Gesht had slept with her sergeant, there was no getting away from that. Gesht had loved him. That was disgraceful.
That was weakness, right there in itself.
Gesht was part of the problem with Alpha Platoon.
‘You honestly believe that?’ Cully asked.
Steeleye nodded.
‘I really do,’ she said. ‘It’s Drachan. You know it. Rachain knows it, and so does Gesht. I’m sorry, I wish she didn’t every bit as much as you do and I know damn well she won’t admit it, but she does, and there we are.’
‘What… what do you think she’s going to do?’
Steeleye shrugged and looked at Cully.
‘What would you do?’
What do Guardsmen do?
Kill, and kill, and kill.
‘How do we do it?’
Steeleye wiped the hole in her face again.
‘I wish I knew,’ she said.
The fools had a triple guard set that night, more of them awake than asleep. Boots, most of them, barely trained and scared out of their minds, utterly and totally useless in the face of the true reality of war. Drachan had been two years on Vardan IV. He knew the jungle. He lived it, every foetid breath of rotting humidity giving him life.
He loved it, loved it in a way that he had never been able to love the artificial environments of barracks and troop-ships and firebases.
Stinking and rotting as it was, the jungle was real.
This is my home, now, he thought as he hung upside down from the tree, his knees locked over the branch that held him. Invisible, his face and the ragged remains of his flak armour smeared black with the charcoal and burned human fat from his camp fires. The noose of tightly woven vines hung from his left fist. The knife, clamped tightly in his right.
Death, and judgement, and natural selection.
The Emperor’s Will.
I’m top sergeant, he thought. Not Rachain, me! You think hecould survive what I’ve been through? Two months an ork prisoner, before I fought my way out with my teeth and fingernails?
No.
No, Rachain couldn’t have done that. I’m top canid in Alpha Platoon.
He was top canid, and they would all come to see that.
In time, they would. The survivors, anyway. The few who he would allow to live.
The worthy ones.
Navylover from Three Section died that night, the boy who had been oh-so fond of the female Valkyrie pilots stationed at Advance Firebase Theta 82.
Triple guard, and still no one had heard anything.
‘It’s like a ghost,’ Rachain said, when they found the young trooper hanging from a tree with his entrails dangling in great, reeking purple ropes. ‘Nothing’s that quiet.’
‘Someone is,’ Cully said, and he exchanged a long look with Steeleye as he said it. ‘Someone we know.’
Rachain turned on Cully with his fist raised in preparation for a punch that would have floored him, but Cully met his old friend’s eye and faced him down.
‘Come on, Rachain,’ Steeleye said, and spat snot onto the ground out of the hole in the middle of her ruined face. ‘Who was your top scout? Who did you send out into the green when you needed ork advance parties murdered nice and quiet in the dark? It was Drachan, every time.’
‘Be quiet!’ Rachain growled. ‘It’s not…’
‘Isn’t it?’ Cully snapped. ‘Isn’t it, Rachain? Who else? It’s no ork, and we all know there aren’t any drukhari on this planet. Who the hell else could it be? Who else is this good?’
‘No one,’ Rachain admitted with a sigh. ‘You’re right. Oh Emperor’s love, you’re right. It’s him, I know it is. I’ve known for days. I just… I didn’t want to be right, you know what I mean?’
Cully turned and looked at his friend, recoiled from the expression in his eyes.
Betrayal, and murder, and despair.
‘Yeah,’ he said at last.
Rachain’s jaw set in a hard line.
‘Then we end this,’ he said. ‘We end this now.’
