Sabbat Worlds Anthology

BLUEBLOOD (Nick Kyme)

The pillar of fire exploding from the desert forced the gunship to bank sharply. A series of warning runes flashed in the cramped cockpit alongside the Valkyrie’s steering column. While the pilot fought to control the vessel, the rest of the crew felt the sudden thrust of motion in the tightening of their grav harnesses. Somewhere, a muffled emergency klaxon droned. In the troop hold men were scattered like debris, amidst vocal curses and angry shouts of pain.

Major Regara stood defiantly in the open hatchway of the Valkyrie, Warbird, with one hand on the guard rail, the other snapped to behind his back. Framed by the hold’s exit hatch he cut a stern, precise figure, the epitome of Volpone starch and sturm.

‘Have you ever seen the Euclidian Squalor-Pits, lieutenant?’ he declared to the burning air outside. The fire-flare tinged his grey-gold armour a ruddy orange and the squalls from the explosion seared his tanned features with a prickling heat.

Regara didn’t flinch. The role of imperious officer, master of war was one he played to military perfection.

The plume of fire died away to a trickling smoke that carpeted the landing zone in a grey fog. They were coming in hard – ninety birds touching down in minutes, scorching the sand to glass with the roar of descent jets.

‘No sir, I haven’t.’ Lieutenant Culcis clung to the guard rail opposite the major and stood just behind him.

Regara looked down into the dispersing smoke, through the growing dust cloud created from the Valkyrie squadrons’ downthrust.

‘It’s like a Volponian bathhouse compared to this hole.’ He scowled and the gesture pulled at a scar running from his smooth-shaven chin to the edge of his collar.

There were troops below, a few kilometres from the landing zone, getting closer by the second. It was an encampment, several encampments in fact. Together they were more like a city, hundreds of disparate regiments, all part of the Crusade reserve, billeted in tents, prefabs, re-appropriated local structures or simply gathered in the open with only a few windbreakers to impede the sandstorms. Like borer-ants at this distance. Millions of them.

‘Tell me again, lieutenant,’ said Regara as they approached their final landing vector. By now the chatter over the inter-company vox, comprising, in the main, barks of dissatisfaction from the other Volpone officers at the explosive welcome they’d received, had ceased. Nine companies. Nine hundred men. A full battalion of the Volpone 50th awaited landfall in silence.

All except Regara. ‘What do we know about this hole, other than it’s at the arse-end of nowhere?’

A tremor of mild turbulence shook the ship’s hold, forcing the major to shift his footing. The bionic leg he wore in place of the organic one he lost on Nacedon whirred and groaned. Compared to most Guard prosthetics, it was a work of art.

‘Sagorrah,’ Culcis began, regaining his footing after he’d stumbled with the sudden bucking of the gunship. ‘A collection world. Approximately one hundred and fifty-two separate regiments are in residence, of varying strengths and fighting viability. A depot, sir – Sagorrah has over three hundred promethium wells, a reserve of several million tonnes, vital fuel for the conquest of the Sabbat Worlds.’

Regara discerned the depot’s central hub, a vast factorum structure attended by a multitude of vast sunken silos.

Another explosion, farther out this time from a distant well, thrust a lance of fire into the hot sky.

Regara turned, uninterested. His eyes were like flint as he regarded the young Culcis.

‘I blame Nacedon,’ he said candidly.

‘Sir?’

Culcis had been on that world, too. They’d fought side-by-side with a ragged bunch of barbarians from Tanith, a backward planet that had long since been atomised from existence. The Colonel, Gilbear, had an especial loathing for the ‘Ghosts’, as they were known. Regara, one of the wounded left behind by Volpone command and subsequently saved by the bravura of the Tanith and their medic, had had the audacity to recommend the Ghosts for commendations. It hadn’t translated well.

Regara turned his gaze back to Sagorrah. A landing party was mustering a few hundred metres below. Though they were little more than slowly resolving specks, he was able to make out the crisp uniform of a Munitorum officer. Clerks, associated ground staff and servitors surrounded him. Regara was reminded of flies buzzing around a carcass. This entire sinkhole was a foetid carcass.

‘Only reason I can think of that Gilbear shipped us here. Must’ve pissed the colonel off royally.’ Since Monthax, relations between the Volpone and the Tanith had improved but between two such polar opposites, there would always be needle. Grudging respect was one thing; outright commendation was quite another. In retrospect, Regara thought he must have sustained a head wound in addition to his lost leg during the Nacedon action. How else could he explain his recommendations?

‘Defending a promethium well,’ he muttered ruefully, the screech of stabiliser jets smothering his voice to a thought. ‘Where is the glory in that? It’s no task for a Volpone.’ No, Gilbear didn’t like Regara. The feeling was mutual. Being left to die by your commanding officers will have that effect on a man.

As the desert basin closed, Regara’s gaze was drawn to a vast brawl erupting deeper in camp in the distance. He discerned several bulky troopers in commissarial black breaking up the fight and breaking heads.

The major’s expression grew disdainful as the last few metres to the ground fell away.

‘They’re animals, sir,’ remarked Culcis, the downdraughts from the engines forcing him to clamp a hand down on his officer’s cap. Their raucous din turned his comment to a shout.

‘Chain a dog in the sun long enough, lieutenant, and it’ll eat its own tail,’ replied the major, dragging a rebreather over his nose and mouth to keep out the worst of the dust. ‘Gilbear must really hate us,’ he said to himself, as the Valkyrie touched down and the eighth through seventeenth companies of the Volpone 50th arrived at Sagorrah.

It was to be a most unpleasant stay.

Regara looked at the Munitorum officer’s proffered hand with something approaching disgust.

‘Welcome to Sagorrah Depot,’ said the officer, fighting to be heard above the slowly cooling engines.

Despite himself, Regara shook the odious man’s hand. He learned his name was Ossika, a stoop-backed, sun-burnt wretch of a creature. Ossika had the look of a man who’d spent too long inside a Departmento-appointed office-hub, logging and charting, turning the slow logistical wheels that fed the great war engine of the Crusade. Idly, the major wondered who Ossika had annoyed to be ‘rewarded’ with this duty.

Introductions were made crisply and efficiently from both parties. They were walking from the landing strip when Ossika spoke next.

‘Quite a few birds you’ve got in tow,’ he said, wiping a dirty kerchief across the strands of hair threading his bald patch.

Culcis sneered but kept the gesture hidden beneath the brow of his officer’s cap. It was a gesture of ostentation and strength, making it clear to all and sundry that the Volpone were at the summit of the hierarchical chain.

Behind the lieutenant strode the rest of the cadre: Speers and Drado, both corporals, both aides to Regara and Culcis respectively. Sergeant Vengo followed. He’d been quiet since embarkation. A head wound sustained in a recent combat action meant he’d only just returned to service from the medicae. After him were the seven remaining Volpone troopers from Regara’s command squad. The other eight company captains and their associated officer cohorts would join them later. Operatives from Ossika’s staff were already liaising with them in a holding station just outside the landing zone to assign billets.

‘Almost stretched our landing field to capacity,’ Ossika concluded – Regara did not deign to respond – leading them towards a Salamander-class command vehicle. There was only room enough for Ossika, the two Volpone officers and their aides.

Culcis nodded to Vengo as he climbed aboard, to which the grim-faced sergeant nodded back and then turned on the rest of the troopers.

‘March formation, crisp and straight!’ he bellowed. ‘Show this rabble the quality of the Volpone 50th!’

The Salamander was already rumbling away, its engines stuttering with the repellent sand that seemed to clog up everything – Culcis brushed at the rust-coloured rime it left on his buttons and lapels, the raised plates of his carapace armour – before Vengo had the men assembled. They’d rejoin the rest of the battalion and prepare the major’s command station for his return.

As the command vehicle picked up speed, the camp grew slowly around them. Lieutenant Culcis found his eye drawn to the various regiments, cooling their heels and awaiting reassignment to the Crusade frontline.

No soldier liked being away from battle. After a while, fighting and survival became ingrained behaviour. Anything else was anathema, a foreign way of existing. Most couldn’t take the silence of ordinary life. It ground at the nerves and made men who were sane and balanced in a trench war react insanely and violently when at peace – judging by the sheer levels of disorder and discontent apparent on Sagorrah, that fact was evidently true.

Culcis recognised some regiments. Vitrians, Roane Deepers, Castellian Rangers – he’d fought alongside them all at one point or another. On the field of battle, they’d spilled blood together; out here in the desert, they reacted with hard stares and aggressive postures. Sagorrah was a powder keg, Culcis realised. All it needed was someone to light the fuse.

‘This place is a wretched dump,’ said Speers. The aide was a wiry-looking man, but tall and brawny like most of the Volpone. You couldn’t tell by looking, but his head was completely shaved under his grey bowl helmet.

‘The phrase is shit-hole,’ offered Drado. The pug-faced corporal smacked his lips and scowled. ‘You can even taste it on the air.’

Culcis had to agree with him. As well as the reddish patina slowly crusting his uniform, there was a disagreeable tang on the breeze. Like metal.

Major Regara didn’t comment. He’d taken a position at the front of the vehicle, hands braced across the flatbed’s holding rail as he glared imperiously at the other officers in the camp. But Culcis knew he echoed Speer’s and Drado’s displeasure.

‘We’ll need to make the best of it,’ the lieutenant said. He noticed fetishes and other icons hanging from the guide poles of several tents. Since the Saint had emerged on Herodor and with her victories elsewhere on the Sabbat Worlds, there’d been an upsurge in religious affectation amongst some quarters of the Guard.

Culcis needed no gewgaws or false reliquaries. He touched the indigo aquila that fastened together the armaplas of his collar – that was all the symbol he needed.

‘No, lieutenant,’ said Major Regara from the front of the command car. ‘I have no intention of us staying long enough to warrant such a concession.’

If Ossika, standing to the major’s left at the front of the car, thought anything about that he kept it to himself.

The Salamander had started to gain a steep rise. As it crested the hill, a large bastion-like structure loomed. Its grey-black walls, buttressed flanks and soaring watchtower screamed operational command station. It was the seat of Ossika’s power. Beyond it, the horizon line hinted at hills and other structures. Only their vague outlines were visible, the rest was lost to the distant heat haze.

A line of troopers was filing towards them as the Salamander began to slow. They were a ragged group with tattered uniforms, sleeves and fatigues cut back with knives to expose tanned, muscled limbs to the sun. They carried tribal tattoos on their slab-like faces, jagged and harsh like painted blades on skin. They also wore their hair long, bound up in topknots and ponytails. Several wore feathers or spikes of bone in their ears, noses and hair. They’d been issued with lasguns, but carried spears and blades in abundance. Culcis counted at least four snipers. It looked like they’d been hunting.

The lieutenant knew enough to recognise a feral regiment when he saw one. Such men were barely human. They had more in common with beasts. Truly, this was a pit of filth the Volpone found themselves in.

‘Hail, brothers,’ said their leader, his guttural accent so thick as to make the words near incomprehensible, as the ragged troopers went by in column.

Regara studiously ignored them.

Culcis conceded a nod as they drove past them. Alongside their officer was a trooper holding a scrap of cloth that might once have been a banner. It was wrecked, riddled with bullet scars and burn damage. Inwardly, the lieutenant despaired at such a lack in decorum and self-respect.

The gate to the bastion shadowed the Volpone as they approached it, smothering Culcis’s thoughts. As it ground open on slow, noisy hinges, Regara looked over his shoulder. The ragged regiment, some thirty or so men, had already disappeared behind them.

‘Dogs in the sun, lieutenant. Dogs in the sun.’

Culcis kept his eyes on the gate, grateful when they could finally drive inside to the cool, recycled air of the bastion.

Regara glared through a viewport in the bastion’s upper tier at the grounds below.

‘A heavy presence of guns,’ he said, noting the frequency and concentration of armed patrols as they overlapped at the bastion’s fenced-off perimeter. ‘There are over a million Guardsmen stationed at this facility.’

The troops Regara saw pacing the grounds wore Departmento Munitorum grey. Their kit and posture suggested storm-troopers. It seemed a little excessive.

Ossika looked up from his desk where he‘d begun compiling reports and logs concerning the depot’s current logistical situation. He was currently occupied with filling out the Volpone’s billet papers. ‘That’s the issue, I’m afraid – too many troops with too much time on their hands. We had a string of break-in attempts before I had to increase the guard rotations.’

