Fall of Macharius

Chapter Five

‘Hell,’ Anton said. ‘Not again.’

The rifle rose to his shoulder and he pulled the trigger. The body of the fat officer fell over backwards, head removed.

‘You can’t say I didn’t help you that time,’ Anton said. ‘I put the fat frakker down but good.’

He had too. I wondered at the way the heretic officer had risen. I glanced around and saw some more of the heretics pulling themselves upright. A few of them shambled forward, arms outstretched, and I was reminded of the way their leader had reached for my throat. I blasted one down with the shotgun. It wriggled forward for a bit before it stopped moving.

Of the enemies that had fallen only a few had managed to pull themselves upright and even they had fallen down once more, like wound-up toys losing their motive power.

‘You see that?’ asked Ivan, pointing at one of the fallen corpses. I did. It was as if all the blood vessels in the corpse’s eye had burst and turned all the white to red. A red film had spread over the iris and only the tiny pinprick of the pupil was visible. I checked all of the bodies that had come back from seemingly fatal wounds and they all shared the same red eyes.

‘Some new form of disease,’ Ivan said. He sounded thoughtful.

‘Looks that way,’ I said.

‘What sort of disease makes a dead body get up and run around like a headless chicken?’ Anton asked.

‘This one,’ I said. ‘I thought that much was obvious. Anyway, we don’t have time for this. Push on!’

We headed on down the trench, chopping our way through more of the heretics. A few more of the bodies rose – not many, but enough. I came across a few more corpses whose stomachs had exploded like the ones on Skeleton Ridge. There were no wounds on them. It was as if they had fallen down dead where they lay, victims of some terrible disease.

Over a few of the dead something seemed to hover, a sort of foul disease spore. The area around their fallen bodies was discoloured by more than just the remains of their innards. It was as if some vile chemical had been produced by their death and tainted the very earth around them. I began to do some calculations in my head. Whenever we were near a spot where the corpses picked themselves up, we found one of these stomach bursters. They were obviously some terrible new weapon. I was grateful for the fact that they did not seem to work very well.

Up ahead of us now, we heard the sound of bitter fighting, of grenades exploding and lasguns pulsing. I heard officers shouting orders in Imperial Gothic and saw men in the uniforms of the Lion Guard in front of us. We had made it to the rendezvous. We had linked up with the force from Plague Hill and cut the enemy force in half. Of course, that just meant that as soon as the enemy realised what had happened we were going to be attacked on two sides, front and rear. Suddenly the Undertaker’s plan did not seem nearly so clever. I glanced out into the darkness from which the heretics had come. For the moment all was quiet. The enemy had fallen back. One of their commanders had clearly realised that something was going wrong and had halted the advance, quite possibly temporarily. It gave us some breathing space.

Behind us the other half of the enemy continued to advance towards our second line. They had not yet realised they were out of touch with their own reserves. A captain emerged from the Plague Hill lines and went to greet our officer commanding. They chatted for a bit and then Lieutenant Creasey came over.

‘Sergeant Lemuel, you and your men will hold this section of the line. The rest of us are going to take those heretics in the rear.’ He said it with the utter confidence that a certain sort of field officer feels he needs to project.

I snapped off a salute and said, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Mighty quiet around here,’ said Anton, staring out into no-man’s-land. He was wrong, of course. Behind us we could hear the sounds of combat as our fast-moving assault squads overtook the rear of the heretic breakthrough.

I kept the periscope focused outwards, wondering when, not if, the next wave of heretics would come in. I had a sick certainty that they would attack again in overwhelming numbers, and it was hoping for too much that they would not. In the past few months they had shown no shortage of men and weapons, so it seemed unlikely they were going to start now.

‘Too quiet,’ Anton said. Ivan made a tut-tutting sound.

‘Are you going to just stand there spouting clichés from a prop-nov all night?’ I asked.

Anton nodded. ‘Yep. It passes the time.’

‘You can pass the time checking our position,’ I said. ‘Make sure everybody has enough ammo and that their rebreathers are tight. The heretics are going to be on top of us soon and I want everybody ready.’

‘Your wish is my command, milord,’ Anton said. I glanced around to make sure there was no officer in position to overhear him cheeking me, or worse yet, none of our men.

‘You want me to head in the opposite direction and do the same thing?’ Ivan asked. I nodded. It seemed like a good idea.

Anton scowled. ‘Typical. We do all the work and he just lazes around playing with his periscope.’

‘Get going, corporal,’ I said. They got. I was left standing in the trench, checking no-man’s-land and feeling my leg beginning to ache again. I looked down and noticed there was a sort of green ooze on my trouser leg, level with the wound. It might have come from a heretic, but I did not trust it. I checked the leg – the gauze was leaking the pus right enough. I did not like the look of that at all.

I adjusted my gear again and checked the shotgun, cleaning it with a cloth. I counted the number of cartridges I had left. Only a dozen or so. I suspected there might not be any more forthcoming. Supplies had not arrived on Loki for some time, and shotguns were not the most common weapons among the Guard. Only my exalted position as part of Macharius’s bodyguard had kept me in supply for this long, and here on the front line even that was not going to help.

I kept my gaze focused on the war-ravaged land in front of me, at the lakes of mud, the rolls of barbed wire, the piles of bodies, the smashed remains of what had once been tanks. I watched clouds of mist swirl over the battlefield. Where was the enemy? What were they waiting for? Why was there no attack?

