They were busy for the rest of the day. There were pits to be dug, deadfall traps to be rigged and wooden stakes to be cut and sharpened and set. The jungle steamed around them, making combat uniforms and flak armour stick to them disgustingly even as hideous insects crawled through their hair.
Vardan IV was hell.
The Emperor created Vardan IV to train the faithful, Cully thought to himself; the old joke, bitter with irony. No, no He did not.
Vardan IV was created by monsters. Vardan IV was, in Cully’s experience, the very worst place in a galaxy pretty much made of bad places. And now they faced one of the very worst monsters it had to offer.
One of their own.
The jungle did strange things to a man’s mind.
Drachan had lost his mind altogether. Cully had no idea where he’d been in the three months since he made the list, and Emperor’s truth be told, he didn’t want to find out. The thought of being an ork POW… no.
No, that didn’t bear thinking about. How he had escaped was anyone’s guess, but even if he’d got his body out he had quite clearly left his sanity behind.
Cully wiped the back of his hand across his sweat-slicked forehead and remembered an ork camp they had liberated a year ago, him and Rachain and Drachan and Steeleye and the other old guard of Alpha Platoon. The prisoners had been kept in tiny bamboo cages, with the new shoots growing up around them like spears. Their bodies contorted into hideous shapes, unable to move, twisted to avoid the plants that would have impaled them as they grew, inches per day.
The others, the unlucky ones, had been shut in metal boxes.
In the jungle heat of Vardan IV.
It was a point of discussion, among the veterans, over sacra and dice, whether or not the heat exhaustion and dehydration killed a man before the meat cooked on his bones. Whether, starved to the point of madness, he was tempted to eat his own limbs before the heat overcame him. Whatever the questions, they had found no one left alive in the metal boxes to tell them the answers. Some of them, yes, had shown the signs of having tried to eat themselves.
Cully shuddered and looked down into the pit. It was twelve feet deep now, with sharpened stakes lining the bottom. Nothing that fell in there was getting out alive. They had dug eighteen of them around the camp.
He could only pray it would be enough.
It wasn’t enough.
Drachan walked through their traps like they weren’t there.
He laughed as he killed, laughed his special silent laugh into the jungle night. The laugh the orks had taught him.
Somewhere deep down in himself, he knew he had changed. Knew he was no longer the man he had been. He had evolved. The orks had done that, taught him new things. New ways of being. New priorities.
Amongst the orks, the biggest and strongest was always in charge.
And why not?
It made perfect sense, when you thought about it. Might made right, everyone knew that. The whole Imperium pretty much ran on that principle, so how was this any different? The jungle made things clearer in a man’s mind.
Everything was very clear, now, to Drachan. What he was.
What he had to do.
He laughed as he hauled Sharpknife up a tree, his noose tight around her throat as he hung upside down over her from his knees and drove the point of his combat knife into her sternum, dragged it down hard to spill her guts out over her boots.
He hadn’t had a firearm since before he was captured, but he found he didn’t miss them anymore. The Guard-issue knife, to kill with. The stolen ork cleaver, to cut his meat with. So simple. So clean.
Might and steel.
That was all he needed.
Drachan walked the jungle like a spirit unavenged, looking for the lieutenant. Blood and blood and death, drummed into him over and over again in basic. Reinforced in the fires of war on twenty planets. The unofficial mantra of the Imperial Guard.
Death and death and death.
Kill. Kill. Kill.
That was what the Imperial Guard were for.
‘Emperor’s teeth!’ Rachain swore, the next morning.
Triple guard, and still they had lost two. Lieutenant Makkron had been almost inevitable, but they had lost Sharpknife, too. She had been a real soldier, not just some recruit boot. Rachain wanted to beat his head against a tree in frustration. Rachain very, very badly wanted to kill someone.
Anyone, anyone at all.
‘Cully!’ he roared, when he was shown the hanged corpses. ‘Get here!’
Cully got there, fast as fast. Rachain was his friend, yes, but sometimes you just didn’t mess with a veteran sergeant.
‘I… I don’t know what to say,’ Cully said, as he stared at Sharpknife and Makkron’s disembowelled bodies.
The lieutenant was a kid and an idiot, but Sharpknife had been one of the tough ones, one of the veterans. There had been nothing not to like about Sharpknife, except…
‘She liked to play Crowns,’ Cully said, the words vomiting out of his mouth before he had time to think about them.
You didn’t tell tales to the boss, not about a comrade, you never, never did, but when she was found hanged from a tree and you could smell the shit running out of her ruptured guts maybe you did after all, just that once.
