Steeleye put a hotshot through its left eyeball at three hundred yards, blowing its brains out of the vaporised remains of the back of its skull.
The vox crackled into life in Cully’s ear.
‘Go,’ she said.
Cully put a three-round burst into the nose-picker without hesitation, blowing the hideous xenos off its arse and onto its back beside the camp fire. Its legs flailed up into the air, and Cully put another deliberately targeted shot into its crotch simply because he could.
Kill!
The horrible thing flailed and howled on its back, and then Strongarm landed a krak grenade right next to it and that was the end of that.
Strongarm was Cully’s top boy in his section, a born thrower who carried most of the squad’s grenades strung from a heavy bandolier that crossed his shoulder and made him walk with a perpetual lean to the left. A sniper like Steeleye was all well and good, Cully reasoned, each shot a personally addressed missive of death, but grenades were addressed to everyone in the vicinity at the time. When you were fighting orks, there was a lot to be said for that.
‘Advance!’ he shouted, rising up from cover and spraying a burst of full auto into the camp as he went.
There was nothing moving there anymore, and it would suit Cully just fine if it stayed that way.
Of course, it didn’t work out like that.
Orks came boiling up out of the huts, out of the trees, out of holes in the ground. They always did.
Heavy calibre rounds flew around Cully as he charged them with his squad behind him, his lasgun barking in his hand. Orks were terrible shots but they all had heavy stubbers; big, ugly home-made things daubed with red paint that showered sparks when they were fired but spat out huge explosive rounds at a terrifying rate. Cully ducked behind the massive trunk of an ancient tree and took aim. He chopped one ork in half at the waistline with a scything blast of las-fire. Another’s head exploded as Steeleye dialled in on it and unleashed the killing power of her long-las from wherever the hell she was concealed.
‘One Section, kill!’ Cully bellowed, and his squad ran forward again to do their jobs.
Killing and dying, that’s what the Imperial Guard are for.
The air sizzled with las-fire.
‘Kill, kill, kill!’ Cully roared.
This was what he was for.
Death and death and death.
The unofficial mantra of the Astra Militarum.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
Afterwards, Cully found he had no real memory of the battle. Steeleye had been up a tree, he discovered later, and she had taken out fifteen orks in that battle alone. The battle that had lasted perhaps ten minutes at the most.
It had felt like an eternity of flying red-hot lead and las-shots and shouting and adrenaline and terror, and yet it had been over in a handful of minutes. Cully slumped against a tree trunk and watched as Steeleye clambered down from her perch in the canopy, her long-las over her shoulder.
She looked at him for a long moment, her single augmetic eye clicking as the bezel adjusted from targeting mode to more rare human interaction.
‘You know it’s not an ork, right?’ she said quietly.
Cully sighed and nodded.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘It’s not drukhari either, is it? They’re no friends of the orks, so why the bleedin’ hell would it be?’
‘No,’ Cully admitted. ‘It’s not a drukhari. The sergeant… he said that, but he knows it’s not really.’
Steeleye looked at him for a long moment, green snot welling up in the open hole in the middle of her face.
‘Didn’t think so,’ she said at last.
Cully swallowed, then spat on the ground between them.
‘I don’t want to…’ he said.
Steeleye shrugged. ‘No one does,’ she said. ‘No one wants to bloody well admit it, do they? I don’t care, Cully. Why the sodding hell should I? So what, a commissar comes after me? So what? I’ll say it like it is, if no one else will.’
‘Emperor’s sake, Steeleye, he’s one of us.’
‘Was one of us,’ she corrected him. ‘He’s officially MIA anyway, no one will know. He made the list, remember?’
Sergeant Drachan wiped the grease off his fingers and kicked dirt over his camp fire. The last one had been delicious.
Emperor but they were hopeless soldiers, in the main, good for nothing but corpses and meat.
Rachain knew the work, and Cully too when he had his mind on the job and not on the card table. Steeleye was an avatar of Imperial Justice, her long-las like lightning from the heavens. He might let her live. This new lieutenant was a child, though. The bloom of Imperial youth, perhaps, but in no way hardened enough for the realities of Vardan IV. He supposed he would have to kill him too.
That would be a shame, Drachan had to allow, but the thing had to be done. The platoon had to be strengthened if they were ever going to defeat the enemy. Tempered in the fire like a fine blade. In his fire.
And then there was Gesht.
