told, he didn’t want to find out. The thought of being an ork POW… no. 
 	No, that didn’t bear thinking about. How he had escaped was anyone’s guess, but even if he’d got his body out he had quite clearly left his sanity behind. 
 	Cully wiped the back of his hand across his sweat-slicked forehead and remembered an ork camp they had liberated a year ago, him and Rachain and Drachan and Steeleye and the other old guard of Alpha Platoon. The prisoners had been kept in tiny bamboo cages, with the new shoots growing up around them like spears. Their bodies contorted into hideous shapes, unable to move, twisted to avoid the plants that would have impaled them as they grew, inches per day. 
 	The others, the unlucky ones, had been shut in metal boxes. 
 	In the jungle heat of Vardan IV.
 	It was a point of discussion, among the veterans, over sacra and dice, whether or not the heat exhaustion and dehydration killed a man before the meat cooked on his bones. Whether, starved to the point of madness, he was tempted to eat his own limbs before the heat overcame him. Whatever the questions, they had found no one left alive in the metal boxes to tell them the answers. Some of them, yes, had shown the signs of having tried to eat themselves. 
 	Cully shuddered and looked down into the pit. It was twelve feet deep now, with sharpened stakes lining the bottom. Nothing that fell in there was getting out alive. They had dug eighteen of them around the camp. 
 	He could only pray it would be enough. 
 	It wasn’t enough. 
 	Drachan walked through their traps like they weren’t there. 
 	He laughed as he killed, laughed his special silent laugh into the jungle night. The laugh the orks had taught him. 
 	Somewhere deep down in himself, he knew he had changed. Knew he was no longer the man he had been. He had evolved. The orks had done that, taught him new things. New ways of being. New priorities.
 	Amongst the orks, the biggest and strongest was always in charge. 
 	And why not?
 	It made perfect sense, when you thought about it. Might made right, everyone knew that. The whole Imperium pretty much ran on that principle, so how was this any different? The jungle made things clearer in a man’s mind. 
 	Everything was very clear, now, to Drachan. What he was. 
 	What he had to do. 
 	He laughed as he hauled Sharpknife up a tree, his noose tight around her throat as he hung upside down over her from his knees and drove the point of his combat knife into her sternum, dragged it down hard to spill her guts out over her boots. 
 	He hadn’t had a firearm since before he was captured, but he found he didn’t miss them anymore. The Guard-issue knife, to kill with. The stolen ork cleaver, to cut his meat with. So simple. So clean. 
 	Might and steel. 
 	That was all he needed. 
 	Drachan walked the jungle like a spirit unavenged, looking for the lieutenant. Blood and blood and death, drummed into him over and over again in basic. Reinforced in the fires of war on twenty planets. The unofficial mantra of the Imperial Guard.
 	Death and death and death.
 	Kill. Kill. Kill. 
 	That was what the Imperial Guard were for. 
 	‘Emperor’s teeth!’ Rachain swore, the next morning. 
 	Triple guard, and still they had lost two. Lieutenant Makkron had been almost inevitable, but they had lost Sharpknife, too. She had been a real soldier, not just some recruit boot. Rachain wanted to beat his head against a tree in frustration. Rachain very, very badly wanted to kill someone. 
 	Anyone, anyone at all. 
 	‘Cully!’ he roared, when he was shown the hanged corpses. ‘Get here!’
 	Cully got there, fast as fast. Rachain was his friend, yes, but sometimes you just didn’t mess with a veteran sergeant. 
 	‘I… I don’t know what to say,’ Cully said, as he stared at Sharp­knife and Makkron’s disembowelled bodies. 
 	The lieutenant was a kid and an idiot, but Sharpknife had been one of the tough ones, one of the veterans. There had been nothing not to like about Sharpknife, except…
 	‘She liked to play Crowns,’ Cully said, the words vomiting out of his mouth before he had time to think about them. 
 	You didn’t tell tales to the boss, not about a comrade, you never, never did, but when she was found hanged from a tree and you could smell the shit running out of her ruptured guts maybe you did after all, just that once. 
 	‘Oh holy God-Emperor, Rachain, don’t you see it? He hated gambling. He hated wet-behind-the-ears officers and he hated weakness, too, in every form he saw it. Webfoot fell over in the swamp and gave our position away, and Hangnail threw up when she saw Webfoot’s corpse, and the lieutenant…’
 	‘Shut. Up,’ Rachain said, and the tone in his voice made Cully take a long, hard look at him. 