Regara turned on his heel, a deep and unimpressed frown marring his face.

An open tiled floor led to Ossika. The Munitorum officer’s desk and series of wall-mounted file cabinets were the only furnishing in an otherwise austere and spartan room.

It wasn’t to Culcis’s tastes. He and the two aides waited silently, halfway between Regara and Ossika in the middle of the tiled floor. The room’s only other occupant was a slack-faced lex-savant, lurking in the penumbral gloom like a ghoul. Culcis hadn’t seen it move since they entered. The Volpone had removed caps and helmets, and enjoyed the cool air from the recyc-units. Culcis wanted to run a hand through his fair, close-cropped hair but officer doctrine forbade it.

‘How many break-in attempts?’ Regara asked, stalking up to where Ossika was hiding behind his desk.

‘In the last month?’ Ossika leafed through a raft of data-slates. It took him a few seconds to find the report he wanted. ‘Sixteen.’

Regara’s expression hardened to rock. ‘And the brawling, the discontent I observed as we entered camp?’

More leafing. This time it took Ossika a little longer. When he’d unearthed what he wanted, he answered, ‘Again, in the last month...’ He trailed off, deciding to show the Volpone major instead.

Regara scowled as he read the data-slate. ‘Unacceptable,’ he whispered. ‘This is unacceptable,’ louder this time, with a barb in his tone directed at Ossika. ‘Who is in charge of discipline at this facility?’

‘I am.’ The quiet hiss-clunk of a closing door made them all turn to see the commissar who had just entered the room.

He wore a long black storm coat, buttoned to the collar. His peak cap carried the Commissariat iron skull icon and a thin film of the ruddy mixture currently dirtying the Volpone’s uniforms. He was thin, and looked like a sliver of darkness. Glare-goggles fastened over his eyes only added to the mystique.

Culcis noted, despite the dingy confines of the chamber, the commissar didn’t take them off.

‘Arbettan,’ he said, saluting the major. ‘Lord Commissar and sworn prosecutor of the Emperor’s will.’

‘Your charges are in disarray, commissar,’ answered Regara, dispensing with protocol.

‘Men off the line will occupy themselves as they will, major,’ Arbettan replied. Behind him, almost lost to the shadows, lurked two bulky-looking cadets. Culcis could tell by the bulges in their frock coats that they carried side arms. Probably bolt pistols. ‘Disorder and discontent are inevitable,’ he went on. ‘But rest assured, my men and I have the situation in hand.’

‘Commissar Arbettan has been at Sagorrah for several months, major, and done an exemplary job,’ offered Ossika unhelpfully.

‘And the explosions,’ Regara countered, ignoring the toadying Munitorum clerk, ‘are they “in hand” also?’

Ossika started to answer, ‘We believe there are insurgents–’

Arbettan cut him off. ‘The outlying townships are riddled with cultists. Sanguinary tribes, most likely. We theorise that some are infiltrating Sagorrah and committing acts of sabotage against some of the smaller, less well-guarded wells.’

‘Blood Pact?’ Culcis ventured.

The commissar turned his fathomless black gaze on the lieutenant. ‘Intelligence suggests no. A minor off-shoot is the insurgents’ probable orientation. It is under control.’

‘The pillars of incendiary that almost downed some of my gunships suggest otherwise, commissar,’ said Regara.

Like a lamp-house but with its light extinguished, Arbettan swung back to face the major. ‘Like I said, just minor wells. I suspect the Archenemy is trying to sabotage the fuel reserves and impede the Imperial war effort. So far, their attacks have been negligible. Patrols are tasked daily with the rousting of the outer slums beyond our borders. We’ll find the head of the insurgents...’ Arbettan’s slow smile made Culcis think of a death-adder, ‘...and cut it off.’

Regara’s expression suggested he didn’t entirely believe the commissar.

‘Now,’ Arbettan continued, ‘if you gentlemen will excuse us, I have private business to discuss with Mr Ossika here.’ He looked to the Munitorum officer. ‘I assume all is in order?’

It was obvious to Culcis that Arbettan was throwing them out. He saw the tic of consternation in Regara’s cheek and the tightening of his jaw as Ossika pushed the Munitorum facsimile of the billet papers towards the Volpone major.

‘Signature, if you please, major.’

Regara eschewed Ossika’s neuro-quill, instead accepting his own pen from Speers. He signed quickly, his script flat and functional.

‘I’ll need a ratified list of men and materiel also,’ Ossika added as the Volpone were leaving.

Regara didn’t turn around. He made sure to glare at Arbettan before he left, though. Culcis stayed behind a moment after the others to hand the list to Ossika then he too departed.

As he exited, he noticed the two cadets behind Arbettan relax. Though it was hard to tell for sure in the half-dark, Culcis swore their hands had been resting on their side arms.

The Volpone officers returned to their billet a short while later. The Salamander command vehicle, this time bereft of Ossika, took them back down the approach road to the bastion and, after a few kilometres, to what appeared to be a disused stockyard.

Regara’s headquarters were located in a deserted gatehouse. The other Volpone officers occupied similar structures radiating out from that central one. There wasn’t enough room in the actual buildings for all the troops, but Ossika had supplied the 50th with a sizeable pitch. Most of the men and their sergeants bunked in tents just beyond the stockyard’s footprint.

‘Even the wine is off,’ moaned Drado, sipping at his fluted glass with a disdainful sneer. He tipped it onto the sand – such waste was equal to a week’s pay for most Guardsmen – and dabbed at his mouth with a napkin.

Culcis had long lost his appetite for alcohol. Like Drado, he sat in a well-appointed officer’s chair at the threshold of the billet. And also like his aide, he agreed the wine tasted bad. For such a rare vintage, it was like sipping copper-filtrate. Instead, he was occupied with watching Sergeant Pillier putting Eighth Platoon through its paces on the makeshift drill-yard.

Every man was wearing full combat regalia, packs and helmets despite the heat. They moved fluidly to Pillier’s orders, precise and efficient. Culcis swelled with pride. Truly, the Volpone were the finest body of men in all the segmentum, perhaps the galaxy. And yet... they had not earned the glory they desired or believed they deserved. It was the nature of war, especially a war like that raging across the Sabbat Worlds, to chew up men of honour, to spit on glory and grind it to paste in the great machine. The Volpone were just one of many. For some in the regiment, it had been a hard lesson to learn.

‘And my boots are scummed to all hell and back,’ a narked Drado continued. He gestured to his footwear, which was gummed with clods of ruddy sand. ‘Have you ever experienced such a foul desert as this one? It’s uncivilised.’

‘I’m more concerned by the failing discipline in camp,’ Culcis admitted as Pillier’s men conducted an expert bayonet drill. He had several disciplinary reports sitting on a small table between them. Drado had purloined them on their exit from the Munitorum bastion. Culcis doubted they’d be missed. The reports made for grim reading. Summary executions and all classifications of violent misconduct as laid out in the Primer were at alarmingly high levels. Suicide and desertion rates were also climbing. Lassitude could have detrimental effects on fighting men, the lieutenant knew that as well as anyone, but the level of disorder hinted at in the parchment papers he was half-reading seemed abnormal.

‘Arbettan doesn’t strike me as soft. So why is there so much disorder in the ranks?’ Culcis recalled Nacedon, the feeling in his gut as the Blood Pact had closed on them, the sense of something... wrong. These were men but they were also something more and less than that. It was hard to define but he felt it at Sagorrah, too.

The sudden crack of a firing squad rang out, punctuating the lieutenant’s thought. Fourth in the last hour and those were the ones they could hear from their billet.

Before Drado could answer, the shadow of Sergeant Vengo falling across the two men interrupted them. Vengo still had that thousand-yard stare as he waited for Culcis to give him permission to speak.

‘What is it, sergeant?’ the lieutenant asked.

‘Orders from the major, sir,’ he said in a neutral tone.

Faced with the hollow shell that was Vengo, Culcis was reminded of the meat grinder again and the fact that the Volpone, like so many, had been sacrificed upon it for Macaroth’s glory.

Vengo pulled a piece of folded parchment from his jacket pocket and handed it to the lieutenant.

Breaking the wax seal, Culcis read first to himself and then aloud so Drado could hear him.

‘We’re assembling a force to go into the slum-zones at the Sagorrah perimeter,’ he said. ‘Fifty men ready for 18.00 hours in the muster yard.’

Drado checked his chrono. ‘Just under an hour, sir.’

Lieutenant Culcis nodded. ‘Get Sergeant Pillier to draft in the rest. Seems Major Regara wants to get his boots a little dirtier. Can’t blame him.’

Drado was on his feet and heading for the drill sergeant when Culcis stopped him.

‘And pack this up. We’re done drinking.’

Drado couldn’t suppress a disappointed frown but continued about his duties without pause.

‘Very good. Sergeant Vengo,’ said Culcis. ‘You’re dismissed.’

Vengo saluted and marched away.

When he was gone and Culcis was alone, the lieutenant looked to the distant hills. Beyond, he imagined the slum towns. City fighting was brutal. Under the right conditions, it could turn a poorly-armed force into a deadly one. Few Guardsmen relished it over pitched battle. Even trench warfare was preferable.

Culcis brushed the rust-coloured rime from his sleeve. It was tacky and reeked of metal. He was just glad to be getting out of camp.

The thud of automatic weapons fire sounded above Culcis’s head as he crouched behind the wall. The brick was baked white and chipped with bullet holes. Though it was approaching evening, the sun set late on the collection world. The street was swathed in shadow, though. The tight confines of its ruined buildings, the tattered tarps and half-demolished awnings created a sort of urban canopy overhead that promoted claustrophobia and paranoia.

‘Scopes,’ said Culcis.

Drado, squatting next to him, passed them over.

Poking the magnoculars through a gap in the shattered wall, Culcis could see all the way to the end of the street. His squad were pinned in a narrow defile, too much open ground between them and their targets to make a bayonet charge a viable tactic.

Still, they didn’t need to.

Grainy thermal imaging showed Culcis what he needed to see – six insurgents, three with autoguns, another carrying a makeshift burner and a team with a heavy stubber. The cultists were wily enough to hold the cannon in reserve. The autogun fire was desultory, intended to draw the Volpone out.

Culcis’s men were split, half and half, across the street. While he took refuge behind the wall, the others hunkered down behind a broken down trans-loader. The heavy Cargo-X was thick enough to take automatic fire. His squad was in no immediate danger.

‘I have eyes on,’ the lieutenant said into his micro-bead. He was no longer wearing his cap and had on the same type of low-brimmed bowl helmet as his men. He related coordinates to the other side of the street where a blind target marker waited.

‘Light them up, Trooper Korde, if you please.’

The marker aimed the laser sight of his hellgun according to his lieutenant’s direction. A beam flashed into the street darkness. Culcis followed it through the magnoculars and saw one of the cultists look down to the glow against his chest.

A few seconds later and the dense thwump of artillery filled the air. The view through the magnoculars was swarmed with white as the explosions from the mortar barrage overwhelmed its thermal imaging.

Culcis put them down and turned his back as a dust plume billowed down the street towards them. When the roar of explosives had died down and the dust settled, he looked back again. The end of the street was a ruin. A smoking, fire-wreathed crater remained where the cultists had been a few seconds earlier.

‘Way is clear. Squad advance.’ Culcis got to his feet and led them out.

Las-bursts burned through the air between the Volpone and their enemies. Bright beams crisscrossed a space of about fifty metres in a deadly lattice of fire. Hunkered down in doorways and behind clumps of broken rockcrete from the remnants of destroyed buildings, Regara and his squad were holding and returning fire.

The cultists were occupying a fortified position at the end of a T-junction, an upturned hauler-truck and an improvised wall of sandbagging. Their shooting was inaccurate and lazy. The major despised them for it. His Volpone were outnumbered three to one, or so he’d judged, but by little more than a disorganised rabble.

‘Steady fire!’ bellowed Vengo, part of the major’s squad. The men responded with short, sustained bursts, forcing the cultists down. Two even fell, shot through with hellgun beams.

Regara tapped his micro-bead. ‘Corporal, we’re wasting ammunition.’

‘Almost there, sir,’ a breathless Speers replied a few seconds later.

‘See that you are.’