I heard a wounded man call out, then the footsteps of a medical orderly rushing to his aid. What was the point? He was most likely going to die anyway. I sneezed and then I coughed. I felt as if a clot of something was stuck within my lung. My breathing had the gurgling quality I associated with the heretics. Damn, it looked like I definitely had caught something. That was not good. The fighting rumbled on behind us; our boys were giving the heretics hell by the sound of it. At least I hoped they were. The thought of any other result was discouraging.

Ivan returned, followed by Anton a minute later. I coughed and wheezed. Ivan’s head tilted as he examined me. ‘You don’t sound so good, Leo,’ he said.

‘I don’t feel so good either.’

‘You want a medic?’

‘There’s others have more need. I can hang on for a bit.’

The words were no sooner out of my mouth when I heard the drumming start up again from the front of our position. It looked like the second wave of the enemy had arrived and was getting ready to attack. I loaded more shells into my shotgun, snatched up a lasgun from a nearby corpse and set it near at hand. I was going to need it when the ammo was all gone.

‘These boys just don’t believe in giving up, do they?’ said Anton.

‘Neither do I,’ I said.

More and more of our own troops filtered along the trench line. I felt my nerves subside a bit. The door of the trap was being shut. Grosslanders and Lion Guard alike were starting to fill these trenches, most of them currently facing inward, and cutting off the retreat of the heretics behind us. I propped myself up on the trench wall and fought off waves of dizziness. The skull moon beamed down from the darkening sky. It seemed to be smiling, which was not a reassuring sight.

The drums and the chanting had stopped. Despite my fears the next wave of heretics had not rolled in. It looked like we had successfully stopped the latest enemy offensive. Anton was whistling cheerfully. Ivan had produced a flask and was sneaking a sip from it as he oiled the joints of his prosthetic. I crunched on stimm tabs and painkillers and felt a little better. There was a satisfying sense that it was all over, that we had somehow snatched victory yet again. You could tell from the jaunty air of the soldiers. They were chatting in an almost relaxed manner, despite the occasional sounds of combat still coming from within the salient.

It was then that the shells started to howl overhead. I swear they sounded like no other shells I have ever encountered – they made a Banshee whine as they fell, like the voices of souls in torment. Some of them left a trail of greenish phosphorescence in the air behind them, whizzing across the sky like dim star shells or ghostly meteors. I wondered what they were being aimed at. They were falling in front of us and behind us. It was perfectly possible the heretics were aiming at their own men, but they did not seem to care.

At the first sound of their falling, I threw myself into cover, with Anton and Ivan beside me and other Lion Guard all along the trench line. I heard a weird sound, like a muffled explosion deep underground. It sounded again and again as the barrage rained down and I realised after a while that it was the shells going off. They were not high explosive. That was for certain.

‘What are they up to now?’ Ivan asked.

‘Some new trick no doubt,’ I muttered.

Billows of greenish, glowing mist spurted down into the trench. I heard a man cough and retch, and I realised we had yet another case of faulty filters. The man did not fall or start to scream or hallucinate. He just stood there coughing.

‘Gas,’ Anton said.

‘They’re covering a new attack,’ said Ivan. That was the logical inference certainly. I stuck the periscope up over the lip of the trench and studied no-man’s-land. Shells were falling thick and fast out there, huge columns of greenish mist leaping upwards in great plumes and then sinking and spreading. Almost directly ahead of me I could see a shell, big as a man, sticking out of the mud. The detonator had failed to go off, obviously, but small trickles of gas and some greenish viscous liquid were leaking from it. I could see it had oddly curved fins on it, which doubtless were the cause of the wailing sound they made as they fell.

I couldn’t see any signs of an enemy advance, though, and I could not hear any chanting or drumming. I turned my head and saw more of the shells still falling behind us. It seemed like the heretics were determined to cover the whole area in gas.

Whatever it was, it did not seem to be working very well. Even men with faulty rebreathers were doing nothing more than cough. I saw Mikals remove his mask and begin to fiddle with the filter pack, his face completely exposed. His eyes were watering and he was grimacing, but he did not seem to have been poisoned. I tossed him one of my spares and told him to put it on right away. He gave me a thumbs up, sat down, still hacking and spitting, and fitted it over his face. Shortly thereafter his coughs subsided.

I turned my attention back to the killing ground in front of us. Nothing seemed to be happening out there yet.

‘Looks like we’re not the only ones getting faulty gear,’ said Anton. ‘They should put whoever made that gas in front of a firing squad. It’s not done anything yet.’

I was tired and my leg throbbed, as did my head. ‘How do you know that?’ I snapped. ‘You don’t know what it was meant to do.’

‘Kill us, I am guessing,’ said Anton. ‘And it hasn’t.’

He sounded like a child in a huff. ‘If it was meant to spread disease spores it might still be working. The symptoms might not have emerged yet, that’s all.’

‘You are a cheery frakker this evening, aren’t you? We’ve won. We beat them fair and square and you’re still looking for something to be depressed about. I tell you something, I’m glad they never promoted me to sergeant if this is what it does to you…’

‘Calm down,’ said Ivan. ‘Leo might be right. We don’t know what these heretics are up to. They’ve always got some new badness up their sleeves, or so it seems to me. Let’s just wait and see.’

We waited like everybody else. The shelling had stopped and it did not start again. The gas obscured our vision for long minutes but then began to disperse or sink into the earth, adding a new chemical colour to the rainwater pools.

Behind us all the sounds of fighting had faded away completely. A red flare rose over the battlefield, announcing the all clear. It seemed as if we had won. Myself, I did not believe it. The fact that the enemy’s gas shells had failed so completely seemed too much like the sort of good luck we had been missing recently. I found it hard to believe that our fortunes might be looking up, and, of course, I was right.