 	‘You know I’m right,’ Cully said. ‘He’s purging us. Getting rid of what he sees as the weak links in Alpha Platoon.’
 	‘What about Gesht?’ Rachain said.
 	Cully gave him a level look. 
 	‘Gesht’s next,’ he said. 
 	Gesht wouldn’t hear it, of course. 
 	There was no way, according to her, just no bloody way. Her Drachan was dead, everyone knew that. Of course he was. He’d gone down fighting orks like an Imperial Hero. He was an Imperial Hero.
 	He hadn’t survived, of course he hadn’t. Heroes never did. 
 	He wasn’t the man who was hunting them. Killing them. 
 	Eating them. 
 	Except of course he was. 
 	Cully and Rachain and Steeleye knew damn well he was. Deep, deep, deep down, Gesht had to admit she knew it too. 
 	She remembered how Drachan had walked her back from the mission where they had used heavy flamers on an unmapped rural settlement, how he had kept her together afterwards. The settlement hadn’t been on the Munitorum survey. 
 	Afterwards, no one could put their hand on their heart and swear that the settlement hadn’t been Imperial after all. 
 	Drachan had just shrugged. ‘They might have been orks,’ he had said to her.
 	Yeah, they might have been orks, Gesht told herself, for the hundredth time since that dark, burning day. 
 	‘Better safe than sorry,’ Drachan had told her.
 	Always. 
 	Always better safe than sorry, she knew that now. That was what you learned, on Vardan IV. It was always better to be safe than sorry, however sorry that made you. 
 	So you creep into a settlement, rotting prefabs standing in a jungle clearing. What’s on the other side of that wall? 
 	An ork warband? 
 	A scholam? 
 	A hospital? 
 	A nest of anti-aircraft guns? 
 	Who knows.
 	Darn it, throw a grenade over. Better safe than sorry. 
 	Bodies are bodies, meat is just meat. 
 	Burning. 
 	The roar of the flamers.
 	Bodies, burning in the jungle. 
 	At least it’s them not me. 
 	Burn it all, he had said. Better safe than sorry. Burn it all, and tell no one.
 	I know, Gesht thought, all at once. I know it’s you, you mother lover.
 	She straightened up all at once, checked her webbing and her reloads. Looked across their camp fire, saw the slick gleam of the snot that oozed forever out of Steeleye’s face. Met the other woman’s eyes. 
 	‘I’m doing this,’ Gesht said. ‘Tonight. Come, or don’t.’
 	‘I’m coming,’ Steeleye said. 
 	She stood up, and she shouldered her long-las, and followed Gesht. 
 	Cully looked at Rachain, and the veteran sergeant looked back at him. 
 	‘Yes,’ Rachain said. 
 	Together, their few surviving men behind them, they set off to hunt a ghost. 
 	Sergeant Drachan wiped the grease off his fingers. 
 	It was time to go again.
 	They were coming for him, he could smell them.
 	Time to kill, and kill, and kill again.
 	He was Guard. 
 	This was what he was for. 
 	Cully led his squad through the drenched, reeking green. They were doubled up with Three Section, following Gesht and those of Two Section who had gone with her. 
 	Drachan was a master scout, silent as a ghost and deadly as a shark. No one else in Alpha Platoon could hope to match him for stealth.
 	So they didn’t even try. 
 	Every sound, every flicker of movement, earned a burst of full auto. 
 	Overkill. Anykill.
 	Kill, kill, kill. 
 	Moonface kicked the body of the indigenous simian he had just blown apart, and cursed. 
 	‘I don’t get it, corporal,’ he said. ‘Shooting at everything like this. He’ll hear us.’
 	‘He can hear us breathing, you stupid sodding boot,’ Cully snapped at the boy. ‘Drachan was – is – the most dangerous man in Alpha Platoon. There’s no sneaking up on him, my lad. We’ve just got to–’
 	‘Blood and fire!’ Rachain roared, blasting away into the trees on a furious rampage of full auto until he drained his lasgun’s power-pack to empty. 
 	His finger stayed clamped down on the trigger even then, the weapon clicking empty in his hands in impotent desperation. 
 	Cully raced towards the sergeant’s position, stopped short when he saw what had provoked Rachain’s outburst. 
