‘Ah, you mean Trooper Verlhan? Yes, yes I… I saw the body.’
Verlhan, was that his name? Cully supposed it must have been, not that it mattered any more.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, him. Well, listen, sir. He was killed in the middle of the night, when we had a double watch set. Not everyone in this platoon is a recruit boot, you know. Emperor’s sake, Steeleye had watch last night, and still no one heard a thing, not even her. Orks are about as stealthy as a grenade in a promethium plant. It wasn’t an ork who did Webfoot, and it wasn’t an ork who cut his arse off for its dinner, either. There’s something else out there. Something even sodding worse than orks, as if this war wasn’t going badly enough as it is. Something that looks an awful lot like a drukhari. Do you really think the Officio Prefectus want to hear that? Even more, do you think they want anyone else to hear that? You put that in the official report and there will be a commissar’s bolter up your arsehole before you can say Ave Imperator, do you understand me, sir?’
Makkron just sat and stared at Cully, blinking like a newly landed fish as sweat rolled down his smooth face in thick rivers.
‘I…’ he started, and fell silent.
The Officer Cadet Scholam probably didn’t prepare Command Lieutenants for being soundly and loudly sworn at by corporals, Cully realised, for all that it really should do.
Lieutenant Makkron looked down at the reeking black mud that encrusted his new Munitorum-issue boots for a long moment, then back up at Cully.
‘Drukhari? Do you really think so?’
Cully nodded slowly. That was what it was, he was sure of it. It had to be.
He refused to think about the alternative.
They buried Webfoot that day, and broke camp the next morning. When Rachain called the roll there was a name missing.
‘Where the hell is Hangnail?’ he demanded.
Cully led the search of the camp and the surrounding jungle, but in his heart he already knew what he would find. No one would desert in the deep jungle, after all.
He was right.
Hangnail had gone the way of Webfoot. They found her dangling from a tree five hundred yards from camp with her guts hanging in tangled loops around her feet. There were rough tracks where she had been dragged, alive or dead, from her sentry position to the place she had been hanged. Again, her hands were bound in front of her in the sign of the Aquila.
‘Imperator nos defendat,’ Cully whispered, one of the few phrases of High Gothic he knew.
Emperor protect us.
Cully was a man of devout faith, but as he looked at Hangnail’s corpse swinging from the tree he wondered if perhaps the Emperor’s gaze had turned away from Vardan IV. Hangnail’s left arm had been taken off at the elbow, the gristle of the joint neatly butchered and showing white against the ragged red of the surrounding meat. There was no sign of the missing limb.
Someone’s taken themselves a shank, he thought, and swallowed bile.
‘Oi,’ he said quietly to Rachain, when he could be absolutely sure there was no one else around who could hear them. ‘We need to talk.’
‘No, we don’t,’ Rachain said. ‘It’s the drukhari. I know that, you know that. What’s to talk about, other than how to kill it?’
‘What if it isn’t?’
‘It is.’
‘Are you sure about that, Rachain?’ Cully asked, putting a hand on his old friend’s arm to stay him as he tried to turn away. ‘Because what if it isn’t?’
Rachain turned and looked at his corporal.
‘I know what you’re trying to say, Cully,’ he said, ‘and I’d like it a lot more if you stopped right now. It’s drukhari, you hear me?’
That sounded to Cully a lot like the way Rachain had told Dannecker that it was an ork, even though they all knew it wasn’t. He swallowed. Him and Rachain had been friends for years, and not too many Guardsmen lived long enough to get to say that. He trusted the older man, and could only pray to the Emperor that he was right.
But he didn’t believe it.
‘So let’s talk about how to kill it,’ he said.
Whatever it is, he thought. Because it’s not a drukhari, Rachain, and you know it isn’t every bit as well as I do.
Cully thought that, but he didn’t say it. Rachain was his friend and his boss, and, if Cully was utterly and totally honest with himself about it, he had always been a little bit afraid of the veteran sergeant.
‘Anything that lives can die,’ Rachain growled. ‘We find it, corner it, kill it. We’ve got Steeleye in our platoon, for the Emperor’s sake. There’s nothing alive within half a mile she can’t drop with a clean headshot. We just need to give her that shot.’
Cully nodded. At least Rachain was prepared to do what needed to be done, that was the main thing. They could argue about how to cover it up later.
They lost Booger Boy and Twitchy and Pretty Girl the next night.
All three of them were found hanged, the same as Webfoot and Hangnail had been. All three of them disembowelled. Booger Boy’s left leg had been taken off at the hip, neat as neat.
There was a lot of meat on Booger Boy, Cully couldn’t help but think. How the lad had ever passed basic training carrying that much weight was a mystery, but one that he supposed was largely irrelevant now.
He was dead, after all.
So was Twitchy, who had been Steeleye’s spotter and the platoon’s up and coming apprentice sniper. So was Pretty Girl, who had been one of the best scouts they’d had.
It took Pretty Girl, Cully thought, and his blood ran cold. She was young but her scout skills were extraordinary. Had been extraordinary, he corrected himself as he dragged his eyes away from the gaping wound in her abdomen. Something had crept up on Pretty Girl. Something even quieter and scarier than she had been.
Cully swallowed.
