Cully nodded. ‘Orks,’ he said. ‘Course it was. Really quiet ones.’
He exchanged a long look with Rachain, and the sergeant nodded.
‘I’ll explain it to the lieutenant,’ he said. ‘You go and take a proper look.’
‘Sir,’ Cully said.
He gave Dannecker a pitying look, down in the mud and the filth, and made himself go and inspect the corpse.
Webfoot had been hanged with a rope made of twisted jungle creepers, plaited thick and strong. Someone had taken their time to make that rope properly, Cully thought. The man’s hands had been bound with a finer version of the same stuff, and thin cords of it had been used to pull his fingers out into the distinctive spread and to hold his thumbs twisted together like the double heads of the sacred eagle.
Someone, Cully thought, had gone to a lot of trouble with that. Someone was making a point, and they had made it far too bloody quietly for his liking.
Cully sighed and took his helmet off for a moment, pushed a hand back through his sweat-sodden hair. He bowed his head and spoke the Emperor’s Benediction over Webfoot, then turned away. There was nothing there to tell him anything. The man had been murdered, silently and expertly, and then someone had strung him up and bound his hands in that symbolic way. Cully was about to return and report to the sergeant when he paused for a moment.
He never did know what made him do it – perhaps it was just instinct, or perhaps the Emperor responded to his prayer. Whatever it was, he paused and walked around the hanging body to look at it from the rear.
What he saw there made him vomit violently on the ground in front of him.
The back of Webfoot’s combat trousers were drenched with blood. Both of his buttocks had been hacked off with some sort of heavy blade, the sort that the orks carried. Whatever had killed him, they had cut themselves a couple of good steaks afterwards.
‘No,’ Rachain said, when Cully told him. ‘No way is that going in the official report.’
‘But sergeant,’ Lieutenant Makkron said, in the sweaty darkness of the command tent, ‘surely we have a duty to–’
‘No!’ Rachain snapped. ‘Sir.’
‘I know, I know,’ Cully said. ‘The Officio Prefectus…’
‘Yes, exactly,’ Rachain said.
The lieutenant looked from one man to the other in obvious confusion. Cully idly wondered whether the boy had actually started shaving yet.
‘Will one of you please explain what you’re talking about?’ Makkron said.
He was trying to sound commanding, Cully realised, but all that he could hear was a plaintive, childish whine.
Rachain sighed.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘do you have any idea how many men the Astra Militarum have lost on this miserable bloody planet in the last two years?’
‘No,’ Makkron confessed.
Two years ago your balls hadn’t even dropped yet, Cully thought. You wouldn’t have so much as heard of Vardan IV.
He envied the lad that, if little enough else.
Rachain fixed the lieutenant with one of his famous glares, and dropped his voice to a flat tone that even the junior officer could tell meant he was in no mood to be messed with.
‘Almost two million,’ he said.
Makkron swallowed, and he paled under his new boot’s sunburn.
‘How… how many?’
‘Two. Bloody. Million,’ Rachain said. ‘Give or take. No one knows, don’t you understand that? That’s the whole problem, sir. People go out into the green, and they just… don’t come back. Over and over and over again. And now it’s us. Now it’s us sent out of our nice strong firebase and into this hell!’
‘But I still don’t see…’
Rachain slammed a hand down on the camp table in the command tent and got to his feet.
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m in no mood for this level of stupid. It’s your turn to babysit, Cully. I’m going to walk the line, talk to the troops. Do my sodding job.’
He stormed out and let the tent flap fall closed behind him, leaving Cully alone with the lieutenant.
‘The sergeant… well, he cares about the troops, sir,’ Cully said awkwardly. ‘He’s under a lot of pressure just at the moment.’
‘I understand, corporal,’ Makkron said. ‘I’m not as naive as Rachain thinks I am. Well, perhaps I am about this particular theatre of war, but I do understand all the same. Morale, and all that.’
This particular theatre of war, Cully thought with disgust. Like you’ve ever seen any other theatre of war, you utter oilrag.
‘The point is, sir,’ Cully said, ‘that this war is utter and total grinding hell and it has been for years. The orks are bloody unstoppable. There are millions of them, and this is their terrain, not ours. And we’re not winning. You do grasp that, right, sir? We are not winning this war, not even a little bit. But now? Now there’s something else out there! You saw Webfoot, right?’
‘I saw what?’
‘Webfoot,’ Cully said. ‘The body?’
Dear Emperor, how slow is he?