 	Dannecker was down, his throat hacked out by a heavy knife. 
 	‘He was right behind me,’ Rachain cursed, ‘and I never heard anything!’
 	Strongarm hurled a grenade into the trees, throwing up a great fireball of shattered branches and pulped vegetation. Somewhere in the green, someone laughed.
 	Cully’s blood ran cold. 
 	There was nothing sane in that laugh, nothing human any more. 
 	‘Drachan,’ he whispered. 
 	Rachain nodded. 
 	‘That way,’ he said.
 	Steeleye heard the laugh. 
 	That was Drachan’s mistake. His one and only and final mistake.
 	Drachan is the most dangerous man in Alpha Platoon, Cully had told Moonface. Steeleye hadn’t heard that conversation of course, didn’t hear about it until much later, but she wouldn’t have cared anyway even if she had. He was probably right, looking back on it, but Steeleye wasn’t a man and she knew exactly what she could do. 
 	She was already up a tree, the custom long-las held tight to her shoulder and her bulbous, augmetic eye snugly interfaced with the scope. It clicked as the bezel rotated in her face, dialling from night vision to the heat spectrum. 
 	The steaming jungle showed as a livid background of green and red. The simians that swarmed in the canopy were flashes of yellow as they moved. 
 	There. 
 	The bright white patch of human heat, moving oh so quietly through cover, deep in the undergrowth a hundred yards off Two Section’s position. 
 	Drachan. 
 	Steeleye took a breath, lined up on the shot, ignored the hot rain that fell relentlessly across her back and shoulders. Data scrolled across the scope and into her eye. 
 	Range, obstructions, refraction index, diffusion potential. 
 	This would probably be her one and only opportunity, she knew. 
 	Better safe than sorry. 
 	She pushed her hotshot charge up to absolute maximum, a whole power-pack discharged in a single furious shot. Released half her held breath. The crosshairs flashed red in the scope as the heavily customised rifle made guaranteed target lock. 
 	She squeezed. 
 	‘Holy Emperor!’ Cully shouted as the hotshot bellowed across the jungle night, a single, searing flash of power like lightning and the very wrath of the Emperor Himself. ‘Tell me that was Steeleye?’
 	Rachain tapped his vox-bead. 
 	‘Alpha sergeant to Steeleye,’ he said. ‘You read?’
 	‘Five by five,’ the woman’s voice came back to him. ‘Give me ten, I’ve just got to see to something.’ 
 	Gesht was there before her, as she had expected, standing over the body of her lover.
 	Sergeant Drachan lay sprawled against the trunk of a massive tree, a smoking hole in the middle of his chest. He had a Guard-issue combat knife clamped in one hand, a heavy ork cleaver in the other. Long ropes of twisted vines wound around his waist. 
 	‘I thought headshots were your signature,’ Gesht said, not looking up as the other woman approached her. 
 	Steeleye shrugged in the darkness.
 	‘Tricky shot through the undergrowth,’ she said. ‘Had to go for the centre of mass.’
 	Gesht nodded, and still she wouldn’t look away. 
 	‘Better safe than sorry,’ she said, her voice sounding bitter and far away. 
 	She unslung her lasgun, flicked it over to full auto, and opened up at Drachan from point blank range. 
 	‘Better safe than sorry, mother lover!’ she bellowed.
 	That was how Cully and Rachain found her, still shooting, and Drachan was nothing but chunks of burning blackened meat in the undergrowth, and Steeleye watching and saying nothing. 
 	‘Enough, Gesht,’ Rachain said at last. ‘It’s enough, now.’
 	Gesht lowered her weapon and looked at the sergeant. 
 	‘It’s never enough,’ she said. ‘Kill and kill and kill, remember?’
 	All Rachain could do was nod.
 	They returned to Advance Firebase Theta 82 eight days later, those of them who had survived. Rachain had salvaged the ident-tags from those Drachan had killed, so at least their families could receive The Letter and take what closure from that they could. 
 	He had sworn every survivor of Alpha Platoon to secrecy, Cully and Gesht and Steeleye and Strongarm and Moonface and the others. They had run into a lot of orks, and that was all it was. 
 	That was nothing new, on Vardan IV. 
 	Drachan’s name was never mentioned again.
 	Three weeks later Gesht went into her tent alone, and shot herself.
 	Death, and death, and death. 
 	It was just another day in the glorious Imperial Guard.