For another thirty seconds the fire exchange continued, both sides at an impasse. Then a line of explosions ripped into the cultists from behind and Vengo screamed the order to charge.

The Volpone ate the metres up the street to the enemy position in seconds, a pall of smoke spilling from behind the makeshift defences which they vaulted with assault-course efficiency. Vengo was at the front and killed a man by thrusting a blade into his neck. A second he smashed with the butt of his hellgun, ramming the man’s nose into his brain and killing the cultist instantly.

Regara wasn’t to be denied. Despatching a fire-blackened enemy survivor with a nonchalant burst from his hellpistol, he went on to kick an onrushing cultist with his bionic leg. The effect was dramatic as the wretch was sent screaming ten metres backwards, crumpling in a heap with his insides a mulched mess.

It was all over in a few seconds. The combination of smoke and frag grenades unleashed by Speers, who then went on to scrag several cultists from behind, had created destruction and a diversion for Vengo to launch the assault.

‘You have a talent, Speers, I’ll give you that,’ Regara conceded as he was reunited with his aide.

‘Thank you, sir,’ the corporal replied, nodding before wiping his knife on the tunic of a dead cultist and sheathing it.

‘Disgusting creatures,’ said Regara, levering one of the dead over with his boot. The cultist was emaciated and filthy. He wore a stitched-together amalgam of flak armour, reused several times judging by the wear, and his footwear was little more than rags. The lascarbine he carried was old and poorly maintained. The sighter was ruined. Regara doubted he could have hit anything unless it was point-blank. Perhaps the grenade diversion had been unnecessary after all.

‘How by Throne have these scum given Arbettan so much trouble?’ he muttered. ‘What say you, Sergeant Vengo?’

Vengo replied with a muted shake of the head. His eyes were distant and glassy.

Regara didn’t get a chance to question him about it.

‘Sir...’ It was Speers. He had his hellgun trained on one of the fallen cultists and was waving the major over.

One of the enemy lived. He was half-buried under a chunk of hauler-truck. The broken engine block had crushed his feeble body but he was breathing. He was also talking.

‘What’s he saying?’ Regara fought the urge to shoot the creature through the skull. Some enemy intelligence might prove useful and unlock some of the mystery around Sagorrah.

Leaning down to listen, Speers frowned and then looked up. ‘Tongues of Tcharesh, he just keeps repeating it over and over.’

‘What’s that in his eye?’

Speers took a closer look. ‘Some kind of cataract, maybe?’

The cultist’s right eye was shot through with purple veins. There was also a dark crust on his lips.

‘Does that look like blood to you, sir?’ Speers continued.

Regara noticed Sergeant Vengo was drawn to a marking on the wall, daubed in the same matter coating the dying cultist’s lips. He was staring at it. The major found he couldn’t focus on the precise image. It kept changing.

‘Destroy it,’ he said.

A moment’s indecision by his men increased Regara’s urgency. ‘Do it now.’

Trooper Basker came forwards with his flamer and doused the patch of wall until the image was scoured away. All the while, Vengo didn’t retreat. He only backed off once it was gone.

The stricken cultist’s mantra grew louder, rising to an agitated shriek. Speers killed him with a shot between the eyes.

‘Making my head hurt, sir.’

Regara looked back to the scorched section of wall where the strange icon had been. ‘Yes, it was,’ he said, noting that Vengo had returned to squad position and was organising the men.

‘Corporal, situation report,’ the major added to his aide. He had no desire to linger any longer than was necessary but felt it pertinent to check on their progress.

Speers pulled a data-slate from his pack and put it in front of the major. It showed a litho-pict mapping out a section of the slums. Regara’s five fire teams, supported by elements of the Castellian Rangers and Harpine Fusiliers, had penetrated and cleared the outer markers of the eastern approach into the sector.

It was a moderate offensive, more of a fact-finding mission in truth. Regara wanted to gauge the level of insurgent presence in the slums, fathom its strength and likely dispositions. Once he had those details in hand, he could organise a widespread purging operation that would wipe out the traitors utterly. As it stood, he had operational command and just shy of two hundred men at his disposal, spread over an area of several square kilometres. This was just the first approach. There’d be more, and judging by the feeble resistance they’d met so far, such forays wouldn’t be long in coming either. The glyphs were... bothersome, however.

‘How are we faring, corporal?’

Speers regarded the data-slate, navigated through a few screens to get a wider geographical view of the area. ‘So far we’ve mapped thirty-two per cent of this quadrant, sir.’

‘And Captains Siegfrien and Trador?’

‘Reporting steady progress. Resistance minimal.’

‘I expected more,’ he admitted to Speers.

‘Sir?’

‘The insurgents are dogs, by all that the Emperor is holy, but I thought they’d at least be organised.’

‘You think Commissar Arbettan isn’t taking his job seriously?’

‘I’m not sure what I think at this juncture.’

The vox crackling to life interrupted Regara’s train of thought.

Trooper Crimmens handed him the receiver cup without needing to be asked.

‘This is Major Regara.’

Captain Trador of the Harpine responded. ‘We encountered some glyphs, major, daubed on the brickwork. One of my scouts, Jedion, has just voxed it in. Please advise.’

Regara went back to the scorched wall for a third time. His voice was full of conviction. ‘Destroy it, captain. Destroy any and all glyphs you come across.’ He cut the vox link, handing the cup back to Crimmens.

Regara’s face was grim. ‘Pack it away, Speers, and have Sergeant Vengo move the men out. We’ve lingered here long enough.’

Less than a half-hour later the major’s squad was moving low through the north-east quadrant of the slums. They passed an open alleyway. It was long, and at the other end, Regara saw some of the Harpine tracking past in their green armour-mesh, stubby lascarbines held low in a grip suited to a crouched-running advance. Since they’d entered the slums, the major hadn’t seen any of Siegfrien’s men. Most of the Castellians formed the rearguard, anyway, their mortars and autocannons providing vital long-range support to take out particularly entrenched insurgents.

Regara battle-signed for his squad to continue forwards at pace.

The narrow streets that fed like corrupted arteries through the slums gave way to an open plaza. It was huge, some kind of provincial square, and bore recent signs of battle. Several dusty craters gouged clay flagstones and exposed the sandy earth beneath. Toppled columns created barricades of debris that broke the expanse into several discrete sections.

Across the carnage, Regara spotted Lieutenant Culcis and his squad moving into position. At the far end of the plaza, some three hundred metres or so distant, were a pair of tall towers. They looked empty, but then nothing was ever as it appeared to be in an urban engagement. Just arriving were a second squad of Volpone, led by Sergeant Pillier, and two squads of Harpine Fusiliers. A third entered through a side street just ahead of Regara. It was the group he’d seen down the alleyway a few minutes earlier. They took up an advanced position, dropping a tube-launcher into a particularly deep crater and aiming it at one of the towers.

Silence rolled across the shattered esplanade. A hot breeze kicked up grit and created coiling dust eddies. The creak of hinges, the shriek of bending wood and the hollow echo of the low wind passing through the carcass of the city provided a haunting chorus.

For the first time since they’d entered the slum zone, Culcis felt unease. He’d already noticed the major and Sergeant Pillier. All told, there were sixty men occupying the massive plaza, almost half the strength of the Imperial insertion force.

Culcis brought up the map of the eastern approach to the slums to his mind. All of its streets and conduits led to this point like tributaries to a river. All other ways had been blocked by toppled buildings or stacked trucks and the wreckage of other vehicles. That alone should have tipped the lieutenant off.

He surveyed their surroundings through the magnoculars, waiting for the order to advance. Regara had brought them to a halt. Wisely, given the environs. Culcis noticed an altercation brewing between one of the Harpine and his sergeant. The lieutenant couldn’t tell what they were arguing over, only that it was getting heated. Such insubordination was to be expected of lesser regiments.

Lower breeding, he told himself but was then put in mind of the appalling discipline at Sagorrah in general. Something niggled at Culcis at the back of his mind and he called for the vox. When he managed to raise the Harpine, all he got was a fairly breathless and crazed reply from their comms-officer.

‘He’s lost it, sir. Jedion. He’s raving at the sergeant. He’s–’

The sound of a gunshot interrupted him.

To his horror, Culcis watched the Harpine sergeant slump to the ground. It took the Volpone lieutenant a few seconds to realise that Jedion had taken his pistol from him and shot his sergeant dead.

The vox was still going in his ear.

‘...Throne above! He’s killed him. Scav me, he’s only scavving shot the sarge...’ The Harpine comms-officer wasn’t talking to Culcis any more. The return was muffled and distant. He’d dropped the receiver cup and was pulling out his lasgun.

Through the magnoculars, a ball of something cold and unpleasant growing in his gut, Culcis watched Jedion waste the comms-officer too. The man bucked, a ragged hole opened up in his chest and the lasgun went off. A stray shot capped one of the missile tube team across the plaza. In an audacious display of bad luck, the gunner fell and triggered the weapon.

Culcis’s eyes widened as he followed the erratic trajectory of the missile, spilling contrails of smoke in a spiralling arc as it left the tube’s housing. It was headed straight for them.

‘Down!’

Fire and thunder engulfed them as the missile struck rockcrete and pulverised it.

For a moment, all Culcis could hear was a whining refrain in his ears like tinnitus. His vision blurred, his eyes watering with the smoke. Coughing up wads of black phlegm, he fought for his bearings.

Korde was dead, half of his torso a blackened ruin from where the blast had taken him. Varper’s eye was streaming blood and he’d lost his helmet somewhere in the explosion. Other than that, just cuts and bruises. When Culcis emerged from the clearing fog, he was still a little dazed. Drado’s voice came through loud and clear, his strong grip supporting his commanding officer and helping him back to his feet.

‘Those bastards! How dare they open fire on the Royal 50th!’

He had murder in his eyes. Drado wanted to retaliate, but a choked command from Culcis stayed his hand. Something was wrong. The Harpine were struggling. More fights had broken out in the aftermath of the sergeant’s slaying. Jedion was down, but others were turning their guns on one another too.

It was anarchy.

Regara turned away to shield himself as Culcis was engulfed by the explosion.

‘Corporal, report! What by the Eye just happened?’ he bellowed against the roar of the missile’s detonation.

Speers was nonplussed. ‘Don’t know, sir. The Harpine...’ his gaze tracked across the plaza to their allies, ‘...they just started shooting one another.’

Captain Trador was moving out of cover to try and restore order. His bolt pistol was in hand and his command squad were in tow. The Harpines with the missile tube waited uneasily, unsure what they should do. Meanwhile, Jedion’s former regiment were tearing themselves apart.

‘This is unconscionable!’ spat Regara, reaching for the vox cup offered by Crimmens. He was about to try and raise Trador when he noticed the glint of metal in one of the towers. There was no time to shout a warning before the Harpine captain and his men were chewed up by heavy bolter fire.

In a few seconds the Harpine command was reduced to a visceral mist by the chugging cannon. Regara ordered retaliatory fire into the tower but it was too late and largely ineffective. The cultists were too heavily defended.

From the left flank, just north-west of the beleaguered squad of Harpine, twenty cultists armed with autoguns and mesh-carapace filtered from their hiding places. These men were not the rabble the Volpone had encountered earlier, they were military-trained and well-equipped. They advanced in a staggered formation, the front ranks firing snapshot while the rear ranks stopped to kneel and aim. Three of the Harpine went down before they could even muster a counter.

Bellowing orders to hose the tower with las-fire, while repelling the fresh wave of attackers, Regara got a closer look at the enemy.

As well as the military-grade kit and training, the cultist-elite wore half masks that divided their faces down the bridge of the nose. The left side was open, showing off the purple cataract and their scar-ravaged flesh; the right was covered by a dirty powder-blue mask split by a savage klown-like grin.

Despite the efforts of the Volpone, the Harpine were swept away under a furious assault of blades and close-range automatic fire. As the cultists continued their assault, some laying back to occupy the dead Guardsmen’s defensive position, several were cut down by salvoes from Pillier’s squad.

‘All Volpone, pull back to my position,’ Regara shouted into the vox as the heavy bolter in the tower started up, chugging overhead.

More cultists were spilling from the opposite side of the plaza, another twenty advancing in five-man kill-teams, heads low and hugging cover.

‘We were drawn in,’ said Culcis. Whickering las-fire from the cultists split the air around him, making him duck behind the chunk of broken column.

Varper took a bolt to the throat, slumped back and never moved again.

