Cully blinked. Sergeant Drachan had been the platoon’s top scout.
Making the list, that was what they called it when you went out into the green and didn’t come back. Sometimes a trooper might be confirmed Killed in Action, if they were shot down right in front of their comrades and someone managed to bring their ident-tags back for the Munitorum to log the death and send The Letter to their next of kin, but it was rare. In the impenetrable, greenskin-infested jungles of Vardan IV, ninety per cent of casualties were officially listed as MIA for the simple reason that no one could find what was left of them after an engagement.
‘You sure?’
Steeleye nodded, and paused to wipe her oozing snout with the back of her already crusty uniform sleeve.
‘Emperor’s word,’ she said. ‘He went out with Two Section yesterday, didn’t come back. Gesht’s in pieces.’
Cully nodded slowly. He knew Drachan and his corporal had been close. Maybe too close, if you cared what the regulations said.
Cully didn’t care one little bit.
‘I’ve got some sacra in my tent,’ he said. ‘I’ll go see her. Thanks, Steeleye.’
The old veteran nodded her ruined head at the corporal, and no more words needed to be said between them. Moonface just looked on in simple, naive bewilderment as the day to day business of the Astra Militarum went on around him.
Death, loss, grief.
It was just another day in the glorious Imperial Guard.
Vardan IV
Now
Cully squeezed down on the trigger of his lasgun and blew the ork apart with a sustained burst of full auto.
‘Emperor’s teeth, but there’s a lot of them,’ Gesht’s voice growled in his vox-bead.
The other corporal was five, maybe six hundred yards to Cully’s left, away through the curtain of suffocating rain with her own section spread out around her.
Alpha Platoon were deep into greenskin country, on an advance recon mission.
‘I hear you,’ Cully replied. ‘Concentrate on the big ones, they’re the bosses.’
‘You think I’m some new boot?’ Gesht snapped. ‘I know that, Cully.’
Cully shrugged, for all that he knew the woman couldn’t see him.
‘Sure, Gesht,’ he said. ‘Just watch your arse, and watch your section’s arses even harder.’
‘Teach me to suck a bleedin’ egg,’ Gesht started, then her inevitable obscenities were cut short by a crackling barrage of automatic lasgun fire through Cully’s vox-bead.
‘Say again?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I was just doing my job. What are you doing?’
Cully bit back a reply and pulled himself forward on his elbows and knees through the stinking mud and rotting vegetation. The light was greenish yellow in the rain, filtered through the high jungle canopy above them. Everything in Cully’s world was made of sweat and mud and filth.
His webbing chafed at his shoulders through his flak armour, rubbing his sodden undershirt against the constant friction sores that were a simple part of life on Vardan IV. Enormous insects swarmed around him, biting at his exposed skin, and more than once he’d had to stop and brush hideous, translucent arachnids off his sleeve.
‘Status report,’ he said, after a moment.
‘About five hundred on your nine,’ Gesht said. ‘No more contacts. Closing on the boss.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Cully said. His section were finally out of orks to kill, too.
They were both closing on Rachain, bringing their sections forward to the sergeant’s position. He was in the command squad, of course, with Lieutenant Makkron who was at least nominally in charge of Alpha Platoon’s deep recon patrol.
If Makkron had even half a brain, Cully thought, he would be doing what Rachain told him. The officer was fresh out of the cadet scholam back on Reslia itself. They still did things the old-fashioned way on Reslia; sent anyone with good breeding straight to officer school. That meant anyone with money, obviously. He was maybe twenty Terran-standard years old at the most. Rachain was almost twice his age, and had spent all those extra years in the Guard. He knew what he was doing.
A newly commissioned lieutenant outranked a platoon sergeant, of course, but he would have to be a special kind of stupid to try to enforce it. Cully really didn’t want to have anyone that stupid in command of him and his men.
‘Hey, Gesht,’ Cully said, flicking his vox-bead over to their private channel. ‘What do you make of the lieutenant?’
Gesht snorted in his ear. ‘Wetter behind the ears than the last one was,’ she said. ‘The next one will still be in nappies, at this rate.’
‘I hear you,’ Cully said. ‘You reckon he’s listening to Rachain?’
‘He’d better be, or he might get shot in the back by an ork,’ Gesht said.
‘Like the last one did, you mean?’
Their last lieutenant had been the special kind of stupid that had almost got thirty of them killed when she marched them straight into an ork ambush despite Sergeant Drachan’s insistence that it was a trap. It had only been the honed reactions of the veterans, and Steeleye’s stone cold sniping, that had got them out of it alive. The lieutenant had been gunned down from behind by a lone ork on their way back to the base. No one ever found that ork, and platoon lore had it that perhaps its name had been Gesht, but of course no one could prove anything and in honesty no one much cared. As far as Cully was concerned that was all well and good.
The jungle did strange things to a man’s sense of right and wrong, and he had long since come to accept that.
‘Don’t know what you mean,’ Gesht said, and her voice was flat and emotionless.
