He was right, he knew he was. Whether Rachain wanted to hear it or not.
Of course he didn’t want to hear it. Cully didn’t want to hear it himself, and it was him thinking it.
I’m wrong, he told himself. I must be.
But he knew he wasn’t.
They were deep in the jungle now, perhaps a hundred miles from where they had started at Advance Firebase Theta 82. They fought orks on a daily basis as their recon patrol cut deep into enemy territory, but to Cully that was almost secondary now. He had been fighting orks in the steaming jungles of Vardan IV for two years and more. He understood orks, he respected orks, but he no longer truly feared them.
Cully feared the other thing.
Voxjockey was gone now, and Wanna-be-a-pilot, and Lickspittle.
Voxjockey had died in combat like a normal person, shredded by an ork’s heavy stubber, and Cully had managed to gather the boy’s ident-tags as they fled the ambush zone. His family at least would get The Letter. Well, they would if Cully made it back himself, he supposed. If not, what the hell did he care?
Wanna-be-a-pilot, though, and Lickspittle, they had gone the way of Webfoot and the others. Hanged from the trees in the dead of night, disembowelled and their hands bound in the pious sign of the aquila. Lickspittle had been cut for steaks too, where Wanna-be-a-pilot had been left alone. There was no meat on her skinny body anyway, Cully thought, and he had to rest his forehead against a tree until the nausea receded.
It’s a drukhari, he told himself. The sergeant said so. It’s a filthy bloody drukhari.
It wasn’t a drukhari, and he knew it and Rachain knew it and he was starting to suspect that Steeleye did as well. He wondered whether Gesht did, too.
No, no, no. Oh Holy God-Emperor of Terra, don’t do this to her.
Please.
Please don’t.
On the twelfth day of their recon patrol they found an ork encampment. Steeleye had the point, and she voxed her position back on the command channel. She was the only non-command trooper to warrant a personal vox-bead, but she was a near-legendary sniper so Rachain hadn’t had any trouble getting it for her. Even the chair-polishers at the Munitorum had heard of Steeleye, and to be honest no one wanted to piss her off. If she wanted a vox-bead, she got one.
‘Understood,’ Rachain said, and voxed through to Cully. ‘One Section, move up to support.’
Cully tapped his vox-bead in acknowledgement and waved his squad forward.
They crept through the perpetual gloom of the green, lasguns at their shoulders as they closed on Steeleye’s position through the constant pissing rain. Rachain himself was bringing Two and Three Sections up on the far flank, Cully knew, the sergeant not entirely trusting Gesht or Dannecker to hold the command all by themselves.
I’m top canid, Cully told himself as he swiped a fang-leach off his shoulder before it could get a hold through his sweat-soaked combat uniform. He trusts me.
Did he, though? Did he really? According to Rachain they were still hunting a renegade drukhari, but Cully knew that was just so much groxshit. He knew exactly what it was. Every night in his tent, twisting in his own rancid sweat in fever dreams of horror, Cully saw the face of their murderous foe.
That was the nights, though, when the humidity was trying to drown him alive in his tent. This was now. A Guardsman has to live in the now, or he’ll sure as hell die in it. There was no time for distractions.
The ork settlement was rough and crude, as everything the orks built was.
Cully and One Section bellied down in the swampy filth between the trees, their lasguns held tight to their shoulders and the rain beating down on them, and waited for the signal. He had absolutely no idea where Steeleye was. She was like a ghost, in the green. Silent, invisible. Like all the veterans were.
Shut up, Cully, he told himself. Don’t think about that. Just don’t.
He sighted along his rifle, picking targets, for all that they had been ordered was to wait until the master sniper gave her word that it was time. There were orks out there – cleaning weapons, mending the crude thatch of their huts, cooking meat over open fires that sizzled and smoked in the rain.
Cooking meat.
Could I be wrong? Cully wondered.
So much simpler, this way. Forget about drukhari, and perish the other thought; maybe it was orks. Very, very quiet orks. Orks who knew what the sign of the Aquila was, and what it meant.
Don’t be bloody stupid, he told himself.
Obviously, he wanted it to be orks. He understood orks. He hated them, of course he did. They were filthy xenos, the enemies of the blessed holy God-Emperor, but after two years deployed on Vardan IV he understood them all the same.
No.
No, that just wasn’t going to work, was it?
It wasn’t orks, however much he wanted it to be.
Cully snugged his lasgun to his shoulder and sighted on a big greenskin who was threading an ammunition belt into a heavy stubber with its left hand and vigorously picking its nose with the forefinger of its right.
Still Steeleye waited.
It’s not an ork.
Cully really, really needed to kill something, anything, to take his mind off the alternative, even if only for a little while.
The jungle did strange things to a man’s sense of right and wrong, he thought again. The jungle did strange things to a man’s mind in general. What could it do to a man like that?
Shut up, Cully. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
One of the hut doors was flung open, and a huge ork came stomping down the crude wooden steps in front of it, a big rusty cleaver in its hand. It wore a spiked leather vest and a pair of heavy, ugly boots, and nothing else. It was enormous, even by ork standards, and quite clearly the boss of the whole encampment.