Regara wasn’t listening. He was bawling at Siegfrien down the vox, demanding he bring in his troops as a matter of urgency. As the major slammed down the receiver cup, drawing a wince from Crimmens, he sighed. ‘They’ll never make it in time. We’re too far advanced.’

The las-fire was intensifying. The cultists had got into an enfilading position and seemed content to hold it. Meanwhile the heavy bolter continued to disintegrate the scant cover the twenty-something Volpone had left to hide behind.

‘This was an ambush, sir,’ Culcis persisted. ‘And what about the Harpine? There is something seriously wrong here.’

Regara didn’t answer, he was thinking. Hard. Trying to find a way out of the crap-storm the Volpone were embroiled in. Their return fire was admirable. Every man jack of the 50th shot in disciplined bursts, never giving in to panic, conserving ammunition. In a few minutes, it would matter for nothing.

‘Sir!’

‘I know, lieutenant,’ snapped the major, ‘but what use is it to us, now?’

‘We need to warn Captain Siegfrien, tell him to turn back.’

‘We are unaffected,’ Regara countered, but his gaze straying to the vox showed he was listening.

‘For now.’

Regara gritted his teeth, eyed the tower where the muzzle flash of the cannon flared like an angry star. ‘If we could just take out that gun...’

As if the Emperor was listening and had answered his prayer, another flash lit up the tower, silencing the heavy bolter. A few seconds later, a cultist slumped forwards against the firing lip. Even from distance, Culcis could tell half the man’s head was missing.

More shots streaked from the shadows, their firers unseen and unknown. Six more cultists fell dead with burn holes through their heads and necks. Not to turn up his nose at an opportunity, Regara ordered his squads to redouble their fire, picking off the cultists as they were thrown into sudden confusion. Without the heavy bolter pinning them down, the Volpone could move.

They advanced in small teams, four and five men strong, flanking left and right across the plaza. As one team came forwards, another held back providing covering fire until they were in position. Then the forward team took over fire support and so they crept outwards until they were pincering the cultists.

‘Where’s that fire coming from? Did Siegfrien have advanced units already in position?’ asked Regara, snapping off tight, accurate bursts with his hellpistol. He spun a cultist on his ankle, burning a shot through his abdomen and shoulder.

‘Negative, sir,’ said Speers, advancing alongside the major. ‘The Castellians are still inbound.’

The las-bolts from the shadows continued, both behind, in front and to the flanks of the rapidly crumbling enemy force.

‘Douse that tower!’ Culcis pointed to where the dead heavy bolter gunner was still slumped. Drado and two others filled it with las-beams, shredding the fresh team of cultists who’d sneaked in to retake the gun. ‘Take it out. Permanently.’

Trooper Henkermann was brought up, flanked either side by Drado and Lekke. Two incendiary rounds from his grenade launcher burned the tower completely and collapsed in the roof. The heavy bolter would no longer be a threat.

‘Forward the 50th!’ roared Regara, as the Volpone stormed the slowly retreating cultists. Gone was the enemy’s military discipline, eroded in the face of a superior foe that now had the tactical advantage.

The major was first in, parrying a bayonet blow with his sabre. He kicked, breaking the cultist’s shin with his bionic leg, and rammed the blade through the traitor’s face when his defences crumpled in pain.

Culcis shot another enemy in the chest, almost point-blank, before shouldering the wretch over to engage a second.

Speers lobbed a pair of frag grenades into the midst of a fleeing group, who disappeared in a storm of fire and shrapnel a few seconds later.

And it was done.

The cultists were slain to a man. Upon investigation, each was revealed to have a purple cataract blighting their left eye like the others the Volpone had seen. And they wore the same sigil upon their armour as had been daubed on the brickwork.

Regara ordered Basker and his flamer up to burn them. The Volpone were dragging the bodies into a pyre to be immolated when their mysterious allies showed themselves.

‘I don’t believe it,’ Drado articulated what they were all thinking.

Major Regara kept his reaction behind a mask of aristocratic arrogance.

With little choice, Lieutenant Culcis came forwards to receive the Guardsmen that had saved the Volpone’s collective arses. The taste in his mouth was bitter when he acknowledged the leader of the ragged regiment they’d met on the road. Just over thirty men emerged from the shadows, all told. They moved in pairs and teams of three and four, from all across the plaza.

‘Hauke,’ said the leader, slapping his chest. Like his kinsmen, the ragged officer was dressed in dark tan fatigues, cut off at the knees and elbows to reveal even darker skin. Blue and grey whorls, jagged teeth and concentric circle tattoos daubed his body. A feather earring hung from his left lobe – some of the others had bones or necklaces of teeth and bird feet.

Hauke had a lasgun looped on a strap across his back. In his belt he carried two long knives and a bandolier with spare ammunition. He grinned, showing perfect teeth and warm eyes ringed with a sort of kohl. An aquiline face framed thin, reddish-brown lips and an angular nose not unlike a beak. His captain’s rank pins were bright and well-polished but the rest of his uniform was dishevelled.

‘Lieutenant Culcis, Volpone 50th.’ Culcis saluted but didn’t shake Hauke’s hand when it was offered.

Hauke let it fall. He tapped his chest again. ‘We are Kauth, last of the Longstriders.’ He thumbed over his shoulder at the trooper carrying the scrap of banner Culcis had seen them with earlier. A small cadre of men had fallen in next to Captain Hauke, whilst the rest fanned out amongst the enemy dead that Basker and the rest had yet to collect for the pyre.

To Culcis’s repugnance, he realised the Kauth were cutting trophies off the dead: fingers, ears, teeth – anything they could carry and thread on a piece of twine.

Regara saw it too. The major wasn’t best pleased.

‘Desist at once!’ he raged. ‘We’re men of the Imperial Guard, not savages!’ He looked quickly to Vengo who was loitering nearby, his gaze lost in the middle distance. ‘Sergeant, impede those men.’

Like a switch had been flicked in his head, Vengo moved in to intercept the Kauth with a small combat squad from the Volpone nearest to him.

There was arguing immediately. Not all of the Kauth could speak Gothic and ranted back in a feral tongue.

A clipped command from Hauke, more like a squawk, halted the Longstriders in their tracks. He frowned.

Before he had a chance to speak, the major was on him.

‘I am appalled, sir,’ he said. ‘Butchery is the province of the Archenemy, not good Emperor-fearing men of the Imperium. This is not the jungle or some arse-end backwater bereft of order’– Culcis raised an eyebrow at that remark, that’s exactly what it was – ‘it is the sovereign soil of the Imperium.’ Regara was incensed and working himself up. The near miss with the cultists had affected him, maybe something else too. He wasn’t done and looked Hauke up and down with an aggressive sneer. ‘And you call those uniforms? You are a disgrace to the Imperial Guard. I do not recognise you, sir. No, I refuse to recognise you.’

Hauke was nonplussed, even a little amused, though he kept it veiled in case of more reprisals. ‘We saved your life, brother.’

‘You did not. And I have the sworn testimony of over twenty men that will attest to that. The record will show the Volpone’s courage in this combat action.’

‘Sir?’ Culcis felt he should intervene. The Kauth did save their lives, whether Regara cared to acknowledge it or not.

The major turned on him, crimson with rage. He hissed through gritted teeth. ‘They are a rabble, lieutenant. Less than that, they are tantamount to animals. I will not recognise them.’

‘Seems you’d be better with an eye rather than a new leg, eh, brother?’ said Hauke, genuinely. ‘Man who can’t see truth at end of nose is poor indeed.’

Regara didn’t even look at him, instead spitting his words candidly at Culcis. ‘Get them out of my sight, lieutenant. Do it now, or I shall order Sergeant Vengo to open fire.’

Culcis bit his tongue. These men were savages, yes, but they had saved the Volpone. He also didn’t trust Vengo not to turn this altercation into a bloodbath. ‘At once, sir,’ he said at length. Regara stalked away to let his second-in-command get on with it.

‘You need to get your men to stop doing that, captain,’ Culcis addressed Hauke.

‘It is right of Kauth to trophy-take from slain.’

‘Not when you’re fighting alongside the Volpone, not when you’re fighting for the Guard. Do it now, sir.’

A shrilling cry issued from Hauke’s lips, a sign to his men to desist and gather. Some frowned, wanting to resume cutting, but they obeyed and converged on the banner bearer.

‘Very good,’ said Culcis. ‘Is that your regimental standard?’ he asked, noting the scrap of cloth the Kauth had flocked to.

‘Blessed by the beati,’ Hauke replied. ‘On Vigo’s Hill where Longstriders stood their last, or so we thought until She came.’

‘Saint Sabbat?’ Culcis couldn’t keep from scoffing. He regained his composure quickly. ‘You were blessed by Saint Sabbat.’

‘Aye.’ Hauke was solemn as a priest. He believed it. Judging by the stern expressions of his men, they all did.

Culcis shook his head, his incredulity obvious to all but the unassuming Longstriders.

‘Here, brother.’ Hauke offered Culcis a pair of cigars. The leaf was dark and thick, and redolent of liquorice. No doubt Hauke had won, stolen or been gifted them by another regiment in the reserve.

Culcis hesitated.

‘Good,’ said Hauke, pushing the cigars onto the lieutenant. ‘Take them.’

Grudgingly, Culcis accepted the offering, swiftly pocketing the smokes before Regara could see, and politely asked the Kauth to return to camp.

Hauke nodded. He gave another shrill cry, almost avian, to his men and they departed the plaza quickly. In a few minutes they’d blended back into the slums and it was like they were never there.

Culcis rejoined the major who was conversing with Corporal Speers.

Siegfrien had just raised them on the vox and Crimmens was handing over the receiver cup.

‘Give me that,’ Regara snapped at the vox officer, his ire obvious and enflamed. ‘Negative,’ he barked down the cup at the Castellian captain. ‘Pull back, we’re returning to camp for an immediate debrief and mission post-mortem.’ He thrust the vox at Crimmens, punching it into his chest, and stalked off.

Regara never made eye contact with Culcis once.

It was going to be a long walk back to the deployment zone and an even longer drive back to Sagorrah.

Grim. That was how Regara had described the situation on their return to camp. Culcis was forced to agree with him. The major had requested a private audience with Commissar Arbettan to discuss what went wrong during the mission and his concerns regards ‘warp taint’ evident in the slums. Culcis wasn’t so sure it was only confined to that area. At least they hadn’t seen the Kauth again. Either the Longstriders were keeping a low profile and they’d just missed them in the throng or they’d never gone back to Sagorrah. In any event, it was a small mercy as far as Culcis was concerned.

Sitting at one of Refectorum B-62’s benches, idly fingering his Guard-issue mess tin and knife, Culcis was lost to his thoughts.

Drado snapped him out of it. ‘Mind if I sit, sir?’ he said, setting down opposite the lieutenant.

‘Looks like you already have,’ Culcis answered dryly. ‘What’s the word in the camp?’ he added, watching Drado attack the Guard chef’s slop with too much gusto. Sometimes Culcis wondered whether the corporal was Volpone at all, that perhaps he’d been switched with another regiment for some Munitorum clerk’s amusement. Not so. Drado’s blood was as blue as any of them.

The Royal 50th had their own chef, of course, their own small army of retainers and staffers in fact. Culcis had chosen to slum it in the ranks. Something wasn’t right and he wasn’t about to discover the source by staying in the regiment. Most of the men were disgruntled at having to lower their standards. Drado, despite his fierce aristocratism, was actually coping rather well.

There was a low hubbub of aggression pervading throughout the mess hall, several disparate regiments jammed together in its hot, sweaty confines. The men were on edge, the Harpine especially. Losing one of their captains, though the circumstances had been covered up, was chaffing at what little fortitude they had left.

‘If I might be so bold,’ ventured Drado. ‘What do you think happened out there?’

Culcis shook his head slowly. ‘Fegged if I know, corporal.’

‘That Harpine – what was his name again? Jedion, that was it – he just seemed to lose his mind. And then there were the glyphs...’ Drado let his theory trail off, as if fearful that voicing it out loud would give it power.

‘I’ve heard of combat stress taking men to the brink, but I’ve never seen a trooper shoot his own regimental sergeant over a petty squabble.’

‘Undisciplined dogs,’ Drado muttered, shooting daggers at a belligerent group of Harpine who’d just bustled their way inside. ‘Sir...’

