She squeezed.
‘Holy Emperor!’ Cully shouted as the hotshot bellowed across the jungle night, a single, searing flash of power like lightning and the very wrath of the Emperor Himself. ‘Tell me that was Steeleye?’
Rachain tapped his vox-bead.
‘Alpha sergeant to Steeleye,’ he said. ‘You read?’
‘Five by five,’ the woman’s voice came back to him. ‘Give me ten, I’ve just got to see to something.’
Gesht was there before her, as she had expected, standing over the body of her lover.
Sergeant Drachan lay sprawled against the trunk of a massive tree, a smoking hole in the middle of his chest. He had a Guard-issue combat knife clamped in one hand, a heavy ork cleaver in the other. Long ropes of twisted vines wound around his waist.
‘I thought headshots were your signature,’ Gesht said, not looking up as the other woman approached her.
Steeleye shrugged in the darkness.
‘Tricky shot through the undergrowth,’ she said. ‘Had to go for the centre of mass.’
Gesht nodded, and still she wouldn’t look away.
‘Better safe than sorry,’ she said, her voice sounding bitter and far away.
She unslung her lasgun, flicked it over to full auto, and opened up at Drachan from point blank range.
‘Better safe than sorry, mother lover!’ she bellowed.
That was how Cully and Rachain found her, still shooting, and Drachan was nothing but chunks of burning blackened meat in the undergrowth, and Steeleye watching and saying nothing.
‘Enough, Gesht,’ Rachain said at last. ‘It’s enough, now.’
Gesht lowered her weapon and looked at the sergeant.
‘It’s never enough,’ she said. ‘Kill and kill and kill, remember?’
All Rachain could do was nod.
They returned to Advance Firebase Theta 82 eight days later, those of them who had survived. Rachain had salvaged the ident-tags from those Drachan had killed, so at least their families could receive The Letter and take what closure from that they could.
He had sworn every survivor of Alpha Platoon to secrecy, Cully and Gesht and Steeleye and Strongarm and Moonface and the others. They had run into a lot of orks, and that was all it was.
That was nothing new, on Vardan IV.
Drachan’s name was never mentioned again.
Three weeks later Gesht went into her tent alone, and shot herself.
Death, and death, and death.
It was just another day in the glorious Imperial Guard.
The debris dropped from orbit and fell beyond the horizon. The explosion of its impact lit up the night, the flash reflected by the toxic clouds of Eremus. Dominic Seroff lifted his goblet of amasec. ‘To your health, inquisitor,’ he said to Ingrid Schenk.
She raised her drink in return. ‘And to yours, lord commissar.’
The amasec was a poor vintage. It made Seroff’s tongue curl against its sweetness, and it tasted of machine oil. It was the best he and Schenk could manage. There was no good amasec to be found anywhere on Eremus. This poor synthetic was the least offensive that could be had. It had the benefit of being potent, at least. It warmed Seroff’s chest as it went down.
Commissar and inquisitor were seated on the balcony of Seroff’s quarters at the top of a thin tower of blackened rockcrete and iron. It overlooked the endless vista of wreckage and decay that covered the entire surface of Eremus. If the planet had once had individual hives, they had long since blended together, their names lost to history. Eremus did not even have the filthy grandeur of Armageddon’s towering hives. The mounds of this human anthill were low. The higher structures that had existed had been scavenged for parts over the course of the last few thousand years. On Eremus, everything and everyone had been brought low.
The planet was dying. Its population had been in decline for centuries. There were fewer than five billion citizens struggling in the wastes now, a tenth of what there had been five hundred years ago. There were no more resources, no more ore, and very little coin for the few imports that still arrived. Eremus’ civilisation had become cannibalistic, everything used and used again, until it broke down into nothing.
The world was moving towards extinction, but the process still took time. Seroff did not expect the end to come in what remained of his life span, and he did not care what happened after that. There wasn’t very much he did care about. There hadn’t been since Armageddon, and that was a very long time ago now.
Seroff leaned back in his chair. The leather cracked. The rusted iron framework squealed. He took a healthy swallow of the amasec. ‘Do you know,’ he said to Schenk, ‘I can no longer remember if we use each other’s titles out of respect or as an insult.’
Schenk nodded. She brushed a strand of lank, grey hair out of her eyes. Her face was gnarled with age, clenched and hard as a mummified fist. ‘I think it was about ten years ago,’ she said, ‘that I last asked myself that question. I couldn’t remember then, either.’
Seroff shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’
‘Does anything?’ Schenk asked.
They toasted each other again.
Debris streaked the clouds again, but it burned up before reaching the surface. The wastes of the land were mirrored by the graveyard of Eremus’ orbit. The planet moved through an endless cloud of broken ships, military and civilian, of satellites, and of dead defence platforms. Eremus’ Mandeville point was little better than a cosmic sewage outflow. Seroff sometimes felt that the wreck of every ship caught in the warp found its way out of the immaterium and into this system, and then to Eremus. The derelicts fed the scavenger economy, and were, for Seroff, yet another symbol of the world’s identity. Eremus was decay. It was a refuse dump for the galaxy, and Seroff and Schenk were just as much refuse as the debris burning up in the atmosphere.
A large chunk came down midway between the tower and the horizon. The blast was huge. The fireball filled the night for a satisfying length of time. Seroff listened carefully. Faintly, over the night wind, came the screams of the wounded and dying. There would be many casualties from that blow, though the deaths would barely be noticed outside the zone of destruction. Life on Eremus meant accepting the fact that death could come at any moment. Seroff was at ease with the knowledge that every day he was granted was the result of blind chance. He nodded at the expanding fire. ‘What about that one?’ he said. ‘Shall we say he was on that one.’