Culcis had seen them too. His gaze was weary. The atmosphere was on a knife-edge. When the Harpine had settled into line, the lieutenant relaxed the grip on his hellpistol, snug in his belt and concealed beneath the mess table.

‘No sign of that feral mob?’ he asked Drado.

‘None at all. Speers reckons they never came back to camp. How would we find them if they did, anyway?’

‘Why would we want to?’ asked Culcis, though he still had the cigars given to him by Captain Hauke. Didn’t feel right to discard them. Perhaps he was the one who’d swapped regiments when he wasn’t looking. They were all different since Nacedon. Even Regara, though the major fought it with every aristocratic fibre.

Drado leaned in close. ‘I did hear about another sixteen scheduled executions this morning. And the number of violent acts of misconduct has doubled since yesterday.’

After their disastrous foray into the slums, the Volpone had returned through the night. By the time they’d made reports, broken down kit and secured it in the armoury at their billets, it was approaching another arid Sagorrah morning.

‘Only sixteen?’ Culcis remarked dryly.

‘Apparently, Arbettan has a long list of offenders he’s working through,’ Drado replied. ‘Hold on...’ he added.

Culcis followed his anxious gaze to the mess line where Corporal Speers had just cut in.

‘Stinkin’ glory boys, what gives you the right?’

Evidently, the Harpine weren’t pleased. One, a big fellow as broad as the Volpone’s Colonel Gilbear, advanced on the corporal.

‘Step back, dreg,’ Speers replied, with an arrogant side glance at the disgruntled Harpine trooper. His tags read: Maggon.

‘I say again, what gives you the right?’ This time the Harpine trooper got in the Volpone’s face, determined to make his point. He prodded the corporal’s arm with his finger.

Speers first looked down at the finger then up at the Harpine. The Volpone were big, strong men, of fine stock, but this Maggon was a giant. The top of Speers’s shaven head only came up to the Harpine’s chin. It didn’t seem to faze him. ‘You want to lose that, keep talking. Otherwise, get back in line and know your place.’

‘You arrogant bastard...’ The Harpine was about to seize the Volpone’s arm when a shot rang out, hard and heavy like a bell chime. Blood and tiny chunks of brain matter spattered Speers’s face as Maggon’s head exploded like a crushed egg.

Vengo was on his feet, a smoking bolt pistol in his outstretched hand.

‘Oh shit...’ Culcis was up too, pulling out his hellpistol with frantic fingers. ‘Put the weapon down, sergeant.’

The refectorum was plunged into shocked silence. The Harpine lolled against the mess counter as his legs gave way before slumping into a heap at Speers’s feet. The corporal turned on Vengo.

‘What in the hells are you doing, sergeant?’

Vengo’s eyes were blank of expression. His face was utterly devoid of emotion.

‘Gun down. Now,’ insisted Culcis, his tone level.

Maggon’s blood was spilling across the refectorum floor, wetting the boots of the men in line next to him, including Speers.

‘Put it down, sergeant,’ the corporal pleaded, hands up in a plaintive gesture for calm.

‘Throne above, Vengo,’ said Drado. ‘Just do it.’

Culcis had moved up alongside and saw Vengo’s left eye twitch. He shifted the bolt pistol, aiming for the next Harpine in line.

‘Dogs in the sun...’ he chuckled. ‘Need putting down,’ and tensed the trigger.

Culcis shot him in the side of the head.

Vengo fell, the bolt pistol skittering out of his grasp for Speers to stoop, retrieve and disarm.

The room breathed a collective sigh of relief.

‘Everyone stay where they are,’ Culcis ordered. The other troops in the hall were too shocked to disobey. It wouldn’t last. The lieutenant crouched next to Vengo’s cooling corpse. ‘You see this?’ he asked Drado, who squatted down next to him.

The left eye had a purple tinge, just like the cultists.

‘Holy Throne...’ breathed the corporal.

Culcis flashed a glance at the rest of the Harpine in the refectorum. It didn’t look good. Only Regara and Arbettan entering the room stopped things from getting really ugly.

Relief had turned to anger. There was shouting, accusation. Some of the men were pulling side arms – the ones who carried them, anyway. Others were seizing mess knives for improvised weaponry. Blood was in the air, that same metallic stink that laced the breeze around Sagorrah and the slums.

‘Hold!’ bellowed Arbettan. ‘By the order of the Commissariat, hold or I shall summarily execute anyone who does not.’

Regara’s eyes widened in surprise when he saw Vengo. ‘You did this, lieutenant?’

‘He was mad, major. Something snapped.’ He added, beneath his breath, ‘Look at his eye.’

The major stooped to regard the corpse. Surreptitiously he made the sign of the aquila. ‘Throne of Earth...’

He stood and swiftly about-faced. Commissar Arbettan stared at him through the blank, soulless lenses of his glare-goggles. Three of his shadows had moved in behind him, exuding menace.

‘This is Volpone business,’ said Regara, quickly. ‘I’ll deal with it.’

‘Captain Trador dead, thirty of his men also,’ – he looked down disdainfully at poor Maggon – ‘make that thirty-one. I’d say this is beyond the remit of the Royal 50th, major, wouldn’t you?’

Regara never moved. ‘That said, I will deal with this. I’d say you’ve enough to contend with in this camp at the moment, commissar, wouldn’t you?’

Arbettan didn’t looked impressed, or about to let it go. Two more cadets came out of the shadows.

‘Your goons are outnumbered,’ Regara told him. ‘We’ve dealt with commissars before. Are you really going to push this?’

A few tense seconds passed by, the air as thick as glue, before Arbettan scowled and left the refectorum, his shadows slinking after him.

‘Thank you, major,’ said Culcis once the commissar had gone.

Regara was livid. ‘Get them out,’ he said, eyes wide with anger, ‘all of them. Right now. Including Sergeant Vengo. Report to my billet when it’s done. As soon as it’s done, lieutenant.’

Culcis nodded, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Speers,’ Regara paused by the corporal on his way out of the mess hall, ‘a word.’

The major had done what he could to smooth things over with the Harpine. By the time Lieutenant Culcis had finished up at the mess hall, securing Vengo for transport and sending the men back to their billets, Regara had had several conversations with the Harpine officer cadre. Speers had left without word, on some errand for the major, so just Drado and Culcis were left to tramp from the refectorum to Regara’s billet.

They attracted scathing glances from the Guardsmen they passed on the way. Some of the regiments they hadn’t even seen before, yet they seemed to hold the Volpone, any outsiders in fact, in suspicion and belligerence.

Walking the densely populated avenues of Sagorrah, Culcis felt strangely exposed.

‘Quicken your pace, corporal.’

‘Beg your pardon, sir?’ asked Drado with an incredulous expression.

‘You heard me. We are in hostile territory,’ said Culcis. ‘Quicken your pace and keep your side arm ready.’

Drado noticed the looks they were getting too, now. He brushed at the rust rime on his jacket nervously. The ruddy scum on his boots was making them feel leaden; so too was his anxiety.

‘My heart is pounding,’ he admitted.

‘Just combat tension,’ Culcis replied. Drado’s body knew it was about to get into a fight before his mind did and was preparing for it.

A group of tankers, brawny-looking men with oil-smeared features and olive drab fatigues bearing a split-skull motif, jumped off their armour rigs where they’d been loitering. They looked like engineers, carrying wrenches, cutting torches and other tools. A boxy Chimera lay open with the guts of its engine strewn across a blanket. The machine parts were gummed with the ruddy substance marring the Volpone’s boots and uniforms.

The tankers didn’t seem to care.

‘This way,’ said Culcis, taking them down an empty side street, between two unoccupied billet houses.

Drado followed, even though it wasn’t the direct route to the Volpone camp.

‘Wait,’ the lieutenant hissed, ducking them into an alcove. The area was thick with native structures, mostly disused warehouses and stockyards.

‘Sir, what are you–’

Culcis silenced him, crept deeper into the shadows of the alcove, eyes on the street. ‘Wait,’ he insisted.

A few minutes later, the tankers swaggered past, still tooled up and looking for the Volpone.

After they were gone, headed further down the street and bypassing Culcis and Drado completely, the lieutenant pulled them out of hiding.

‘Come on,’ he whispered, breaking into a jog and doubling back.

‘They were going to kill us, weren’t they?’ said Drado.

‘I don’t honestly know, corporal. Whatever they had in mind, it wasn’t good.’

Culcis and Drado made for the Volpone billet with all haste. They took an oblique route, keeping away from crowds and sticking to the side streets, hugging the shadows when they could. It took a while.

Sagorrah was headed for meltdown. Over a million Guardsmen, armed and armoured for war, approached the brink, and Culcis had no idea why.

Though Regara glowered from behind his desk, Culcis was relieved to have finally reached the major’s billet.

His retainers had appointed the Volpone headquarters at Sagorrah well. The gatehouse had been gutted of debris. Thus cleared, the major’s men had added luxuriant carpeting, portraiture and the fine blackoak desk Regara was currently leaning on. There were charts and data-slates strewn upon it. A plump-looking leather chair, with a blackoak frame to match the desk, sat idly behind him. A pair of cooling units lost somewhere in the shadows of the room’s periphery hummed dulcetly and kept the ambient temperature pleasant.

In one corner, a chaise longue with a small table sat next to it. There was a decanter on the table, the crystal vial stoppered to prevent the wine within becoming exposed to the air. Against the opposite wall, a steel rack where the major stowed his hellpistol on a holster and his uniform jacket and storm coat.

Anterooms were hinted at beyond but right now the focus was on the scowling major and the slew of intel on the desk before him.

They were late, much later than Culcis had intended. Explanations would have to wait. Regara wasn’t about to heed them.

‘We can be agreed, I think,’ said the major, ‘that this is no ordinary spate of insubordination afflicting Sagorrah. Something is at work here that goes beyond boredom and disaffection. Sergeant Vengo’s death was proof enough of that.’

‘He hadn’t been the same since Monthax,’ offered Pillier, filling in for the deceased officer. They all remembered Monthax, and the eldritch storm. No one could truly say they’d been unaffected by it. Vengo, it seemed, had suffered worse than most. It had unhinged him, somehow left him vulnerable to whatever malady was plaguing the depot.

The four other men present – Regara, Culcis and their aides – all acknowledged it but no one spoke further. Some battles, glorious or not, were best left unremembered.

The major spread his hands over the data-slates and parchment reports in front of him. ‘We have here the bulk of Arbettan’s incident reports concerning the appalling lack of Sagorrah discipline. Corporal Speers,’ he added, gesturing to his aide, who was sporting several cuts and bruises, largely lost to the half-dark of the room, ‘was kind enough to procure them for me.’

‘Does Arbettan know?’ asked Culcis. If the commissar had knowledge of this transgression it might make whatever the Volpone had to do next difficult, if not impossible.

Speers grinned, revealing a bloody tooth. ‘Not unless he can find where I stashed two of his enforcers,’ he said. ‘Which he won’t.’

‘While we were waiting,’ Regara gave Culcis a dark look, ‘I had Sergeant Pillier draw some conclusions.’

Pillier came forwards into the light from a glass-shaded desk lamp and pulled a map of the Sagorrah depot from under the morass of files.

There were small red dots littering the map, denoting areas where incidents of violence and discord had been reported according to severity and frequency. Pillier had been busy. Culcis didn’t realise they were quite so late, but swallowed his shame and concentrated on the map.

‘Can you see something in it, lieutenant?’ asked the major. ‘A pattern, perhaps?’

‘I see a void,’ he said, not looking up. He pressed his finger against a section of map which had an absence of dots. ‘Who resides in this part of the camp?’

Regara had a list of where the billets had been assigned and to whom. He was smiling, a smug grin affecting his noble countenance.

‘It’s the Kauth.’

The rest of the room stayed silent, awaiting Culcis’s reaction.

‘The Longstriders? But they aided us out in the slums, saved our collective arses, major.’

Regara dropped the list on top of the map and leaned in. ‘Facts are, there’s no way insurgents could get so close to the promethium wells without help. What we saw with the Harpine, the way they were turned, and Vengo...’ Regara let that one float a little before he went on, ‘Someone in this camp is opening the door for these attacks.’

‘And the Kauth are suspects because they’re not affected?’

‘It is because they are not affected that suggests they can operate even in the same conditions that are debilitating every other man jack in this stinking cesspit! How else do you do that unless you are the ones propagating the taint?’

Culcis frowned. ‘But we are also still ourselves, sir.’

Regara straightened and pushed out his chest. ‘We are Volpone, lieutenant. We are not like the dogs shackled to this gnarled stick of an outpost. Our breeding and superior training keeps us immune.’

‘Tell that to Vengo, sir.’

The major flushed with anger but mastered it quickly. He seized his lapel and pulled on it, exposing the rust rime to the light. ‘It is this, and this,’ he added, showing the scum on his boot. ‘The air is filled with it, the entire camp polluted by something as pervasive as the sand in the desert. We have been here for a matter of days, lieutenant. The Kauth have been in the reserve for much longer than that. They should be as crazed as the rest of the Guard.’

The smile returned. It was as if all of Regara’s private theories and suspicions about the feral regiment had been suddenly and conclusively confirmed.

‘It has to be them,’ he said.

Culcis wasn’t so sure but kept it to himself. Instead he said, ‘The mood in the camp is reaching fever pitch. Drado and I were almost attacked walking from the mess hall to the billet. It was why we were so late.’

Regara’s eyes narrowed and his smile thinned to a mirthless flat line. ‘I’m sending thirty men to the Kauth billet. We’ll apprehend these traitors ourselves since Arbettan is evidently incapable.’

‘Only thirty?’ asked Culcis. ‘The Longstriders are scum but they are skilled in the art of killing. Thirty men would put us at roughly equal strength.’

‘Have some backbone, lieutenant!’ snapped the major. ‘You are Volpone, more than the equal of any man in the Guard, especially a ragged band of savages like the Kauth. Besides,’ he added, calming down, ‘we can’t risk a show of greater strength. If the camp is as volatile as you say it might spark a reaction we can’t control easily.’

Culcis nodded his acceptance.

‘Lieutenant,’ said Regara, ‘I want you and Sergeant Pillier to take three squads to the Kauth billet and bring them all back here – under force of arms if necessary – for interrogation. Take Speers with you, too.’ The corporal smiled. It put Culcis in mind of a gore-shark. ‘His ruthless streak is bound to come in useful.’

‘Ever since we met, I’ve wanted to scrag a few of those savages, sir,’ he said, blissfully ignorant of the irony in his words.

‘Right here, lieutenant,’ said Regara, ignoring the bloodthirsty corporal, and prodding the area of the map where the Kauth were located. ‘Take all necessary steps to apprehend them,’ he warned. ‘All necessary steps.’

Speers tossed Culcis a lasgun from the armoury, and the lieutenant caught it deftly, checked the power gauge and shouldered it before taking his leave.

Sergeant Pillier and Corporal Drado followed close behind.

Speers lingered a little at a glance from his commanding officer.

‘Make sure he follows through on this,’ whispered the major. ‘Bloody the dogs if you have to, but bring them here to me.’

Nodding, the corporal then turned on his heel and went after Culcis and the others.

The Longstrider billet was deserted. It sat at the edge of Sagorrah Depot in a pitch that was little more than a scrap of barren earth. It was a contrast in styles to the opulence of the Volpone’s billet, particularly Major Regara’s accommodations. Scattered tents and doused cook fires defined the space. It was untidy and ragged, just like the men stationed there. The emptiness, its isolation from the rest of the camp only added to the eeriness of the place.

Once he was certain there was no one around, Culcis investigated further. He saw totems, fetishes, trophy racks and other disturbing evidence of the Kauth’s feral nature, littered throughout the billet. And there was blood too, dark streaks like pronounced veins webbing the sand having dried in the sun. The metallic stink was as pervasive here as it was anywhere in Sagorrah.

‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,’ said Drado as he and Culcis were exiting their third empty tent. Speers, from another part of the billet, came jogging over to them. The Volpone had fanned out, tackling the area in teams of two and three, checking each and every one of the thirty or so tents pegged around the billet.

‘Something isn’t right,’ the corporal hissed.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Culcis. ‘What is it?’

‘We’re being watched. I can feel it.’

Sociopathic as he probably was, Culcis had also learned to trust Speers’s instincts over their years of service together. The man had a knack for sniffing out trouble, as well as finding and creating it.

‘All right,’ he said, scanning the shadows at the edge of the billet, seeking enemies but finding none. ‘Tell Sergeant Pillier and have him alert the men. We’ll turn this sorry hole inside out if needed.’ Culcis was reminded of the feeling he’d had walking past the tankers, the sense of impending violence.

Speers nodded and got about halfway to Pillier when a shout came from one of the other troopers. The Longstriders had returned and were making their way back to the billet in force.

‘Greetings, Volpone,’ said Hauke, extending a hand and giving Culcis a warm smile.

The lieutenant refused it and kept his arms by his sides.

‘You never returned from the slums that first time we saw you, did you?’

Hauke shrugged, affecting a placid, easy mood. His men, now fully arrived in the billet and squaring off against the Bluebloods in packs, were entirely more restive. ‘It seemed a shame to leave so soon. Much more to find, Volpone.’

‘Your insolence is reason enough for your being apprehended,’ Culcis told him, ‘but Major Regara has some questions for you concerning another matter.’

‘Oh yes? Tell me Volpone, what questions are these?’ A flicker of annoyance marred Hauke’s feigned bonhomie. Both the Kauth and the Volpone tensed, anticipating trouble.

‘That’s for the major to tell you, sir. You need to come with us. Right now.’

‘And if we don’t?’

‘Then this camp is about to get a sight bloodier than it already is.’

Hauke’s eyes narrowed as he considered what he regarded as a request and not an order. ‘I like you, Volpone. We will come.’

Culcis tried to mask his sudden fluster but failed. ‘Very good then.’

As the Kauth relaxed, Hauke looked to a pair of nearby hills, overlooking the billet. He made a noise like a shrieking prey-bird and two sentries emerged from their hiding place, each shouldering a long-las.

Culcis hadn’t noticed, but Speers had taken up a position by one of the tents, his lasgun aimed at the very selfsame spot in the hills.

‘I had ’em, sir,’ he said, lowering his gunsights now the Longstriders had revealed themselves.

Culcis wasn’t sure about that. He was only glad Hauke had been so gracious about being taken into Volpone custody. The spilling of more blood was the last thing Sagorrah needed. But he suspected it wasn’t done with it, not yet. They made for the Volpone billet and only disarmed their prisoners once they’d arrived.

Major Regara was poised at the threshold of the makeshift holding room where they’d put Hauke and his three officers. He looked nonplussed at Culcis.

‘They submitted without a fight?’

‘Yes, sir. The Kauth captain stated he would be pleased to converse with you.’

Regara made the equivalent facial expression of a shrug and moved into the holding room where Speers and Drado were already waiting. Culcis followed the major, leaving Sergeant Pillier at the door on guard.

Drado was looking nervous as he cradled his lasgun. Seemed as if the near miss in camp had spooked him. The entire room felt tense, in fact. No stranger to conducting interrogations, Speers had already removed his carapace breastplate and was rolling up his sleeves when the two officers entered. Culcis leaned in to have a word in the corporal’s ear.

‘Let’s just ask some questions first, eh?’

Speers sought Regara’s nod of approval before he backed off.

The lieutenant took his place and addressed Hauke.

‘What we all saw out in the slums with the Harpine is starting to happen here, in the Sagorrah camp.’

The Longstrider captain said nothing but stared intently, his eyes like burning sapphires.

‘It’s been slow at first but now the effects are starting to tell. The discord, the lack of discipline, the murders, executions and brawling are all a product of whatever is afflicting the camp. Likely some outside force, in league with the Ruinous Powers.’

Culcis caught Drado out of the corner of his eye making the sign of the aquila.

Hauke smiled without mirth, without warmth. ‘And you think we Kauth responsible, eh, Volpone?’

‘You are the only regiment unaffected by the taint.’

Now the warmth returned. ‘We are blessed.’ Hauke slapped his hand on the shoulder of the warrior next to him, his banner bearer. The pole with the ragged strip of cloth was held firmly but reverently by the Longstrider. It was the only item they’d refused to be parted from and Culcis had seen no harm in that.

‘Touched by Saint Sabbat,’ Hauke added, touching the fabric, ‘for our fight on Vigo’s Hill.’

‘Explain.’

‘After Herodor, we fought many battles. The world I don’t remember,’ Hauke confessed, ‘there were many. Vigo’s Hill stays in mind. We fought last stand. It was to be end of Longstriders. Until She came.’

Regara made a grunting sound and came forwards. ‘You cannot expect us to believe this. The Saint rescued your sorry hides and touched your banner, thereby blessing you and your savage brethren? Likely you were cowering in the dirt or hacking trophies from your enemies, tantamount to beasts. Saint Sabbat would not bless beasts.’

‘It is so,’ said Hauke, without anger, without aggression. It was an irrefutable truth to him, as pointless to argue against as it was to protest for.

Leaning in to Hauke, the major scowled. ‘Where are the others, the rest of the insurgents? Are there more glyphs around the camp? Is that how you’re affecting the men?’

Hauke frowned as if hearing the answer to a puzzle he didn’t quite understand.

‘But you are not affected, Volpone–’

‘Address me as major, you dog!’ Regara looked to Speers, giving the corporal’s brutalisation tactics sanction.

Speers grinned. Culcis was about to intervene, still unconvinced by the major’s argument, when a new voice filled the holding room.

‘I shall take it from here, major.’

It was Commissar Arbettan with Ossika loitering in the background.

They weren’t alone. Arbettan had brought five of his goons with him. The meatheaded cadets bristled with violent intent behind the commissar. All wore the familiar pistol bulges just under their frock coats. The commissar had his side holster exposed. The pearl grip of an ornate bolt pistol was in full view. Ossika looked indignant but also slightly terrified.

‘I told you back in the mess, commissar,’ said Regara, straightening his back and thrusting out his chin, ‘this is Volpone business. I shall deal with it.’

The tension had just racked up a few notches. Drado was sweating, fingers itching on the stock and trigger of his lasgun. Culcis flashed him a stern but reassuring glance to steady him. Speers was already sneaking his hand to the laspistol attached to his belt. As for Pillier, he’d been muscled out of the way by a sixth cadet and waited calmly outside. His eyes were on the major, as he waited to back up any decision Regara was about to make.

‘Hand over the prisoners, Regara,’ ordered Arbettan. ‘Do so immediately and you’ll be free of further repercussion, including the theft of Commissariat property and the assault of one of my men.’

‘Thought you said he wouldn’t find him,’ hissed Culcis into Speers’s ear.

The corporal gave a near imperceptible shrug.

Speers received a bladed look from behind Arbettan’s glare-goggles. His jaw hardened in response and his hand crept a little closer to his pistol.

‘Get ready...’ said Culcis. Only one way this was going to go now.

‘Yes, sir.’

Arbettan looked at Regara and smiled.

‘In the Emperor’s name, I condemn thee to death!’ he cried. Ripping out his bolt pistol, he fired.

The heavy boom of the bolt pistol filled the chamber, reverberating around its rockcrete bulkheads and columns like thunder.

Regara flinched, already tearing his hellpistol free, when one of the Kauth officers behind him bucked and exploded as the mass-reactive rounds destroyed him.

For Culcis, everything went into slow motion. He felt the warmth of sudden blood spatter against his neck and face, the percussive force of the expelled bolter round upon his back. He was moving. Head low, he made for the nearest column. Six in total, supported the makeshift holding room’s puckered ceiling. Three stone bulkheads jutted from one flanking wall, dividing it into three discrete sections. It was huge, but was wide and long enough for a medium fire exchange. After the first shot fired that’s exactly what happened.

Slipping out his pistol, Culcis snapped off a few shots and caught a cadet in the leg. A hot blue beam from Drado’s direction pierced the same cadet’s sternum and he fell.

Arbettan was moving too and returning fire.

In the space of a few brutal, muzzle-flaring seconds, every man in the tight chamber had gone for cover, hunkering behind the bulkheads and columns. Both forces retreated to opposite ends of the room and the space inbetween was littered with shells and las-tracer.

The air became charged with heat. The sound of discharged weapons fire was deafening.

Speers was hugging the wall. He leaned out to take a cadet through the throat with a finely aimed shot but spun as return fire glanced his shoulder. He went down, blood streaming along his arm before Culcis lost him from sight.

‘Where are the Kauth?’ he asked Sergeant Pillier, who’d just scurried alongside him.

Pillier shook his head, stooping low and tagging a cadet in the knee with his hellpistol. A muffled cry of pain rewarded his efforts before one of the cadet’s allies dragged him clear. The chairs where they’d had the Kauth were tipped over and empty. Only the dead officer remained, face down in a pool of oozing blood.

‘They have us pinned, sir,’ said the sergeant, taking cover from the inevitable return fire.

Culcis leaned out of hiding to get a better idea of the situation. Exploding shrapnel forced him back quickly.

‘They’ve spread out across the back end of the room, four cadets plus Arbettan.’

For their part, the Volpone had Culcis and Pillier crouched behind one bulkhead with Regara and Drado a metre away opposite them taking advantage of one of the columns.

Pillier was right – they were pinned. Arbettan had more men and probably the means to contact them. The nearest vox-bead for the Volpone and possible reinforcements wasn’t near enough.

Regara knew it, too. Culcis could see the realisation of it manifest on his face as livid anger. His hellpistol blazed in the half-dark, lighting up his visage. His shots were largely ineffectual – the commissar and his men were well hunkered down by now. Arbettan saw that as well.

‘Give it up, Regara,’ he shouted over the din. ‘You are all dead men, anyway. The punishment for treason against the Emperor is death. Death! Death!’

‘He’s lost his mind,’ Culcis muttered, unable to get a bead on any of them.

Something was moving out of the corner of his eye, ahead by the next most advanced bulkhead. It was Hauke and his banner bearer. They were crouched, like predators stalking prey. Each carried a small hatchet blade in his right hand.

Culcis bristled with self-directed anger. He’d thought the Longstriders were completely disarmed.

As if reading the lieutenant’s thoughts, Hauke turned and smiled. He pointed two fingers at the loitering silhouettes that were Arbettan and his men.

‘Pillier,’ said Culcis, ‘on my mark, direct suppressing fire against the right column.’ Without waiting for a response, the lieutenant caught Drado’s attention. Regara was too busy emptying his power pack in a frustrated rage.

‘Corporal...’ Culcis had to shout.

Drado noticed the lieutenant and nodded to his gesture as he caught on to the plan.

Culcis slashed his hand down at the same time shouting, ‘Mark!’

The Volpone fired as one, lacing the columns at the far end of the room with las-fire and pressing the cadets back.

The Longstriders advanced, skirting around the bulkhead at speed and slipping up to a pair of cadets. When the first stuck his head out, Hauke slammed a hatchet into it. The cadet’s nose and face caved. The second took a blade to the stomach – the grim handiwork of the Kauth banner bearer.

Arbettan saw what was happening too late and screamed in incoherent rage. He overextended himself, ducking a flung hatchet that pitched the man behind him off his feet, and Regara shot him in the chest. The commissar’s pistol burst went wild, raining rockcrete on the Longstriders but otherwise doing no damage.

The Volpone were already moving, screaming at the last cadet to surrender.

‘It’s over!’ yelled Culcis. ‘Put up your arms.’

Momentarily shocked by the felling of his commissar, the remaining cadet found his wits but not his common sense – Speers, groggy but braced against a column, shot him through the heart before he could fire.

Dust motes and the strong scent of cordite laced the air with an unhealthy pall.

Regara strode though it like a smoke-wreathed avenger. Arbettan was stirring as the major reached him, still scrabbling for his fallen pistol.

Regara shot him through the head without ceremony, shattering his glare-goggles and displacing his cap.

In the far corner of the room, bunched in a foetal position, was Ossika.

‘I di-di-didn’t know,’ he stammered, looking up through tear-rimmed eyes at Culcis. The lieutenant seized the Munitorum officer’s chin and stared.

‘He’s clean,’ he said to the major. ‘Must be all the time he’s spent in the bastion. The recyced air would’ve been purified of the blood taint.’

Regara was glaring down at the purple cataract webbing Arbettan’s left eye. How long had it been there behind his goggles? How long had he been enslaved to the so-called ‘Tongues of Tcharesh’?

‘The cadets are the same,’ he snarled, as Drado turned one of the dead over. ‘All traitors.’

‘We know where they are,’ said Hauke, simply.

The major gave the Longstrider a disdainful look.

‘We found caves, out in hills. We found source.’

Culcis remembered. They’d apprehended the Kauth returning from some scouting mission. Evidently they’d been busy after ignoring direct orders to return to camp.

‘Sir?’ he ventured, standing next to Regara.

‘Sagorrah is going to explode when this gets out,’ said the major, referring to the dead commissar. His eyes never left Hauke. ‘You’ll lead us there, to these caves,’ he said. ‘All of your men.’

Hauke nodded, leaving to gather his men. Sergeant Pillier went with him at Regara’s order to release the Longstriders’ weapons from the armoury.

‘And us, sir?’ asked Culcis.

The grim mask of Regara’s face broke into a dagger smile. ‘You, I and thirty men are heading into the hills, lieutenant.’

Regara had left Captain Stathan in charge. His instructions: protect the sovereign territory of the Royal Volpone 50th. Pillier stayed behind to deal with Ossika. The sergeant was to return him to the bastion with a full-squad bodyguard and await the major’s return. Regara had wanted to decamp the entire billet to the Departmento fortress but that desire was outweighed by the practicality of moving almost nine hundred troopers over potentially hostile ground. For now, they needed to keep things as quiet as they could.

A red dawn was bathing the desert as Lieutenant Culcis arrived at the reconnoitre point with his squad. Major Regara was already there, panning a pair of magnoculars across the hills where the morning heat was shimmering the air.

The only other officer, Sergeant Brutt, nodded as Culcis hunkered down beside them.

‘Thought we’d lost you again, lieutenant,’ remarked Regara without looking up from his magnoculars.

Following on the heels of the Longstriders, the three squads had taken different routes through Sagorrah Depot. The infighting was getting worse. Culcis recalled a large, but thankfully distant, explosion lighting up one quarter. Gunshots and belligerent shouting were ever-present on the copper-tanged breeze. Deciding stealth was preferable over strength, the Volpone had crossed the camps in small groups, keeping clear of the worst of it and avoiding undue attention.

‘My apologies, major,’ Culcis replied. ‘We had to detour several times.’

Regara grunted in what might have been acknowledgement, and gave the scopes back to Speers. The corporal’s shoulder had been hastily bandaged. It was just a flesh wound and, as his aide, he had no intention of leaving the major in the lurch.

After a few moments, Hauke appeared in the distance.

‘Here they are, the savage bastards,’ Regara muttered.

Despite everything, he still didn’t trust them. He was just pragmatic enough to realise he had to work with them.

Hauke waved them on. His men were nowhere in sight. Privately, Culcis marvelled at their stealth. Brushing the ruddy sand off his knees and elbows, the lieutenant followed the rest of the Volpone out.

Despite the fact they were in shade, the caves offered no respite from the heat. If anything, it was even hotter in their dusky confines.

‘Hear that, sir?’ asked Drado, leaning with his ear towards the darkness. With the Longstriders moving cautiously a few metres in front, they’d breached the threshold of the caves and were advancing slowly.

‘Machinery of some kind?’ It was a low thrumming sound, like the action of an engine constantly turning over.

‘That’s what I thought,’ Drado replied. ‘Could be the reason it’s so hot. A generator perhaps?’

Culcis nodded. The air was growing thicker by the minute. Heat and the scent of metal cloyed it.

They moved on.

A palpable sense of menace hung in the air like a bad tranq of combat drugs. Culcis felt his senses go instantly on edge. The Longstriders had felt it too. Hauke brought them all to a stop.

They were deep now, far into the subterranean. It was stifling, the Volpone’s uniforms dark with sweat. Even Hauke was dappled with beads of perspiration like tiny, transparent pearls on his tanned skin.

The Longstrider captain held up four fingers, utilising Guard battle-sign so the Volpone could understand.

Four hostiles.

Most likely sentries.

Four of the Longstriders hurried off into the darkness at Hauke’s command. After a few minutes they returned with hatchets bloodied.

‘Scratch four bad guys,’ grinned Speers.

Something about his bloodlust unnerved Culcis. Worse still, he’d felt it too. They were closing on the source. The lieutenant only hoped they’d find it soon, otherwise the Volpone’s guns might do the traitors’ work for them.

The first thing they knew of the ambush was a grunt from Sergeant Brutt. The man crumpled, clutching ineffectually at the arterial bleed in his neck.

Caught in a narrow defile, concealed ridges above the Longstriders and the Volpone offered murderously advantageous firing positions to the enemy. Another Volpone and one of the Kauth were killed before both groups pressed to the walls, cutting down the angle of exposure, and returned fire.

Ahead of them, the machine thrum had built to a cacophony. The air was so redolent of metal it was like Culcis’s mouth was filled with blood. He spat out a gobbet of saliva but it didn’t help.

The source, the thing the Kauth had found and knew was in these caves, was just beyond, through a natural archway in the rock.

First, though, they had to break the ambush.

‘I think this is the bulk of them, sir,’ said the lieutenant, hunkering down alongside Regara.

‘I agree,’ the major replied between shots. ‘We need only get a kill-team beyond that archway and take out whatever is causing this madness.’

Hauke was close by and had overheard them.

‘Your men hold,’ he said, indicating their gloom-shrouded opponents above them. ‘Mine draw out,’ he added, pointing first towards the archway and then to Regara, Culcis and his own banner bearer, ‘We run.’

‘That’s suicide for your men, captain,’ Culcis informed him needlessly.

‘Sacrifice is part of Kauth way, Volpone. Hold, draw out, run,’ he repeated.

Even Regara nodded this time.

‘Very well,’ he said, ‘Corporals Speers and Drado too.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Culcis beckoned the two aides over as Hauke was relaying orders to his men. The fight had reached an impasse for now, both sides unable to lay any meaningful fire into the other. It at least allowed the Volpone/Kauth coalition to formulate their plan.

In a few minutes it was done and the kill-team was gathered together to make a dash for the archway.

‘Just because the savages are offering themselves up on a plate to these bastards, doesn’t mean they won’t shoot at us,’ said Regara.

Culcis nodded.

‘Quick and quiet,’ the major added. ‘No delays, even if someone falls, even if I fall. Understand, lieutenant? Whatever’s beyond that archway, we must be ready for it.’

Culcis nodded again, slower this time.

Regara gave the signal to Hauke that they were ready.

An ear-piercing shriek scythed out of Hauke’s mouth and the order was given.

Suppressing fire lanced from the Volpone as they expended what was left of their hellguns to keep the ambushers at bay. At the same time, the Longstriders exploded into the open, moving back down the defile as if in retreat, guns blazing. Meanwhile, the kill-team led by Regara was running.

Culcis felt the patter of solid shot glancing off his bowl helm but kept moving. Shots tore up the earth around them, pranged off jutting stones and ricocheted from the walls. The incoming fire was light. The Kauth had done their work well. Culcis was only glad he didn’t have to turn and see them slain.

The kill-team breached the archway intact and found themselves in an expansive chamber.

It was like descending into some visceral hell-realm.

Walls like incarnadine flesh shone slick with blood. They were ribbed, too, like meat. The stink of it was strong. It was emanating from a deep reservoir in the centre of the room. Squatting over it was a vast and tortured machine. Twisted and spiked, it was a thing utterly unlike any engine Culcis had ever seen. The machine was some kind of drilling platform, part metal, part organic. It had four pseudo-fangs plunged deep into the earth, pumping and siphoning a clear liquid into the bloody morass.

It took Culcis a few seconds to realise the Tongues of Tcharesh had tapped into the promethium wells that veined the region in tributaries of vital fuel. Except now, the fuel was vital in the most literal way. It was alive, sentient and tainted by blood sacrifice.

Further machines were visible in silhouette beyond this first infernal engine, dormant but foreshadows of the insurgents’ plan yet to come.

The very thing the Crusade reserve was meant to be protecting was the very thing driving them insane. The red rime of their jackets, the ruddy sand underfoot – the entire Sagorrah camp was tainted by the promethium-blood. Bad enough if an encampment of nearly a million Guardsmen was turned – Culcis paled at the consequences if the fuel was allowed to infect the rest of the Crusade forces. And the architect of that depravity was close by.

Crouched by the edge of the pool, a slain Guardsman in her talon-like clutches, was what used to be a woman. She was hideous. Even her presence felt anathema to Culcis, as if she shouldn’t even be. A dirty, blood-flecked smock covered her frail, bony limbs. She was withered and wretched like a corpse. Her lank hair was grey and matted with dark stains. Ranks of teeth stood in blackened nubs as she grinned at him.

Something hard and cold clutched at the lieutenant’s chest and he forced it down through sheer effort of will.

‘Stay close!’ warned Hauke, indicating the banner.

Culcis, even the other Volpone, obeyed. As he neared the scrap of cloth, the lieutenant felt the discomfort from the witch’s presence ebb.

‘Emperor have mercy...’ he heard Drado mutter.

Speers made the sign of the aquila. The corporal’s hands were shaking.

Regara’s mouth was drawn in a taut line.

The witch was not alone. A beast of a soldier, too broad and tall not to have been genhanced, was standing a few metres from the witch at the edge of the machine. His hard armour was dark and he wore a grotesk to hide his graven features.

Culcis knew Blood Pact when he saw it.

Drawing a serrated sabre, the soldier waved his retinue forwards – four men, all Tongues of Tcharesh elite like the Volpone had fought in the slum town square.

‘Kill that witch,’ Regara told him. ‘Speers and I will deal with the Blood Pact.’

The kill-team split into two, Regara and Speers going for the Blood Pact officer whilst the others, led by Culcis, tackled the witch. Percussive las-fire echoed behind them, the rest of the Volpone keeping the traitor forces at bay.

Two narrow pathways fed off from a platform immediately in front of the archway and led around the edges of the chamber towards the hideous lagoon. It was here that the two groups diverged.

Whickering las-fire, the beams an unwholesome red compared to the purity of Guard blue, snapped at the earth around the advancing Volpone and their allies. Racing down the right-hand channel, Culcis returned fire and lanced one of the Tongues of Tcharesh across the torso. The wretch staggered, grasping at the wound, and fell from the pathway into the bloody mess. He sank immediately, as if weighted down, as if something had... dragged him. The witch shrieked in delight. Another offering to the Ruinous Powers.

Drado caught a las-bolt to the knee before they’d reached the end of the pathway. He went on for a couple more steps before slamming against the wall, his face awash with agonised sweat.

No delays, the words of the major came back to Culcis, even if someone falls.

The lieutenant carried on. A lasgun shot, fired from the hip by Hauke, took a traitor in the throat, avenging Drado’s wounding.

Both her guardians down, the witch was left vulnerable. Or so Culcis believed.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

He glanced across at Regara. He and Speers had dispatched the lackeys and were engaging the Blood Pact officer. Though Culcis only caught a snapshot, the fight was brutal and close-quarter. Speers had gone to his bayonet, whilst Regara drew his sword. Adamantine steel flashed against Chaos-infused iron. Only the fact it was two against one kept both the corporal and major alive for more than a few seconds. They were holding their own, but only just.

Culcis focussed on the witch. He was flanked by Hauke and his banner bearer. The two Longstriders had pulled ahead. The banner bearer took aim with his lasgun but never fired. The witch extended an emaciated claw in his direction as a fountain of blood erupted from the Kauth warrior’s mouth. The lasgun slipped from his nerveless fingers, falling uselessly to the ground. The banner bearer followed, tipping off the edge and plunging to his doom in the blood pool. Hauke reached for the banner itself before it joined him, snatching the weathered shaft like a lifeline, and dropping his weapon to do it.

Smiling, the witch advanced upon them both. She was preceded by an invisible veil of cold. Culcis felt daggers of ice puncturing his chest over and over. Needles of pain speared his forehead, and he clutched at it. Somewhere during this torture, he lost his pistol and fell to one knee.

‘Emp–’ he began, seeking benediction, when a froth of blood bubbled up from his throat. He choked then gagged. It was filling up his mouth and nose, a reservoir of vitae fattening his lungs with hot fluid.

Hauke was still moving, the banner clenched in his whitened fist giving him resolve. Culcis watched him draw his hatchet and close on the blood-soaked harridan. He swept the blade towards her head but incredibly she moved, far faster than any living thing should. Culcis couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the fact he was dying and had started to hallucinate, but she... blurred, as if sliding from one plane of existence into another and back again. A needle-like punch-blade had also materialised in her grimy claw. She thrust it gleefully into Hauke’s exposed neck. It went all the way through. The Longstrider captain lost his grip on the hatchet, before even realising what had happened and that he was dead, and crumpled into a heap. He shuddered once, the banner falling from his grasp, and was still.

She was near to him. Culcis could hear the witch’s ragged breathing. He caught an impression of her withered form through his blood-filmed eyes. He felt the needle-blade closing rather than saw it. But as the witch threw back her foul head in exultation, something rolled against the lieutenant’s clenched fist. As it touched him, his vision cleared, like a cloth wiped over glass, and some of his strength returned. Acting purely on instinct, Culcis seized the banner pole that had rolled down to him from Hauke’s dead hand and shoved it upwards into the witch.

Her cackling turned to screaming horror when she saw the banner pole jutting from her torso. Culcis roared, as much to banish his fear as to focus his anger, and thrust deeper.

‘Hell-bitch, die!’

Convulsing once, the witch was done, her power extinguished.

Culcis braced the pole and snapped it off halfway, leaving the harridan impaled. He salvaged the end with the blessed cloth before kicking the witch into the promethium morass with his boot.

‘Major!’ he cried, aiming his recovered hellpistol across the hideous blood-filled chasm where the machine was pumping like a grotesque heart.

Culcis fired, and Regara ducked, opening himself to attack. Speers was already down and not moving.

The shot took the Blood Pact in the shoulder. It wasn’t fatal but the sudden change in position, the attempted death blow when Regara had opened himself up, put him off balance. The major thrust upwards with his power sword. The Blood Pact officer’s riposte and parry were a fraction too late and the humming blade sank into his chest. Regara wrenched it free, forcing the traitor to stagger and pitch backwards. The major didn’t give him time to recover. He cut the bastard’s head off with one swipe.

‘Nearly done,’ bellowed a weary Regara across the crimson gulf. He went into his webbing to retrieve a pair of krak grenades. The entire kill-team was carrying them. Culcis had made it as far as the machine already and was mag-locking his explosives to the engine’s superstructure.

‘Prime them for a ninety-second delay,’ Regara told him when they met up where the two pathways converged.

Culcis nodded, working at the detonation stud to give them the ninety seconds to effect an escape. He’d ripped the scrap of cloth off the pole completely now and stuffed it in one of his combat pouches.

Both men bolted from the chamber. Regara had Speers slung over his shoulder like a meat sack; Drado clung to Culcis as the two of them hobbled out urgently.

Back into the narrow defile and the Volpone were finishing off the ambushers. At the witch’s death, most of the traitors had fled or cast themselves over the edge. Her hold upon the insurgents had been strong, so her demise sent psychological shockwaves through her puppets.

The Volpone had reached halfway down when an explosion shook the caves. An incendiary flare erupted behind them in a bright orange bloom as the promethium lagoon went up in conflagration. The rest of the way upwards was frantic. In his panic to escape the sundered caves, Culcis caught their flight in flashes only. Smoke wreathed his world, together with the stink of burning. Darkness smothered his thoughts and senses.

Then there was light and the oppressive heat of the desert sun.

‘Vox,’ snapped Regara when they were out. Several of the men were rolling onto the sand, their minds and bodies near exhaustion.

The major took the receiver cup as it was offered and raised the Munitorum bastion.

A flustered, anxious Ossika answered.

‘It’s done,’ Regara told him. ‘The insurgents are finished.’

‘Emperor’s mercy,’ breathed Ossika. Culcis was standing close and could overhear the conversation clearly. It sounded like the Munitorum clerk was crying.

‘The fuel, Ossika,’ said Regara. ‘It’s in the fuel. That’s what’s turning the men. It has to be destroyed.’

Ossika didn’t sound so sure. ‘What? All of it?’

‘Every damned drop.’

‘No, no, no, no. That fuel is for the Crusade. It’s the war effort. Do you know how much–?’

Regara cut him off. ‘It’s tainted, man. A million Guard turned to Chaos, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘But we can’t... we... I need authority. Can’t just destroy it.’

‘Do it,’ Regara told him in no uncertain terms. ‘Do it, or I will come over there and do it myself, orders be damned.’

‘I can’t, major. I simply can’t. It’s not protocol, it’s not–’

Regara severed the link, slamming the receiver cup back in its holder. ‘We need the gunships,’ he muttered, partly to Culcis, partly to himself. Then louder, ‘Get them up. We march for Sagorrah.’

The Volpone had to run through the encampments. They were just under thirty men but at least the presence of the Kauth’s banner seemed to keep the belligerence felt towards them by the other regiments to a minimum. Widespread fighting had broken out. There were even firing exchanges. Sagorrah had descended into hell.

It was with some relief that they reached the Munitorum bastion alive and unscathed.

Regara and Culcis muscled their way past the few troops that Ossika had left that weren’t suffering the effects of the blood-fuel and found the Munitorum clerk at his desk.

‘Major,’ he warned, shuffling through paperwork, trying to find the correct documentation to sanction such a measure as destroying the fuel. ‘Major, you cannot do this.’

Sensing its master’s distress, the lexicanum-servitor came forwards from its shadowy perch to intercede. Culcis shot it with his hellpistol.

‘Step aside,’ he told Ossika, training the weapon on him.

‘You cannot,’ he repeated, eyeing the twitching lex-savant on the ground, but he was moving. ‘It’s not protocol.’

‘Hang protocol,’ snarled Regara, pushing the clerk out of the way so he could get to a long-range voxsponder set in a brass casing behind the desk.

He raised the commander of the Valkyrie fleet swiftly. A terse explanation followed, the conversation riddled by static.

‘Burn it, burn it all,’ the major concluded. His face was grim when he set the receiver down again and he turned it on Ossika. ‘Too late, now. Fire is coming to Sagorrah, and with it the salvation of thousands.’

From the hillside, below the ridge, a flame storm rippled the horizon line like a bright orange ocean. In the distance, the fifty-strong fleet of gunships were pulling away and making for higher orbit, the smoke of their missile contrails lingering in the air like a threat. The incendiary payloads had done their work, igniting the promethium wells and vanquishing the tainted fuel in a series of glorious explosions.

There would be ramifications, Culcis knew. Major Regara would shoulder them, despite the fact he had undoubtedly saved almost a million Guard soldiers in a single, decisive act. Only a man with Regara’s self-belief and arrogance could have even countenanced such a move. But it wasn’t bravura; it was necessity that drove him.

It had once been called Sagorrah Depot, but now the vast plain that burned below was simply a sea of fire. The flames rose high, caught by the wind, their edges blackening as the fuel cooked off and so too the poison that had afflicted so many.

In a valley behind where Culcis and Regara stood, the regiments who had survived gathered. Orders had been received from Macaroth himself; the Crusade reserve was mobilising for war and that included the Volpone 50th. Some would not return to glory, some had fallen. Culcis was determined they’d be remembered. He took the scrap of cloth from his equipment and tied it around the barrel of the lasgun he was carrying. Planting the stock in the ground, he smiled as the ragged banner snapped on the breeze.

‘What is that, lieutenant?’ asked Regara, raising an eyebrow.

‘Honour,’ said Culcis simply. ‘Honour for the dead.’

The major, for his part, didn’t respond or object. He merely took in the view. The flames stretched for kilometres. It was as if the entire horizon burned.

Culcis joined him, feeling something jabbing him in the chest. He reached into his pocket and found the pair of cigars Hauke had given him in the slums. He’d completely forgotten about them. He offered one to Regara.

‘Sir?’

The major took it after a short pause, nodding his thanks discreetly.

An errant pool of burning promethium thrown out in the initial explosion provided Culcis with a light. He then used his own cigar to light the major’s and the two men smoked a toast. The fire, rising all the while, threw a lambent glow over them both. It was warming.

Culcis supped and raised his cigar, blowing out a smoky plume.

‘To dogs in the sun, sir,’ he said, his eyes filled with reflected flame.

‘Dogs in the sun, lieutenant,’ Regara replied.

Behind them, the first of the drop-ships were landing. The troops of Sagorrah were being re-appropriated across the planet to fresh fronts. War was calling.